Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed

by Maureen Callahan

As of this writing, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent conspiracy theorist and anti-vaxxer who has made racist and antisemitic comments, is running for president of the United States.

Context

He remains unbothered and unquestioned about the circumstances leading to the suicide of his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, in 2012—a fragile woman whom he tormented toward the end of their marriage and in the lead-up to her suicide, cheating on her, cutting off her credit cards and access to cash, trying to forcibly hospitalize her, telling her she’d be “better off dead.”

Yet all these decades later, the Kennedys benefit from a perverse double standard—in the press, in the justice system, and in the court of public opinion.

The pattern originates with the ruthless patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., a financially and sexually rapacious man who fathered nine children. His path to power would be through his sons; his daughters were bred for marriage and babies, worthless as anything else in his eyes.

“Ask not” has also forever been an admonition to women in the Kennedy sphere: Ask no questions. Don’t ask for help or respect, for fairness or justice.

teetering on the brink of insolvency.

“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.

She had no memory of leaping out of the car and crawling on the trunk. When she later saw the photos and the Zapruder film she could never recognize the woman in the pink suit or what she was trying to do. Escape? Get help? Grab a piece of Jack’s skull? His brain?

She translated ten books in French for Jack, just so he could have a more nuanced take on Indochina.

the mysterious fate of his sister, beautiful Rosemary, who was only twenty-three when she disappeared, the remaining siblings understanding they were never to ask where Rosemary was or what happened to her.

Janet Lee Bouvier, American socialite and daughter of a wealthy Manhattan real estate developer.

When Jack finally landed in the States, he told a reporter that Jackie had not let him know about the stillbirth because she didn’t want to ruin his vacation.

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.

What would Jackie make of her, this nineteen-year-old intern whose husband had just—what? What had he done with her? Mimi hadn’t said no, but she hadn’t said yes either. When she thought about it, days and weeks and years later, well into her sixties, she still didn’t know how to define it.

Mimi was nineteen and a college student; he was forty-five and the married leader of the free world.

There was Pamela Turnure, Jackie’s newly appointed press secretary; Judith Campbell Exner, who had been involved with Frank Sinatra and mob boss Sam Giancana; and Helen Chavchavadze, first cousin to Jackie’s spurned fiancé, John Husted. And then, of course, there was Marilyn Monroe, whose ongoing affair with Jack dated back to 1955. That was supposed to be a secret, too.

he, the physical embodiment of postwar America, vibrant and youthful and much too cocksure; she, pure carnality softened by kittenish innocence, a symbol of the culture tip-toeing its way to the sexual revolution, women on the verge of second-wave feminism.

She did not testify to the physical abuse she’d suffered, did not reveal that DiMaggio had left her right arm black-and-blue after he watched, in a rage, Marilyn film her most famous scene for The Seven Year Itch: standing above a New York City subway grate, her white dress billowing up, an exuberant Marilyn covering her groin and laughingly preserving her modesty.

By shedding Norma Jeane Baker, the shy, stuttering, unwanted child and creating Marilyn Monroe, hadn’t she won? Why couldn’t she keep forging ahead?

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.

That Emily loved Bobby and had stuck with him through his heroin addiction, his overdose and arrest, the rehab stint in New Jersey, the serious health issues to follow, the five-months-long hospitalization?

Mary’s mother vanished into her own grief, and Mary developed an eating disorder. She was haunted by feelings of abandonment and low self-esteem. She drank and used drugs too, and when she was twenty-two her anorexia became so severe that she wound up in Boston’s famed McLean Hospital for three months. She’d tried to commit suicide twice, once at twenty-five and again at twenty-six.

Bobby was soon making enemies and embarrassing himself as a self-branded environmental expert. His book The Riverkeepers, which he co-authored with John Cronin in 1997, was meant to burnish his reputation in a field relatively new to him.

tone-deaf hosanna to his Costa Rican nanny, whose “heavily accented versions” of fairy tales and folk tales, Bobby wrote, inspired his environmentalism.

The more pain she was in, the worse Bobby treated her. Some days he wanted a divorce; others, he wanted to bring another woman into their bed, an idea that left her humiliated. She rejected him outright. 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.

Each night they were drinking away the looming specter of Hitler and the approaching horrors. “All you can hear or talk about at this point is the future war which is bound to come,” Kick wrote in September 1938. “Am so darn sick of it.”

