Ask Not Quotes

“New York City, near death and calling for her desperately. His cries had broken her heart. In his anguish she heard the little boy who’d been left in one too many hospital beds by his mother and father. But back then Jackie did what the doctors said and stayed in the hallway, trusting they knew best. She had sworn that she would never leave Jack alone like that again.”
― Maureen Callahan, Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed

“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.”
― Maureen Callahan, Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed

“She told Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. that she couldn’t find slumber at night despite all the sleeping pills she took, that her medications did nothing to stop her mind from obsessively replaying the assassination. She told Roosevelt that Bobby Kennedy was the only person keeping her from killing herself. For Bobby, the same was true of Jackie.”
― Maureen Callahan, Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed

“She was having nightmares, vivid and unceasing. Most days she couldn’t get out of bed. She was as inconsolable as ever, reminiscent of the months after Jack’s death when little Caroline told her schoolteacher, “My mommy cries all the time.”
― Maureen Callahan, Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed

“Ari Onassis was a Greek shipping magnate, a billionaire, an antisemite, a vulgarian, and a bisexual with a string of bought-and-paid-for young men that he savagely beat after sex. On October 17, 1968, he and Jackie Kennedy, thirty-nine years old to his sixty-two, announced they would marry in three days’ time.”
― Maureen Callahan, Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed

“As in the White House”
― Maureen Callahan, Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed

“The media kept propping him up as the next hair of Camelot even as they knew better. 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 tried to rape and whose parents he’d paid off.”
― Maureen Callahan, Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed

“the”
― Maureen Callahan, Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed

“Carolyn really, really did not want to get on that plane.”
― Maureen Callahan, Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed

“Now fifty years old, Jackie was in her prime. She was building her dream house on Martha’s Vineyard, had raised two children in uniquely difficult circumstances, had earned the respect of her peers in publishing, and had fallen in love with Maurice Tempelsman, a man she had known since her years with Jack. She had no desire to marry again, ever, and that was just fine with him; he remained married to his first wife and had no desire to divorce. Jackie had always had a penchant for married men and the emotional distance baked into those arrangements, but Maurice was different; he was devoted to her. Jackie Onassis, in short, had found her bliss. She was now the architect of her own life.”
― Maureen Callahan, Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed

“It took three years,” Chase-Riboud wrote, “from the time a concerned Jacqueline Onassis had turned to me and said, ‘You must write this story,’ to the time it was published at Viking Press with her as my acquiring editor… I realized that sitting beside me in a black one-piece swimsuit was one of the few women in the world who could explain political power and ambition, American sex and American autocracy, the back stairs at the White House and the intolerable glare and flame of living history. Who else?” Who else, indeed?”
― Maureen Callahan, Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed

“Jackie had encouraged her friend Barbara Chase-Riboud to write her groundbreaking book about Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson’s slave and the mother of at least six of Jefferson’s children—a disturbing part of American history that, at the time, remained little known.”
― Maureen Callahan, Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed

“It did make sense. Books were among Jackie’s great loves; she was a voracious consumer and reader of them, and aside from her children, books were her solace, her emotional sustenance. And editing would fit with her baseline personality: Jackie was social and loved meeting new and fascinating people, but she was also, at her core, a loner. Becoming an editor would mean lunches and book launches and office work, but it would also allow her hours away on her own, reading and thinking and refueling.”
― Maureen Callahan, Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed

“Bobby had been more than a brother-in-law to Jackie; before his assassination, in the wake of Jack’s death, the two of them destroyed and disconsolate, they became romantically involved.”
― Maureen Callahan, Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed

“That was another secret between her and Jack, their confidential appointments with Max Jacobson, the German physician they called Dr. Feelgood. He shot them up with all kinds of drugs: speed, steroids, painkillers, animal hormones, bone marrow, human placenta. Neither Jack nor Jackie knew what, exactly, was in Feelgood’s injections. “I don’t care if it’s horse piss,” Jack once said. “It works.”
― Maureen Callahan, Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed

“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”
― Maureen Callahan, Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed

“removed the cast the day before, and even though John needed a cane to walk and would need months of physical therapy, he swore the doctor had cleared him to fly. Not likely. But John was so confident. Overconfident, as usual. Carolyn couldn’t fully blame him. No one said no to John F. Kennedy Jr., heir to Camelot, the only living son of the beloved slain president, with movie star looks and charm to match. “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?”
― Maureen Callahan, Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed

“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”
― Maureen Callahan, Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed