As I have shown in Part One, Maureen Callahan’s three sets of eyes on her cover—Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy and Carolyn Bessette—are really a portentous charade. In Part Two, I explained why Mimi Alford is not credible; Leo Damore is not reliable on Chappaquiddick and third, how she turns the innocent into the guilty in the cases of Michael Skakel and William Kennedy Smith. She manages this by consistently using very questionable and biased sources. She is so consistent on this that it suggests a lack of objectivity from the start.
But even after all of the above, we are still not done scrubbing Callahan. There is the case of Arabella Kennedy. This was a child who Jackie Kennedy delivered stillborn in 1955. It's true that John Kennedy was not there for his wife, but it is also true that the child was born prematurely by about five weeks. And, unlike Callahan, I do not trust George Smathers as a source about John F. Kennedy in this case. (Callahan, p. 37; for Smathers, see Don McGovern, Murder Orthodoxies, 193-218) In fact, I could not find any notes to this episode in her references section. Yet, in spite of this, she actually rebuilds dialogue.
Then there is Diana DeVegh. This is a woman who revealed she had an affair with John Kennedy rather late in life. She first wrote about it sixty years after it happened. I have no doubt if she had waited 15 more years, Callahan still would have printed it.
There was no way Callahan was going to leave alone the tragedy of Rosemary Kennedy. She was the first daughter to Joe and Rose Kennedy. No one knows what the real problem with Rosemary was. It may have begun with Rose’s difficult birth of her, done without her normal doctor. But most observers think that this uncertainty was the beginning of the spiraling road downward.
Whatever the basis of the problem, her rages and tantrums grew worse and worse upon her return from England in 1940. She became uncontrollable. As one writer described it, Rosemary would pace “up and down the halls of her home…like a wild animal, given to screaming, cursing, and thrashing out at anyone who tried to thwart her will.” She even physically assaulted her 78 year old grandfather, to the point she had to be restrained. (Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, “The Miracle Cure” at The Literary Hub)
Joseph Kennedy—the less we write about what Callahan says about him the better—finally became desperate. He consulted with two doctors at George Washington University Hospital. They recommended what was then called a leucotomy, something being sold as a cure all for violent anti-social behavior. We know this today as a prefrontal lobotomy. And it was a terrible mistake for all involved, most of all Rosemary. She became an invalid and was sent to a convent in Wisconsin. There she lived in a private home and had full time care. (ibid, Lieberman)
II
But as noted above, a serious problem with Callahan is her selectivity. For example, if the Kennedys were so pathological in their relations with the opposite sex, then a couple of obvious questions are: 1.) Why was Ted Kennedy’s second marriage to Victoria Anne, ambassador to Austria, so successful? 2.) Why was Bobby Kennedy’s marriage to Ethel so enduring? (As I have shown, the stuff she writes about Bobby through Jeanne Carmen is rubbish) And if one is going to use Kick Kennedy as a strike against the mother Rose Kennedy, then why not bring up the facts of the very successful and lengthy marriages of say Eunice Shriver and Jean Kennedy Smith? I think to most objective people this pattern betrays an agenda.
But none of the above bothered Megyn Kelly. And before Kelly gave her so much time, as far as I can see, the book was not doing very well. But not only did Kelly give her a lot of time, she whole heartedly endorsed all that is in the book. But, beyond that, on her YouTube channel she actually labeled what Callahan wrote about Jackie as “Shocking new reporting”. Having read through all Callahan wrote about Jackie Kennedy, and taken many notes, I am still wondering how any of it is new. And if any of it is new, as I noted, I failed to see references.
On that same channel Kelly actually said that Mary Jo Kopechne was killed by Ted Kennedy. As I explained in Part 2, this is simply not the case. It was an accident pure and simple and Ted Kennedy tried to save her. But since Callahan was working an agenda through the flawed author Leo Damore, like a ringmaster, Kelly follows it word by word.
Here is the very serious professional problem with this. Kelly started her career as a lawyer, with a degree from Albany Law School. She then worked as a practicing attorney for ten years. So she understands the rules of evidence and testimony. Any good lawyer would have sliced and diced this book into pieces.
Now here is something else that the reader should understand about these Kelly/Callahan You Tube interviews. Kelly is worth tens of millions. She was very well paid at Fox for 13 years. She then jumped to NBC News where she was again very well paid for two years, reportedly at about 15 million per year. When NBC terminated her she collected about 30 million. (The question should have been: why did NBC ever hire her?)
Now, let us give Kelly the benefit of the doubt. Maybe she did not know anything about this material. But if Kelly was not cognizant of any of the problems I have sorted through, what was to stop the millionairess from hiring a fact checker? Callahan’s book is less than four hundred pages. So it would have taken a fact checker maybe a month to hand in a thorough and annotated report. Total cost would have been maybe 12-15 thousand dollars; a proverbial drop in the bucket for Kelly.
