A profoundly humanized portrait … With more than 25 years of historical research on which to draw, Taraborrelli’s powerfully resourced biography offers incomparable observations … Decades later, as the U.S. and the world again finds itself teetering on the brink of existential crisis, the ethos demonstrated through Kennedy’s public speeches and private musings resonates even more deeply. —Booklist, starred review

A Kennedy specialist, Taraborrelli has written six books on the family, but this is the first on JFK … An excellent biography of the 35th president. —Kirkus Reviews

A compelling read with standout quality and originality that reveals the much-discussed personal side of JFK’s life via Taraborrelli’s … impeccable research … A riveting exploration for the millions of readers still fascinated by the Kennedy family’s dynamics and legacy.
—Library Journal, starred review

Taraborrelli eschews sensationalism, casting doubt on several lurid Kennedy legends … [an] emotionally charged portrait … and entertaining take on a great American soap opera.
—Publishers Weekly

Taraborrelli has spent over 30 years researching the Kennedy family—meticulously assembling the pieces of their rich and complex story—but this is the first time he has dedicated a book solely to JFK.

After revisiting hours of interviews and thousands of pages of notes and documents—as well as candid, first-hand oral histories from the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Presidential Library, rare internal reports from the Secret Service, detailed files from the National Archives, and intelligence documents from both the C.I.A. and F.B.I.—JFK: Public, Private, Secret presents an unvarnished account of a deeply flawed leader who nonetheless captivated a nation. This is JFK as never before captured by history: brilliant yet fallible, revered yet human— a figure whose legacy continues to shape America and the world.

Groundbreaking revelations from JFK: Public, Private, Secret include:

• A marriage defined by devotion and distance—Jackie’s quiet but firm rule regarding her husband’s infidelities: “Show me some respect and don’t rub it in my face.”
• The romance with Inga Arvad that posed a potential national security risk.
• The long-awaited truth about Marilyn Monroe—uncovered at last through the firsthand account of one of her closest confidantes.
• The mafia’s role in his rise to power.
• A presidency tested by betrayal and crisis.

The JFK presented in Taraborrelli’s definitive biography is a complex and endlessly fascinating historical figure—despite, and perhaps even because of, his many flaws.

This is the deeply human story of a man shaped by emotional vacancy and parental ambition, and a woman who challenged him to face the consequences of both. When Jack meets Jackie, he’s emotionally stunted. His father Joe even tells her, “I wished him pain,” because pain, Joe believes, creates empathy, and empathy is essential to leadership. But Jack has learned to keep emotion at a distance.

What unfolds is both a private reckoning and a public awakening. From Jack’s affair with Joan Lundberg, who lived in a trailer park and taught him how to feel, to his being absent during Jackie’s grief after a stillbirth, this story reveals a man slowly learning to confront what he’s spent a lifetime avoiding. In the end, it’s Jackie who forces him to reckon with the past.

And then, of course, there’s Marilyn. The story of how JFK and Marilyn met, and what exactly happened between them, has been shaped by years of misinformation, innuendo, and myth. Here, for the first time, Taraborrelli settles the truth of this story by revealing what really did, and didn’t, happen.

But JFK: Public, Private, Secret is more than just the story of John Kennedy’s personal life. It’s also packed with political history, scrupulously chronicling everything from the Bay of Pigs to the Cuban Missile crisis, through the civil rights movement to the unraveling conflict in Vietnam. His chess-like moves against USSR’s Nikita Khrushchev couldn’t carry bigger stakes as two nuclear powers square off on a global stage. Throughout it all, Kennedy’s close relationship with his brother and confidante Robert F. Kennedy reveals a moving portrait of two siblings bonded in the principled pursuit to defend the United States and its democratic values. And the book documents the many different ways, both as a senator and then as president, JFK worked to help create a more equal and caring society. Some of the programs founded on that work are well known: He developed the Peace Corps so that American volunteers could assist humanitarian efforts in other countries. But Kennedy also pushed for programs that advanced disability education and treatments.

These stories show us a president in progress—a man struggling to align private values with public duty. To the question of what integrity in office really looks like, JFK: Public, Private, Secret offers the answer.

The Kennedys loom so large in Jackie’s history that the story of her own family—the Bouviers and Auchinclosses—has never been fully explored.

She grew up the privileged member of a wealthy family, the daughter of a titanic mother figure Janet who held court with her children as if they were royals. At age fourteen, Jackie developed a close, moving relationship with Hugh Auchincloss, a beloved stepfather who mentored her and her siblings in the years to come. Taraborrelli carefully reconstructs these stories and introduces us to people rarely, or even in some cases, never written about: Jackie’s sister, Lee and enigmatic half-sister, Janet Jr., whose relationship with a young John Kerry Jackie opposed; her gay half-brother, Jamie, and how the family dealt with his sexual orientation; her stepbrother Yusha, whose love for Jackie was forced to go unrequited; her natural father Jack Bouvier, whose life Jackie tried to save in vain; and her fight later on to protect her mother from elder abuse.

Jackie’s larger-than-life romance with JFK is often told one- dimensionally as just that, but it is far more complicated than previously known. She got cold feet on the morning of their wedding. She didn’t want to move into the White House after he got elected and developed a plan to avoid it altogether. She loved him, but at every turn was forced to live with his infidelities, in turn developing close relationships with other men such as John Warnecke who would play crucial roles in her life after JFK’s assassination.

Finally, after 50 years of rumor and innuendo, Taraborrelli reveals the complete truth about JFK’s relationship with Marilyn Monroe. He also tells the story for the first time of the one conversation Jackie had with her, her reaction to Marilyn’s death, and how she ended up in therapy with Marilyn’s psychiatrist. For the first time, readers will learn how Jackie and her family made the decision to not have her attend the Madison Garden celebration during which Marilyn sang “Happy Birthday” to the President, and what they did that evening, instead.

For the 60th anniversary of the JFK assassination, the author also breaks new ground about Jackie’s private moments at the White House in the aftermath of the President’s murder, when she was surrounded by friends, foes … and Aristotle Onassis. We learn the full story of her relationship with Onassis, a telling packed with new discoveries:

• Jackie was facing a financial crisis after JFK died, and the Kennedy family did not provide her with the safety net she wanted. Enter Aristotle Onassis.
• An Onassis family member was instrumental in Jackie’s marriage to Aristotle—his formidable eldest sister, Artemus Garofalidis—who collaborated with Jackie to make her Mrs. Onassis.
• People have assumed that Onassis cheated on Jackie, but Taraborrelli reveals that this was the agreement they had—there would be no intimacy in their marriage—an agreement that closely mirrors the one her mother Janet made with her stepfather Hugh Auchincloss.