A new biography of former first lady Jackie Kennedy details an affair she had with architect Jack Warnecke, months after John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
In an excerpt of “Jackie: Public, Private, Secret” by J. Randy Taraborrelli, the story of Kennedy’s affair with Warnecke is fleshed out — starting soon after JFK’s murder in Dallas in November 1963.
Warnecke, who Kennedy hired to design the dead president’s gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery with its famous eternal flame, asked her out to dinner in May 1964 and arrived at her door later that day with flowers despite not getting an affirmative response.
“That’s when it started between us,” Warnecke said.
Despite friends and family telling her she was moving on too soon, and her own claims to never want to date anyone again, Kennedy brought the architect and former college football player to the family compound in Hyannis Port on Cape Cod in November 1964 where “one thing led to another,” according to Warnecke.
The pair wound up dating for three years. Warnecke even planned to propose during a trip to Hawaii in 1966, before he told her that he was in debt because of the expansion of his firm and their expensive habits.
According to Warnecke’s recollection, she soon stopped taking his calls and told JFK Jr. that “We won’t be seeing Mr. Jack again.”
In 1968, Kennedy married Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, who died in 1975.
Toward the end of her life, she had a relationship with diamond merchant Maurice Tempelsman, but it was Warnecke who she reconnected with after she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1994. He met her at her Manhattan apartment where she read some of her old letters aloud to Warnecke before burning them — a ritual she had been performing with close friends and family before her death. However, she did ask him to keep a photo of her and JFK taken on the day of his inauguration.
Kennedy died May 19, 1994. Warnecke dished about their time together to Taraborrelli, who promised to sit on the information until 10 years after Warnecke’s death. He died in 2010 at the age of 91.
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