America’s first family has been in the news again recently. This time, the focus has been Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) Jr. After nominating as an independent candidate for the US presidential election, he subsequently withdrew and endorsed Republican candidate Donald Trump.
His staunch anti-vaccination stance had already been reported, but then came the bizarre stories about him chainsawing the head off a dead whale and driving around with it attached to the roof of his car – after he’d already admitted to dumping a dead bear cub in Central Park ten years ago.
The nephew of assassinated US President John F. Kennedy (JFK) and son of Robert (Bobby) F. Kennedy, the former US attorney general who was assassinated in 1968 while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, RFK Jr has a long history of inconsistent and embarrassing behaviour.
But what is more concerning, according to Maureen Callahan’s new book Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed, is his behaviour towards women, including the neglect and gaslighting of his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, who died by suicide in 2012.
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She writes that he “remains unbothered and unquestioned about the circumstances” leading to the death of this “fragile woman who he tormented toward the end of their marriage and in the lead up to her suicide, cheating on her, cutting off her credit cards and access to cash, trying to forcibly hospitalise her, telling her she’d be ‘better off dead’.”
RFK Jr’s prominence in the 2024 US election (Trump has appointed him to a senior role in his transition team) makes Ask Not particularly timely and topical. While the book mostly focuses on people and events from the past, it highlights the persistent influence of the Kennedy legacy on American politics.
Entitlement and recklessness
Ask Not draws a line between the Kennedy history and contemporary America, while also connecting the stories of the many women who have suffered at the expense of the Kennedy men’s extraordinary sense of entitlement and recklessness.
Divided into 12 parts, with sections on 13 different women, Ask Not turns the attention from the prominent Kennedy men to the women they “destroyed”. Some of these women are well known. There are two sections devoted to Marilyn Monroe and three to Jackie Kennedy. Other women would have barely been noticed by the Kennedys until their lives were ended or ruined through associations with the family.
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Callahan identifies Pamela Kelley as one of those women. As a teenager, she was friends with RFK Jr and his brothers David and Joe. In August 1973, she reluctantly agreed to travel with David and Joe and others on a trip to Nantucket. Seven teenagers piled into an open jeep.
According to Callahan, Joe tore through the streets of Nantucket, driving in circles before crossing into the other lane and incoming traffic. He swerved and the jeep flipped at least twice. “The carnage,” Callahan writes, “was unbelievable”. Two of the girls had broken necks. Pamela was thrown 30 metres into the air before landing on a tree trunk. She would never walk again.
Six days later, Joe Kennedy pled not guilty in court, standing before Judge George Anastos, an old classmate of his late uncle, Joseph Kennedy. Callahan recounts the scene: “You had a great father and you have a great mother,” Anastos said. “Use your illustrious name as an asset instead of coming into court like this.” He gave Joe a $100 fine and let him go.
There was a similar lack of accountability when Joe’s uncle, US Senator Ted Kennedy, faced court over the death of Mary Jo Kopechne a few years earlier. The young political staffer was the only passenger in a car that Ted Kennedy crashed after a party at Martha’s Vineyard in 1969.
Ted had been drinking and was speeding when the car plunged from a bridge into the water. He left Mary Jo in the car to seek help but did not call the authorities. By the time trained rescuers arrived, Mary Jo had suffocated.
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Defying belief
The stories in Ask Not often defy belief. But most of the older stories in the book have been well and truly verified by now. For the more recent examples, Callahan has relied on original interviews with friends and families of the affected women, plus additional sources including other books and media reports. She provides notes for each woman included.
She conducted original interviews with (mostly unnamed) people who knew John F. Kennedy Jr’s wife Carolyn Bessette, who died along with her sister when a plane he was flying crashed in 1999. She also spoke to those who knew RFK Jr’s second wife Mary Richardson, Mary Jo Kopechne, Pamela Kelley and a young girl called Martha Moxley.
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Moxley was brutally murdered aged 15. RFK Jr’s then-teenage cousin, Michael Skakel, was convicted and jailed for the crime. After serving 11 years of a 20-year sentence he was released and the conviction was vacated, pending a retrial that never happened. RFK Jr later published a book, Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison for a Murder He Didn’t Commit.
Callahan also drew on “a long history of reporting on the Kennedy dynasty” as a writer for Vanity Fair and the New York Post. Callahan’s author note doesn’t specify whether she interviewed any of the Kennedy men. Although there is very little direct attribution in the book, Ask Not appears to be thoroughly researched and she is an excellent writer.
