Books
Maureen Callahan’s “Ask Not” delivers damning details about the exploits of three generations of the storied family.
Marilyn Monroe with President John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy in 1962. Cecil Stoughton / White House
By Nina Burleigh, Washington Post
updated on July 11, 2024 | 8:59 AM
When the B-52s first sang about “heroes falling to the ground like Hell’s magnet pulls me down,” JFK had been dead for only 15 years and was still a mostly unblemished national icon. Stories about how he treated women had been leaking out, but not until the #MeToo era did we learn just how abominably he and other revered and influential men behaved.
Journalist Maureen Callahan has worked for the New York Post and the Daily Mail – tabloids that have never met a Kennedy they didn’t love to trash. In her new book, “Ask Not,” she has stitched together a stinging portrait of the depredations of not just John F. Kennedy but of three generations of Kennedy men. It’s a group portrait that reminds us that former president Donald Trump is hardly an outlier among powerful men.
Relying on a vast array of sources from the obscure (the White House “kennel-keeper”) to the best-selling (Kitty Kelley) and her own reportage, Callahan takes a critical look at the Kennedy men through the lens of the miserable and sometimes abused wives and girlfriends in their lives.
She identifies the wellspring of misogyny in Irish Catholic patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. in Boston during the Gilded Age, and traces it anecdote by anecdote down through JFK, RFK and Teddy, and the litter of boomer generation men – boys hatched by three Kennedy wives Callahan depicts as humiliated breeders and political props, driven to madness and alcoholism. At the top is matriarch Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, a champion procreator who gave birth to nine living babies, including one who would become the 35th president, and two future senators.
Little, Brown
For the sections on JFK, Callahan relies heavily on a plethora of secondary sources about White House orgies, parties and the Camelot King’s sex addiction. She repeats allegations in Kitty Kelley’s 1978 book, “Jackie Oh!,” that marriage to JFK at one point drove Jackie to anorexia and a depression that required electroshock therapy. Callahan refloats unfounded claims that suggest both JFK and Robert F. Kennedy were somehow involved in Marilyn Monroe’s suicide.
She also recounts the stories of women who have since written or spoken about being college-age interns who were transformed into Kennedy sex objects. Diana de Vegh was one, a Radcliffe junior when she caught the eye of the married senator from Massachusetts in 1958. Kennedy eventually seduced her in his Boston apartment. Her first sexual experience with him was quick and decidedly unromantic. “There were no kisses. No professions of love,” she told Callahan in an interview. De Vegh was among a number of young women who later were invited to the White House family quarters when Jackie was away.
Then-Sen. John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline Kennedy, at the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port on July 20, 1957. Charles McCormack / The Boston Globe
Callahan has a good eye for lurid details. Among the most controversial anecdotes – the ones reviewers and excerpters are already plucking out – is one that she attributes to conversations with author William Manchester’s son, John, who shared details from his father’s two five-hour recorded interviews with Jackie, which are locked away from the public until 2067. According to Callahan, Jackie told Manchester that she and Jack had sex the night before he died. But she offers no source for her eye-popping claim that Jackie kissed the dead president’s entire naked corpse while alone, “or so she thought,” in the hospital in Dallas.
Anyone born after 1970 does need reminding about the horrific story of Ted Kennedy leaving Mary Jo Kopechne to die a slow death in his submerged car while he walked away. And Callahan delivers. The ghastly details are damning, and the fact that Teddy spent another five decades in the public eye is a testament to the normalized misogyny of the culture.
Callahan writes that reporters routinely referred to Kopechne not by name but as “the blonde.” They often described the “Boiler Room girls” who worked for Bobby Kennedy, of whom Kopechne was one, as “party girls,” and after Kopechne’s death, they were defamed by Kennedy attaches if they tried to speak out about her.
