Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed

by Maureen Callahan

They were careless people… they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. —F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Only Marilyn’s shrinks had any inkling why she spoke that way, why some women who were abused as children sometimes adopt a child’s voice. It was a way of saying: I’m smaller than you. Please don’t hurt me. She never thought Jack Kennedy would hurt her.

was beginning to lay the groundwork, to set her up as an unfit mother. It was what Kennedy men did—turn on their women when they were done with them, call them crazy. Dispose of them.

It wasn’t as if he were the only one to blame here. Even those close to Mary—much like those close to Carolyn Bessette—would admit she could be difficult. Very, very difficult.

Bobby was trying to rein in Mary’s spending, her compulsive shopping. But she was trying to fill an emotional black hole with clothes, trips, private yoga sessions with a local teacher who was becoming one of her closest friends. That should have been a warning sign to Mary—

That was another secret between her and Jack, their confidential appointments with Max Jacobson, the German physician they called Dr. Feelgood. He shot them up with all kinds of drugs: speed, steroids, painkillers, animal hormones, bone marrow, human placenta. Neither Jack nor Jackie knew what, exactly, was in Feelgood’s injections. “I don’t care if it’s horse piss,” Jack once said. “It works.”

Ari Onassis was a Greek shipping magnate, a billionaire, an antisemite, a vulgarian, and a bisexual with a string of bought-and-paid-for young men that he savagely beat after sex. On October 17, 1968, he and Jackie Kennedy, thirty-nine years old to his sixty-two, announced they would marry in three days’ time.

This was something Jackie and Lee had in common with the Kennedy men, an incestuous tendency to compete for lovers and sometimes share them. Jackie felt certain that she and Lee would get past this. Less so as to whether America would forgive her.

She was having nightmares, vivid and unceasing. Most days she couldn’t get out of bed. She was as inconsolable as ever, reminiscent of the months after Jack’s death when little Caroline told her schoolteacher, “My mommy cries all the time.”

Bobby had been more than a brother-in-law to Jackie; before his assassination, in the wake of Jack’s death, the two of them destroyed and disconsolate, they became romantically involved.

But the help he gave her wasn’t just practical. It was Bobby alone who could rouse Jackie from her grief, from sleeping her days away, from drinking and weeping and fearing ever going outside.

She told Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. that she couldn’t find slumber at night despite all the sleeping pills she took, that her medications did nothing to stop her mind from obsessively replaying the assassination. She told Roosevelt that Bobby Kennedy was the only person keeping her from killing herself. For Bobby, the same was true of Jackie.

Jackie and Bobby’s affair, which was on-and-off from 1964 to 1968, was whispered about in their social circles and well known among the press corps. Jackie and Bobby would be seen dining out in New York City, openly kissing and cuddling, but because it was the Kennedys—because of what happened to Jack, and because of Jackie’s strength in the days to follow—the secret had been kept.

“The war would drain us,” he said. “It would turn our government into national socialism… What would we be fighting for?… Democracy is finished in England.” But he was happy to leave Rosemary there. Rosemary, who with her limitations would never have survived the horrors of Hitler’s eugenics.

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.

It did make sense. Books were among Jackie’s great loves; she was a voracious consumer and reader of them, and aside from her children, books were her solace, her emotional sustenance. And editing would fit with her baseline personality: Jackie was social and loved meeting new and fascinating people, but she was also, at her core, a loner. Becoming an editor would mean lunches and book launches and office work, but it would also allow her hours away on her own, reading and thinking and refueling.

As at Viking, Jackie kept her head down and her door open. She worked Tuesdays through Thursdays, bringing her own lunch and eating at her desk, usually a tuna fish sandwich with celery and carrots for snacks. She never pretended that her celebrity hadn’t gotten her catapulted above entry level; in fact, she used her status when asked. In the mid-1980s, even though she had preferred not to, Jackie flew to London and approached Princess Diana about writing her memoirs. (That was a no.) It was the same when she was asked to persuade Michael Jackson to write his autobiography, swallowing her distaste and flying to his Neverland Ranch, this time succeeding.

But Jackie also had her passion projects: she acquired Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth and Bill Moyers’s Healing and the Mind—two books quite personal to her, given her obsession with mythology and her lifelong attempts to heal herself—and both became bestsellers. Her lifelong love of ballet helped Jackie to persuade prima ballerina Gelsey Kirkland to write her autobiography, also a critical and commercial success. And Jackie worked closely with the African American author Dorothy West on her novel The Wedding, which would come to be regarded as a modern-day classic.

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.

Chase-Riboud later wrote. “After lunch, sitting on the beach while boats filled with paparazzi circled the island with telephoto lenses that resembled bazookas, I told Jacqueline the story of Sally Hemings, my desire that the world know who she was, and my own frustration at perhaps not having the skills or the stamina. ‘I’m a poet, a sprinter—not a long-distance runner,’ I said, ‘and no one seems to be interested in the life of an American Revolution–era enslaved Black woman.’” Random House, including her editor there, the legendary Toni Morrison, had passed on the book.

“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?

Now fifty years old, Jackie was in her prime. She was building her dream house on Martha’s Vineyard, had raised two children in uniquely difficult circumstances, had earned the respect of her peers in publishing, and had fallen in love with Maurice Tempelsman, a man she had known since her years with Jack. She had no desire to marry again, ever, and that was just fine with him; he remained married to his first wife and had no desire to divorce. Jackie had always had a penchant for married men and the emotional distance baked into those arrangements, but Maurice was different; he was devoted to her. Jackie Onassis, in short, had found her bliss. She was now the architect of her own life.

Rosemary Kennedy, her unspeakable lobotomy Joe Kennedy’s personal original sin, was twenty-three years old when her father rendered her mute and helpless in 1941. It wasn’t until his death in 1969 that Rose Kennedy felt she could tell her sons and daughters where Rosemary was, and that they felt it was safe to visit her. Rosemary had lived for nearly thirty years without any contact from her parents or siblings. Can you imagine a lonelier life?

flirtatious Jackie says goodbye to brother-in-law Robert F. Kennedy, who casts a look back next to wife, Ethel. Years after Bobby’s assassination, his lengthy affair with the newly widowed Jackie came to light — too scandalous for the Kennedy-loving media to report then, it was a relationship that today would be considered a trauma bond.