Review of Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed by Maureen Callahan

*Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed* by Maureen Callahan (2024). Published by Little, Brown and Company

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m coming across in the world.

This blog post is interesting to me because lately, I’ve been struggling to get in my reading time. I was working for the longest time as a freelancer and contractor, but recently pivoted to an 8-5 job where I’m in an office. It’s not hybrid, so I’m always at home trying to put the puzzle pieces together of how I’ll get my reading done. I also continue working on this blog when I’m not at work, so the Instagram reels I’m fed about a 5-9 feel too real right now.

Anyways, I am trying to find that time to read here and there. Somehow I’m still on track for my Goodreads goal, even though I’ve been slowly giving up on the notion of reading goals in life. I think they can be a little too much pressure and takes the fun off of reading at the end of the day, and I want to read because I want to stay in touch with literature while also pursuing my side career as a writer.

Today’s book was an audiobook I specifically listened to while I was driving to and from work. Audiobooks can be something I often turn to in these times—and yes, I do consider them to be reading. I remember most of what I listen to in an audiobook, even when I’m doing laundry or cooking, and I’m able to break down the language as needed.

I’ve had this book on my radar for a bit, so when I saw it was on my list and available for checkout immediately, I said might as well and went for it. I ended up finishing it over the course of two weeks, which is about average for my turnaround time when it comes to audiobooks.

Let’s get into the review! I don’t want to ramble too much in the intro.

A deep dive into the women of the Kennedy family and how the men in their lives failed them.

This book clocks in at 400 pages, and if you knew nothing about the Kennedy family beyond the basics, then you’re in for a wild ride. I would call myself fairly comfortable with the Kennedy family lore from my childhood adventures on Wikipedia—I was a kid who was real weird, it was the beginning of the Internet being more widespread in homes, and I really liked going on Wikipedia and reading history.

The focus of the book is specifically on the women of the Kennedy family. I think the premise of the book is really interesting in that sense, with each chapter/section focusing on a different woman in the Kennedy family, and how they were specifically fitting within a very masculine system that didn’t favor women.

What happened to some of these women are horrible. The Kennedy family curse sucked in some outsiders who married into it, that’s for sure, but I think Callahan also does a decent job in showing how some of these women were pulled in specifically by the Kennedy family name and allure. They wanted something from the name, which is how they got into this situation in the first place.

Some of the stories, like what happened to Mary Jo Kopechne and how Ted Kennedy literally abandoned her in a sinking car and didn’t get any help, I knew beforehand. I didn’t find that this book presented them in a way that was new or shocking, although a common thread throughout the book that had me scratching my head was the dialogue that was incorporated between individuals.

I did my master’s thesis with a comparative literature and history discipline, and anyone who knows and studied how to be a historian is to always be careful with dialogue like this, especially if you’re presenting your book as fact and trying to make a nuanced argument like Callahan is. I don’t doubt some of the validity of her research, but I do think some of the sources she’s pulling from aren’t primary sources or firsthand accounts.

That makes the foundations of the dialogue a little shaky, or even the moments where she’s recreating entire scenes potentially from scratch like they happened this way. I was also wondering about some of the fact checking, as I caught some of the dates/information in it being wrong, even while listening to it, and I thought that I was going crazy for a minute while I was on a highway going to work.

Overall Thoughts

I think we touched on this already a bit with my thoughts, but I think this is a strong premise but didn’t quite do the delivery well. I began to doubt the validity of these scenes she was recreating in the book and wondered how much creative liberty the author was taking. I read quite a bit of nonfiction, which lends itself to the opinion I started forming there.

I do think setting up a profile and introducing each of these women involved with the Kennedys was quite powerful. I didn’t really find myself learning anything new here because of the fact I’d already gone down the rabbit hole many years ago, but it did renew how I wanted to approach women’s history.

When we talk about the Kennedys and their legacy it’s always about the men, but the women were heavily involved. Even Jackie was heavily criticized for remarrying after JFK’s death, but I wonder how much of that was fed into the perspective that she was someone who “couldn’t do better” than a Kennedy like JFK. But she was quite a traumatized person after what happened—we have to have space and sympathy for her.

I don’t know if I recommend reading this without a critical eye. Picking it up if you want to learn a bit more, but maybe factcheck certain details if you find yourself thinking something might not be right.

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