The Kennedys were raised to believe that destiny excused excess, that power carried its own moral weather system where ordinary rules bent and sometimes disappeared entirely.

Robert Kennedy absorbed this lesson early.

His first sexual experience, according to biographer Larry Tye, did not occur in romance or rebellion, but transactionally, arranged by his father at a Harlem brothel when Bobby was just twenty-one.

It was efficient, unemotional, and telling.

When he later shrugged that it “wasn’t bad—but wasn’t all that fabulous either,” it sounded less like disappointment and more like detachment, an early hint of a man who would forever separate love from appetite.

A year later, at twenty-two, he married Ethel Skakel, a woman of stamina, faith, and ferocious loyalty.

Together they would produce eleven children, an almost biblical number that helped cement the image of domestic abundance.

Yet abundance did not mean fidelity.

From the beginning, Ethel understood the rules.

To love a Kennedy was to share him with ambition, with tragedy, and with other women.

Silence was not just expected; it was required.

As the years passed and Bobby’s star rose—from Senate investigator to Attorney General to presidential contender—temptation followed him like a shadow that grew longer in the spotlight.

Hollywood noticed him.

Actresses noticed him.

And Bobby, restless and hungry for reassurance, noticed them back.

Kim Novak, the luminous star of Vertigo and Picnic, was one such figure rumored to have crossed into his private world in 1961.

Novak was at the height of her beauty, a symbol of Hollywood elegance retreating from an industry that devoured its own.

The alleged affair was brief, quiet, and never officially acknowledged, but in Kennedy circles, whispers were enough.

Ethel heard them.

She always did.

Then there was Lee Remick, a woman whose performances vibrated with emotional intensity.

In the early 1960s, as she balanced her rising career with a troubled marriage, she too was said to have found herself entangled with Bobby Kennedy.

Timing blurred, details softened, but the implication remained: while the nation watched him prosecute mobsters and champion civil rights, he was privately breaking vows with the same ease he broke bread at the family table.

Claudine Longet’s story cut closer to home.

She and her husband Andy Williams were not strangers or distant admirers; they were intimate friends of the Kennedys.

Summers were spent together on rivers in Idaho, laughter echoing through shared vacations, the lines between families dissolving in the warmth of familiarity.

Somewhere in that closeness, boundaries collapsed.

The affair, said to have occurred in 1967, was brief, almost ghostlike, yet devastating in its symbolism.

Even after Bobby was shot at the Ambassador Hotel, Longet and Williams stood vigil at the hospital, grief binding them all together in a surreal tableau of love, betrayal, and loss.

Marilyn Monroe’s name, however, detonated with a different kind of force.

She was not just another woman; she was an icon, a living projection of American desire.

For years, rumors of her involvement with Robert Kennedy floated through the culture like cigarette smoke.

Then came the letter, allegedly written by Jean Kennedy Smith, delighting in the idea that Bobby and Marilyn were a “hot new item.

” Photographs, parties, and eyewitness accounts piled up, including the infamous night at JFK’s birthday celebration when Monroe allegedly pressed herself against Bobby in full view of Ethel.

One attendee recalled Ethel leaving in disgust, shaken and humiliated.

If true, it was a moment when the private betrayal burst into public humiliation, and yet even then, Ethel returned.

She always returned.

Perhaps the most unsettling chapter came after Dallas.

When JFK was assassinated, something in Robert Kennedy fractured permanently.

He built shrines to his dead brother, drove obsessively past his grave, wore his jacket like a second skin.

He stopped sleeping, stopped eating, chewed his nails until they bled.

Grief consumed him, and in that hollowed state, emotional boundaries dissolved further.

It was during this period that rumors of an affair with Jacqueline Kennedy emerged, a relationship so charged it threatened to implode the entire family mythology.

According to multiple accounts, including those cited in Bobby and Jackie: A Love Story, the affair was known within the family and carried on with an intensity bordering on obsession.

They were said to behave like teenagers, clinging to one another amid shared loss.

Some even claimed Jackie, not Ethel, made critical decisions at the end of Bobby’s life.

Whether exaggerated or not, the implication was staggering: the widow of one fallen president entwined with the brother of another, while Ethel stood to the side, absorbing yet another blow in dignified silence.

Through it all, Ethel Kennedy remained.

She bore children, hosted gatherings, smiled for cameras, and buried her pain beneath faith and duty.

In interviews and biographies, she insisted she loved Bobby more completely than she ever imagined possible.

Love, in her world, meant endurance.

It meant watching the man you adored seek comfort in other arms while you held the family together like a human scaffold.

Robert Kennedy’s life ended violently, just as it seemed he was on the brink of redefining himself yet again.

In death, he was sanctified.

In life, he was deeply flawed.

The women linked to him—some confirmed, some rumored—form a constellation around a man who could never fully sit with his own sorrow.

And at the center of it all stood Ethel, the silent witness to a marriage shaped not by fidelity, but by survival.

The tragedy of Robert Kennedy is not only that he died young, but that he lived divided, and that the cost of that division was paid most dearly by the woman who knew everything and chose, again and again, not to look away.