After the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Jackie wanted to say goodbye to the 35th President of the United States in private. At the hospital, the first lady kissed his lips, chest, penis...
The same virile member that had caused her so much suffering due to infidelities, finally, "she was the last to possess it." Maureen Callahan confirms this in Don't Ask. The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed (La Esfera de los Libros), where she reveals the darkest shadows of the Kennedy men who silenced their wives and lovers.
While still a congressman, Jackie caught her husband red-handed as a young woman performed fellatio under the table in his Senate office. She had to endure it. The presidential campaign was at stake. The worst was yet to come.
In the spring of 1962, while JFK was showing the private rooms of the White House to Mimi Beardsley (82), an intern in the president's press office, he pushed her onto Jackie's bed to... violate her? Mimi lost her virginity and never knew how to describe that time when she ended up in the first lady's bathroom washing off the semen and blood.
As an intern, Mimi could not refuse her boss anything. If he asked her to stay overnight while Jackie was away, she did. If she had to massage him, she remained silent and complied. And if at any time Jack seemed distant, she would start to overthink. She believed she was cold, immature, and so inept that the president no longer wanted to have sexual relations with her.
This was the power of the Kennedys. With their actions, they emitted a kind of gaslighting that subdued and annihilated the will of women. Judith Campbell -former lover of Sinatra and the mobster Sam Giancana-, Pamela Turnure -Jackie's press secretary- or Diana de Vegh, another 20-year-old virgin student who fell into Jack's arms while he campaigned as a senator, knew a lot about it.
The politician and the young woman made love in different cities, establishing a toxic romance in which Jack exuded the idea of "if you go to bed with me, I'll make you special," she fell in love, and then he would reject her. "For him, humiliation and sex went hand in hand," Callahan recounts.
Many of them belonged to the presidential harem, always ready upon request and often participating in the famous pool parties at the White House.
The most notable mistress who never bathed there was Marilyn Monroe, turned into the submissive of the dominant chief of the nation. No matter how many promises he made her, such as divorcing Jackie to make her the first lady during his second term, the star was just an object.
The height of it all was when Marilyn sang "happy birthday" to the president at Madison Square Garden. Jackie did not attend. She could not bear the shame. In the Monroe-Kennedy social circle, everyone knew that the diva also slipped between the sheets of Bobby, while his wife Ethel turned a blind eye and became a baby-making machine.
As reflected by the book's author, Jeanne Martin, wife of actor Dean Martin, a member of the Rat Pack whose parties the president frequented, used to say that "the two brothers were very childish, boring, and too aggressive with women."
Jackie also endured her husband's absence when their daughter Arabella was stillborn in August 1956 or his indifference to the death of their last son, Patrick, three days after being born in August 1963.
The first lady was always aware of the infidelities, even made a gesture of seeking a divorce. However, she followed the rules afterward when the patriarch Joe Kennedy gave her a million dollars to endure and not divorce.
Many did not like the adjective "submissive" to describe Jackie, but the same happened after her marriage to Onassis when she received three million dollars for 'enduring' everything. "No courtesan has ever sold herself for so much," claimed a famous American columnist.
The physical and psychological abuse, the contempt for women, and gender superiority came from Joseph P. Kennedy, the patriarch of the clan who in 1935 had a fortune of 180 million dollars (over 4.1 billion euros today) to start producing presidents.
According to Callahan, the millionaire treated women as "accessories, breeding mares, and furniture." He had impunity to denigrate his wife Rose, focused on giving birth while her husband brought his mistresses home for dinner. The matriarch had been taught that a woman's best job was motherhood.
Maureen Callahan states that Rose was aware of her husband's "violent and predatory side" but chose to ignore it. What she did not know was that Joe was also a rapist, as one of his lovers, silent film queen Gloria Swanson, recounted in the late twenties.
After the assassinations of JFK and Bobby in 1963 and 1968, respectively, only Edward remained, the last bastion of the Kennedy's core and senator for Massachusetts. In the summer of 1969, he let young Mary Jo Kopechne drown in Chappaquiddick (Massachusetts), he got away with it, but the scandal cost him the presidency.