The book is chock-full of pregnancies and repeat miscarriages among wives trying desperately to carry out their duty to produce children, and failing. Jackie suffered one miscarriage, lost one full-term baby at 2 days old and endured a stillbirth while her husband was cavorting with women on a boat in the Mediterranean. Joan, Ted’s wife, suffered three miscarriages. But together the three wives managed to hatch out a pack of boys, the Kennedy Third Gen, whom Callahan depicts as morally and intellectually attenuated, coddled, entitled, reckless and as ruinous to women as their fathers and grandfather.
Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. survived a youthful heroin addiction, only to develop a sex addiction that he catalogued in a “sex diary” first published by the New York Post. He wrote of being tormented by “lust demons” and being helplessly “mugged” by horny women. Callahan recounts the story of the suicide of his wife, Mary Richardson, much of it from previously reported details in the New York Post, including quotes from other mothers who recalled Mary begging for $20 to buy gas or food as her husband prepared to divorce her.
RFK Jr.’s older brother Joseph Kennedy II, recklessly driving an open jeep in Nantucket in 1973, veered into oncoming traffic, ejecting seven passengers. The accident left a local girl named Pam Kelley a paraplegic for life. Callahan devotes a chapter to Kelley’s sad later life and early death in 2020.
Madness, suicide, alcoholism, heartache, trauma, rape and … murder. Michael Skakel, related by the marriage of his aunt Ethel to RFK, was convicted of killing Martha Moxley in 2002. Another third-gen Kennedy man, William Kennedy Smith (the son of JFK and RFK’s sister Jean Kennedy Smith), was famously acquitted of raping Patricia Bowman in Palm Beach, Fla. His cousin JFK Jr. showed up at the trial in a show of support, even though he reportedly told a friend that the Kennedy family “should have done something about Willie when he first started doing this.” Callahan spells it out: “meaning, raping women.”
Bowman later told the journalist Dominick Dunne that, after raping her, Smith “looked at me, the calmest, smuggest, most arrogant man,” and said no one would believe her. The 1991 trial was a display of celebrity misogyny, in which Smith’s lawyer Roy Black painted Bowman as a mentally ill drug addict who shouldn’t have been out with Kennedy men at 3 a.m.
Callahan takes special aim at the reputation of the golden boy who died too young. The eyes of JFK Jr.’s wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, are among the three pairs on the cover of the book (Jackie’s and Marilyn Monroe’s the other two). Callahan portrays Bessette Kennedy as having come to regret snaring the ultimate Kennedy prince. In the first chapter, Callahan relies on ex-girlfriend Christina Haag’s book for details of John’s reckless streak “that bordered on a death wish.” Callahan also claims – without attribution – that Carolyn “really, really did not want to get on” the plane the night Junior insisted on flying up to a Kennedy wedding together.
John F. Kennedy Jr. speaks with Carolyn Bessette at the Municipal Art Society of New York Benefit held at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York on Feb. 28, 1996. The pair were married Saturday, Sept. 21, 1996, on Cumberland Island, off the coast of Georgia. Richard Corkery / New York Daily News / AP, File
She also repeats unsubstantiated reporting by the National Enquirer that the couple were on the verge of divorce before perishing in Junior’s small plane in 1999. “She wanted out of her marriage but also felt trapped,” Callahan writes, quoting Carolyn – from an Enquirer article – telling pals: “I can’t get a divorce. I’ll wind up living in a trailer park, out of my mind, going ‘I used to be married to JFK Jr.’”
The multigenerational abuse cycle chronicled in “Ask Not” is certainly not confined to the Kennedys. Entitled male predators, protection by a retinue of enablers, and silencing by payoff or litigation are still foundational to our national power structure. The anecdotes that make up this book are not news, but Callahan strings them together in a way that makes the House of Kennedy look like Bluebeard’s castle of horrors.
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Nina Burleigh is the author of seven books, including “The Trump Women: Part of the Deal” and, most recently, the novel “Zero Visibility Possible.”
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Ask Not
The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed
By Maureen Callahan
Little, Brown. 400 pp. $32.50
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