More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
January 1 - January 4, 2025
He was memorialized by Ellen R. Malcolm, the founder of EMILY’s List, as “a true champion for women.” Cecile Richards, then-president of Planned Parenthood, lauded him as “a true champion of women’s health and rights.” Neither woman mentioned Mary Jo Kopechne.
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 expired. As if Ted hadn’t sped down an unlit dirt road and careened off a small bridge with such force the car flipped and landed on its roof, the windshield smashed in.
He hadn’t banked nearly the hours in the air, in daylight and at night, to pilot alone. He would break the rules, sneak in solo flights when he was supposed to have an instructor fly with him, but not one person admonished him or threatened to take away his training certificate. Nope, it was just John being a Kennedy, a rogue and rebel like his father, risk in his blood.
Even his close friend Steve Gillon, an eminent historian, gave up trying to educate John on the realities of the Vietnam War and his father’s backroom decision to escalate troop levels rather than, as post-assassination myth had it, end American involvement.
He was such a heedless driver, speeding and switching lanes and, when stuck in traffic, driving on sidewalks. No wonder his closest friends refused to get in the plane he was learning to pilot, assuming—rightly—that he would fly the way he drove.
“There’s an unwritten rule in Massachusetts,” John told her, “whereby members of my family can commit murder and mayhem”—after all, decades earlier his uncle Ted had left a young woman to die in three feet of water—“and nobody bats an eye.” That heartless remark was a huge red flag. Carolyn ignored it.
Jackie wasn’t naïve. She knew Jack wouldn’t be faithful. But she hadn’t known just how promiscuous he was or how little he’d do to protect her. Later she’d learn, along with the whole world in news reports too numerous to bear, that Jack had likely infected her with his own constant sexually transmitted diseases, the asymptomatic chlamydia among them, and this was quite likely why she’d had so much trouble carrying her first two pregnancies to term.
“What’s done is done,” Jack told Bobby over the phone. “The baby is lost.” Jack saw no point in cutting his vacation short. Her husband had given no greater rejection. Mourning a child she never got to see or hold, Jackie lay in the hospital absorbing the message that her husband’s absence, the lack of so much as a phone call, had sent.
Jackie never even had a honeymoon period with her husband. In fact, days into their actual honeymoon, Jack suggested she fly home alone so he could travel with “friends.” Jackie declined. She later felt ashamed that she’d even considered his request.
Jack’s back was such a mess that he couldn’t bend over to tie his shoes, or climb stairs without help, or tolerate riding in a car. He walked with crutches, an obscenity to him. They both knew a wheelchair was next.
When he slipped into a coma days later, Jackie was there. When the priest was summoned to administer last rites, she was there—all three times. When Jack fought his way back only to spend the next two months in the hospital,
So she brought him games, made him laugh, encouraged his friends to visit. She shrugged off the Marilyn Monroe pinup, which he’d turned upside down above his bed, positioning Marilyn’s crotch in his face. She even ignored the private hospital visit from Grace Kelly, although it made her nervous.
If anything, the more successful Jack was, the crueler he became. “I suppose if I win, my poon days are over.” Jack had scribbled that note to himself back in 1960 while on the campaign trail. But that hadn’t been true—not after winning the White House and certainly not before. Jackie had caught Jack getting a blow job in his Senate office, a young girl under his desk, just after they were married. He didn’t even try to hide his affairs.
The stiff corset he had worn for his bad back, which kept him upright after that first shot, had been cut off his body.
Suddenly the president was inside her. “Haven’t you done this before?” Mimi had been kissed once, in the eighth grade. “No.” “Are you okay?” Mimi said yes. But she knew she was in shock. He finished, got up, and redid his pants. The whole thing lasted less than three minutes. He never kissed her. The president pointed to Jackie’s bathroom. “If you need it,” he said. Then he was gone.
staffers. Nor was Mimi the only young woman to administer one of his daily scalp massages, rubbing ointments and conditioner into his thick brown hair before his press conferences, senior male staff often walking in on them and trying to act as though this was all perfectly normal, a teenage would-be typist performing such intimate caregiving.
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.
Bobby was never around. Ever. He didn’t have a job that required travel, yet he traveled all the time. It was like a compulsion. Some days he’d be in three different states, giving speeches or taking meetings or… really, she didn’t know what he was doing. His packed schedule signaled status, but it was all a façade. Bobby gave paid speeches and appeared on television and hobnobbed with the elite, but he was prone to outlandish beliefs.
Mary didn’t handle it well. You could say to yourself, Who would?, but of course there had been the dignified Jackie. There was Ethel, there was Rose. The question was never: Why can’t Bobby be faithful? The question was always: What’s wrong with Mary?
One day Mary had a female friend over and Bobby sauntered in, right out of the shower, and dropped the towel around his waist, exposing himself.
Then she found the diaries. Oh, the diaries. It was as if he was writing for posterity, for some future biographer. In Bobby’s writings, Mary was either the perfect wife or an unhinged monster.
“Mary is being impossible,” he wrote in one entry. “She refuses to do anything fun with me like snorkeling… and is deeply resentful when I do it myself.” She had been pregnant with their fourth child. “Mary is out of control. She is angry now every day… She is not even remorseful but is filled with venom and retribution.” “Mary is continuing in her resolve to deal with anger and control… I am discovering the well of resentments I have against her.” “Mary on a rampage… She is really possessed by some terrible demon.” Not once did Bobby link her rage to his constant cheating, which was all over
...more
In the back pages of each book, under the heading “cash accounts,” were lists of women, delineated by month, that Bobby had been with. He ranked them from one to ten, as if he were a teenager. Ten, Mary knew, was for full-on intercourse. “My lust demons,” he wrote, were his greatest failing. He used the word “mugged” a lot—women who, he wrote, just came up to him on the street and said, How about it? If they had sex, he considered himself mugged, a passive victim of aggressive women.
