Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed

by Maureen Callahan

Diana was so young that she didn’t even know herself yet, and the world was telling young women that they weren’t worth much without a man. But Diana had this man! And this man saw things in her she could not even fathom.

When Dave called, Mimi answered. She never made plans after work—never made any friends, really—because this was too big a secret. She only cared about being available to the president. It didn’t seem like a sacrifice; if anything, she felt special.

What if he forgot about her? But then he would call, and it was like Diana had been plugged back into a wall socket, her adrenaline soaring and warming her up.

“You’re going to regret it,” the woman said. “All of a sudden you’ll turn around and you’ll be twenty-five and you won’t have a life.”

Her marriage would not be a casualty, she wrote, of what was done to her as a child, of the shame she still carried, of the sense that somehow she had deserved that abuse, had invited it. “I will not be punished for it or be whipped or be threatened or not loved or sent to hell to burn.”

The question was never: Why can’t Bobby be faithful? The question was always: What’s wrong with Mary?

Mary had never really grown up, and latching on to the Kennedys so soon after her father died, becoming part of Bobby’s family as a teenage girl, had left her profoundly vulnerable to him.

“What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black…

Joan was a people pleaser, the default setting of so many young women raised in respectable postwar families where, say, alcoholic moms and abusive dads such as hers weren’t discussed.

What she had learned from a young age she would master as a young wife, both in public and private: Never let anyone know how quickly you see through them.

That was Jackie’s genius. She knew how to bring people in while keeping herself at bay. She met them at their level but made them want to be like her.

Every moment, every photograph, every note taken by reporters, every detail recorded by all these men who would go on to write biographies of her husband, all of it now had extraordinary weight. She understood instantly: Optics. If she controlled those, she controlled the messaging. She could shape how history viewed her husband.

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.

John’s cousins were less upset about their own respective scandals than John’s disloyalty to fellow Kennedy men. His first reaction, Joe told the Associated Press, was: “Ask not what you can do for your cousin, but what you can do for his magazine.”

“When John Kennedy lost interest in me,” Diana wrote years later, now a renowned New York City psychotherapist in her eighties, “I also lost interest in me. Inexperienced in adult relationships, it didn’t occur to me that women could be angry with men, so instead I turned on myself. Paralysis, confusion, and ever more waiting ensued.” She was, she wrote, “mired in shame.”

Her secret, Diana said, had always been a heavy weight. She called it the “pocket of dead energy” she had forever carried. She was ready, finally, to drop it.

“What happens when the star strides on?” Diana wrote. “Useless, futile, ridiculous rage aimed at his disappearing back? A rapid ride down the escalator of self-hatred? All of the above… Back then, I thought my job was to become pleasing, an enabling acolyte to a master of the universe. I know now that my job was to become myself.”

If we don’t care about our past, we cannot hope for our future.”