Many years ago, at the end of 1997 to be exact, I wrote a two part essay for Probe Magazine entitled “The Posthumous Assassination of John F. Kennedy.” This was done in reaction to the publication of Sy Hersh’s horrendous book on Kennedy, entitled the Dark Side of Camelot. That book was so bad, so intellectually problematic that it was almost universally panned; even in the MSM. The most notable instance was by Garry Wills in the New York Review of Books. And Wills was no fan of JFK.
In that essay, I went through a collection of books that had arisen in what I called the anti-Kennedy category; thus tracing the origins of Hersh’s debacle. This included works by authors like, among others, John Davis, Thomas Reeves, and the writing duo of Peter Collier and David Horowitz. I stated that by the time of the Reeves book, A Question of Character, in 1991, the field had become voluminous enough that an author could just rely on the accumulated secondary sources to do a compendium styled book. Which is what Reeves did. Even to the point of including the utterly fatuous Kitty Kelley article in People magazine in 1988. In that piece, bylined by Kelley, Judith Exner said that she had been a messenger between the White House and Chicago Don Sam Giancana in the plots to kill Castro. For Hersh she said that Bobby Kennedy was cognizant of this and commented on it to her. (Hersh, pp. 307-08). Somehow Hersh missed the fact that on a 1992 program with Larry King, the fraudulent Exner said she never even talked to Bobby Kennedy, at the most she ran into him at a rally in LA. In other words, Exner uttered so many fabrications she could not keep track of them. This is just an inkling of the quicksand one can fall into by implicitly trusting the rabid anti-Kennedy literature.
II
Maureen Callahan had no inkling and no trepidations about what had happened to Hersh. After all, as she later reveals, her mother urged her on. Also perhaps because she worked for Rupert Murdoch at the New York Post for two decades. In fact, Callahan just leaped into the morass—headfirst. She has now pretty much done what Reeves did. And, unembarrassed, she includes both Reeves and Hersh in her bibliography. But, her volume more accurately resembles the Collier/Horowitz book, The Kennedys: An American Drama. Why? Because that book did not just focus on John Kennedy. It covered, in large part, the entire Kennedy clan. As I pointed out in my essay, Collier and Horowitz were migrating from the left—they had both worked at Ramparts in upper level positions—to the right. And their Kennedy book was so bad—in every way—that it seemed to provide their golden key to the conservative kingdom. And from all appearances, it did. In other words, theirs was really a political book. Which is why the two former journalists and scholars decided to use Kelley as a source. As we shall see, one can conclude the same for Callahan, who also uses Kelley.
The title of Callahan’s book is Ask Not. And on the cover there is a set of three eye shots, easily discernible as Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy and Carolyn Bessette. I think this is supposed to do two things. First to suggest a “deer in the headlights” pose and second, of course, to mock Kennedy’s famous inaugural address. Since Bessette never knew JFK, and as we shall see, there is very little evidence for any kind of an affair between Monroe and JFK, that heavily suggestive cover and title is pretty much bombast. Let us take the three cases up in order.
I would have thought that any serious author today would have known better than to jump into the Monroe mess using writers like Tony Summers and Donald Wolfe. Yet Callahan sources them, uses them and does not issue the unsuspecting reader any qualifications. Today that alone should put her book on the reject list. Why? Because both men not just trusted the proven liar Robert Slatzer but, according to Monroe scholar Don McGovern, both referenced Slatzer literally scores of times in their books. (McGovern, Murder Orthodoxies, p. 76) Why is that important in understanding Callahan?
