“America’s Prince” was a complete zilch.
“John Kennedy, as he preferred to be called,” was “a middle-aged man with no real accomplishments.” He “wasn’t that complex or interesting.” Neither was he “bright or curious.”
Carolyn Bessette married him anyway. Thirty-four months later, she was dead.
Warned not to fly that hazy evening in 1999, her husband refused “to adhere to fundamental safety measures, such as filing a flight plan and remaining in contact with air traffic control.” The greenhorn aviator “waved off a willing flight instructor who offered to co-pilot,” and at one point, almost “crashed into a commercial airliner.” His arrogance and entitlement killed him, his wife, and one of her sisters.
In Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed (Little, Brown and Company; 400 pages; $32.50), Maureen Callahan profiles Bessette and 12 other women “whose lives were upended by Kennedy men, but whose collective history has never been captured in total.” The author claims that her book “is not ideological or partisan,” and the assertion is mostly true. Feminist shibboleths flare up, sporadically, but elections and legislation go unmentioned. Smart move. The stories speak for themselves.
The evil, it appears, started with Joe and Rose. Their second son was a horribly sicky child. (And adult, for that matter — his constant VD probably played a role in his wife’s multiple miscarriages.) But compassion wasn’t a virtue his parents embraced:
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