Interview with Maureen Callahan
Maureen Callahan
author of "Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed"
Michael Carter
Co-Host
Maureen Callahan, author of "Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed"
Maureen Callahan's Website
Maureen Callahan is a New York Times bestselling author, award-winning investigative journalist, columnist, and commentator. She has covered everything from pop culture to politics. Her writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, New York, Spin, and the New York Post, where she is Critic-at-Large. She lives in New York. Visit her at maureencallahan.net.
“The must-read book of the summer” (Megyn Kelly) from New York Times bestseller Maureen Callahan: a “harrowing, incendiary” exposé of the real Kennedy Curse—the family’s generations-long legacy of misogyny, murder, and mayhem (Karen Abbott). The Kennedy name has long been synonymous with wealth, power, glamor, and—above all else—integrity. But this carefully constructed veneer hides a dark truth: the pattern of Kennedy men physically and psychologically abusing women and girls, leaving a trail of ruin and death in each generation’s wake.
Through decades of scandal after scandal—from sexual assaults to reputational slander, suicides to manslaughter—the family and their defenders have kept the Kennedy brand intact. Now, in Ask Not, bestselling author and journalist Maureen Callahan reveals the Kennedys’ hidden history of violence and exploitation, laying bare their unrepentant sexism and rampant depravity while also restoring these women and girls to their rightful place at the center of the dynasty’s story: from Jacqueline Onassis and Marilyn Monroe to Carolyn Bessette, Martha Moxley, Mary Jo Kopechne, Rosemary Kennedy, and many others whose names aren’t nearly as well known but should be. Drawing on years of explosive reportage and written in electric prose, Ask Not is a long-overdue reckoning with this fabled family and a consequential part of American history that is still very much with us. At long last, Callahan redirects the spotlight to the women in the Kennedys’ orbit, paying homage to those who freed themselves and giving voice to those who, through no fault of their own, could not.