Because in order to sell a book Slatzer made up a story about being married to Monroe in Mexico. That story is so full of holes that it is hard to keep a straight face while reciting it. But McGovern spends 18 pages taking it apart piece by piece. (McGovern, pp. 48-66). Other writers, like April VeVea, have also shown that Monroe could not have been in Mexico at that time since it is proven through photographic and handwriting evidence that she was in Los Angeles. (McGovern, p. 48, p. 100) This fake marriage is just one of several inventions by Slatzer. Which includes bribing someone to lie for him about his manufactured wedding, namely boxer/actor Noble Kid Chissell. Slatzer then welshed on the bribe. Summers used Chissell to validate Slatzer. (McGovern, pp. 98-99)
In addition, those books also utilized other dubious witnesses like the late wiretapper Bernie Spindel, detective Fred Otash, policeman Gary Wean, and trick golfer Jeanne Carmen. Like Spindel, Callahan says that Monroe’s house was bugged. (Callahan, p. 209; all references to E book version) This issue has been negated twice. The first time was by the 1982 Los Angeles DA Ron Carroll inquiry. (McGovern, p.445) The second source was author Gary Vitacco Robles who got access to the records from the phone company and devoted a whole chapter to this mythology, concluding there was no evidence of such tapping. (Icon, Chapter 24)
Callahan uses the oft repeated cliché that Monroe’s phone records were somehow concealed. (Callahan, p. 208, p. 319, p. 353) Again, Vitacco Robles shows this was not true. The original LAPD inquiry had the Monroe records. And the Carroll inquiry in 1982 went even further by trying to find every phone Monroe could have possibly used in the last months of her life. (Icon, Chapter 24) All her calls to Bobby Kennedy went through the main switchboard at the Justice Department and were brief. As Gary points out, she was very likely seeking help for her termination by the studio at that time over her last film, Something’s Got to Give. RFK knew the chairman of the Board of Directors at Fox. There are documents and credible testimony from Monroe’s publicist, Rupert Allan, that indicate this point. (Icon, Pt 2 pp. 535-36)
As one would suspect by now, Callahan also uses two other pernicious myths in her writing on Monroe and the Kennedys. The first is the idea of some kind of diary that went missing after her death.(Callahan, p. 320) Like the discredited wiretapping, this has also been exposed as a Robert Slatzer hoax. (McGovern, p. 558) Monroe did have an address book that was on a table next to her bed when she died. But it was Slatzer who invented the diary myth for his first book, The Life and Curious Death of Marilyn Monroe. There he has Monroe reading to him from it. Slatzer actually wrote that RFK was running the Bay of Pigs operation for his brother. Anyone can investigate—through authors like Peter Kornbluh-- and find out that Bobby Kennedy had nothing to do with the execution of that operation. It was a CIA project from first to last, and the two men running it were Director of Plans Dick Bissell and Deputy Director Charles Cabell. As Don McGovern notes, and was proven later, what Monroe kept was not a diary but more like a set of notebooks that was found years after her death. It was published as a book called Fragments. And it does not at all resemble what Slatzer and others, like Lionel Grandison, describe. (Grandison is too ridiculous to even note, but for the curious reader see McGovern, p. 359, p. 560)
As Don McGovern notes, President Kennedy and Monroe met, at the most four times.(McGovern, Murder Orthodoxies, pp 176-183) In only one instance is there any evidence of a dalliance, and Gary VItacco Robles has even brought that into question. Need I add that Callahan writes that Monroe had an abortion about a month before she died. (p. 319) Unbelievably, she even suggests it was Bobby Kennedy’s child. (Which, as we shall see, is impossible.) This is more mythology. Monroe pathologist Thomas Noguchi found no evidence of any recent abortion. And her gynecologist Leon Krohn said she never had one. (McGovern, pp. 523-24)
One of the tawdriest aspects of this tawdry book is its use of Jeanne Carmen. And the use of her pretty much gives Callahan’s Machiavellian game away. Today, no rational, objective commentator can believe the deceased Carmen. She has been taken apart piece by piece by so many writers—April VeVea, Don McGovern, Gary VItacco Robles—that anyone who uses her today renders themselves the gravity of a SNL sketch. But this is how hellbent Callahan is to involve both Robert Kennedy and Peter Lawford in the death of Monroe, or to at least for them to be at her home on the day she died, manhandling her. (Callahan, pp. 209)
Which is all provably false. Bobby Kennedy, a few members of his family, and several other people were all about 350 miles north, in the San Francisco area on the day Monroe died. This is proven by a series of pictures. The ten photographs cover the entire day. (Susan Bernard, Marilyn: Intimate Exposures, pp. 184-88). Those pictures, plus the matching testimony, are the kinds of evidence one can submit in court. Thus exposing Carmen as a liar. And blowing up Callahan’s credibility in the process.
