Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed by Maureen Callahan
Published by Little Brown and Company
Publication date: July 2, 2024
Genres: Book Clubs, Non-fiction, History
Bookshop
Reams of paper have been expended in dissecting the Kennedys in all their tragedy and fame. Now, author Maureen Callahan joins the fray with a knockout punch in Ask Not. The book’s subtitle is The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed, but in case Callahan’s being too subtle this is a scathing exposé about the Kennedy men and how their extraordinarily entitled beliefs about themselves impacted the numerous young women pulled into their orbit.
Callahan has plenty of material showcasing the inability of the Kennedy men to exercise any self-control around women—Chappaquiddick, Marilyn Monroe, Palm Beach—so it might seem as if Ask Not was going to be reheated leftovers. It’s not. She does include intimate details of the above events, but her laser focus is on the women, the victims. She digs deep into never-before-seen records and personal documents of the Kennedy wives and all their mistresses, including the teenage intern who worked at the White House.
There is much in Ask Not that’s shocking, particularly regarding Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his eldest son Joe, John F. Kennedy Jr., and assorted Kennedy cousins. Each twisted a family mythos of their importance on the American stage to serve wildly destructive, self-indulgent behavior. All at the expense of women like Rosemary Kennedy, Jackie O, Mary Jo Kopechne, Mimi Beardsley, Carolyn Bessette, and others. It’s already a rage-y time to be a woman so this is not uplifting reading, but Callahan doesn’t just recite the crimes and misdemeanors of the Kennedy men. She uses the same attention to detail with the women themselves, filling in the details of their lives, elevating them from footnotes to real women, not just victims. Ask Not is compulsive reading.
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