Maureen Callahan’s Ask Not the Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed exposes systemic cover-ups: Mary Joe Kapekny died from suffocation at Chappaquiddick in 1969 after Edward Kennedy delayed rescue, Jackie Kennedy buried JFK despite his infidelity, and Marilyn Monroe’s death remains unexplained amid CIA/FBI surveillance. Callahan links JFK’s assassination to mob ties, Rosemary Kennedy’s lobotomy to silence potential scandals, and corporate media’s refusal to challenge the "Camelot myth." The book reveals how power shields predators, demanding history be rewritten beyond blind hero worship. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Maureen Callahan, the author of Ask Not, the Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed.
Now, whenever I have an author on, I always make my best effort to read as much of the book as I possibly can.
I'm swamped with reading that I have to do, but I try very hard to read as much of it as I can.
But the truth is, after the interview is over, most of the time I can't finish the book if I haven't finished it already because I have to move on to other things.
In this case, I started this book and I get the books for free, you know, because I'm interviewing people.
I started this book and it went out and spent one of my audible credits to get it so I could continue it because it is absolutely unput-downable.
It is an absolutely riveting look at one of the most privileged and destructive families in American political life.
And it is stories that have been told, but maybe not in this kind of depth, but also not all together like this.
It's Ask Not the Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed.
Maureen Callahan is an award-winning investigative journalist.
The book is already on the New York Times bestseller list, which is kind of funny for reasons I'll explain in a minute.
Maureen, it is lovely to meet you.
Thank you for coming on.
Oh, Andrew, thank you so much for having me.
And thank you for that incredible compliment.
I know, like as someone who also has a ton of reading to do, for you to carve out your own free time to finish the book for pleasure is like the greatest compliment I could get.
I can't stop.
It's like a drug.
And I have to say, I do, you know, authors usually like coming on this because I do read a lot of their books before I get there.
But after the interview is over, I usually have to move on.
I'm not with this.
I'll be listening to this for the next week or so until I finish it.
Thanks.
I also have to bring up, before we get into the meat of the book, I have to bring up the New York Times review because I was looking at this.
I thought, I wonder what the New York Times thought of this.
And not only did they attack you personally and said things like you had written bad things about some women, so you weren't a good sister, which I thought was absolutely wonderful.
But they accused you of not really getting the nuances of the Kennedys, which, by the way, isn't true.
You talk about the nuances of the relationships a lot.
But it seems to me the Kennedys have still got the left by the throat.
I mean, the fact that they could not just accept that you had written a good, entertaining book about how horrible these people were to their women is amazing.
They still are enchanted by them.
Oh, my God.
So, Andrew, that review, I mean, it was such a broadside.
It was such a like hysterical, it was partly a review of the book and partly a review of me.
Yes.
But, you know, what's so fascinating is what that review omitted, which was how much the New York Times has to answer for in doing the Kennedy family's dirty work and cleaning up their messes while smearing the names and sexual reputations of the women that they have harmed, if not completely almost ignoring them.
I mean, one of the women I write about was a teenage girl when she was left paralyzed for life by a Kennedy.
The Times called her one of two girl passengers who was injured.
Didn't name her till the last paragraph.
So I welcome the sanctimony of the New York Times.
Well, speaking of that.
In regards to my book.
Speaking of that, let me read you Teddy Kennedy's Obit in the New York Times, just a little bit of it.
Oh, this is true.
Mary's Silence00:10:59
Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a son of one of the most storied families in American politics, a man who knew acclaim and tragedy in near equal measure and who will be remembered as one of the most effective lawmakers in the history of the Senate, died late Tuesday, 1977.
President Obama said Mr. Kennedy was one of the nation's greatest senators.
So let's start with Chap Aquittick.
Give us a good account of what happened on the night of Chap Aquittick.
Well, I'm so glad you brought this in via Ted's obit in the Times, Andrew, because that was this germ of this book was watching and reading the media coverage of Ted Kennedy's three-day-long statesman's funeral and never hearing the name Mary Joe Kapekny,
who was the 29-year-old campaign aide that Ted left to die in three feet of water at Chappaquittick while he made his escape running past a fire station, lighted residential homes, pay phones, going back to his inn, sleeping it off, waking up the next morning, having a hearty breakfast, showering, shaving, making small talk with the other vacationers,
and then deciding he's going to take himself over to the police station and report that he had a little mishap the night before.
And this was successfully re-spun, and we still hear it all the time, as Ted's tragedy, the thing that kept Ted from ever becoming president.