The machinery would soon start working. The Kennedys managed to have the press discredit the young woman with headlines like "The blonde who drowned," "The girl in Ted Kennedy's car," or "The victim attracted to politics." A display of misogyny that intensified when it was leaked that she was not wearing underwear, so "in the Kennedy version, Mary Jo died as a tempting and seductive prostitute, a groupie," Callahan writes.
For Edward, even his wife Joan was not a problem. Despite his cocaine addiction and compulsive drinking, he always described his wife as a burden. It did not matter if one of his teenage mistresses had two abortions or another was almost raped. The politician managed to make Joan believe that everything was in her mind, which eventually led her to alcoholism.
The family's inner circle blamed her for all the problems. Furthermore, her fashion sense, ahead of her time, did not help; Cosmopolitanpublished that she had an "adorable bottom" and a "welcoming chest."
The third Kennedy generation shone with John John. He loved to examine his testicles every time he came out naked from the gym shower. He could afford it. He had a heart-stopping body.
In fact, People magazine named him the sexiest man alive in 1988, while socially he was America's prince until his death in the summer of 1999 while piloting his plane.
As the son of John F. Kennedy, the most celebrated U.S. president in history, and Jackie Bouvier, the emblem of White House style, he had a free pass.
This became clear when, accompanied by his future wife, Carolyn Bessette, a police officer stopped his car, which reeked of marijuana, on the Massachusetts highway: "There's an unwritten rule in Massachusetts," John said, "that members of my family can commit murder and wreak havoc and nobody cares." This brought to mind his uncle Ted's accident in Chappaquiddick.
The gossip magazines of the time portrayed John John as a mama's boy, spoiled, pampered, and humble because every time he ran or cycled shirtless through Central Park, he was friendly with people.
But in his private life, he was irascible, fickle, arrogant, inconsiderate, and too lazy to clean the bathroom or put his dirty clothes in the hamper. This was attested to by his wife, Caroline Bessette, a social climber and Calvin Klein publicist, whom he married secretly in September 1996.
The night before the wedding, Ann, the bride's mother, made a peculiar toast: "I don't know if this marriage is good for my daughter. I don't know if John is right for her." Something had caught the attention of this mother, who had also lost her other daughter, Lauren, in the plane crash.
What John John liked most was putting his numerous girlfriends in danger while they were playing sports. In fact, he flirted with death on several occasions. He nearly killed Christina Haag on several occasions, such as when they were left adrift while kayaking even though she had a broken leg, or when they sailed through Martha's Vineyard—Jackie's summer paradise—over a Navy testing ground.
If they didn't want to accompany him, JFK's son would threaten to break up with them or, as he did with Carolyn, say, "This will only work if you do the things I want." His close circle, as Maureen Callahan recounts, knew that John Jr. was emotionally and even physically abusive to some of his partners.
John and Carolyn used cocaine and had monumental fights. There were times when she tried to break up with him or even divorce him. The tension was at its peak. She had grown tired of playing the role of the submissive and conformist wife to please John so that he could succeed as editor of George magazine and thus embark on his political career.
Months before the wedding, Carolyn's friends said she had become more isolated, introverted, and paranoid. She locked herself in her Tribeca loft and didn't go out for fear of the paparazzi. One of those friends even went so far as to say that "she was sold a pig in a poke, and what she signed up for was not what she got." He was referring to the wedding.
In the end, Carolyn fell into John's trap. He, who always appeared in the press as an accomplished athlete when in reality he was more than mediocre, and who boasted of being a good pilot with the relevant flight hours, ended up forcing his wife to get on the plane.
No one could say no to him. At the last minute, Lauren Bessette joined them. They were all going to Rory Kennedy's wedding in Martha's Vineyard. They never arrived. The plane crashed into the Atlantic on July 16, 1999. It took divers five days to find the bodies.