A Horror Story Starring the Monstrous Men of Camelot

ASK NOT: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed, by Maureen Callahan

In the opening sentence of her rage-swollen “Ask Not,” Maureen Callahan declares that her book “is not ideological or partisan.” It is, of course, both. Sometimes it is both in extremis. You need only cast an eye over its cover, which, like the book itself, is black and white and red all over. Bad men wronging good women: cheating on them, abandoning them, infecting them, turning them into alcoholics, leaving them for dead, raping and maiming and killing them.

That the men in this case are (mostly) Kennedys is meant to shock us, but the only shock by now is shock’s absence. Decades of reportage have left us with a grim roll call. Mary Jo Kopechne, slowly suffocating beneath three feet of Chappaquiddick black water. Pamela Kelley, thrown from a Jeep and paralyzed for life while the driver, a Kennedy, walked away with a $100 fine.

Not to mention the family’s own women: Joan Kennedy, cycling in and out of D.U.I. arrests and rehab; Mary Richardson Kennedy, the second wife of a current presidential candidate, hanging herself; Rosemary, the loveliest of the Kennedy daughters, muted and infantilized by a family-authorized lobotomy.

What does Callahan hope to add to this vale of tears? Only her residual and, yes, partisan and ideological suspicion that despite ample testimony (in many cases from the victims themselves), the Kennedy men have somehow gotten away with it all.

So unfurls her multigenerational perp walk, which begins, as it must, with Big Joe, the “financially and sexually rapacious man” who built a family fortune and a family to go with it. His Catholic wife doesn’t countenance non-procreative sex, so, without apology, he takes up with a sequence of mistresses, one of whom, the silent-film star Gloria Swanson, in her memoir described the least consensual of encounters.