Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed

Maureen Callahan’s Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed is a nonfiction historical work. Published in 2024, the book covers the troubled history of the women in the orbit of the Kennedy political dynasty. A political family defined by its photogenic, charismatic young men who entered politics as vanguards of the Democratic Party, the Kennedys have both suffered and profited from media scrutiny.

Callahan, a writer for Vanity Fair and the New York Post, draws on her experience covering the more recent Kennedy men. However, instead of focusing on their internal worlds, Callahan turns her lens to the women in their lives.

This guide refers to the first edition published by Little, Brown and Company in 2024.

Content Warning: The source text and this guide include graphic depictions of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse. In addition, they discuss addiction, mental health conditions, ableism, manslaughter, death, death by suicide, miscarriage, stillbirth, plane and car accidents, and a forced lobotomy. The book quotes individuals who use derogatory language about racial groups, women, the LGBTQ+ community, and people with disabilities, which this guide reflects only in quotations.

Summary

Relegated to supporting roles or reviled as scapegoats, the Kennedy women were just as responsible for the celebrated accomplishments of the Kennedys but received mostly scrutiny and opprobrium from the media. The media often colluded with the Kennedy men to portray their women as unstable, spiteful, or jealous and the Kennedy men as sympathetic martyrs to the foibles of women. Though this approach worked for decades, recent media-led movements like MeToo have encouraged writers like Callahan to review how the Kennedys minimized their transgressions by marginalizing and disrespecting women.

This book tells the stories of famous Kennedy-adjacent women, from the most obvious and celebrated, like Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Marilyn Monroe, to the purposely obscured, like Rosemary Kennedy, Mary Jo Kopechne, and Martha Moxley. These women all have one thing in common, however: The Kennedy dynasty sacrificed their dignity, safety, and comfort and sometimes even their lives to preserve the reputations of men. If they were lucky, these women were vilified in the media, depicted as unreliable and vindictive toward the Kennedy men. If they were unlucky, public discourse erased them entirely to cover up the men’s misdeeds.

The book leaps back and forth among the stories of the women through chapters titled with their names. Callahan brings new life to their stories by portraying them not as passive victims or lauded symbols of the Kennedys but as individual people dealing with the fallout of the Kennedy men’s outrageous behavior. Some of these survivors, like Pamela Kelley and Martha Moxley, were private individuals devastated by the entitlement of men who considered themselves immune from consequences. Many of these women, however, were competent and even shrewd political actors.

Beginning with Carolyn Bessette, the wife of John F. Kennedy, Jr., who died as a passenger in a plane that her husband crashed, Callahan depicts the women who understood the power of the Kennedys as a political force and, reacting to a world that often denied women any real political power, sought to align themselves with the Kennedys to acquire status and achieve their ambitions. However, they realized that being a woman in the Kennedy family meant being either a smokescreen or a scapegoat for the scandalous acts of the men. The narrative covers the stories of 13 women, from the matriarch, Rose Kennedy, to 16-year-old Martha Moxley, who was murdered. Some, like Jackie Kennedy Onassis, were accepted into the family and even became symbols of the grace and power that the Kennedys tried to project. Others, like Marilyn Monroe, unwittingly invited scorn by (allegedly) engaging with the Kennedy men in extramarital affairs. The men who instigated in these affairs, however, faced no consequences, instead gaining status and accolades for the same actions. Still other women, like Mary Jo Kopechne, Pamela Kelley, and Martha Moxley, endured horrific physical violence because of the carelessness and brutality of Kennedy men. They underwent further humiliation when their stories were buried or twisted to protect the men’s reputations.

The political media stripped all these women, whether celebrated or vilified, of their nuance and humanity, placing them into strict categories to support the Kennedy narrative. The brunt of the consequences fell on the women, but Callahan shows how this scrutiny negatively affected the Kennedy men too. From the cruelty that John F. Kennedy’s father showed him when he was a chronically ill young boy to the callous disregard for Bobby Kennedy’s grief after his brother’s assassination, the Kennedy men had no framework for empathy or kindness in their lives and inflicted that same cruelty on the women and children in their orbit. The difference in outcomes between the Kennedy men and women starkly illustrates the unequal gender treatment throughout modern US history, which continues to this day.