Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed

by Maureen Callahan

For inconvenient women everywhere

Dedication

History, to paraphrase the adage, is typically told by the victors.

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 viper, a seductress. Whatever grievous harm a Kennedy man may have done to her, the message remains clear: She was asking for it. It was her fault.

“‘Some men see things as they are and say: why? “‘I dream things that never were and say: why not?’”

Never let anyone know how quickly you see through them. Never let anyone know how deeply you are hurting.

She knew about the fifteen-year-old babysitter Jack had gotten pregnant back when he was senator.

What Marilyn could not see was that Bobby, like Jack before him, was less interested in strengthening her than annealing her: heating her up like white gold, then leaving her alone to cool down, making her more pliable, bendable, easier to manipulate. Wearing down her strength.

“His death really robbed me of my chance to be angry with him,” Jackie told Dr. Kris. “He really went out in a blaze of glory.” How could there ever have been room for her rage? How could she allow herself to feel what she felt—that a part of her hated him? America would never accept that.

Joe was on record as supporting Hitler’s forced sterilization plan, its number one targets those with “congenital mental deficiency.” Joe called it “a great thing. I don’t know how the Church feels about it, but it will do away with many of the disgusting specimens… which inhabit this earth.”

The most famous of these women have too often been recast as architects of their own demise, or as women who were asking for it, or as imminent threats to the Kennedy dynasty. Those who were less well known, or merely teenage girls, have become footnotes to history—if they are remembered at all.