Or, as spun by, say, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a longtime Kennedy water carrier, iron had gone into Ted Kennedy's soul that night.
I mean, the most purple prose, the most disgusting stuff.
A young woman died needlessly.
She could have been saved.
She was alive.
She drowned in the car while he was sitting around with his pals.
She actually suffocated.
She didn't drown.
She was breathing through a tiny air pocket for hours.
And the diver who recovered her body the next day said that she could have been saved.
Wow.
Wow.
I mean, that's homicide, right?
That's murder.
I mean, to leave somebody knowing that she's there.
It's incredible to me.
And he was never, I mean, he never, were charges ever brought against him?
I can't even remember now if charges were brought against him.
No, he was never charged.
And in my research, so I went and visited with Mary Joe's family, surviving family members in Pennsylvania.
And I found that no less an American icon than Muhammad Ali had written the Capechnis who never recovered from their only child's death.
He wrote them a handwritten letter in which he encouraged them to sue Ted Kennedy.
He called him a fake and a phony who read from a pre-written script that he had not authored himself.
That was the famous speech to the American people in which he tried to weasel out of what happened or what he did in the hopes of saving his Senate seat.
And in that speech, he perseverates on the Kennedy curse and the Kennedy curse and this thing that looms over them.
Like no thought to Mary Joe.
So yeah, that's Chapaquitik.
It's amazing.
You mentioned in the opening of the book, you mentioned the fact that a lot of these women are not perfect people and that that doesn't give anybody the right to abuse them.
I have to be honest with you and say there were some of the stories that I've gotten, I haven't finished the book, but I have some of the stories that I've gotten to where I do lose sort of sympathy for them because they pursue these guys avidly.
I mean, they know, they know who they are.
They know that they're never faithful.
They know that they cheat almost as an obsession.
And yet these women set their caps for them and go to great lengths to win them over.
And as they mentioned in this Times review, Jackie had herself buried next to JFK, who endlessly cheated on her.
What is that?
I mean, is that charisma or is that?
Well, I think in regards to Jackie, I think she paid at the office.
When you read what Jackie went through and when you read the way in which she held the nation together in the aftermath of JFK's assassination through her own deep trauma, I think that Jackie was a very, she was a very shrewd woman.
She understood history, celebrity, and she understood her earned place in that.
And she was going to be buried at Arlington next to Jack and two of her babies.
I don't think, you know, that was a male reviewer.
I don't think a female reviewer, I don't think I've seen one who picked up on that.
And I think also you may be referring to Carolyn Bassett as well, who is a fascinating character.
I agree, completely flawed.
Even her friends who spoke to me said, I loved Carolyn, but boy, she could be difficult.
She was a lot.
And, you know, despite all the protestations, she so badly wanted to be Mrs. JFK Jr.
You know, she endured a lot of humiliations.
And I completely get it.
It is frustrating, but it also, I think, speaks to the way in which the Kennedy men have long been valorized and held up as the ultimate.
So if you're a woman who snags JFK Jr., well, that redounds to you, right?
You must be special.
There must be something so unique about you that sets you apart.
And, you know, of course, that ended.
She got her look behind the curtain.
She realized the guy she married wasn't really a prize at all.
He was a booby prize.
He was kind of dull.
He was entitled.
He had really nothing going on inside.
And, you know, it ends with their completely avoidable deaths because, you know, he's piloting a plane.
He has no business piloting.
Yeah.
I was I was getting my pilot's license when that happened and I remember sitting at a table with a bunch of pilots and and they were just shrugging their shoulders like he got, you know, sort of saying he got what he deserved because he didn't have an instrument rating and he was flying in mist at night.
It was a really insane thing to do.
Here's one of the reasons this book grabs me so much, aside from the excellent research and the stories are just riveting.
Thank you.
But it rewrites the story of my life, which is the 20th century, the second half of the 20th century.
When JFK was assassinated, that is when most of us feel our generation began.
That's the thing that started that out.
And Watergate has always been held up to us as this brilliant act of integrity by the press, bringing down a president who had become corrupt.
But in fact, the press hated Richard Nixon because he was right about communism and he was right about so many things and they just wanted to destroy him.
He deserved what he got.
He did bad things.
And I'm not saying that.
But they let Kennedy get away with.
I mean, to me, the stuff he was doing sounded like rape.
Is that wrong?
I mean, I mean, tell me.
Me too.
