Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed

by Maureen Callahan

She wanted two things: to be loved—a deep, full love that she believed could heal all her wounds—and to be smart. She wanted powerful and famous men to see past the sex symbol and realize that Marilyn Monroe had substance. She always carried a book with her, a serious one. A big one. Ulysses. She didn’t understand it but didn’t realize that almost no one did.

One week later, in the middle of the night, without telling Mary’s siblings or obtaining the required legal permitting, Bobby Kennedy Jr. had Mary’s coffin dug up and moved seven hundred feet away. When reporters found out and asked why, Bobby, through family spokesperson Ken Sunshine, said, “The grave”—the grave, not her grave, another depersonalization—“is now on a sunny hillside, shaded by an oak tree with room for her children and other family.”

They didn’t know that John Farrar, the diver who pulled her body out of the car, quickly determined that she’d probably lived for at least an hour after the crash, and that had Ted gotten help, Mary Jo could have been saved. Or that, later, Farrar would describe Mary Jo as having been alone in the dark water, “re-breathing her own air,” the oxygen turning to carbon dioxide, her “emotional trauma” overwhelming.

There were lines you didn’t cross with Mary Jo. For all her enthusiasm and good nature, she held herself at a distance. No one she worked with knew her well. Neither did her friends or her boyfriends. To look at her, a sunny blonde pixie in the trendiest clothes, you would never guess at her stubbornness, her seriousness. Mary Jo knew that she was pretty. She liked a party and loved to dance, and that was the only time anyone saw her out of control and un-self-aware: her dancing had a ferocity to it, as if everything she suppressed—her anger, her fears, her desires and sexual energy—used that single, socially acceptable expression to escape.

‘Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’

On June 6, at 1:44 a.m., after one day in intensive care at LA’s Good Samaritan hospital, Robert F. Kennedy was pronounced dead. He had been shot three times, the fatal bullet through his head. His assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, later said that he killed Bobby for his pro-Israel views and for contributing to the persecution of Palestinians.

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

Certainly not Ted. He was unserious, the runt of the Kennedy litter, kicked out of Harvard for cheating.

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. Never let anyone know how deeply you are hurting.

Marilyn showed up drunk to the Golden Globes Awards ceremony, baby-stepping her way to her table in a liquid emerald backless sequined gown, yet another dress that amplified her sex appeal while constraining her. It was the ultimate metaphor for being Marilyn Monroe. She wanted out.

She wasn’t conspicuously friendly, but she had a way of making you look at her.”

On October 20, 1968, Jackie wed Ari on his private island of Skorpios, wearing a high-necked, knee-length, white Valentino dress, her hair pulled back in a half-ponytail and tied off with a white ribbon. It was a rebuke to the church that had denounced her, dressing like a young girl taking her First Communion, and to everyone who thought she was greedy or gone mad. No—Jacqueline Kennedy was quite in her right mind. She was a middle-aged icon who had rewritten her first husband’s problematic history and had just negotiated a marriage contract containing 170 clauses. Most importantly, she had successfully killed off her former incarnation. Jackie Onassis would be a different person entirely. Let the world recoil in disgust—all the better. All the more freedom for her.

“Why do people always try to see me through the different names I have had at different times?” she asked in 1972. “People often forget that I was Jacqueline Bouvier before being Mrs. Kennedy or Mrs. Onassis.” She was modern now in her tight white capris and tissue-thin black tees, her nipples poking through. She strolled the streets of Greece and Italy barefoot. She wore her hair long and loose or parted down the middle, wrapped in a chic low ballet bun. She adopted two accessories that would be named after her: a slouchy Gucci horsebit handbag and enormous black sunglasses that obscured half her face. The effect was pure Garbo: Look-at-me-don’t-look-at-me-I-can’t-bear-it-if-you-don’t-look-at-me. New York City Jackie O was a variation on the theme, a long, black, belted leather trench coat her armor. This Jackie O was a dominatrix. She was entering the most openly sexual chapter of her life. She was no longer the woman Jack Kennedy had humiliated. In marrying Ari, she had publicly triumphed.

For being such a terrible husband and such a distracted, unaccomplished president that she had to create an entire fiction, which had only served to trap her.

So Jackie, as she had done since childhood, turned all that fury inward, and it was killing her.

Jackie couldn’t unsheathe that dagger yet. Part of her pitied him. Ari may have fetishized her pain as something that made her more feminine and him more masculine, but he had miscalculated. In truth, Jackie was the dauntless one.

She saw what was going on in America. She saw the way women were fighting for reproductive rights and equal pay and the ability to open bank accounts without a man cosigning for them. Burning their bras. Motherhood was becoming optional. So was marriage. Women were entering the workforce as never before.

“If I ever feel sorry for myself, which is a most fatal thing,” Jackie said, “I think of her. I’ve seen her cry just twice, a little bit. Once was at Hyannis Port, when I came into her room. Her husband was ill, and Jack was gone, and Bobby had been killed… and the other time was on [a] ship after her husband died, and we were standing on the deck at the rail together, and we were talking about something—just something that reminded her. And her voice began to sort of break and she had to stop. Then she took my hand and squeezed it and said, ‘Nobody’s ever going to have to feel sorry for me. Nobody’s ever going to feel sorry for me,’ and she put her chin up. “And I thought, ‘God. What a thoroughbred.’”

Rose went to parochial school, where she was taught by nuns who believed that a woman’s greatest accomplishment was to suffer well—also a literal teaching. The sisters wore hardware around their necks and wrists meant to inflict pain at the slightest movement.

