Maureen Callahan’s ‘Ask Not’ Paints the Kennedys as Dangerous to Women

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may have been every bit the misogynist Callahan describes, but he has been repudiated by his own family over some of his political positions. All this suggests that Callahan, despite her insistence that “the Kennedys remain a powerful and frequently destructive force,” is essentially writing a history.

That being the case, we should note that her sources include The National Enquirer, journalist-ragpickers like Kitty Kelley and a rotating crew of ax-grinders, including a low-level Senate aide whose claims of rampant cocaine abuse by Ted Kennedy fell apart pretty quickly under scrutiny. Whatever conspiracy theory has ever been floated about la famiglia — Joe Sr. molested Rosemary, Jack and Bobby killed Marilyn, Aristotle Onassis killed Bobby — gets to saunter in the daylight.

Let’s note, too, that not all the victimizers in the book have Kennedy in their name. (Onassis cheated on Jackie within two weeks of their wedding and arranged for paparazzi to photograph them having sex on a beach.)

Nor are all the victimizers men. Rose Kennedy, as Callahan acknowledges, was a cold and punitive mother who abandoned her children to fly off to Paris fashion shows, cut off her daughter Kick for marrying a Protestant and harassed her daughters-in-law whenever they fell out of line. Least forgivable, perhaps, was her abandonment of Rosemary at a Wisconsin facility, shrouded in silence for a quarter-century. “In our family,” Rose acknowledged, “if you’re not doing anything you’re left in the corner.”

In recent months, mostly in The Daily Mail, Callahan has trashed the likes of Britney Spears, Oprah Winfrey, Gisele Bündchen, Hillary Clinton, Taylor Swift, Judy Blume and, for perhaps the millionth time, Meghan Markle. Sisterhood is a sometime thing.

Finally, let’s put in a word for the agency and complexity of human beings. In the book’s final paragraph, Callahan reminds us that Jackie Kennedy Onassis chose to be buried not in New York, where she had enjoyed a successful career and her life’s most satisfying relationship, but in Arlington National Cemetery, alongside her philandering first husband and their two dead babies. Was it the babies she was circling back to? Was it Jack? Was it something else? This isn’t a book that can wrestle with those questions.

ASK NOT: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed | By Maureen Callahan | Little, Brown | 370 pp. | $32.50