Was there a reason for that lack? There are indications there were. Because if you were looking for some balance, some questioning, some kind of cross examination from the former lawyer, forget it. Kelly pretty much accepts everything in the book and then leads Callahan on from point to point, with nothing asked or overturned.
For anyone in the know, their interview on the Marilyn Monroe mirage is actually ludicrous. As many Jackie Kennedy biographers have noted, the reason she was not at the 1962 Madison Square Garden birthday/fundraiser is that she did not like doing those kinds of events. That fundraiser featured 17 entertainers, one of which was Monroe The reason Jackie went to Dallas/Fort Worth is because her husband had allowed her to take a cruise with her sister after her miscarriage with Patrick. When Callahan starts talking about some kind of ultimatum that Jackie gave JFK over Monroe, we are in sci fi land. Except Kelly doesn’t realize it.
But wait, wait, then it gets worse. Callahan says that this “ultimatum” then caused JFK to cut off his “relationship” with Monroe. Still more. It was this alleged curtailment that caused Monroe’s death. And Callahan can’t help herself. She adds this for the road: the Kennedys probably had a hand in her passing.
What does lawyer Kelly say in reply to all this? She actually says that Bobby Kennedy was in LA on the day Marilyn died. As I noted in Part One, this is provably false. (Susan Bernard, Marilyn: Intimate Exposures, pp. 184-87). And Callahan’s so called evidence would be demolished by the photographic proof in Susan Bernard’s book. But then Kelly adds something that is probably just as bad. That somehow, even if Bobby did not kill her, it was the Kennedys who somehow ruined Monroe. Well, ringmaster Kelly has just cued up Callahan. Callahan says the brothers tossed her around like a sexual plaything. As Don McGovern and Gary Vitacco Robles have shown, there is no evidence at all that Bobby Kennedy ever had any kind of romantic or sexual relationship with Monroe. (Don McGovern, Murder Orthodoxies, pp. 177-87; pp. 236-37) There is evidence of perhaps one encounter with JFK, but Vitacco Robles even disputes that. So this is more mythology, which Kelly encourages and then let slide. Some lawyer.
Now let us get out of sci fi land to the facts. The LA suicide prevention squad that investigated Monroe’s death —made up of Dr. Norman Farberow, Dr. Edwin Shneidman and Dr Robert Litman—reported that she had tried to take her life on four prior occasions. Since 1955 she had been through three different psychoanalysts: Margaret Hohenberg, Marianne Kris and Ralph Greenson. Kris had her institutionalized in 1961 since she felt she was suicidal.(The Marilyn Report, 2/11/2002) She had been married and divorced three times by the time she was 35. There is no doubt that Monroe was a pill freak, and this was before she ever met Bobby Kennedy. She suffered from insomnia, depression and many commentators understand it today as bipolar disorder. This caused her to escape via alcohol and chemical abuse. (Dr. Howard Markel, PBS News, 8/5/2016)
To leave all of that out, and more, is simply irresponsible writing and journalism. And Kelly’s interview with Callahan was for me at the level of tabloidism. Whatever credibility Kelly had as a journalist—and for me it was not much—has now dissolved into cheap grandstanding.
III
If one looks at her references, these are some of the sources Callahan uses.
Sy Hersh
Hustler
National Enquirer
Dominick Dunne
Peter Collier
David Horowitz
Leo Damore
David Heymann
Kitty Kelley
Richard Burke
Ron Kessler
Thomas Reeves
James Spada
To go through and analyze what is wrong with these sources would, in and of itself, take another essay. But the fact that she uses them without qualification, I believe, suggests what her intent was.
When one reads the book, there are indications that, as with Hersh, this is partly a political book. Some of the things that Hersh tried to do were so off the wall wrong—like involving the Kennedys in the assassination plots against Castro—that the only way one could explain them was through a political agenda. Well, there are indications of that with Callahan.
This begins quite early when she says that somehow John Kennedy Jr. was wrong to insist that his father was not going to escalate in Vietnam. (Callahan, p. 6). She actually calls the idea that President Kennedy was going to disengage a “post assassination myth”. Can the woman be for real?
The declassifications of the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) proved beyond a doubt that Kennedy was getting out of Vietnam at the time of his assassination. The records of the May 1963 Sec/Def meeting proved definitively that Kennedy had ordered Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to request schedules for withdrawal from all major agencies: CIA, Pentagon, and State Department. When McNamara was in receipt of them he replied that they were too slow. (Probe Magazine, Vol. 5 No. 3 pp. 18-21) These documents were so convincing that even the New York Times and Philadelphia Inquirer ran stories about them, billed as Kennedy’s plan to get out of Vietnam.
So the question becomes: If that meeting took place five months before the assassination, how could this be a “post assassination myth”? And one should add that McNamara’s initial request for this withdrawal action took place in May of 1962. Which is 18 months before Kennedy was killed. (James Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable, pp. 119-21). When McNamara made this original request the Vietnam commanding general’s chin figuratively hit the floor. General Paul Harkins was shocked. This, and more, all culminated of course in National Security Action Memorandum 263 in October of 1963. That was the order for an initial withdrawal of a thousand advisors, and a complete withdrawal by 1965. (Douglass, p. 180). Again, I hate to tell Callahan, but that is about six weeks before Kennedy’s assassination. So, again, how could it be a ”post-assassination myth”?
