Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed

by Maureen Callahan

Many of these women are complicated; they, too, were attracted to money, fame, power—and that’s okay. We have made great strides in realizing that few girls and women ever make perfect victims.

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.

She didn’t think her husband had the patience, the diligence, the attention span, and, really, the humility to be a good pilot. To know when he shouldn’t get in the air. He was still a student, but he had so much hubris. He didn’t take his training seriously. 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

“To Flight Safety Academy, the bravest people in aviation,” John wrote to his instructors, “because people will only care where I got my training if I crash.” John thought it was funny. Carolyn did not.

“America’s Prince,” the media called him, and whenever John wanted to do something—to become a lawyer, start a magazine—hell, run for president of the United States, everyone knew that was coming—the answer was always yes. Sure, yes, of course Mr. Kennedy, and you know what? Let’s start you at the top of your field.

John didn’t live in the real world and never had; he lived on Planet Kennedy, where he was king, and his main experience was a feedback loop of awe at his looks, his lineage, his fame, his politeness.

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.

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.

Marilyn vibrated on a different frequency than his other women. They were both self-inventions, damaged people who had willed themselves into superhuman stratospheres:

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.

vanished into her own grief,

she imbued her Kennedy man with all the qualities he lacked—self-awareness, humility, and intelligence.

Everyone knew what the Kennedy boys got up to. Birth control was the least of it.

“THE POWER OF SILENCE,” he wrote, “IS GREAT.”

lace-curtain Irish.

“So ends the story of Billy and Kick,” she wrote in her diary. “Life is so cruel.”

All your life I shall love you—not only for yourself but that you gave such perfect happiness to my son whom I loved above anything in the world.

He had infamously abandoned Olive on their honeymoon for another woman. He brought his mistresses home for dinner or shooting weekends and paraded them in front of his wife, whose job was to make sure they were well fed and cared for. And when Olive decompensated and became an alcoholic, she was blamed for making Fitzwilliam’s life a misery, not the other way around. Really, who could blame a wealthy, dashing war hero for his many love affairs and one-night stands when he had such a difficult wife at home?

“If you want to commit adultery or fornication & can’t resist, do it,” he wrote her. “But realize what you are doing, and don’t give the final insult of apostasy.”

Kick was buried alone in the English countryside. Her gravestone reads: IN LOVING MEMORY OF KATHLEEN 1920—1948 She was given no last name.

how to help others while protecting herself.

Aeschylus that meant a great deal to him. “He once wrote: ‘Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’

“What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black… “Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and to make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that and say a prayer for our country and for our people.”

“Honorary Kennedys.” Like it was special dispensation to be in their orbit, even more so to be considered one of them.

None of it felt right. Ted wasn’t acting like a man in

love. He wasn’t in the throes of a grand romance. This, Joan realized, was a merger. She was a casting coup.

After all, the thinking went, if a woman as good as Joan loved and stood by Ted Kennedy, how bad could he be? The answer, as those on the inside knew, was simple:

Ted was worse than anyone could imagine.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” he replied. Ted would never sacrifice his Senate seat—ever. “This isn’t a moral animal. This is a political animal.”

all of them, impervious to shame. Ruthless. It didn’t matter that Joan was really hurting, as much for Mary Jo and for her and Ted’s children as for herself. They were all determined to get Ted—lazy, drunk, horny, feckless, remorseless Ted—into the White House.

Never let anyone know how quickly you see through them. Never let anyone know how deeply you are hurting.

“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. 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.

“It’s going to be so long and so lonely,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

you mustn’t be morbid.’”

“For one brief shining moment there was Camelot.” That fairy tale would captivate America for decades to come—at the cost of many more women. What, in hindsight, had she wrought?

aspirin with a Coke and wait to see what happened. Rumor had it you would either get really high or you would die from the combination, but every single time they felt nothing.

I heard this from my Dad, that this was something kids would do in the 70s. Confirmed hete.

But the Kennedys always banded together: “Circling the wagons to protect the cesspool.”

No one saw it for what it was: deep depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

1930s Great Depression mindset?

Dr. Marianne Kris,

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.

“Took a peek at my chart yesterday,” he wrote a college friend in 1935, “and could see that they were mentally measuring me for a coffin. Eat drink and make love as tomorrow or next week we attend my funeral.”

That's how the doomed rich do it.

Carolyn, like so many women before her, would be subsumed into the Kennedys.

John would always circle those Kennedy wagons to protect the cesspool. He admitted as much during an interview with NBC’s Tom Brokaw, plugging George. Brokaw: “Can we expect some tough stories about Uncle Ted?” John: “Never.”

JFK couldn’t abide women who were as smart as or smarter than he was.

Rosemary’s true end belies the Kennedy version, that Rosemary went off to live a private life teaching mentally impaired children. The rest of the women in this book suffered similar false codas, written by the Kennedys or their enablers, in ways that invariably blame them. These are false endings full of slander, misogyny, and character assassination, and they have wrought untold collateral damage, not just for the victims and their families but for all of us. These women’s real endings are not always happy. But they are true. And therein lies their power.

In truth, the resulting investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board found John alone responsible for the crash. The report is online, and to read it is to endure a litany of John’s errors, rule-breaking, and refusal to adhere to fundamental safety measures, such as filing a flight plan and remaining in contact with air traffic control.

He was expressly told by far more experienced pilots, more than once, not to pilot the plane that night. He waved off a willing flight instructor who offered to co-pilot that night. He nearly crashed into a commercial airliner that was on its approach to New York’s Kennedy International Airport.