The thirty days he spent in a maximum-security Puerto Rican prison for protesting navy exercises, he wrote, were among the happiest of his life. It was the summer of 2001, and Mary had just given birth to their fourth child, Aidan Caohman Vieques. The “Vieques” was for the Puerto Rican island where Bobby had been arrested for trespassing. “I’m so content here,” Bobby wrote of prison. “I have to say it. There’s no women. I’m happy! Everybody here seems happy. It’s not misogyny. It’s the opposite! I love them too much.” Not misogyny? Could have fooled Mary.
Your wife isn’t mentally ill, Hankin told him. She is angry and depressed and emotionally immature, but she is not ill. Do you have any idea what could be upsetting her? Of course not.
Her brother wanted to take Mary’s remains and bury her in Westchester, but Bobby fought them. He wanted her buried in the Kennedy family plot in Massachusetts. He took the matter to a judge and brought along one of his teenage sons as support for his argument, and he won.
Mary Richardson Kennedy was buried near Eunice Shriver, JFK’s sister—given pride of place among the Kennedys, a public acknowledgment of her station.
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.” Bobby also said he failed to realize how crowded the Kennedy family plot was, a claim that strains credulity. Mary was left to face traffic, no headstone marking her grave, buried alone.
Yet Mary Jo, in American media, was still nameless. She was “The Victim Drawn to Politics” (New York Times), “The Girl in Ted Kennedy’s Car” (Ladies’ Home Journal), “The Blonde Who Drowned” (New York Daily News), the expendable woman whose death “made Ted a man” (New York Times) yet might keep him from becoming president.
Ted had promised to tell Joe and Gwen Kopechne what happened that night, when he was ready. Her parents were dissuaded from exhuming Mary Jo’s body and from suing Ted Kennedy, afraid of what it would do to all of their reputations. As the years passed with no explanation or answers, and no justice for their daughter, Gwen began self-medicating with Valium. Her father, who kept all his anguish bottled up, eventually developed stomach cancer. They spent their lives tending to Mary Jo’s grave and her memory while fielding calls from Ted Kennedy every few years, asking them to quietly support his
...more
“The scheme involved hiring a good-looking man to seduce the women in the apartment, have pictures taken secretly, and then blackmail the women into revealing details about Miss Kopechne and the party that took place shortly before the Chappaquiddick accident.”
Mary Jo had been a week away from turning twenty-nine. In the Kennedy version, Mary Jo died a temptress, a seductress, a slut, and a groupie. In all likelihood, she died a virgin.
The groom did not so much as touch his bride during the reception.
All the main players were wearing microphones—which was how she could hear Ted’s best man, his brother Jack, lean over and whisper some last-minute advice: getting married, Jack said, didn’t mean Ted had to give up sleeping with other women.
Jackie smoked three packs a day but joked that it was her sister Lee who came out of the womb puffing away, a cigarette in place of a rattle. Jackie always looked and smelled like money, even through her cloud of tobacco smoke. Joan had been dying to ask: What scent did Jackie wear?
Ted had no memory of his childhood after age seven—that everything was a blank until he hit his teenage years, all that emotional trauma blacked out. He had been bullied mercilessly by his stronger, fitter, smarter older brothers, who liked to call him “fat stuff.”
Ted walked into a royal dinner in Belgium with a sex worker on his arm. They were both drunk, just completely hammered, and Ted made a terrible spectacle, making out with this woman on an antique sofa that one of them, in their total inebriation, urinated on.
She suspected that Lee had slept with her husband—just once, she was sure—but never said a thing.
She knew about his penchant for picking up girls while traveling and having three-ways, four-ways, five-ways, swapping hookers with his buddies. She knew about the fifteen-year-old babysitter Jack had gotten pregnant back when he was senator. The rumors were true—she had cut that deal with Joe then, the one million dollars not to leave the marriage, millions more if Jack ever gave her a sexually transmitted disease again.
“He just goes too fast and falls asleep,” Jackie said. Little did she know that this was the complaint of every woman who had had sex with Jack Kennedy: no kissing, no buildup, no intensity or sensuality or fun.
never lasted longer than three minutes and didn’t even seem to enjoy sex. It was like a compulsion. There was never anything remotely personal about it for him.
Desperate, he called Pam. He begged her to come stay with him for a little while. Pam agreed. He told her that she would need to leave her wheelchair at home. “I can’t leave my wheelchair here, David,” Pam said. “It’s part of me, and I’m part of it.”
Over forty-seven years, Joe, who by 2005 had amassed a real estate portfolio worth two million dollars, had given Pam $50,000 in total.
When he flew into Palm Springs in March of 1962, she spent a secret weekend with him in a cottage on an A-list star’s estate. A certain young White House intern was along on that excursion, coming down from an involuntary drug trip inside the main house. Neither the intern nor Marilyn knew of the other’s presence, not that it would have mattered.
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.
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.
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.
No one at the time reported Ari’s sinister machinations, the rumors that he had his enemies, including Bobby Kennedy, killed. Jackie wouldn’t have heard that rumor, but she knew that Onassis and Bobby shared a vengeful streak.
Years after Ari and Jackie died, an esteemed biographer who had worked with Ari reported that Onassis had paid a member of the Palestinian Liberation Organization—which regularly extorted Onassis and other airlines in exchange for not hijacking their planes—to kill Bobby.
The nurse, trained in obstetrics, could have delivered this baby. 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.
