The women who fell victim to the Kennedy curse

Being a republic, the US does not have a royal family. But it does have the Kennedys. This almost mythical dynasty of tough, arrogant, sexually magnetic, cruel and ruthless men has provided fodder for the tabloids for many decades and looks likely to keep doing so for many more. 

Ask Not lifts the veil on this Camelot clan of Kennedys, revealing many repugnant traits, most notably in the way the men treated their women.

Investigative journalist Maureen Callahan has followed the ups and downs of the real-life Kennedy soap opera and shines a spotlight on the stories of the women they have abused — or sometimes killed — in this grimly fascinating and devastating exposé.

Of course, the Kennedy men themselves have suffered — brothers Bobby and JFK were both assassinated and the president’s son, JFK Jnr, died in a plane crash, albeit due to his arrogance and ineptitude as a pilot. However, this is mainly a book about the women — many of them strong and beautiful — who fell victim to the Kennedy curse. 

Many members of this prominent Catholic family seem to have ridden roughshod over the 10 commandments, and yet there is still a willingness by many to revere the dynasty, possibly because their achievements were so much more impressive than their characters.

“Kennedy men have been valorised and lionised for nearly a century, but the women they’ve broken, tormented, raped, murdered or left for dead have never really been part of their legacy,” writes Callahan. “They must be. None of this is history. As William Faulkner wrote, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ The Kennedys remain a powerful and frequently destructive force, both in our politics and our culture.”

The book focuses on 13 women who were born or drawn into the Kennedy orbit and highlights the way they were treated. The tale begins with the founder of this mythical tribe, patriarch Joe Kennedy. A highly successful businessman who was appointed the US ambassador to Britain in 1938, in the run-up to World War 2. He was an anti-Semite with sympathies for Hitler, and he was recalled in 1940.

Callahan records that Joe was vile in his treatment of women, and would often force himself on his victims, who included friends of his daughters.

He was also accused of raping one of the stars of the silver screen, Gloria Swanson, though, strangely, she later became Joe’s longtime mistress.

“Of their initial encounter in 1927, Swanson said that Joe Kennedy came to her hotel suite in Palm Beach, entered with total force and, she said, ‘moved so quickly that his mouth was on mine before either of us could speak. With one hand he held the back of my head, with the other he stroked my body and pulled at my kimono ... After a hasty climax, he lay beside me, stroking my hair. Apart from his guilty, passionate mutterings, he still had said nothing cogent.’”

As we are to read, it was like father, like sons in the Kennedy clan. His most famous son, John F Kennedy, often called Jack, was to become president. A remarkable man, an inspiring leader and the victim of a cruel assassination, he echoed his father’s flaw of being a serial womaniser, not content with being married to the remarkable Jackie Kennedy, whose bed in the White House was used by her husband for coupling with a stream of interns. And whose mistresses included the most beautiful woman in Hollywood, Marilyn Monroe.

“What had Jack Kennedy really thought of women ...? The president said that ‘the chase is more fun than the kill’, that he called his paramours ‘kiddo’ or ‘sweetie’ because there were so many that he couldn’t remember their names,” Callahan notes.

“For a man with such a libido, Jackie said, Jack was terrible in bed. Little did she know that this was the complaint of every woman who had had sex with Jack Kennedy: no kissing, no build-up, no intensity or sensuality or fun. He just attacked you like a dog humping a leg.” 

Monroe slept with both Jack and his brother Bobby, and there is still suspicion over their involvement in her death from a drug overdose on August 4 1962 at her home in Brentwood, California. 

“The official cause was ‘probable suicide’, but suspicion has forever hung over John F Kennedy and Robert F (Bobby) Kennedy. Earlier that day, Marilyn had told her friend Jeanne Carmen that she’d gotten harassing phone calls the night before, a familiar woman’s voice telling her to ‘leave Bobby alone’.”

Monroe’s former husband, the baseball legend Joe DiMaggio, told his biographer, Dr Rock Positano, more than once that the Kennedys were responsible for Marilyn’s death.

Callahan quotes him as saying: “I always knew who killed her, but I didn’t want to start a revolution in this country. She told me someone would do her in, but I kept quiet. The whole lot of Kennedys were lady killers, and they always got away with it. They’ll be getting away with it a hundred years from now.”