Her language is concise and evocative. Each section reads like a tightly edited feature story. She draws the reader in, and at various points, leaves them wanting more. Ask Not is a long book, but it is also compulsively readable (not to be confused with an easy read; it’s frequently disturbing).
A key strength is the unconventional structure. Divided into 12 parts, it does not follow a chronological order, instead combining the various stories of the women by themes such as “Rebels”, “The Girls”, “The Survivors” and “Falling Stars”.
Unexpectedly, Ask Not includes sections on women within the Kennedy family: the matriarch Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy and two of her four daughters, Rosemary and Kathleen (known as Kick), sisters to JFK, Bobby and Ted.
These sections provide insights into the family’s attitudes towards women, driven largely by pervasive patriarchal values and misogyny, but also through Rose’s religious beliefs: “The only Catholic more devout than Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy may have been the pope.”
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When Kick Kennedy decided to marry an English protestant, she continued to have a relationship with her father Joe, while Rose completely cut her off. She died, aged 28, in a horrific plane crash in 1948.
Her sister Rosemary lived a long life, but her story is no less tragic. According to Callahan, Rosemary was seen as different to her smart and sporty siblings. She was “slow at school, earnest, child-like and needy”. The Kennedys were winners; yet she was a loser.
Her father Joe was so embarrassed of Rosemary that he hid her away for years before arranging for her to have experimental surgery at age 23. She was lobotomised and “left functionally as a two-year-old” and subsequently “stashed away in another state without any contact from her siblings or parents”.
Dangerous men
Ask Not starts with “Icons” and Carolyn Bessette, detailing her initial reluctance to allow her husband, JFK Jr, to fly her to Martha’s Vineyard on the night of July 16 1999.
Long before he made a series of rash and senseless decisions that led to the plane crash that killed him, Carolyn and her sister, Lauren, JFK Jr had a history of selfish risk-taking. “No one could have believed that the kind, humble, gorgeous John Kennedy had a habit of putting others in danger too – most often his closest friends and girlfriends,” Callahan writes.
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“Speeding, swimming too far out into the ocean, driving recklessly onto sidewalks or while high on pot, skiing in whiteout conditions, acting like an expert in all sports when really he was just an amateur – there was little John wouldn’t dare and he bullied almost everyone in his life to be as wild as he was.” Like many of his male relatives, JFK Jr was not used to being told “no”. Whatever he wanted, he got. His life was defined by a sense of entitlement others would struggle to comprehend.
The initial focus on JFK Jr works well, as he exemplifies the recklessness and carelessness of the Kennedy men that Callahan outlines throughout the rest of the book. For most of the Kennedy men, a sense of entitlement extended beyond their professional lives and into their interactions with women. JFK Jr was somewhat of an exception, according to Callahan. His father, on the other hand, may have the worst reputation for womanising.
Even though some of the women in JFK’s life had shared their experiences publicly before, they make for confronting reading. As president, JFK would invite young women who worked at the White House to drinks in his office before offering them “a tour of the residence”. When 19-year-old Mimi Beardsley agreed, the president pushed her onto Jackie Kennedy’s bed, pulled off her underwear and had sex with her.
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According to Callahan, JFK Jr had a voracious sexual appetite. He constantly slept around, repeatedly infecting his wife with sexually transmitted diseases, sharing lovers and prostitutes with his friends and brothers. Concerningly, his womanising was well known in Washington circles, including among the press who turned a blind eye.
A destructive force
Other Kennedy men may not have been as extreme, but they tended to share a perception that women were objects of lust, something that they were owed.
In diaries he left around for the house for his wife Mary to read, RFK Jr kept a list of all the women he had been with. There were so many – “astronomical numbers”. He ranked them from 1 to 10, as if he were a teenager, according to Callahan.
“The Kennedys remain a powerful and frequently destructive force, both in our politics and in our culture,” Callahan writes in the prologue, citing RFK Jr’s current influence as an example.
We must examine the Kennedy history, Callahan argues, and question the family’s enduring legacy. “Do the Kennedys deserve to remain a power centre in American life and politics?” she asks. She ends the prologue with an explanation for the book’s title, taken from JFK’s famous 1961 inaugural address, and a call for the question to be reframed.
“Ask not” has also forever been an admonition to women in the Kennedy sphere: Ask no questions. Don’t ask for help or respect, for fairness or justice.
This book takes that as a dare. Ask Not?
Let’s.
