Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed

by Maureen Callahan

Think about this: Jacqueline Kennedy, a thirty-four-year-old widow and mother who held the nation together after narrowly escaping the assassin’s bullets that killed her husband—who signaled to the world that America would not only survive this trauma but emerge stronger—was, upon her remarriage five years later, castigated as a whore who had sold herself to the highest bidder. That mantle hung over Jackie’s fascinating, difficult, creative, controversial life until the day she died. A man would never have been so denigrated. What happened to Jackie would be unthinkable today.

But John’s habit of being careless with his own things and those of others was his defining character trait. Responsibilities were for other people, not him. He rode around the city on his bicycle and never locked it up. He spent thousands of dollars replacing bike after bike.

This man was the spoiled brat to end all spoiled brats.

If he wanted to keep risking his life, fine. But why was he so insistent on risking Christina’s? Why did he have to pressure other people into going along with his crazy ideas?

WHY INDEED?

There was the time Carolyn and John got pulled over on the Massachusetts Turnpike, the car reeking with the smell of pot, a starstruck cop letting them go without even a warning. “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.

Shame on that police officer.

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. What kind of narcissist had she married? 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,

And, of course, a wandering eye, Bobby’s wandering eye, was just part of the deal. Congenital, generational, baked in—the original recipe Kennedy.

The question was never: Why can’t Bobby be faithful? The question was always: What’s wrong with Mary?

Honestly this is really difficult to read. I want to punch all the Kennedy men in their stupid noses.

Mary panicked. She worried that Bobby was beginning to lay the groundwork, to set her up as an unfit mother. It was what Kennedy men did—turn on their women when they were done with them, call them crazy. Dispose of them.