“Mary Jo, even in death, was immaculate. She was found in her dark blue pants and long-sleeved wide shirt, her jewellery – a ring and two gold bracelets – intact. She was not wearing any underwear.” This passage, like many in Maureen Callahan’s exposé of Kennedy men, is pure pulp. It’s drawn to the sick beauty of an image. It replicates the predator’s cold, prurient gaze. It’s instinctively amoral.
Pulp is fun but if your aim, as Callahan professes, is “to do right by the women and girls”, then there are better approaches. It’s tricky to criticise a book like this on the level of style without inadvertently siding with power, so let me be clear: it is undeniable that generations of Kennedy men have got away with violence against women with total impunity, and a biography that grapples with this as part of their legacy is long overdue. Such a project requires moral precision and a clear-sighted survey of the facts. Here are a few of them: JFK recruited teenage interns to have sex with and pass around to his friends. He is still remembered as one of the best presidents in American history. Ted Kennedy drunkenly crashed his car off a bridge, leaving his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, to a slow death when he could have easily saved her or gone to fetch help. He served in the US Senate until his death four decades after. Joseph Kennedy II veered into traffic, leaving a local girl, Pam Kelley, paraplegic for life. He paid a $100 fine and went on to pursue a career in politics.
A narrative emerges naturally and it’s a depressingly familiar one. Callahan weakens the impact by mixing in her own speculations, tired conspiracy theories and a fair amount of gratuitous moralising. The question of whether or not the Kennedy men were always faithful to their wives might make for juicy gossip but it’s ultimately banal. What matters is not that they are all jerks like their fathers before them, but that they are the product of a diseased power structure. Callahan misses this point, focusing on the Kennedys as a “cancer in the American body politic” and on the importance of “excising” it. If only the solution were that simple.