JFK’s son, John F Kennedy Jnr, was another womaniser and was responsible for the death of his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, when he crashed the plane he was piloting on July 16 1999.

Callahan is adamant that JFK Jnr should never have been allowed to take the controls for this flight that took off from New Jersey, taking the man once described as America’s most eligible bachelor and his nervous wife to attend a family wedding on Cape Cod. But he was adamant, and so arrogant that he turned off the radio so he couldn’t communicate with ground control, who might have told him he had veered off course.

His leg had recently been removed from a brace, the weather was awful, “he had logged only 55 hours of night flight and wasn’t instrument-rated — he didn’t know how to read and rely on his controls, which often contradicted what a pilot could actually see.

“He wasn’t licensed to fly alone at night. He didn’t care, and Carolyn didn’t trust him. She told almost no-one, but Carolyn was so terrified of her husband’s piloting that she would often fly commercial rather than get in his plane. Or drive the four hours to Massachusetts — six if there was traffic.”

Carolyn’s sister Lauren Bessette was also on the plane and perished alongside Caroline and JFK Jnr. Another victim of the Kennedy machismo. 

Some of the Kennedy women will be easily recognised by the readers of the gossip magazines. But not all. One deeply sad story is one of Joe’s daughters, Rosemary Kennedy.

“She was considered the beauty of the Kennedy girls, but her learning disabilities and unstable moods brought shame to her parents.” So her father had her lobotomised, in a brutal operation, that left her crippled for life.

“When it was finally over, Rosie wasn’t Rosie any more. She would never be able to do anything again: talk, walk, swim, dance, flirt with boys, smoke cigarettes, meet future queens and accompany her father to dinner. Go to the movies. Take a shower, comb her hair, feed herself and use the toilet. She would never again go home or be one of the Kennedys. Her brain’s circuitry, like a string of Christmas lights, crushed one by one, had gone dark. Rosie was left, functionally, as a two-year-old.”

After reading this, the Kennedy charisma seems far less magical.

Another woman to die at the hands of the Kennedys was Mary Jo Kopechne, who was a passenger in the car of senator Ted Kennedy, another of patriarch Joe’s sons.  On the night of July 18-19 1969, Ted Kennedy drove his car off an unmarked bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, near Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. He escaped, but left Mary Jo to die in the black Oldsmobile in the shallow waters of Poucha Pond.

“He had emerged from the water and walked over a mile, passing by several houses, at least one with the lights on, never knocking for help ... He had passed the local firehouse ... He had bypassed pay phones and never called the police or 911. 

“Her parents didn’t know that the very next morning members of his staff could still smell alcohol on Ted’s breath. Or that their daughter had been alive for hours, tossed upon impact into the back of the car, contorting herself upside down in the rear footwell, clutching at the back and craning her neck to breathe ...

“Yet that criminal act has successfully been transformed into ‘Ted’s tragedy’, an awful event that unfairly kept him from ever becoming president of the United States. 

“The news reports to follow would only prove Ted right: in headline after headline, this would be called Ted’s accident, and how lucky America was that senator Ted Kennedy survived, narrowly escaping the Kennedy Curse. The young woman whom Ted left to die would be identified as ‘the blonde’ or ‘the victim’.”

There are other sad takes of women used and abused by the Kennedys, and an extensive narrative on perhaps the most famous of the Kennedy woman, JFK’s widow, Jackie Bouvier Kennedy. 

Some might dismiss this as a trashy book, full of gossip, sleaze and tragedy. However, it does have a brutally serious message. Over generations, the Kennedys may have been remarkable men. But they were also a misogynistic, unpleasant, violent and thuggish bunch when it came to the treatment of women.

Callahan concludes: “Any victims who dare to fight back will find themselves confronting the awesome power of the Kennedy machine, one that recasts any woman, no matter how wealthy or famous or powerful, as crazy, spiteful, vengeful; a drug addict, a viper, a seductress. 

“Whatever grievous harm a Kennedy man may have done to her, the message remains clear: She was asking for it. It was her fault.

“Thus Camelot, that fairy tale of Kennedy greatness and noble men, still stands.”