Ask Not

Susan Midalia's Review 

The subtitle of this new book - The Kennedys and the Women they Destroyed - makes its author’s intention unapologetically clear. Award-winning journalist Maureen Callahan systematically reveals the morally appalling treatment of women and girls by generations of Kennedy men. Patriarch Jo, an admirer of Hitler, had his mentally unstable daughter Rosemary lobotomised and institutionalised; this lively young woman never spoke or walked again. Jo’s son, the president John F. Kennedy, chose to have sex with a group of women in the knowledge that his wife lay in a hospital bed, distraught by the loss of a stillborn baby. JFK’s brother Ted left young Mary Jo Kopechne dying in a river while he rushed off to concoct a story to save his political career. John Kennedy Junior’s willful refusal to heed expert advice about piloting his own plane caused not only his own death but those of his wife Carolyn and her sister Lauren Bessette. The Press called it the tragic loss of a future president; the official, largely unreported investigation, laid the blame for the deaths on the ego of a reckless young man.

These are just some of the morally sickening accounts of the men who destroyed – literally, psychologically, emotionally – their wives, friends of wives, mistresses, interns, casual acquaintances. President John F. Kennedy and his Attorney General brother Bobby frequently “shared” or passed on women, including the movie star Marilyn Monroe. Young female interns were on endless supply in the White House. Babysitters were sexually coerced or raped. Wives were publicly humiliated as dumb or unattractive, or condemned as bad mothers. A young Kennedy brutally murdered a teenage neighbour who rejected his sexual overtures; his original prison sentence was reduced because the judge was a friend of the family. What emerges is a damning picture of voracious, sometimes brutal, sexual appetites; an abhorrent sense of masculine entitlement; the unethical use of cosy connections; and a pathological exploitation of women as expendable objects. 

But Ask Not is no simplistic male predator/female victim story. Callahan acknowledges that women were often attracted to the wealth, fame and status that came with marriage into the dynasty, while some young women were unabashedly proud of having been ‘chosen’ by a good-looking, charismatic Kennedy, one of them the most powerful leader in the western world. It’s also the case that the wives typically turned a blind eye to their husband’s infidelities, partly because of the Catholic stigma attached to divorce, and partly because their pre-feminist upbringing made them feel resigned to their lot as disregarded wives. As well, and depressingly, most of the wives and mothers were knowingly complicit in sustaining the public myth of Kennedy integrity. Perhaps the most striking example is Jackie Kennedy, who after her husband’s assassination, created the idealised ‘Camelot’ story of their marriage and his presidency to protect his legacy, in the full knowledge of his countless affairs, callousness and hypocrisy. It’s worth remembering that the handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis for which JFK has been lauded was a near-disaster of his own making. It’s worth remembering his reluctance to support the Civil Rights Movement to ensure continuing support for his political career.

What also sustained the veneer of Kennedy innocence was the media’s unethical protection of the men’s public reputations. The book’s title Ask Not - taken from JFK’s exhortation not to ask what the country could do for Americans but to ask what Americans could do for their country - was the modus operandi of journalists. They chose not to ask about the whispers and rumours; they chose not to let the public know what they knew to be the truth by resorting to cover-ups, omissions and outright lies. When a scandal did manage to make its way into the papers, they typically blamed the women for being temptresses and whores. The lack of compassion, indeed the blatant contempt, for the women and young girls (some as young as 14) is perhaps most shockingly evidenced by the newspaper headline after Ted Kennedy left Mary Jo Kopechne to die: “Teddy saved, blonde drowns.” Mary Jo Kopechne’s name was never mentioned in subsequent reports, while “Teddy” went on to have a long and illustrious career as a United States Senator.  

It’s also important to insist that Ask Not is not mere speculation or gossip. Although Callahan does write scenes that tend to read like they belong in a novel – she imagines specific details, for example, and analyses people’s ostensible motives – her detailing of journalistic sources and her bibliography run to many impressive pages. While some of the material is already on the public record, much of it is new, and courageous in the telling. Nor is the book merely an account of one certifiably narcissistic group of men. It’s an important work of social history that lays bare the manifestly unjust gender politics from the early twentieth-century to the present day. It’s also a celebration of those few Kennedy women who ultimately managed to forge a more productive life, like Jackie Onassis and Joan Kennedy, the latter the first discarded wife of the notoriously unhinged Robert Kennedy Junior, now a fervent supporter of another unspeakable misogynist, the current Republican presidential candidate Donald J Trump. Importantly, too, Callahan’s book is an expose of powerful media interests, including Rupert Murdoch, who were determined to serve the interests of other powerful men. We might well ask: how much has changed?

Ask Not is a sobering, utterly absorbing, enraging and sometimes distressing read. It will stay with you for a long time. 

Publisher's Review 

A Mail on Sunday ‘Best Holiday Read 2024’

From New York Times bestseller Maureen Callahan, a fierce, character-driven exposé of the real Kennedy Curse—the family's generations-long legacy of misogyny, murder, and mayhem—and the women who have paid the price for our obsession with Camelot.

For decades, the Kennedy name has been synonymous with wealth, power, and—above all else—integrity. But this carefully constructed veneer hides a dark truth: the Kennedy men's legacy of physical and psychological abuse of women, part of a tradition of toxic masculinity that spans generations and has ruined untold lives. Through scandal after scandal, the family and their defenders have managed to keep this shameful story out of the spotlight. Now, in Ask Not, bestselling journalist Maureen Callahan reveals the Kennedys' hidden history of abuse and exploitation, laying bare their rampant misogyny and restoring women to the center of the dynasty's story: from Jacqueline Onassis and Marilyn Monroe to Carolyn Bessette, Mary Richardson, Rosemary Kennedy, and many others whose names aren't nearly as well known – but rightfully should be.

Drawing on years of fierce reportage and written in electric prose, Ask Not is a long-overdue reckoning with this fabled American family, showing how the Kennedy myth and their raw political power has enabled the clan's many predators while also silencing generations of traumatized women and girls. At long last, Callahan also redirects the spotlight to the women in the Kennedys' orbit, paying homage to those who freed themselves—and giving voice to the countless others who could not do the same.

‘A searing exposé’ - Glamour

‘A timely reminder of the dangers posed by men who crave power’ - Observer