For decades, the Kennedy name has been synonymous with wealth, power, and above all else – integrity. But this carefully c constructed veneer hides a dark truth: the Kennedy men’s legacy of physical and psychological abuse of women, part of a tradition of toxic masculinity that spans generations and has ruined untold lives.  Through scandal after scandal, the family and their defenders have managed to keep this shameful story out of spotlight.

Long before the Lewinsky affair, JFK had multiple sexual encounters with White House interns, he even slept with one Mimi Alford, in his wife’s powder-blue bedroom.

It’s no secret that JFK and his male relatives were unfaithful to their wives.

The attempt on Donald J Trump’s life being hit with a bullet in the ear, a few centimetres closer would have killed him on live television, recalled the assassinations of John F Kennedy in 1963 and his younger brother Robert who was shot to death on the presidential campaign trail in 1968. FBI Director Chris Wray says Donald Trump shooter googled for details of JFK assassination.

Kennedy a young and handsome war hero, was highly educated at Ivy League levee, intellectual and articulate, and he intended to study at the London School of Economics under the tutelage of the great socialist Harold Laski, just like elder brother Joe. 

Journalist Maureen Callahan, putes JFK into the same dismal category as Trump. “When a life-size bronze statue of JFK was unveiled in DC in 2021, not one bit of news coverage addressed his treatment of women. Not one journalist, essayist, political writer, or cultural critic asked whether this was a man deserving in our new era, of such a memorial. Donald Trump’s infamous comment, Grab them by the pussy”, writes Callahan.  

The Kennedys was the closest thing America has to royalty, continue to exert their peculiar spell over the collective imagination. Bobby’s son RFK Jr is an independent candidate for president and JFK’s grandson Jack Schlossberg is a TickTok star and political correspondent for Vogue.

Callahan takes a predictable and reductive line by depicting the Kennedy men as predators and the women who swam in their wake as downtrodden or martyred.

It is common knowledge that Jack and Bobby had voracious appetites, that both of them bedded Marlene Monroe, and that they unashamedly cheated on their wives, Their father normalised sexual infidelity in an era where powerful men chased and got way with it. The sexual double standard prevailed, boys could be boys, but  the girls were encouraged to be chaste.

Mary Richardson Kennedy, the second of the three wives of RFK Jr, Callahan presents  new and revealing information gleaned from Mary’s therapist and yoga instructor. According to Callahan, the brutalisation of Kennedy women began with Joseph. He was a “financially and sexually rapacious man” who set the pattern for his sons’ deviance  and his wife and daughters’ lack of self-worth.  She glosses over the simiarly predatory behaviour of John “honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, the mayor of Boston and father of Joseph’s wife. Rose, who had well-publicised affair with a cigarette girl called Toodles who was the same age as his daughter. Rose, the matriarch of the Kennedy family, is unrecognisable in this account, depicted as a victim of her husband’s philandering and a cold and heartless mother.. But Rose was clever and headstrong, fluent in German and French and when news broke of her father’s affair, gave  him a furious dressing down he would never forget. She severed emotional ties with him and married Joseph, despite her father’s disapproval. 

Caroline Bessette-Kennedy, the wife of John Kennedy Jr, JFK’s son comes across as a vicious social-climbing arriviste who dyed her hair blonde and made herself thin with cocaine and chain-smoking.It was the ultimate glow-up to capture America’s heir to Camelot, the only living son of the beloved slain president, with movie star  looks and charm to match, John Jr is described as prickly and impatient and something of a brat, really John didn’t live in the real world and never had , he lived on Planet Kennedy, where he was king”.

Ask Not’s two-dimensional depiction of the Kennedy men as brainless sex addicts.

 Jack had endured severe childhood illness, been close to death on more than one occasion and travelled round Nazi Germany taking notes. His male companion noticed that Jack gave rides to student hitch-hikers. When he asked for an explanation, he was told that students tend to speak good English and he wanted to learn about what was really happening in prewar Germany. This was the act of a future president. Immediately after the assassination of Martin Luther King and shortly before he was himself gunned down on live television, Bobby Kennedy gave an extraordinary speech that deserves to be quoted at length, given the drama of last saturday in Pennsylvania. 

“We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire weapons and ammunition they desire. Some look for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear, violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation and only a cleaning of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul”.

Callahan asks her reader only to slaver over lurid sexual encounters and risky details of dead bodies. 

Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed by Maureen Callahan, Mudlark £25, 336 pages.