As per Lawford: again, the evidence is probative that he was not at Monroe’s home the day she died. He was trying to get her out of her house and to a dinner party at his Santa Monica home. The guests were talent manager George Durgom, and TV producer Joe Naar and his wife Dolores. She declined. (Vitacco Robles, Icon, Pt. 1, p. 394) But Lawford was worried because of her speech pattern, plus he was aware of her serious drug problem. Lawford called back but could not get through. He phoned his agent Milton Ebbins and told him to call Monroe’s lawyer Milton Rudin. This got through to Eunice Murray, Marilyn’s housekeeper who—not knowing about her slurred speech to Lawford—said Monroe was alright. (Ibid p. 398, p. 403) Lawford still wanted to go over and get her. But Ebbins told him not to, since Murray would say the same thing. Ebbins later revealed he had a secret agenda: he knew about Monroe’s drug problem and how bad it would look if the president’s brother in law, his client, was at her home when the paramedics arrived. Ebbins told Tony Summers that Lawford never mentioned Bobby Kennedy that evening or even after he told him she was dead. (ibid, p. 413)
Randy Taraborrelli, a biographer of Marilyn Monroe, has written that the evidence indicates that the relationship between RFK and Monroe was platonic. In his work he found only three instances where they even met in person. And each time was in public. (McGovern, p. 237). Predictably, Callahan uses a very dubious witness, the late Jeanne Martin—Dean Martin’s former wife-- to dispute this. Without saying what a wild outlier she is. None of the witnesses at the Lawford dinner parties corroborate her and its not even proven she was there when RFK was. And at one of those dinners, Bobby brought his wife. (McGovern, p. 181)
Finally, as both San Francisco pathologist Boyd Stephens and the late Pittsburgh forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht agree, Marilyn Monroe was not murdered. The drugs she took were ingested, not injected. (Vitacco Robles, Icon Pt.2, pp 351-61; McGovern, pp. 494-95). Again, this blows Callahan’s ersatz witness Jeanne Carmen off the stand and into the Pacific Ocean. Which is where she belongs. (Carmen once said that Johnny Roselli killed Sam Giancana over Marilyn; 13 years later while Johnny was in retirement in Florida?)
I could go on since I have rarely seen so much junk on Monroe piled into a relatively compact space. But I think the above is enough to show that, as far as the portentous shot of Marilyn’s eyes on the cover, Callahan has zero to back it up. In fact I would call it less than zero, since what she fails to reveal demolishes her own sources and statements.
III
The second set of eyes belongs to Jackie Kennedy, and this really puzzled me. Why? Because to anyone who reads any reputable biography of the woman, marrying John Kennedy was probably the best thing that ever happened to Jacqueline Bouvier. Before she married Kennedy she was working for $42.50 per week--about 650 dollars today--at a newspaper called the Washington Times Herald. She was doing man on the street interviews as a photojournalist. Questions being things like “Is your marriage a 50-50 partnership?” and “Would you like to crash high society?” (Donald Spoto, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onasis, p. 81). That newspaper was purchased in 1954 by the Washington Post and was then discontinued.
After her husband was killed in 1963, Jackie had a trust fund that, in today’s dollars, was worth about two million per year. She then borrowed money from Robert Kennedy to buy a home in Georgetown. She then leveraged that into a New York City, 14 room townhouse on Fifth Avenue, and according to Bobby, she did not pay him back. (Randy Taraborrelli, Jackie: Public, Private Secret, p. 196).
In 2006 that townhouse sold for 30 million.
She deserved it all. Why? Because Jackie Kennedy revolutionized the office of First Lady. She took it to a point that, in my view, went even beyond Eleanor Roosevelt. As her stepbrother said about her, “Being the First Lady wasn’t just her job. It was who she was.” (Taraborrelli, p. 178) The woman spoke five languages. So when President Kennedy would visit Italy, France or South America, she would be voicing his message in those foreign tongues. In her own right, she was well read and intelligent. So she helped Senator Kennedy in the making of what I still think is his greatest speech: his 1957 Algeria address on Third World nationalism, which put him on the map for the 1960 election. (Spoto, p. 112) She, along with David Ormsby Gore of England, convinced Senator Kennedy that “tactical nuclear war was an illusion and that disarmament was the only sane road to lasting peace.” This was another policy that Kennedy then pursued in the White House. (ibid) After her husband’s death, Jackie took the notes of his last meeting, where he mentioned poverty six times, to Bobby Kennedy. RFK had them framed and put on his wall. (Edward R. Schmitt, President of the Other America, p.92, p. 96)
The First Lady was well aware of the influence that Edmund Gullion, ambassador to Congo, had on her husband. It was Gullion who JFK tasked with stopping the secession of the breakaway Katanga state and keeping Congo one nation against the forces of European imperialism. (Monika Wiesak, America’s Last President, p. 40) She also understood what Kennedy was trying to do with his Alliance for Progress in Latin America. When the newspapers pictured her visit to an orphanage in Venezuela and wrote how she allowed the children to kiss her when she departed, both Kennedys despised the reporting. Since it indicated what an inferiority complex American policy had bestowed on the area. (ibid, pp. 63-64) When she visited Cambodia in 1967, Prince Sihanouk had written a speech to greet her which, in its original form, said the Vietnam War would not have happened if her husband had lived.
