Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed

by Maureen Callahan

This book is not ideological or partisan. It’s about thirteen women and a piece of American history hiding in plain sight. Kennedy men have been valorized and lionized for nearly a century, but the women they’ve broken, tormented, raped, murdered, or left for dead have never really been part of their legacy. They must be. None of this is history. As William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The Kennedys remain a powerful and frequently destructive force, both in our politics and our culture. As of this writing, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent conspiracy theorist and anti-vaxxer who has made racist and antisemitic comments, is running for president of the United States. He has raised tens of millions from big donors, almost all based on legacy.

He remains unbothered and unquestioned about the circumstances leading to the suicide of his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, in 2012—a fragile woman whom he tormented toward the end of their marriage and in the lead-up to her suicide, cheating on her, cutting off her credit cards and access to cash, trying to forcibly hospitalize her, telling her she’d be “better off dead.” He continues to smear her reputation, telling the press in December 2023 that yes, he had flown on the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s private plane not once, as he previously claimed, but twice, and that was only because Mary had a “relationship” with Epstein’s chief procurer, the convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell—an assertion that several people who knew Mary well told me is impossible, given her character, her morality, and her devout Catholicism. RFK Jr. also, incredibly, has been given a huge pass for his false accusation that the savage 1975 sexual assault and murder of fifteen-year-old Martha Moxley was committed not by his once-convicted cousin Michael Skakel but by two teenagers from the Bronx, one Black, one mixed-race—teenagers he publicly named, endangering their lives.

RFK Jr. wrote that one of the teens was “obsessed” with Martha’s “beautiful blonde hair” and that both young men decided to go “caveman” on her. Imagine anyone but a Kennedy leveling such racist, baseless accusations. The media would, rightly, be aflame with indignation. Yet all these decades later, the Kennedys benefit from a perverse double standard—in the press, in the justice system, and in the court of public opinion. It’s a double standard that is clearest and most insidious when it comes to the crimes that Kennedy men have committed against women and young girls. What was done to Mary and Martha are only two recent examples. Any victims who dare to fight back will find themselves confronting the awesome power of the Kennedy machine, one that recasts any woman, no matter how wealthy or famous or powerful, as crazy, spiteful, vengeful; a drug addict, a vipe...

The late Ted Kennedy, vaunted “Lion of the Senate,” drove off a bridge and left a twenty-nine-year-old woman to die in three feet of water—his passenger Mary Jo Kopechne, whose life could have been saved. Yet that criminal act has successfully been transformed into “Ted’s tragedy,” an awful event that unfairly kept him from ever becoming president of the United States. Ted Kennedy served out the rest of his life in Congress and was given a statesman’s funeral with wall-to-wall news coverage, while Kopechne’s name was barely mentioned. He was memorialized by Ellen R. Malcolm, the founder of EMILY’s List, as “a true champion for wo...

This well-known drunk and serial sexual assaulter has been the glorified subject of two recent biographies, both by men: a two-volume treatment hyperbolically titled Catching the Wind and Against the Wind, respectively, by prize-winning author Neal Gabler, and Ted Kennedy: A Life, by prize-winning historian John A. Farrell. The latter describes Kopechne as “attractive but not gorgeous”—that observation, why?—before noting that she had the bad luck to be in a vehicle that passively “left the bridge,” as if, like the car in Stephen King’s Christine, it had a mind of its own. As if that car hadn’t been driven by a drunken Ted Kennedy, his driver’s license ...

Ted escaped. He left Mary Jo in that car upside down, forced to crane her neck at an awkward, painful angle as she struggled to breathe through a tiny pocket of air, surrounded ...

After the accident, guess who was at fault? Not Ted but his victim, Mary Jo, for being a single woman in this ...

The Kennedys have a way of quashing anything or anyone—a book, a miniseries, an interview—that contradicts their golden image. They typically do this through power or payoffs. Caroline Kennedy and Maria Shriver personally lobbied the History Channel to kill The Kennedys, a 2011 miniseries that one family loyalist called “vindictive” and “malicious” in the New York Times, and were successful. In one of the saddest ironies, even the most powerful Kennedy women would like this history erased. And such efforts have allowed this lie, th...