Me too.
So there are two young girls in the book, one of whom, Mimi, is a 19-year-old White House intern who is invited to the White House residence after her first day, is gotten drunk.
The president suddenly grabs her, throws her down on a bed, takes her virginity within three minutes.
Now, she doesn't classify it as rape, but she also still to this day doesn't know what to call it.
I think that's rape.
Days after that, he basically forces her to perform oral sex on one of his aides while he watches.
Amazing.
The press, meanwhile, sees him shuttling this girl around the country as basically a sex toy and covers for him, covers for him, covers for him.
I could not agree with you more, Andrew.
And I will say while working on this book, it was Trump was in office.
And no matter what side of the aisle you're on, I was researching everything that JFK got up to when he was in office.
And work was not on the top of that list.
He almost brought the world to nuclear Armageddon.
And I'm thinking, if Trump is up to half of what JFK was up to, we're going to be fine.
It's going to be fine.
Let's talk about what really went on in JFK's presidency.
Well, you know, this is the thing.
I mean, they waited.
They had a tape of Donald Trump saying locker room crazy stuff about women, very ugly stuff.
Not doing anything, but saying these things.
And he obviously has not been a great husband to his many wives.
But was there ever a point in which, I mean, they still defended Bill Clinton for doing the kind of stuff that Kennedy was doing.
What was it with John F. Kennedy?
I mean, some of the stuff that he was doing didn't even sound fun to me.
I mean, it sounded like...
He didn't even like sex.
Yeah.
That's that fascinating thing.
He didn't like sex.
He seemed to think it was unclean.
He treated it like a compulsion.
Every woman who ever slept with him, his own wife included, said he was terrible.
He just went hard and fast, and that was it.
It's interesting too that you bring up Bill Clinton because when he was having what they called his bimbo eruptions, they pulled straight from the Kennedy playbook 101.
Their defense was called nuts and sluts.
That's what happens if you're a woman who comes forward against the Kennedys, the Clintons, up until Harvey Weinstein.
You were a nut or a slut.
And it still is pervasive in the culture.
And it's to circle back to that Times review.
That's really the problem they have with this book.
It's telling the truth about these men that they idolized and continue to do.
I mean, we're still getting Kennedys shoved in our face, you know, whether it's RFK Jr. running for president or JFK's grandson, you know, now ostensibly covering politics for Vogue.
They just, they're still in like our water supply.
They're still in the air that we breathe.
It's a very toxic relationship.
And I think it's what we need to rid ourselves of.
That was one of the things in the review where they said, well, this is just ancient history, which is always what the left says when they get caught.
You know, it's over now.
It's over now.
But RFK is one of them and he's kind of playing the same kind of games, isn't he?
Well, it's the same thing.
You know, his treatment of women has and is, has been and is, from what I've heard from people who have read the book and come and spoken to me, terrible.
Toxic Relationships Exposed00:02:11
Mary Richardson was his second wife.
She is in the book.
Bobby Kennedy Jr. treated her mercilessly as their marriage unraveled.
He went with her to their therapist who spoke to me for the book and said, I want you to declare my wife mentally ill because she was upset.
She found his sex diaries.
She was upset that he was cheating on her all the time with women who she knew.
And the therapist said, Bobby, I'm not going to do that.
Your wife is angry and she's sad, but she's not mentally ill.
Wow.
And Bobby would get her revenge, his revenge on her, even after she killed herself, by secretly digging up her coffin in the middle of the night and moving it out of the Kennedy family plot to the side of a hill where she was buried alone.
Wow.
Wow.
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In doing the research for this book, you actually went and talked to some of these people.
And you mentioned, I believe, that you talked to this 19-year-old girl who was raped, right?
You said you said that she didn't.
Mimi, I didn't speak with Mimi.
Talking to Kennedy Family Members00:13:02
Mimi wrote a memoir.
Ah, okay.
Came out about 10 years ago, which was also conveniently ignored by the mass media until the New York Post picked it up.
I'll never forget because I was working there at the time and we put it on the front page and it like exploded in the culture because this was a story that was true.
And even I'm not sure, Andrew, if you know the historian Robert Dalek, who wrote a great JFK biography called An Unfinished Life.
And he was the one who uncovered how sick JFK really was physically throughout his life and how much he had lied to the American public about that.
And Dalek said that Mimi's story was important and had to be part of JFK's legacy and that there's no putting the horse back in the barn.
Yeah.
