DYNASTIES Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed Maureen Callahan Mudlark, $35.99 Do we need another book on the Kennedys? As of this writing, Robert Kennedy jnr , son of the senator slain in 1968, is running for the presidency as an independent. Joseph Kennedy III, grandson of Robert Kennedy, was considered a potential future president when he gave the reply to Donald Trump’s State of the Union address three years ago.
Caroline Kennedy , daughter of the late John F. Kennedy, is the US ambassador to Australia. And if the adherents of QAnon, the bizarre pro-Trump conspiracy group, are to be believed, then John F.
Kennedy jnr, killed in a plane crash in 1999, is alive and will return any day to join Trump in ridding America of evil. John F. Kennedy Jr and wife Carolyn Bessette in May 1999.
They died in a plane crash months later. Credit: Reuters In short, while we may not need another book on the Kennedys, there is certainly an audience willing to consume all things Kennedy, and clear signs that the Kennedy family themselves are not going anywhere. While there may be an audience, is there anything new to say about this turbulent political dynasty? For Maureen Callahan, the answer is yes.
In Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed , Callahan places the emphasis on the women in the Kennedy story, from matriarch Rose Kennedy, through the Kennedy daughters, to the various women that the Kennedy men were involved with. Maureen Callahan’s book is a light, frothy take on the Kennedy clan. The title, Ask Not , is taken from John F.
Kennedy’s inaugural address in 1961. It was also, Callahan argues, “an admonition to women in the Kennedy sphere: Ask no questions. Don’t ask for help or respect, for fairness or for justice.
” In tackling the Kennedy family treatment of the women in their lives, Callahan is setting out over fairly well-trodden ground. It should not come as a surprise to anyone at this point that John F. Kennedy was an unfaithful husband, that Ted Kennedy should have been convicted of vehicular manslaughter for the death of Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick in 1969, that John F.
Kennedy jnr wasn’t that bright, or that Robert Kennedy jnr is rather strange, to say the least. In centring these women in the story instead of the Kennedy men, Callahan builds a prosecutorial case that the Kennedy saga has been, as much as anything else, a multigenerational tale of misogyny, sexism, abuse and destruction. The narrative shifts back and forth from woman to woman, from time period to time period, in a way that does not necessarily do any favours for the book’s subjects, or the book itself.
While going over ground that has been mostly covered before, Callahan has nevertheless written a brisk page turner. With subjects such as these, it would be difficult to make the story boring. Ask Not is bookended by two women, Carolyn Bessette and Jackie Kennedy, the wives of the two JFKs.
While adhering to conventional standards of beauty and grace, in Callahan’s telling, both women were shrewd operators as well, carefully positioning themselves as the wives of America’s foremost bachelors, and in the case of Jackie, carefully cultivating and exploiting the “Camelot” mythology that has maintained the political currency of the Kennedys right through to the election cycle of 2024. This focus, however, does tend to undermine the central thesis of the book, that the women in the Kennedy lives were hapless victims. Robert Kennedy (left) and JFK.
Robert had an affair with Jackie Kenendy after his brother’s death. Credit: Alamy Stock Photo A gossipy, breathless style runs throughout Ask Not in a way that is occasionally distracting. Chapters end with high drama.
Sentences such as “Oh, the irony” keep company with sentences such as “Oh, the fun they had in the years to come” and “Oh, Billy.” This collision between style and substance makes it difficult to determine exactly what sort of book Callahan wants to write. Is it a well-researched, in-depth demolition of the Kennedy mythology similar along the lines of Seymour Hersh’s The Dark Side of Camelot ? Or is it a lighter, frothier take on the Kennedy story in keeping with Edward Klein’s The Kennedy Curse ? Mostly Callahan’s book falls into the latter category, reheating old innuendoes and rumours (JFK’s infamous “pool parties” with young female staffers in the White House, Marilyn Monroe’s affair with Robert Kennedy, Robert’s affair with Jackie after his brother’s assassination) while indulging in creative licence to establish what Callahan believes are her subjects’ “closest, most accurate approximations of [the] thoughts and feelings”.
Jackie Kennedy carefully cultivated the mythology that has maintained her family’s political currency through to 2024. Credit: At the same time, there are deeper and darker stories that Callahan brings out well, particularly the damage wrought by the family founder and patriarch, Joseph Kennedy. A bootlegger, an adulterer, an isolationist at best and a Nazi sympathiser at worst, Kennedy snr’s demands of his children sowed the seeds of the intergenerational trauma that would reverberate over American politics and can still be felt today.
Nowhere was that more clearly seen than in the tragedy of daughter Rosemary Kennedy. Lacking the intellectual gifts of her siblings, combined with what seemed to be a serious learning disorder and behavioural issues, Rosemary may well have been fine in a less demanding family. Instead, concerned about her progress in her studies, and her increasingly aberrant behaviour, Joseph Kennedy arranged in 1941 to have his daughter lobotomised, a procedure that had been promised as a “miracle cure” for difficult patients, but reduced Rosemary’s mental state to that of a toddler.
Rosemary’s fate was covered up for years, concealed even from her younger siblings until well into the 1960s. Callahan has provided a shortcut, a set of CliffsNotes for those who may desire to get up to speed on a political dynasty that has had thousands of books written about it. As a primer for the unpleasant aspects of the Kennedy saga, Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed is adequate for a reader unfamiliar with the tale.
For longer time Kennedy watchers, however, Ask Not provides few new answers. The Booklist is a weekly newsletter for book lovers from books editor Jason Steger. Get it delivered every Friday .
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