Books

Nemesis: The True Story of Aristotle Onassis, Jackie O, and the Love Triangle That Brought Down the Kennedys

Peter Evans

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: 2008
Category: Non Fiction

Like conspiracies that involve the Kennedys?

In The Tears of Autumn --- a novel by Charles McCarry, who was a deep-cover operative for the CIA for a decade --- the motive for the assassination of John F. Kennedy is nothing you've read before.

In American Tabloid --- James Ellroy's blistering novel about the assassination --- everyone's so dirty it's a miracle there weren't a dozen gunmen in Dallas.

Peter Evans, an English journalist, has nothing new to tell us about the killing of the President in Nemesis.

But he has a mind-blowing theory about the assassination of Robert Kennedy -- based on what some will call “evidence” and others will call "anecdote."

In a word: Aristotle Onassis paid protection money to Arab terrorists, who used it to kill Robert F. Kennedy.

Was Onassis horrified when he learned what he'd financed?

Not at all. And for a simple reason: He hated Bobby Kennedy. He had for 15 years. And he knew that if Kennedy became President, his oil tankers weren't like to be welcome in American ports -- because Bobby Kennedy hated Aristotle Onassis just as deeply as Onassis hated him. That's why Onassis had no remorse for putting up the money that financed the operation which turned Sirhan Sirhan into a "Manchurian Candidate" who killed Kennedy to benefit a man he'd never met.

"Very interesting, if true," Gertrude Stein liked to say. Are you willing to convict on antagonism dating from the early 1950s, primal rage over possession of Jacqueline Kennedy, and the whispered confessions of the dying Onassis? This is the book for you; it's complicated, exhaustively reported, richly footnoted.

But the thesis of the book isn't, for me, the reason to read it. The social history is. I mean, the story of who slept with whom at the highest levels of society and politics --- sexual and romantic dalliances of very public, married people who were so rich and powerful they didn't believe the "rules" applied to them.

You may, in other books, have read many of these tidbits. But it was news to me that:

• Onassis tried to arrange for Marilyn Monroe to marry Prince Rainier of Monaco.

• That when Jacqueline Bouvier was only recently married to John Kennedy, she slept with William Holden in the same bed where JFK made love to Marilyn.

• When Bobby Kennedy called Onassis to urge him to stop seeing Jackie's sister, Lee Radziwill, the Greek snapped, "Bobby, you and Jack f-- your movie queen [Monroe] and I'll f--- my princess."

• Onassis may have made his first real money --- and, when he was broke at the end of his life, his last --- by carrying drugs for organized crime in his tankers. (But then, as a young man, he may have saved his life during the massacres of 1922 by becoming the lover of a Turkish officer.)

• Jackie and Onassis became lovers in the fall of 1963, when he was romancing her sister and she was, lest you forget, First Lady. Bobby Kennedy was so angry he instructed Jackie to "tell your Greek boyfriend he won't be coming back here until Jack's re-elected.... a f---g long time after, like maybe never."

• The Presidential marriage was so frayed that the Kennedys had "a separate sleeping arrangement" on the last night of the President's life.

• After the President's assassination, Jackie needed money. She took cash, in envelopes, from Onassis --- as much as $100,000 a year.

This is crude, nasty stuff, very far removed from the modest fantasies that peasants like us have of what we'd do if we had major money and power. That is because we have morals. Onassis did not. He had raw charisma, and he never thought to polish it. He liked to boast that he had been Jackie's lover before John Kennedy died --- and that, after Dallas, he had "shared" her with Bobby. Indeed, as a metaphor, he loved screwing everyone. And, better, keeping it secret. It was said that not being found out was, for him, “the same as telling the truth.”

But if Onassis is horrifying, he's not alone. Just crude. Why did the urbane CIA Chief Allen Dulles use Robert Kennedy to damage the Greek's shipping business in the early '50s? Because Dulles, though married, was having an affair with Queen Frederika of Greece, and he didn't want Onassis using that tidbit against him --- so he let Kennedy hurt Onassis. From many sources, including Forty Ways to Look at JFK, we know that John F. Kennedy was the most flagrantly promiscuous president in our history. And “Camelot” was a fantasy that Jackie created after the assassination -- as much for herself as for her husband. Not pretty stuff, but slicker than Onassis.

Mortals behaving like gods. Until recently, they got away with it --- that is, the public didn't find out. And so many were agog when some of these social outlaws came to bad ends. But what we saw as “tragedy” was really more like “destiny”, and the easy descriptor that comes to mind is “Shakespearean”.

"Nemesis" is a dishy, dirty book. It's great beach/vacation reading for people who like smut and scandal that reads like fiction but is presented as non-fiction. And maybe -- maybe -- it even is.