And we know what happened when Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had dinner with her in New York. He notes how Jackie had become depressed and critical over the fact that Lyndon Johnson had altered Kennedy’s Indochina policy. In fact, she visited wounded Vietnam vets in hospitals. (Spoto p. 252) When discussing a poem by Gabriela Mistral--which reminded Jackie of her husband--she grew very tense and could barely speak. She suddenly exploded in rage. She then began to pound him across the chest “demanding that I do something to stop the slaughter.” (McNamara, In Retrospect, pp. 257-58). All of this, and more, indicates that the First Lady knew a lot about what her husband’s policies were, and how they were changed later.
If any reader can find any of the above in Callahan’s book, please let me know.
So what does Callahan give us instead? Well, what does one expect from a writer who relies on the likes of Sy Hersh and Jeanne Carmen? She uses the late David Heymann and Peter Evans. After the multiple exposes that have been done on the former this is simply fruity. As Donna Morel and David Cay Johnston have shown, Heymann was a pathological liar. He not only made up quotes, he made up people. And this was proven about one of the Heymann books she uses as a source. But further, in order to libel Bobby Kennedy, Heymann even made up police departments. (Click here).
In Bobby and Jackie, a book Callahan sources in her bibliography, Morel discovered that Heymann likely made up Secret Service reports. (ibid) Lisa Pease did a coruscating review of that same book, in which the author claimed to have been nominated for a Pulitzer three times. He was never once nominated. He also claimed to have had a ten year long relationship with John Kennedy Jr. As Pease shows, this is another falsehood. Lisa also shows that, as Heymann was apt to do, he fabricated witness testimony after the witness was dead. Heymann had Mary Harrington, a neighbor, watch from above as Bobby had his hand on Jackie’s breast at the Kennedy Palm Beach estate. As a local real estate agent noted this was not possible as the entire estate was walled. (Click here).
I won’t even go into the other book Callahan uses on Jackie. Suffice it to say that Lisa thinks that Nemesis may be a black book, inspired by Robert Maheu. (Click here).
She even uses the Kitty Kelley story that somehow JFK’s affairs drove her to seek shock treatments in a sanitarium. (Callahan, p. 144) Which is ludicrous. As both Spoto and Taraborrelli note, Jackie did not seek any such counseling until after the assassination. And that was due to the fact that she was clearly suffering from PTSD. She also sent her daughter Caroline for counseling. (Spoto, p. 217, Taraborrelli, pp. 384-85)
But Kitty Kelley is not the worst concerning Callahan and Jackie Kennedy. The author is intent on somehow demeaning Jackie’s admirable behavior after the assassination, both at Parkland Hospital and the return to Washington. So she has her performing fellatio on his corpse at Parkland. (p. 42) I actually wrote “WTF” in my notebook when I saw this. I could not find any reference to it in her notes section, which is very loose and would not pass muster in any history department. Not only is this not in either Spoto or Taraborrelli, but its not in the hour by hour chronicles of the assassination by either William Manchester or Jim Bishop. The Bishop book is actually a minute by minute account of the day of the murder, and he spends several pages on this Parkland episode in his chapter entitled “The Afternoon Hours”. And in his introduction, called “For the Record”, one can see that he is no big fan of either President Kennedy or his wife. In fact, Jackie did not want him to write the book.
When I saw this, I dialed back to Callahan’s introductory notes. There she said that her subjectivity is no less or more than that of any other historian. (p. xi) She then said that she had taken some creative license in the book.(p. xv) Can the woman be real? As we shall see, the last thing anyone should characterize Callahan is as historian. Not with this kind of referencing. And historians do not use creative license.
In sum, and in the real world, Jackie Kennedy became the most famous First Lady in history, a worldwide political symbol, a fashion icon, and ultimately a millionairess due to her wedding to John Kennedy.
Second dud for Callahan
IV
In 1968, after Bobby Kennedy’s murder, which frightened and sickened her, Jackie agreed to marry Aristotle Onassis. He was a Greek shipping magnate who had his own island off the coast of Greece with a security detail. (Spoto, p. 236). But the problem was she wanted her children raised in New York. So she ended up splitting time between the two places.