I mean, it is an amazing thing in this Me Too era where this is where now supposed to be, which is simply a reaction to Trump, is simply a reaction to that Trump tape because they thought they could turn this into a great, you know, they could use it against him.
But it's amazing to me that nobody goes back and says, we have to actually rewrite the history of the 20th century because this was an incredibly abusive group of people.
I mean, this was an incredibly, you know, Teddy Kennedy, I'm sorry, but that is murder.
JFK was a rapist.
And as you point out in the book, Jackie probably had STDs that caused her to have the kind of continual miscarriages she had.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, the Kennedys, it wasn't only vulnerable women that they would target and exploit.
They also got great pleasure out of targeting extremely famous, powerful women.
Yes.
Yes.
And grinding them down into nothing.
And Marilyn Monroe is exhibit A.
Well, let's talk about this because most guys, I think, would cut off their left hand to get their right hand on Marilyn Monroe.
I mean, it's kind of hard, hard to blame anybody for going after.
But talk about that.
I mean, what happened in that relationship?
So Marilyn was simultaneously involved with JFK and with his brother, Bobby Kennedy, who was then the Attorney General of the United States.
Jack was president.
And talk about complicated women.
You know, Marilyn was the most famous movie star, sex symbol, sort of this post-World War II, the epitome of like American supremacy, right?
And these two get involved with her and they grind her down to nothing.
All her life, what she wanted more than anything was to be considered smart and was to find a romantic love that would heal her.
And she mistakenly thought that in the Kennedys, she had found that that one of these men would provide that.
And it all comes to a head at that famous 62 performance she gives at Madison Square Garden, cooing happy birthday, Mr. President.
And, you know, Jackie, for the second time, tells Jack she's leaving.
She's going to divorce him.
And he'll never get a second term.
So he cuts it off immediately.
Bobby comes in to do cleanup.
Marilyn unravels.
The day of her death, Bobby is caught on a hot wire.
She's being secretly wiretapped by the CIA and the FBI, demanding to know where is it?
Where is it?
Where is it?
She's dead hours later.
And many pieces of evidence went missing in the aftermath of Marilyn's quote unquote suicide.
And I sort of explore a lot of that in more detail in the book.
I mean, you're suggesting that there was something that was not suicidal about this.
Well, you know, it was Joe DiMaggio, Marilyn's own ex-husband, who said that, and I quote, I always knew who killed the Kennedy.
Sorry, Brady, and so I always knew who killed Marilyn, but I never wanted to start a revolution in this country.
Wow.
Wow.
That's insane.
And what about Judith Exner?
She was the one who was having an affair with Sinatra and a mob boss, right?
And the Kennedys.
And some people have tried to connect that to his assassination.
How do you feel about that?
There's always been a lot of speculation that it was like a mob hit, that, you know, they had pissed off the mob, Bobby going after them after all the mafia had done to elect JFK, which they did a lot.
I was talking to somebody the other day who mentioned that.
I don't know if you saw the Irishman, Martin Scorsese, but that comes up in The Irishman.
They talk about JFK's assassination and the links to the mob.
And I think there's a reason that that has always stuck.
And it's something that the book just very clearly gets at.
This is a deeply corrupt family.
They move with deeply corrupt people.
Bad things happen when you do that.
Yeah.
How did you get started on this?
What made you think that you wanted to take this story up?
I mean, again, you tell these stories in depth and putting them all together, it really does have a powerful effect seen one after another, after another.
It's obviously some kind of, I don't want to call it a mental illness, but it's some kind of passed on attitude toward women in this family.
What caused you to take that story up?
Well, you know, as I said, the germ was the Ted Kennedy media coverage.
And then I had been musing about this for years and years.
I knew I was going to do a Kennedy book, a counter narrative.
But then when Harvey Weinstein was convicted in a New York criminal court of rape by a jury pool that was populated by more men than women, having heard testimony from women alleging these rapes, who had also said, well, yes, I stayed in touch with him after the fact, or I took him to lunch with my mom.
We emailed.
Suddenly, the understanding in the culture became way more nuanced.
And I thought, oh, this book is not about the men.
This book is about the women.
Like, I have to tell the women's stories.
And, you know, when I got started, I mean, there were more women than I could even put in the book.
You know, I chose what I thought were the most salient, the most misunderstood women, whether that's Jackie, who, you know, upon making her second marriage was called a whore by the international media, who had sold herself to the highest bidder, or whether that's a meanie.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I think it was, it was the sort of twin poles of those bad men, Ted Kennedy, Harvey Weinstein.
