Does the fact that this question remains unanswered despite its popularity indicate that there is no reliable academic source from which to develop an informed answer?

greeting everyone. Just a reminder of this subreddit's rules regarding answer quality, since we're so far getting answers of the "I read an article about this" variety.

A brief excerpt:

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I commented earlier but didn't expand properly so this is what I know about this:

Marilyn and the President only met 4 times, three of them publicly, so it is extremely unlikely they ever conducted the affair that many people believe happened. No rumours about Marilyn and JFK ever circulated until ten years after Marilyn’s death, when Norman Mailer published his controversial and arguably tasteless book about Marilyn, which he later admitted writing “because he needed the money”.

Aside from the fact there is absolutely no hard evidence to suggest that Marilyn and JFK ever had an affair, at the time of the alleged ‘affair’, Marilyn was growing closer to her ex-husband and friend Joe DiMaggio, had been busy buying her own home and furnishing it, and also working on Something’s Got to Give. It is unlikely Marilyn ever had time to have an affair with the President of the United States, never mind keep it a secret from the press.

The fact is that there really isn't enough evidence for a historian to say for sure - there are plenty of people out there who have suggested that Kennedy and Monroe had an affair, starting with Earle Wilson, a gossip columnist whose book Show Business Laid Bare was one of the first to claim that the two of them had had an affair in 1974. But the evidence that we have tends to come from memoirs or exposés that people wrote long after the fact, or from second- and third-hand accounts. We need to take those kinds of accounts with a grain of salt and certainly can't accept everything that they say as gospel.

Now, add to that the fact that there's very little other evidence suggesting that Monroe and Kennedy were ever even in the same room on more than a handful of occasions, and that other members of Kennedy's inner circle (people like Arthur Schelsinger and Peter Lawford) have questioned the accounts that allege an affair, and you might start to understand why very few historians are willing to go out on a limb and say "yes, it's clear they had an affair."

The only real possible/responsible answer is to say that "quite a few people have said that they had an affair, but we can't confirm those accounts, and will likely never know for certain." The evidence we have just isn't reliable/strong enough to draw any other conclusion - and you'll find that the vast majority of academic Kennedy biographers (people like Robert Dalleck) are pretty dismissive of the whole idea.

Is there reliable evidence that he had affairs with other women?

Follow-up Question: Did the idea for this alleged affair partly come from the infamous "Happy Birthday" that Marilyn Monroe performed?