Catholicism wasn’t their one true religion. Power was.

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

Did anybody understand how terrifying it was to be told you had to be perfect all the time?

“Another dress?” he asked. “No,” Jackie said. “Let them see what they’ve done.” She wanted to see the book, she said, the one detailing President Lincoln’s funeral. She summoned Mac Kilduff, Jack’s acting press secretary. “You make sure, Mac,” she said. “You go and tell them that I came back here and sat with Jack.”

Jackie’s right hand clutching Bobby’s, her black handbag in the other. It was a detail, a signal, that only other women would notice: I literally have my bearings. I am holding all my stuff together.

An ambulance would take Jack’s body to Bethesda for the autopsy. The driver, Jackie made sure, was Bill Greer, who had driven the black Cadillac carrying Jackie and Jack in Dallas when he was shot. She wanted him to know that he was not to blame—that she didn’t blame him.

cursive: “For one brief shining moment there was Camelot.”

Bobby Jr., as the ringleader, would roam the streets with one of his massive hawks. These birds were a point of pride for him, having taken up falconry after his father’s assassination. Everyone else hated those hawks, because Bobby never really learned how to train them, yet he insisted on having his birds and other exotic animals in his room at boarding school. He once threatened a Hyannis police officer with one of his hawks, saying he had trained it to “kill cops.”

In 1998, almost a quarter-century after Martha’s murder, Michael, out of desperation or hubris or both, hired a ghostwriter to work on a book proposal called Dead Man Talking: A Kennedy Cousin Comes Clean. It was explosive, but not for the reasons one might expect.

He was more than the leader of the free world; to Marilyn, he was her cult leader, her guru, her ruler. She was the submissive and he was the dominant. She had recently told Dr. Ralph Greenson, her longtime psychoanalyst, as much.

Marilyn had believed Jack when he said he would leave Jackie and marry her, that she would be First Lady for his second term.

She wanted to look like Marlene Dietrich in one of her sparkly soufflé gowns, but sexier, edgier, more risqué. And so Dietrich, the one-time lover of Old Joe and Jack himself, sent Marilyn to her designer, the great French costumer Jean Louis. For Marilyn, he conceived a gossamer flesh-toned dress glittering with thousands of hand-sewn rhinestones, so figure-hugging that it had to be sewn onto her body, so tight that she couldn’t wear undergarments.

The president was left slack-jawed but regained his wit, taking the stage with one intent: acknowledge but minimize. “I can now retire from politics,” he told the crowd, “having had ‘Happy Birthday’ sung to me in such a sweet, wholesome way.” He laughed. The crowd roared. Later that night, at the private afterparty in a clubby Manhattan room filled with mahogany bookshelves and important men, the only known photo of Bobby, Marilyn, and Jack was taken.

Bobby and Jack had overlapped in Marilyn’s bed, as had Jack’s friend Frank Sinatra.

Extracting her from these entanglements would be like a military operation. Despite her enormous success, she still primarily defined herself through men.

He asked her to call his father, because few things would impress the Old Man more than a call from America’s number one sex symbol.

In March of 1962, fourteen months after she had filed for divorce from Arthur Miller, he remarried the set photographer from The Misfits, the movie he had written for her! Arthur had replaced the most famous woman in the world with a mere crew member. So much for beauty as the ultimate currency. Marilyn took to calling herself “a negated sex symbol.”

There was no therapy session or drug or starring role that gave Marilyn Monroe the high of knowing the president still wanted her. During that liaison she made sure that one of her best friends spoke to Jack on the phone; proof that it was real, that it happened, a witness, if he ever tried to deny it. If he ever called her crazy.

She was about to be named Female World Film Favorite at the Golden Globes yet was despondent,

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.

They let her stay with them for a bit, took her on vacation, and one morning, Peter woke up to find Marilyn on their balcony, looking down as if she might jump, her face streaked with tears.

He wanted her wiretap. He wanted her recordings of conversations with him and Jack. The FBI and the CIA, Bobby and Jack discovered, had bugged Marilyn’s house and her phone line. It was a coordinated attempt to bring down both Kennedys—didn’t she get that? Marilyn had no idea what Bobby was talking about.

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 took charge of all the arrangements, and her funeral service was that of an innocent: Marilyn