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Maureen Callahan’s “Ask Not” delivers damning details about the exploits of three generations of the storied family.
Marilyn Monroe with President John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy in 1962. Cecil Stoughton / White House
By Nina Burleigh, Washington Post
updated on July 11, 2024 | 8:59 AM
When the B-52s first sang about “heroes falling to the ground like Hell’s magnet pulls me down,” JFK had been dead for only 15 years and was still a mostly unblemished national icon. Stories about how he treated women had been leaking out, but not until the #MeToo era did we learn just how abominably he and other revered and influential men behaved.
Journalist Maureen Callahan has worked for the New York Post and the Daily Mail – tabloids that have never met a Kennedy they didn’t love to trash. In her new book, “Ask Not,” she has stitched together a stinging portrait of the depredations of not just John F. Kennedy but of three generations of Kennedy men. It’s a group portrait that reminds us that former president Donald Trump is hardly an outlier among powerful men.
Relying on a vast array of sources from the obscure (the White House “kennel-keeper”) to the best-selling (Kitty Kelley) and her own reportage, Callahan takes a critical look at the Kennedy men through the lens of the miserable and sometimes abused wives and girlfriends in their lives.
She identifies the wellspring of misogyny in Irish Catholic patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. in Boston during the Gilded Age, and traces it anecdote by anecdote down through JFK, RFK and Teddy, and the litter of boomer generation men – boys hatched by three Kennedy wives Callahan depicts as humiliated breeders and political props, driven to madness and alcoholism. At the top is matriarch Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, a champion procreator who gave birth to nine living babies, including one who would become the 35th president, and two future senators.
Little, Brown
For the sections on JFK, Callahan relies heavily on a plethora of secondary sources about White House orgies, parties and the Camelot King’s sex addiction. She repeats allegations in Kitty Kelley’s 1978 book, “Jackie Oh!,” that marriage to JFK at one point drove Jackie to anorexia and a depression that required electroshock therapy. Callahan refloats unfounded claims that suggest both JFK and Robert F. Kennedy were somehow involved in Marilyn Monroe’s suicide.
She also recounts the stories of women who have since written or spoken about being college-age interns who were transformed into Kennedy sex objects. Diana de Vegh was one, a Radcliffe junior when she caught the eye of the married senator from Massachusetts in 1958. Kennedy eventually seduced her in his Boston apartment. Her first sexual experience with him was quick and decidedly unromantic. “There were no kisses. No professions of love,” she told Callahan in an interview. De Vegh was among a number of young women who later were invited to the White House family quarters when Jackie was away.