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July 31 - August 1, 2024
Jackie went into the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. She reached for Jack’s razor blades, the stainless steel Gillettes, and thought about how easy it would be to draw a warm bath and a straight line down each wrist. Had she ever been truly happy? She thought she had gone into this marriage with eyes wide open, but Jack’s cheating was unbearable, the humiliations unrelenting. The babies she lost. Her beloved father’s death from liver cancer in 1957, a slow suicide caused by his drinking. Her sister, Lee, so competitive and envious—of what, exactly?
Jack was the first person Jackie saw when she came to, and it was he, not a nurse, wheeling the infant into her hospital room. She would often refer to this as the happiest day of her life. So Jackie could carry a baby to term. Her baby was healthy. She was free, for now, of Jack’s sexually transmitted diseases. She and Jack were a real family.
Jack was just as elated and proud. Now Jackie had power.
Jack loved Jackie’s irreverence, her defiant streak, her capacious mind. All the qualities Jackie’s mother had sought to contain were admired by the Kennedy men—to a point.
Never let anyone know how quickly you see through them. Never let anyone know how deeply you are hurting.
There were so many women that Jackie didn’t know all of their names—or so she told the doctor. She was strong and prideful. She suspected that Lee had slept with her husband—just once, she was sure—but never said a thing. She knew about Jack and Pamela Turnure, her own assistant.
There was the time Jackie found, in her and Jack’s White House bed, a strange pair of underwear. “Would you please shop around and find who these belong to?” she had asked her husband. “They’re not my size.”
She knew about the fifteen-year-old babysitter Jack had gotten pregnant back when he was senator.
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.
this was the complaint of every woman who had had sex with Jack Kennedy: no kissing, no buildup, no intensity or sensuality or fun. He just attacked you like a dog humping a leg. He 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.
Most embarrassing was a photo of Jackie on the cover of the National Enquirer, her belly distended: “Is she or isn’t she expecting?” Always fanatical about her weight—really, always in the throes of disordered eating, attempting to control the one thing she could—Jackie went on a crash starvation diet. Each day she allowed herself half a grapefruit, a little yogurt, 2½ ounces of meat, one apple, 3½ ounces of green vegetables, and a salad without dressing. Jackie began having panic attacks and outbursts and was still taking drugs: tranquilizers to sleep, possibly amphetamines to kill her
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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.
Rose subscribed to the Church’s teachings that sex was permissible only for making babies, not for intimacy and certainly not for pleasure. After having Teddy, her ninth and last child in February 1932, Rose told Joe she would never have sex with him again. “This idea of yours that there is no romance outside procreation is simply wrong,” Joe said. “It was not ...
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Did she leave her husband no other option than to sleep with other women? And if so, did she deserve this degree of suffering? Joe stayed out night after night and constantly traveled on so-called business, even as she had baby after baby in those first years of marriage: Joe, Jack, Rosemary. Rosemary.
It was Kick alone who told them they were callous, that they ought to sympathize with their mother and the brutalities she endured. Oh, how her brothers would laugh and make fun, mocking their mother behind her back for the way their father cheated on her, flaunting his infidelity. Joe would bring his lovers home, parade them around the front porch, take them sailing—Jack, at twelve, had actually plunged off the side of a boat once he realized that Dad and his movie star girlfriend were having sex on board.
It was Kick who exploded the last time he did that, bringing yet another woman to the Cape. None of her siblings had the guts; they were all afraid of Old Joe. But Kick was fed up with his flagrant disrespect of their mother and, really, every one of his daughters.
Coincidentally, it was Kick whom her mother had been pregnant with the first and only time she left Joe, so fed up with his women, his lies, his utter disregard for their marriage.
Rose had gifts, not least her smarts, her high organizational skills, and her energy, but these had been dimmed by the men in her life. First, her father, whose insistence on a Catholic college over Wellesley was not about Rose’s best interests at all but, as she would later learn, political expediency: the great feminist mayor of Boston had sold out his daughter after he was warned by the archbishop, no less, that he would lose the Catholic vote if he allowed Rose a secular, liberal education. As for that Catholic education?
She was promised total fulfillment in that role, assured that all of one’s creativity and intellectualism would, if channeled properly into her husband and children, be satisfied. “The most beautiful station” of her life, Rose was told. It wasn’t. Not even close.
He wouldn’t tell her where he was or what he was doing. He kept a suite at the Ritz in Boston and another at the Waldorf in Manhattan, while she was shut up in the suburbs.
It wasn’t just Rosemary who concerned her; little Jack was a very sick toddler. He had been ill with scarlet fever when she left Joe—that’s how desperate she was. She left poor Jack with the nannies to save herself. It was the winter of 1920. Women had just won the right to vote. Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, wife and daughter to two political geniuses, had never felt so powerless.
“You can make things work,” her father said. “I know you can. If you need more help in the household, then get it. If you need a bigger house, ask for it. If you need more private time for yourself, take it. There isn’t anything you can’t do once you set your mind to it. “So go now, Rosie. Go back to where you belong.”
Rose’s husband wasn’t just promiscuous. He wasn’t just an adulterer. He was also, according to Gloria Swanson, a Hollywood star and Joe’s longtime mistress, a rapist.
Rose never knew about this attack. But she knew this side of Joe—the violent side, the predatory side—and it was one she chose to ignore.
She no longer had the word for it, but she knew the feeling: lonely.
It was yet another example of Joe’s hypocrisy—the man whose vaulting ambition was fueled by prejudice against Irish Catholics was every bit as hateful of another persecuted group facing eradication. Of that he cared nothing.
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. Was he aware of having a death wish for his daughter? 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. I don’t know how the Church feels about it, but it will do away with many of the disgusting specimens… which inhabit this earth.”
