Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed

by Maureen Callahan

Marilyn Monroe’s death was officially ruled a massive barbiturate overdose. She was thirty-six years old. Whether it was accidental or purposeful or subconscious suicide will never be known, but those who knew and loved Marilyn best, Lawford included, blamed Jack

and Bobby Kennedy.

“If it weren’t for her so-called friends,” DiMaggio said, “Marilyn would still be alive today.” He

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. It began not long after Jackie and the children relocated to a Georgetown town house at 3017 N Street; unable to afford the mortgage, Bobby negotiated the price down from $215,000 to $195,000 and had $100,000 paid out from Kennedy family funds.

She told Roosevelt that Bobby Kennedy was the only person keeping her from killing herself.

He was the only other family member grieving as deeply as Jackie—the only blood Kennedy who could not adhere to the family’s mantra: Move forward, get on with it, stop feeling sorry for yourself, life is for the living. Bobby, already wiry, began dropping an alarming amount of weight. He, too, cried all the time. He couldn’t sleep, either, and now began spending more time at Jackie’s, more time with her children than his own.

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.

Onassis worried that if Bobby became president, he would keep Onassis’s oil tankers from ever docking in American ports. And Bobby, to Onassis’s mind, had had the temerity to call him years prior and tell him to stop sleeping with Jackie’s sister Lee—the Princess Radziwill by her marriage to Stas. Onassis could not bear the hypocrisy. He knew that Bobby and Jack Kennedy were both having affairs with Marilyn Monroe. “Bobby,” Onassis told him, “you and Jack fuck your movie queen and I’ll fuck my princess.”

Her financial adviser, André Meyer, proposed that Ari pay $20 million to make the marriage happen.

Jackie wound up getting $3 million up front from Ari, $1 million for each of her children, $600,000 a year for travel, millions more in the event of divorce or Ari’s death, and stipulations as to how many times a year she would be required to have sex with Ari. She also insisted on separate bedrooms at shared residences, though theirs would be a marriage in every sense, save children. On that they agreed.

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. Onassis had been among those who knew about Marilyn Monroe’s house having been bugged shortly before her death. He was among those who suspected—as did his friend Rupert Allan, Monroe’s personal publicist—that her death had not been an accidental overdose nor a suicide. He thought the Kennedy brothers had something to do with it, and his hatred for Bobby was not tempered by Jack’s assassination. 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.

Some historians believe it; others do not.

Dr. Kris diagnosed Jackie with PTSD and explained that her trauma had as much to do with November 22, 1963, as it did with her marriage to Jack, and that made sense to Jackie. She still had so much rage toward Jack for everything he put her through. For not coming home when she delivered a stillborn Arabella. For all the other women, so many of them. The lies and the selfishness and hiding behind her skirt as a happy family man when often he would rather be anywhere else. 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.

She was furious about the way he died and was finally able to say it out loud...

“His death really robbed me of my chance to be angry with him,” Jackie told Dr. Kris. “He really w...

Ari had always loved flaunting Callas to denigrate Jackie. “Everybody knows three things about Aristotle Onassis,” he would say. “I’m fucking Maria Callas, I’m fucking Jacqueline Kennedy, and I’m fucking rich.” But now he was about to lose Jacqueline. Dr. Kris may have been problematic, but she had helped Jackie to realize: She had a right to be angry. She had a right to refuse such abuse.

And so, in 1914, Joe and Rose were married in a modest Catholic ceremony in Boston, united not just by their faith and politics but also a mutual grudge against Protestants, WASPs, and any other group that routinely ostracized Irish Catholics. Their exclusion from Boston’s polite society would fuel Joe’s determination that he or one of his sons would become the first Irish Catholic American president.

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.

“We only have winners in this family,” Joe and Rose would say. “We don’t allow losers.”

Everyone on the Hill knew about the drug box Ted kept in his desk in the Senate. They’d all heard the story about the fourteen-year-old girl he’d tried to rape and whose parents he had paid off. Or the high school girl he had hired as an intern and begun having sex with; she was only seventeen. The waitresses he’d sexually assaulted.

The cruises around DC in the back of his limo, rolling down his window, trying to pick up young women.

Who could forget the time he caught two of their children using cocaine and, during his subsequent antidrug talk—telling them they had to be careful, their mother suffered from addiction, and it was her bad genes that put them at risk—deciding to do a few line...