But this was yet another thing women weren’t allowed to do, because that meant earning money that otherwise would have gone to the doctor. If Rose’s nurse were to deliver Rose’s baby, then Frederick Good, the otherwise-occupied obstetrician, would not be able to bill Joe Kennedy his standard $125 fee. And so this capable nurse, upon seeing the baby crown, felt no other option but to put her palm on that tiny head and shove the baby back inside, holding her there for two hours.

Rose needed something other than babies and paid bills to feel fulfilled. She wanted to be around interesting people and things, the theater and corporate boardrooms and political campaigns. She had so much to offer, but Joe wouldn’t share anything of his political maneuverings with Rose: not his strategies or his enemies, his fears or his goals.

Eat drink and make love as tomorrow or next week we attend my funeral.”

She would never be that carefree girl on a Kennedy sail, windswept hair and white sweaters, weightlessly bobbing on ocean swells while the men sipped bourbon and smoked cigars.

The doctors told Rosie not to worry. She didn’t even need anesthesia—that’s how simple and painless this was. Everything that was happening to her, she would be awake and aware. Not many operations you could say that about. Pressure above her eye now. Rosie’s head was vibrating, the side of her head pulsating. The doctor talking to her seemed pleased. The way they once did this was so much less pleasant. Those other patients he had had to knock out—not with anesthesia but with electroshock through the brain, even though it could take five or six tries and the patients convulsed and howled and cried. Sometimes they would beg to die.

The rumors and stories, Joan said, “hurt my feelings. Of course they hurt my feelings. They went to the core of my self-esteem. When one grows up, feeling that one is sort of special and hoping that one’s husband thinks so, and then suddenly thinking maybe he doesn’t… Well, I didn’t lose my self-esteem altogether, but it was difficult to hear all the rumors. And I began thinking, ‘Well, maybe I’m just not attractive enough or attractive anymore.’… And so rather than get mad, or ask questions concerning the rumors about Ted and his girlfriends, or really stand up for myself at all, it was easier for me to just go and have a few drinks and calm myself down as if I weren’t hurt or angry.”

That motherhood was devalued in American society and too often left women financially dependent on their husbands. On the surface, Joan appeared to be campaigning for her husband—but whom was she fighting for, really?

He thought John, Carolyn’s Ultimate Trophy Husband, her knight in shining armor, was a loser wrapped in tinfoil.

His life was coming apart on all fronts, and John did not have great internal resources to draw upon, the kind of inner strength forged only from being humbled, humiliated, pushed down and then forcing oneself to get up again.

“Europe has its cathedrals, and we have Grand Central.”

“Is it not cruel,” she wrote, “to let our city die by degrees, stripped of all her proud moments, until there is nothing left of all her history and beauty to inspire our children? If they are not inspired by the past of our city, where will they find the strength to fight for her future? Americans care about their past, but for short term gain they ignore it and tear down everything that matters.”

“Wearing little makeup and no jewelry,” the Times reported, “the 47-year-old Mrs. Onassis said she felt no longing for the opulent clothes and lifestyle of the Russian nobility. ‘You love to see it, the way you love to see “Gone With the Wind,” ’ she mused, leaning back in her chair, chewing a shortbread cookie. ‘But wouldn’t you rather wear your blue jeans than wander around in a hoop skirt?’”

Jackie told an adult John one November that she had been rethinking her first marriage and didn’t think it would have survived today. She would have left Jack Kennedy. The most interesting men to her now were the smart ones, writers and artists. Among her suitors was a TV producer she had asked to lunch, then back to her place for sex. He never heard from Jackie again and told a mutual friend that the encounter had left him shocked that women now treated sex the way men did—fun, casual, meaningless.

It was a heartbreak. Jackie had been in the job for ten months and had begun finding her rhythm. Her colleagues were no longer showing up to work in their finest clothes; they had stopped addressing her with stiff formality. At Viking she was just another beginning editor with a crappy office who got her own coffee, made her own photocopies, and placed her own phone calls.

“I’ve never known professional women,” Jackie told one of her colleagues. “I’ve never worked for women before.”

Jackie had encouraged her friend Barbara Chase-Riboud to write her groundbreaking book about Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson’s slave and the mother of at least six of Jefferson’s children—a disturbing part of American history that, at the time, remained little known.

“It took three years,” Chase-Riboud wrote, “from the time a concerned Jacqueline Onassis had turned to me and said, ‘You must write this story,’ to the time it was published at Viking Press with her as my acquiring editor… I realized that sitting beside me in a black one-piece swimsuit was one of the few women in the world who could explain political power and ambition, American sex and American autocracy, the back stairs at the White House and the intolerable glare and flame of living history. Who else?” Who else, indeed?

“What has been sad for many women of my generation,” Jackie told Steinem, “is that they weren’t supposed to work if they had families. There they were, with the highest education, and what were they to do when the children were grown—watch the raindrops coming down the windowpane? Leave their fine minds unexercised?… You have to be doing something you enjoy. That is a definition of happiness: ‘Complete use of one’s faculties along lines leading to excellence in a life affording them scope.’ It applies to women as well as to men. We can’t all reach it, but we can try to reach it to some degree.”

Left unsaid was Jackie’s other personal triumph: she never thought twice now about grabbing a pair of big bold sunglasses from the basket near her door, belting her black leather trench, swinging her namesake Gucci bag over her shoulder, and heading out of 1040 Fifth Avenue, off to work. Right across the street, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was the ancient Egyptian Temple of Dendur, which Jackie had officially received as a gift to the United States back in 1965. Another time, another life. Then Jackie would look south, turn left, and disappear into the crowd, just another New York woman on the go.

The exhumation of Mary’s body and her secret reburial have, as of this writing, been forgotten.

He was convicted in 2002 and sentenced to twenty years to life. In 2013, after years of agitating, his cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr. helped push for a retrial;

Keep Ithaka always in your mind. Arriving there is what you are destined for. But do not hurry the journey at all.