Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed

by Maureen Callahan

For inconvenient women everywhere

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

This book is not ideological or partisan. It’s about thirteen women and a piece of American history hiding in plain sight. Kennedy men have been valorized and lionized for nearly a century, but the women they’ve broken, tormented, raped, murdered, or left for dead have never really been part of their legacy. They must be. None of this is history. As William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

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. He has raised tens of millions from big donors, almost all based on legacy. He remains unbothered and unquestioned about the circumstances leading to the suicide of his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, in 2012—

Whatever grievous harm a Kennedy man may have done to her, the message remains clear: She was asking for it. It was her fault. Thus Camelot, that fairy tale of Kennedy greatness and noble men, still stands.

The late Ted Kennedy, vaunted “Lion of the Senate,” drove off a bridge and left a twenty-nine-year-old woman to die in three feet of water—his passenger Mary Jo Kopechne, whose life could have been saved. Yet that criminal act has successfully been transformed into “Ted’s tragedy,” an awful event that unfairly kept him from ever becoming president of the United States. Ted Kennedy served out the rest of his life in Congress and was given a statesman’s funeral with wall-to-wall news coverage, while Kopechne’s name was barely mentioned.

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. Ted escaped. He left Mary Jo in that car upside down, forced to crane her neck at an awkward, painful angle as she struggled to breathe through a tiny pocket of air, surrounded by dark water, waiting for help that never came.

The Kennedys have a way of quashing anything or anyone—a book, a miniseries, an interview—that contradicts their golden image. They typically do this through power or payoffs. Caroline Kennedy and Maria Shriver personally lobbied the History Channel to kill The Kennedys, a 2011 miniseries that one family loyalist called “vindictive” and “malicious” in the New York Times, and were successful.

In one of the saddest ironies, even the most powerful Kennedy women would like this history erased.

Through deep reporting and interviews with many who have never spoken before, this book seeks to understand what being a woman among Kennedy men felt like over the years.

Many of these women are complicated; they, too, were attracted to money, fame, power—and that’s okay.

Not one deserves the stains on their legacies wrought, with great deliberation and zero remorse, by the Kennedys.

Do the Kennedys deserve to remain a power center in American life and politics? Or should we relegate them to their inglorious past? If not, what should we now demand of any Kennedy who seeks power?

The pattern originates with the ruthless patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., a financially and sexually rapacious man who fathered nine children.

Joe committed two original sins. The first was political, and it would keep him from ever becoming president: his open admiration, as United States ambassador to the United Kingdom, of Adolf Hitler and his bloodless acceptance of the looming death of Western democracy. That was followed by his personal original sin: the unthinkable act he committed against his beautiful young daughter Rosemary, who suffered a fate worse than death.

This book’s title comes from the most famous line of John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address: “Ask not what your country can do for you…” “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. This book takes that as a dare. Ask not? Let’s.

She didn’t think her husband had the patience, the diligence, the attention span, and, really, the humility to be a good pilot.

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.

Jack had never heard such an apt description of himself. His childhood trauma, even by Irish Catholic standards, had been repressed: the maternal neglect; the domineering, unfaithful father; 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. Jack had lost his twenty-nine-year-old brother Joe Jr., a navy pilot, in a midair explosion during World War II; four years later, in 1948, Jack’s beloved sister Kick died in a plane crash. She was only twenty-eight. Jack himself had nearly died many times and was a bona fide war hero.

At two years old he’d already survived measles, whooping cough, chicken pox, and then scarlet fever, which almost killed him. He’d spent a month in the hospital, then a few months recovering in Maine, a little boy alone, his parents never visiting.

Janet had once shoved her husband during an argument; he hit his head and bled in front of Jackie, who had stopped playing with her stuffed animals. It was one of the few times Janet ever saw her daughter cry. Normally Jackie wouldn’t give her mother the satisfaction, especially when she became the object of her mother’s rage—the slapping of the face, the hitting that continued well into Jackie’s early twenties. “If something unpleasant happens to me,” Jackie said later, “I block it out. I have this mechanism.” Jack had that, too.

She was rushed to Newport Hospital, where she underwent an emergency cesarean section and gave birth to a girl. The baby was stillborn. When Jackie came out of anesthesia hours later, at two in the morning, it wasn’t her husband at her bedside but her brother-in-law Bobby. It was he who broke the news, who held Jackie’s hand, who told her he would take care of everything—by which he meant the baby’s burial—and who made the excuse Jackie wanted to believe: Jack was still at sea, unreachable in the Med.

“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.

Meanwhile, anyone who had ever seen Jackie nurse Jack back to health in those early days of their marriage, Jack nearly dying after one of four risky back surgeries, would never have doubted her love for him.

And indeed, Jack’s illnesses, when Jackie finally learned of them, were overwhelming. He suffered from colitis, ulcers, prostatitis, urinary tract infections, frequent headaches, stomachaches, upper respiratory infections. One leg was shorter than the other, a congenital defect. He had Addison’s disease, a rare endocrine disorder that left him dependent on cortisol injections and hormones secreted through an implant in his thigh. The Addison’s was so serious that Joe kept Jack’s meds locked in safety deposit boxes all over Europe in case Jack had an attack abroad.

Jack was never cowed by risk. In fact, he craved it, and to Jackie, this was one of his sexiest qualities.

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, Jackie rallied him, bringing stacks of newspapers and magazines and reading aloud to him.