How about the doctor who would show up to Ted’s office and treat him for gonorrhea? Did Joan ever wonder if, like Jackie, her miscarriages, the enormous amount of hormones she needed to take to get pregnant with their youngest, Patrick, all may h...

Carolyn’s mother rose and made a toast of her own. I don’t know if this marriage is good for my daughter, she said. I don’t know if John is right for her. John was stunned. In all his life he had never heard nor expected such a sentiment, let alone one voiced in public on the eve of his wedding—a wedding that was the most coveted invite on the planet, that would make headlines all over the world.

Ann wasn’t reacting only to that evening. She had known that the past three years had not been easy for her daughter. Carolyn had been met with suspicion by John’s family and their inner circle. John’s brother-in-law, Ed Schlossberg, was especially cold to Carolyn. His aunt Ethel, during Carolyn’s first visit to the Cape, brusquely suggested that Carolyn familiarize herself with geopolitics and policy if she wanted to be invited back. Worse

were the rumors that John’s so-called friends spread about Carolyn’s devotion to his terminally ill cousin Anthony, implying that the care she showed for him—taking Anthony to his doctor’s appointments, sitting with him for hours as he underwent chemotherapy, visiting him constantly while he was in the hospital—was all a cynical ploy to get to John.

The lone wedding picture released to the press—Carolyn and John exiting the chapel, not a hair out of place or a bead of sweat anywhere, John kissing Carolyn’s tulle-gloved hand—was a metaphor for the weekend and the marriage to come: a pre-Instagrammable image that looked perfect and effortless but was really a lie. That quaint little chapel, built by Cumberland’s enslaved workers, had an ugly history. John had not seen the problem with that. Nor had he seen the problem with including Willie, the cousin who had stood trial for rape in the early 1990s, even though the guest list was so small that other family members and friends were excluded.

little more than one year into their marriage, rumors circulated about John’s wrist injury, a severed nerve that everyone suspected was Carolyn’s fault, that she had attacked him.

It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. Carolyn had real rage, and she could come at you with no warning. As her closest friends often said: Carolyn isn’t easy. But neither was John. This marriage wasn’t bringing out the best in either of them.

As much as Carolyn’s gut was telling her not to fly with John that night, she was pushing through. She and John hadn’t even hit their third wedding anniversary, and already their marriage was in shambles. Multiple tabloid stories, many of them well sourced, were reporting that John was having affairs, that his ex-girlfriend Daryl was back in the picture, that John was disappointed that Carolyn couldn’t rise to the level of a Kennedy wife. One of his relatives had told Carolyn that she’d better “get her act together.” Meanwhile, John was demanding that Carolyn be a stay-at-home wife but had no sympathy for her boredom and frustration.

“I’ve learned a lot about temptation recently,” he wrote. “But that doesn’t make me desire any less.” There were reports he was getting ready to file for divorce.

That last one was easy enough to believe. They had fights about it, one on a commercial flight to the Vineyard, loud enough for fellow passengers to hear. “Maybe we should get divorced,” John said to her. “We fucking talk about it enough.”

“Oh no,” Carolyn shot back. “We waited for your mother to die to get married. We’re waiting for my mo...

they were going to die. The sheer force of gravity and speed would have been terrifying as they spun at 200 miles per hour, nose first, into the ocean.

In death, as in life, they never considered Carolyn Bessette a real Kennedy. And as per Kennedy tradition, burying troublesome women alone was nothing new to them.

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?

In the 1980s, ABC News planned to air a special regarding the Kennedy brothers’ involvement in Marilyn’s death. But at 6:00 p.m. on the day the broadcast was to air, with mere hours to go, ABC pulled the plug. “A dead president belongs to history,” host Hugh Downs said by way of explanation, “and he belongs to accurate history.” ABC News president Roone Arledge, who canceled the documentary, was a longtime friend of Ethel Kennedy. He denied any conflict of interest.

Joe DiMaggio told his biographer Dr. Rock Positano more than once that the Kennedys were responsible for Marilyn’s death. “I always knew who killed her, but I didn’t want to start a revolution in this country,” DiMaggio said.

Despite promising to one day tell Mary Jo’s parents, his own children, and the world what really happened the night he left Mary Jo to her certain death, Ted took it to his grave.

In November 2021, I became the last person to see the state’s evidence in Martha’s case, which contained everything from her personal diary to the murder weapon. Under state law, the evidence was about to be sealed away forever. The prosecutor in the case, Susann Gill, told me she hopes the court will someday reverse that decision, given the historical importance of the case. Her greatest fear is that the evidence will be destroyed.