John Jr. understood his mother’s PTSD so he covered up pictures of her in Dallas before she could see them. (Taraborrelli, p. 401). He attended Brown University for his undergraduate degree and while there organized seminars on South African apartheid, a situation which horrified him. (Elaine Landau, John F. Kennedy Jr, p. 78). He then worked a year at the Office of Business Development in New York, becoming the deputy director of the 42nd Street Development Corporation in 1986. He was interacting with developers and city agencies. (Michael Gross, New York, 3/20/89) He did this for $20,000 a year. After this, he headed up a nonprofit group called Reaching Up which, among other things, provided education and other opportunities for workers who aided disabled persons. (Click here.) This last clearly reflects the things his father, his Aunt Eunice and his Uncle Robert were attempting to do. Which is probably why Callahan brushes it aside.
He attended NYU Law school and passed the BAR on his third try. He was in the Manhattan DA’s office for four years. And according to those he worked with, he took cases no one else wanted, and then won them in court. (Michael Gross, in the A and E Biography, John F Kennedy Jr: The Death of an American Prince; Taraborrelli, p. 421). Contrary to what Callahan implies, his mother was not all that excited about JFK Jr starting George, his political/cultural magazine. She thought he should continue in his law career in which she saw him carving an estimable niche. (Taraborrelli, p. 421)
In no uncertain terms Callahan tries to demean John’s work at George. Really? At its inception, in 1995, George was a startling success, achieving about a 500,000 circulation. What makes that even more remarkable is that this was when the online revolution in publishing was taking place. Yet George was a print magazine. For a point of comparison, David Talbot started Salon online that same year. It peaked at about 100,000 subscribers, 1/5 the circulation.
So in light of all the above, for her to say that John Kennedy Jr was a middle aged man with no accomplishments, this says much more about Callahan and her agenda than it does Kennedy Jr. But that’s not all. Callahan is so monomaniacal, so freight train in her intent, she even trashes John’s wedding to Carolyn Bessette on Cumberland Island off the coast of Georgia. Callahan throws in a line criticizing Carolyn’s wedding gown and adds that the metaphoric picture of John kissing her gloved hand was a lie. (Callahan, p. 273, p. 275)
Again, there are pictures and films of this wedding, and in her book Once Upon A Time, Elizabeth Beller spends ten pages describing what a joyous event this was and how exuberant everyone felt afterwards. (pp. 139-148) In honor of JFK’s and RFK’s work on civil rights it took place at the First African Baptist Church. The guest list was small and the couple tricked the media by saying they were going to Ireland. They did not want the paparazzi there, and they succeeded. In fact, there was only one phone at the inn they rented. People were dancing, singing and reciting poetry.
But that is not the worst part. Apparently, Callahan wants to attack John Jr from beyond the grave. She writes that somehow Carolyn was going to be buried separately from John. This allows her to close a chapter with this: “In death, as in life, they never considered Carolyn Bessette a real Kennedy.” (p. 284 )Stunned, I wrote, “Look this up!’ Any junior high school student can google “ burial of John\ Kennedy Jr.” You will see that all three people who died in the plane crash of July 1999, that is John, his wife and his wife’s sister Lauren, were buried at sea.(Beller, p. 280). There was a very nice memorial service on July 23rd, no cameras allowed, and 315 people were invited. Then there was another the next day for all three in Greenwich. (Beller, p. 284) Can she really not have known about all of this? I find that very hard to believe.
There was an incredible outpouring of grief exhibited by the enormous number of mourners who assembled outside the townhouse the couple lived in, with the flowers and gifts they brought to the curb. Maybe there was a subconscious reason for this remarkable display. As some writers have noted, and as revealed in JFK Jr. The Final Year, John was going to run for governor in 2002. But even further, as researcher Don Jeffries has written, John Jr, was an avid reader of books about his father’s murder. (Hidden History, Chapter 7)
In fact, according to a high school girlfriend, Meg Azzoni, “His heartfelt quest was to expose and bring to trial those who killed his father and who covered it up.” Jeffries got corroboration for this from a second source who wished to remain anonymous. The message was that John “was keenly interested in and knowledgeable about his father’s assassination, and often talked about it privately.” According to Steven Gillon, John told him that Bobby knew everything. (People Weekly, 7/3/19, article by Liz McNeil)
If so this may shed light on an enigma about the night of the crash. Although the story was that the weather was hazy, according to Jeffries, the last message that John conveyed about the conditions was that all was well. And the man assigned to write the FAA report, Edward Meyer, strongly disagreed with the weather conditions being depicted as hazy. (See Jeffries Substack of 7/18/24)
Those people gathered outside the townhouse understood something that Callahan’s country mile agenda cannot bring herself to address. This tragedy deprived them of their hope for another JFK and Jackie.