Jackie was so weak and depressed that she couldn’t even attend her daughter’s burial. Bobby stood over the baby’s coffin while Jack was still sailing with his starlets and bikini babes off the south of France, drinking, smoking cigars, having fun. She knew he was cheating on her.

A week went by, and Jackie was still in the hospital with no word from Jack. He intended to keep cruising around the Med till September—and as soon as he got home, he was going off to campaign for the next three months.

Jack’s womanizing had always been off-limits with the press—but how much longer would they abide by that gentleman’s agreement? If a fraction of Jack’s sex life made the papers, it wouldn’t be Jack left humiliated. When Jackie was finally released from the hospital, she stayed with her mother at Hammersmith Farm, where she mourned her baby and her marriage.

it was obvious why Jackie felt this way: Rose and Joe Kennedy were already making snide remarks about Jackie’s smoking having caused the stillbirth. If the marriage ended, the Kennedys, too, would blame Jackie. The press would blame Jackie.

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.

Two priests came in to deliver last rites. They were both in shock, both struggling to maintain their composure, as was Doc Burkely. Jackie prayed with them, her voice stronger now. “Let perpetual light shine upon him,” she said. The priests left. Alone with her husband, or so she thought, Jackie kissed his naked body everywhere: His mouth, his chest, his leg, his penis. For all of Jack’s women, she was the last to possess him.

On her fourth day at the White House, Mimi Beardsley got a call at her desk, inviting her to drinks with the president. Sort of a welcome party for new staffers.

It was spring 1962, and Mimi was fresh off the train from Farmington, Connecticut, where she had just graduated from Miss Porter’s School—Jackie Kennedy’s alma mater. Mimi felt every bit of her nineteen years: unsophisticated, unglamorous, inexperienced with grown-ups. With men.

Now the president was undressing her. Mimi was wearing a shirtdress and he undid the buttons, played with her breasts, slid his hand between her legs and pulled off her underwear. He pulled down his pants but did not undress. 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.

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. She had taken her dress off, hadn’t she? Wasn’t that consent? But the way the president moved, grabbing her so fast, pushing her down on the bed so forcefully—she could never have stopped him. Short of screaming, she’d later write, there was nothing she could have done to get him off of her.

This second encounter would set the tone for their relationship. Mimi would be welcomed upstairs only when the First Lady was away, and it was her job to remind him of simple pleasures: small talk, shared bubble baths, and sex, hasty though it always was.

He didn’t seem to care whether she slept over or not, but when he offered she always did.

“Well, my dear, you have the advantage here. You know that I’m Jack Kennedy, but I don’t know who you are.” It was 1958, and twenty-year-old Diana de Vegh was a junior at Radcliffe. Until that moment, she had been bored to tears at a fundraising dinner in Boston. James, her date, was the one interested in politics.

She wondered what the rest of the residence looked like; her access was limited to the sitting room, the president’s bed and bathrooms, and the kitchen. As if she were a concubine or a house pet. Mimi convinced herself that none of this mattered. Just as it didn’t matter that the president never kissed her. Just as it didn’t matter that she only ever called him Mr. President, even though they were regularly having sex. Just as it didn’t matter that he never told her to call him anything else, that he never told her he loved her or cared about her. It was okay, really. Mimi was nineteen and a college student; he was forty-five and the married leader of the free world. Who was she to complain?

Jack was just trying to get her into bed. There would be no wining, no dining, no romance—his attention was on other things, more important things. There would only be fast, technical sex with Jack Kennedy, man on the move.

For all their growing knowledge of Jack’s faults, neither Mimi nor Diana knew that he could be a real sadist. Humiliation and sex went hand in hand for him. He was at his best during the chase, but once he seduced you, he seemed to think less of you. These humiliations were never sudden; they were subtle at first, and easy to explain away.

Who was under more stress than he was? What kind of woman would demand more of him, especially with his bad back, his multiple ailments, his clearly unhappy marriage? These girls would serve, more than they knew, at the pleasure of the president.

Her presence was always explained away as one of Pierre Salinger’s aides in the press office. She wasn’t even old enough to vote, but most people went along with it. Most, that is, except one.

She pulled Mimi aside during cocktails on the upper deck. “You are too young to be here.” Mimi was stunned. Humiliated. She thought she had become so sophisticated, keeping such a dangerous secret with élan. But this woman had seen right through her. Who else knew? She had to recover quickly. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Mimi said. “You’re going to regret it,” the woman said. “All of a sudden you’ll turn around and you’ll be twenty-five and you won’t have a life.”

“Nothing will come of it,” Diana told him. “But he has a hold on me.” She was hardly the only woman he had a hold on. 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.

Marilyn was his latest prey. He had been angling to meet her, and finally got his chance at a Hollywood party with Jackie on his arm. Marilyn was with Joe DiMaggio, her husband of six months, who also happened to be one of America’s greatest ballplayers, more famous than Jack Kennedy.

They had friends in common, especially Kennedy’s brother-in-law Peter Lawford, a film actor of some renown. Marilyn was wary of Peter; she thought he was secretly gay and not just envious of her, but very much wanted to be her. Clearly, Peter also wanted to be Jack. Marrying his sister, Patricia Kennedy, hadn’t been enough for Peter; he quickly became Jack’s shadow, his pimp, his fixer, drug supplier. Anything or anyone Jack wanted, Peter made it happen.

To Jack, who had always felt rejected by his mother, who had repelled her with his tears as much as his sickly body, the orphaned Marilyn vibrated on a different frequency than his other women.