Old Joe snuck into guest rooms whenever Kick or her sisters had teenage friends sleep over. It didn’t matter that these young girls didn’t want Old Joe in their beds. It didn’t matter that sometimes he had his way with them, whether they wanted to or not. No one talked about it. Joe took whom he wanted when he wanted, and Rose Kennedy couldn’t do a thing about it.
Rose had so little tolerance for Rosie as it was—how slow she was at school, how earnest and childlike, how needy. Rose hated neediness. Even Jack, with all his serious illnesses, had learned to suffer silently. But Rosie wasn’t quiet about it.
Rosemary was the odd girl out. Rose herself conceded as much: “In our family,” she said, “if you’re not doing anything you’re left in the corner.” Rosie was excluded from parties and family vacations. Her mother had tried putting Rosemary in sleepaway camp in western Massachusetts that summer, but the staff—uninformed by Rose of her daughter’s special needs—were horrified by Rosemary’s condition. Her shoes were so small that her feet were bleeding. She tended to wander out late at night and wound up sleeping in the same room as the camp’s director. Rosemary began acting out, missing her father
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Rose refused to get her daughter; instead, she remained ensconced at a luxury spa and retreat in Maine. Joe was traveling.
She snuck out most every night; whether she was looking for someone or trying to find her way home or was trying to escape abuse, sexual or otherwise, is unknown. But Rosemary, serially abandoned by her father and mother, made to feel that she was the defective product in a line that otherwise produced Outstanding Kennedy Offspring, had understandably become a tearful young woman with lots of rage.
Rosemary would remain at Saint Gertrude’s for the next thirteen months, until November 1941. That’s when Joe came upon his own final solution to the Rosemary problem.
Kick got the information she had been tasked with finding, and came back to her mother with an informed opinion. “Oh, Mother, no,” she said. “It’s nothing we want done for Rosie.” Rose was relieved. The idea hadn’t sat well with her from the beginning.
Everyone in and around the Kennedy family knew that Rosemary would never say no to her father, no matter what.
But the deeper the tool went the harder it was to understand the doctor, to understand what was happening to her. When it was finally over, Rosie wasn’t Rosie anymore. She would never be able to do anything again: talk, walk, swim, dance, flirt with boys, smoke cigarettes, meet future queens, accompany her father to dinner. Go to the movies. Take a shower, comb her hair, feed herself, use the toilet. She would never again go home or be one of the Kennedys. Her brain’s circuitry, like a string of Christmas lights crushed one by one, had gone dark. Rosie was left, functionally, as a
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Ted refused to support the Equal Rights Amendment. At least it was in keeping with his terrible treatment of women in private. Few aside from Kennedy wives knew the indignities as Joan did, of slinking away from a party thrown in your own home, having watched your husband flirt with every other woman in the room, only to hear the whispers later that he’d had sex in the library with one of your guests after you went to bed.
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.
He didn’t realize that American women were questioning sexual mores and politics, rejecting the idea that men somehow knew better. Wondering why they could get fired for being pregnant—or if they weren’t fired, why there was no paid maternity leave. Why the wage gap was something they were just supposed to accept. Why, if their husbands made them have sex when they said no, that wasn’t considered rape. The American woman was changing.
Suzannah Lessard wrote a groundbreaking, six-page piece that ran in the Washington Monthly, which picked it up after the New Republic, original commissioners of the piece, had killed it.
Headlined “Kennedy’s Woman Problem, Women’s Kennedy Problem,” Lessard’s piece argued that female voters had been hoodwinked by “the boys in the press” who kept Ted’s philandering secret.
Lessard argued that Ted’s chronic cheating was legitimate cause for concern. “It suggests an old-fashioned, male chauvinist, exploitative view of women as primarily objects of pleasure,” Lessard wrote.
“What it suggests,” she continued, “is a severe case of arrested development, a kind of narcissistic intemperance, a huge, babyish ego that must constantly be fed. It suggests: if he is immature in this area, mightn’t he be in others?
Soon his aides were begging Joan to make extra stops and be seen with Ted as much as possible, and when she did, Ted could barely look at her. He never touched her. And once again, he never said thank you. Joan’s sobriety had given her a gift: the ability to embrace her rage. Instead of dulling it with alcohol she was feeling it now, and it felt good. Justified. Appropriate.
America was getting a second look at Joan Kennedy, and they were rooting for her. The unspoken consensus was that marriage to Ted Kennedy was a burden no woman should have to endure.
Time magazine explored “THE VULNERABLE SIDE OF JOANSIE,” writing of her alcoholism as a disease, not a moral failing, and the toll Ted’s womanizing had taken.
The New York Times ran a glowing piece on Joan’s advocacy. She was fighting for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, saying things that, at the time, were still controversial: That all women should have access to higher education, to employment, to the same pay as men. That motherhood was devalued in American society and too often left women financially dependent on their husbands.
Cumberland Island was like no place Carolyn had ever seen. Remote, untouched by industry or technology, maybe forty people total lived on this strip of land situated between Florida and Georgia. Its pristine beaches were the domain of wild horses and enormous sea turtles and resembled a land before time, before humans existed. The only place to stay was a mansion-turned-inn, run by descendants of Andrew Carnegie. On the other end of the island was a tiny white chapel built in 1893. John wanted them to be married here.
Already Carolyn was torn. John wanted her wedding party to be all Kennedys: his sister, Caroline, the maid of honor, his nieces the flower girls, his nephew the ring bearer, his cousin the best man. Didn’t that say it all? This wasn’t a joining of families. There was no room for Carolyn’s twin sisters, Lisa and Lauren, or for any of her relatives in the bridal party. Carolyn, like so many women before her, would be subsumed into the Kennedys.
