Originally published on 8/9/25

When John F. Kennedy first became president in 1961, people fell in love with his natural charisma, rugged handsomeness and overall trustworthy demeanor. Now, over 70 years after his tragic assassination, the father of two is still making headlines, but not for his lasting legacy in politics, but instead for his romantic relationships. From alleged affairs with people like actress Marilyn Monroe to his 10-year marriage with Jackie Kennedy Onassis, America simply cannot get enough of his life outside of the Oval Office. This is why we’ve decided to take you inside JFK’s personal life and find out what really happened behind closed doors—including what exactly Jackie did and didn’t know. Scroll on for more. 

A look at John F. Kennedy’s relationships 

John, born in 1917, was the first Roman Catholic to be elected president. He served for two years before he was fatally shot and killed in Dallas, Texas, in 1963, leaving behind his wife, Jackie, and their two kids. And while their family and relationship might have seemed picture perfect on the outside, there were several different hurdles that the Kennedys faced, including a stillborn birth, a miscarriage, affairs and more—all of which were heavily publicized and discussed in the media. However, not everything discussed was true, and as of publication, the relationships below are the ones that historians believe to be accurate. 

Jackie Kennedy Onassis (1953 to 1963)  

John and Jackie—whose last name was Bouvier at the time—met in 1952 when he was a senator and she was a reporter. They fell in love, got engaged and married a year later. 

Flash forward to 1955 when the couple suffered a tragic miscarriage, which was then followed a year later by their daughter Arabella being stillborn. John wasn’t even present forthe birth as he was on a yacht at the time, and Jackie was reportedly so mad she almost divorced him, but her sister Lee Radziwill talked her out of it.

Following that, Jackie and John welcomed three children together–Caroline Kennedy, John F. Kennedy Jr. and Patrick Bouvier Kennedy—the latter of whom died after just two days in 1963. 

“After the death of Patrick, the other agents and I noticed a distinctly closer relationship, openly expressed, between the president and Mrs. Kennedy,” Jackie’s secret service agent, Clint Hill, wrote in his 2012 memoir, Mrs. Kennedy and Me. “Prior to this, they were much more restrained and less willing to express their close, loving relationship while out in public. The loss of Patrick seemed to be the catalyst to change all that.”

The couple remained together until John’s death in 1963.  Following that, Jackie married a man named Aristotle Onassis in 1968, with whom she remained until her death in 1994. She was 64 at the time, and died from cancer. 

“Jackie Kennedy Onassis was a model of courage and dignity for all Americans and all the world,” former President Bill Clinton said in a statement at the time. “More than any other woman of her time, she captivated our nation and the world with her intelligence, her elegance and her grace. Even in the face of an impossible tragedy, she carried the grief of her family and our entire nation with a calm power that somehow reassured all of us who mourned.”

John, Jackie, Arabella and Patrick are all buried next to each other at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia and historians now believe that Jackie did know about her husband’s affairs. 

Joan Lundberg (1956 to 1960) 

Joan Lundberg was a flight attendant who met John in 1956 and then became close to him after the death of Arabella left him feeling isolated from the rest of his family. She became pregnant in 1958; however, John mailed her some money to terminate the pregnancy. Their relationship ended in 1960 after he was elected president. 

“The trauma of his [John] death was devastating on many levels,” her son Zachary Hitchcock. said, per People. “She lost a friend, a companion— the mere mention of John F. Kennedy would bring her tears. There was a lot of love and a lot of sadness and a lot of loss. 

“The relationship encompassed friendship, romance, intellect—she adored him. They had an adventure together. It’s funny how this girl from Racine, my mom, made an impact.  She always spoke of him with fondness and affection. She loved, respected and missed him dearly.”

Lundberg died in 1983 from cirrhosis of the liver. She was 49. 

Judith Exner (1960s) 

Judith Exner and John dated for two and a half years before officially ending things in 1962. They met after she served as a middleman for JFK and Frank Sinatra’s mobster friend Sam Giancana. She then went on to claim that John got her pregnant and insisted she have an abortion. 

“For the past 25 years, I have been terrified to tell the truth about my relationship with Jack Kennedy. In fact, I’ve gone to great lengths to keep the truth from ever coming out, which is probably the only reason I’m alive today,” Exner told People in a late 1980s interview. “With the exception of Sinatra, all the key figures involved in my story have been murdered.”

Exner then died in 1999 at age 65 from breast cancer, and to this day, people still wonder if her and John’s mob ties are what led to his murder.  

Mary Pinchot Meyer (1961) 

Mary Pinchot Meyer was the sister-in-law of Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee, who was believed to have had an affair with John at some point in 1961. 

“Why don’t you leave suburbia for once — come and see me — either here — or at the Cape next week or in Boston the 19th,” John reportedly wrote in a letter to Meyer, which was sold at auction in 2016. “I know it is unwise, irrational and that you may hate it — on the other hand, you may not—and I will love it.

“You say that it is good for me not to get what I want. After all of these years, you should give me a more loving answer than that. Why don’t you just say yes?”

Meyer was shot and killed in October 1964 and several people believe that the Kennedy family orchestrated her death to keep the affair from coming out and destroying their legacy. 

Mimi Alford (1962) 

Mimi Alford was a White House intern in 1962, and in her 2012 memoir Once Upon a Secret: My Affair With John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath, she detailed that she and the president had an 18-month-long affair that ended after he shared that he wasn’t willing to end his marriage. At the beginning of it all she was 19 and he was 44. 

“It may be hard to accept that a chaste teenage girl can end up in bed with the President of the United States on her fourth day in the White House,” Alford wrote. “Living with a secret had stunted me emotionally, and I realize now that my letters were only tentative steps at understanding. Taking complete control would demand intense self-reflection, and not just beginning and ending with my time at the White House.

“This book represents a private story, but one that happens to have a public face. And I do not want the public face of this story—the one where I will be remembered solely as a presidential plaything—to define me.”

Alford is still alive and lives in New York City. She is 82 years old. 

Marilyn Monroe (1962) 

John’s affair with Monroe (The Seven Year Itch and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) is one of the most talked-about relationships throughout all of history. It started when she gave him a rather seductive performance of “Happy Birthday” in May 1962. After that, the rumors began to spiral, and when Monroe died in August of that year, people began to wonder if John and his brother Robert “Bobby” F. Kennedy had anything to do with it. 

“It was pretty clear that Marilyn had sexual relations with both Bobby and Jack,” biographer James Spada said, per People. He also claimed that Monroe met John in 1954 and when he grew tired of her, he passed her on to his brother Robert in the spring of 1962. 

There are also reports that Monroe and Robert were heard screaming at each other on the night of her death, but those were never proven. 

“The Kennedy’s could not risk this coming out, because it could have brought down the President,” Spada said in that same People article. “But the cover-up that was designed to prevent anyone from finding out that Marilyn was involved intimately with the Kennedy family has been misinterpreted as a cover-up of their having murdered her.”

Link to original: https://www.womansworld.com/entertainment/inside-john-f-kennedys-love-life-jackie-to-marilyn