When I look at the Kennedys now, they seem sort of, you know, they've lost that central kind of place they have in our society.
Do you think when you're being attacked, which you obviously are?
I mean, I don't know if there were other reviews like the one in the New York Times.
It was, it was, it was, it was an appalling review.
I mean, I that one stands alone.
Yeah.
I will say.
But I think to your point, Andrew, like they do and they don't.
So for example, my former publisher wouldn't touch this book.
Why?
They were making a deal with Maria Shriver.
Didn't want to upset her.
There are major news outlets I have been told point blank, will not touch this book, will not talk about it, promote it, book club it, whatever, because it's bad for the Kennedys, makes them look bad.
They don't want to upset Kennedys.
It's this weird, sometimes it's not even that they have personal relationships or employ Kennedys.
It's just that, and I heard this, they don't want to destroy the Camelot myth.
They love it too much.
I mean, it's sick.
I mean, are we adults or are we not?
Well, I mean, a guy I knew when I was working in Hollywood, Joel Cernow, he made a mini-series about the Kennedys, and it was kicked off the history channel and relegated to some channel nobody ever saw.
And it was, it was pretty kind.
I mean, it was not as bad as it could have been.
It was pretty mild mannered, but it did bring up certain things like Joe Kennedy having his daughter lobotomized.
It brought things like that up.
And they just couldn't.
Yeah, they just couldn't stand it.
You know, they can't stand it.
By the way, so in the book, I write the real reason Joe had Rosemary lobotomized, which has gone criminally underreported.
It's not because they were just overcorrecting for what they saw as her mental deficits.
Joe was sexually abusing his daughter.
And she was about, she was losing control of her emotions, understandably, and was on the verge of outing this terrible family secret.
And he had to shut her up.
And I think when you read what Rosemary was done to her and what her life was like, I personally think murder would have been the kinder alternative.
So all of this stuff, I mean, do you find, as you're researching this, do you find anyone anywhere who says, we made a mistake?
You know, we've seen books like The Dark Side of Camelot.
There are books that sort of deal with this, but still these guys are elevated, right?
I mean, you know, the only thing that's keeping RFK Jr. from being elevated is he's just too out there for them to sort of wrangle with.
But still, Kennedys are easily elevated into the position of being candidates.
They are easily brought to, they have these jobs like the editors of magazines and as you said, right, writers for very top magazines.
Do you find any pockets of the media where people are saying, no, this was a mistake?
Are we kind of alone in feeling this way?
I don't know.
And so I'm having this dual experience, which is one, like getting a very clear, unequivocal sense of how much corporate media remains in the pocket of the Kennedys.
And on the other hand, I'm getting this incredible feedback from readers.
I have no idea what their political persuasions are.
They don't tell me.
And I'm glad because as I say in the beginning of this book, it is an apolitical book.
I am taking a look at this family and what they have done to women.
And they are responding very, very deeply, very strongly.
They're having this weird experience, as you put it, of both enjoying the book and being moved to tears by some of these women and their strength and their fortitude and their ability to push through some of them.
So it's, I would like to think that this book, in whatever way it can, begins to change the conversation and begins to change this hero worship that still exists in our politics.
When you watch corporate media coverage of Kamala Harris, I feel like I'm watching fans at a Taylor Swift concert, the way they talk about her.
They're not doing their jobs.
No.
They're propping her up.
Right.
Right.
Well, they've reconceived their jobs.
I think let's put it that's the kind way to put it.
Maureen Callahan, the book is Ask Not the Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed.
As I say, it is a hell of a read.
It is just unput-downable.
And I'll be really, I'll be watching to see how you're treated here.
You're on the times list, right?
They did put you on the times list.
Yes, they had to.
So that's small victories, you know, Andrew.
No, I appreciated that.
But still, I'll be watching to see how you're treated because I think that you are actually touching on something that they do not want to let go of, because it means, it does mean the entire history of the second half of the 20th century in American politics has to be rewritten.
Well, I think that you're right.
And I think that's also just an enormous compliment to what the book is hoping to do.
And I can't thank you enough for having me on.
No, it's been a pleasure talking to you.
I appreciate it.
And I hope to talk to you next time you have a book.
Likewise.
Thanks.
All right, folks.
That's what we do here.
We rewrite history, change everything.
And that's why you'll not only want to listen to our interviews, but also come on Friday to the Andrew Clavin Show.