This was all reversed by Lyndon Johnson in the space of about three months. Culminating in National Security Action Memorandum 288 in March of 1964, which mapped out an air war against North Vietnam. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August was essentially a declaration of war. (JFK Revisited, James DiEugenio, pp. 216-217) So what Kennedy did not do in three years, LBJ accomplished in nine months. It is hard to ignore something as sweeping as that. But Callahan manages to do so.
But then there is this: somehow the Missile Crisis was a catastrophe of Kennedy’s own making. (Callahan, p. 289) Again, this is simple nonsense.
To anyone who knows anything about that much studied event, it was not Kennedy who caused it. Kennedy had made it clear to the Soviets that he would allow defensive weapons in Cuba but not offensive ones. (The Kennedys Tapes, edited by Ernest May and Philip Zelikow, p. 35) And, in a letter, Nikita Khrushchev had told Kennedy:
We have stated on many occasions, and I now state again, that our government does not seek any advantages or privileges in Cuba. We have no bases in Cuba, and we do not intend to establish any. (Ibid, p. 34)
This might have been the case in the spring of 1961. But it was not the case a year later. In March of 1962, Khrushchev began haranguing Kennedy about Berlin becoming a demilitarized free city. (ibid, p. 35) Which the Russian leader knew was a sensitive spot with JFK, as he saw it as the nexus of the Atlantic Alliance. In July there were reports of “Soviet freighters steaming for Cuba with what appeared to be military cargo on board.” There were accompanying reports of military equipment arriving at Cuban ports and moving to the interior under Soviet escort. (ibid). CIA Director John McCone was the first to suggest that the Soviets were sending in offensive medium range ballistic missiles. And as early as August, Kennedy “raised the question of what we should do in Cuba if Soviets participated a Berlin crisis.” (ibid, p. 36)
This was in all likelihood correct. Because the size and scope of the atomic armada betrayed any kind of defense against a Cuban exile invasion. There were 40 land based missile launchers, with 60 missiles in five missile regiments. There were both medium and long range missiles, the long range missiles could fly a distance of 2,400 miles. There were also 140 air defense sites to protect the launchers. In addition to this there were 40 nuclear armed IL-28 bombers. The third leg of the triad was a nuclear armed submarine pen consisting of seven atomic launching subs with one megaton payloads. That would be five times the power of the Nagasaki bomb. But further, the Russians provided a wing of MIG-21’s, and 45,000 men in motorized divisions. In other words, the Soviets had a protected first strike that could hit over 100 American cities with ferocious atomic power. (James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed, second edition, p. 66)
It was Kennedy who was confronted with this out of the blue. And when he called in the Soviet foreign minister, Andei Gromyko, he was lied to. (May and Zelikow, p. 169) Kennedy now felt he had to take some kind of action to remove the threat. He decided on the least aggressive act, the blockade. And this worked toward a settlement for which he went around his advisors, sending his brother Robert to negotiate with the Russian ambassador. One reason he did this was because most everyone else wanted either an invasion or a bombing run on the missile siloes. (DiEugenio, p. 64) And this included not just military men but congressmen. Because of the Russian forces on the island either of those options would have created many casualties. And if there was an invasion it very well might have resulted in atomic holocaust since the Russians had given Castro two varieties of tactical nuclear weapons, short and long range.
How Callahan can say that Kennedy created that first strike armada is beyond me. But there can be little doubt that Kennedy was the most important person on the American side in avoiding atomic war. For whatever reason, Callahan wants to reverse that.
IV
We have seen how Callahan distorts two important Cold War military issues, one in Cuba and one in Vietnam. Many commentators think those areas loom large in the violent fate of the brothers. Since, as for example, John Bohrer proves, Bobby Kennedy was even more liberal in 1967-68 than his brother was in ‘62-63. (See his fine book, The Revolution of Robert Kennedy)
In my opinion one can draw a dotted line between her treatment of those two huge issues and the assassinations of Bobby and John. The first is explicit and the second is indirect. In dealing with the assassination of Robert Kennedy, she writes that there were 3 gunshots. (p. 113) And that Sirhan shot Bobby Kennedy by himself. (ibid)
Any amateur investigator in that case rushes straight into the problem that there was much solid evidence to betray many more than three shots being fired that night at the Ambassador Hotel. Lisa Pease perhaps has the best study on that case, and through some very detailed and revealing work from the UCLA archives, she believes that there more like 14 bullets fired. (Pease, A Lie too Big to Fail. p.265) She furnishes prolific evidence for those findings including pictures and illustrations of the walls and the swinging door opening into the pantry where Kennedy was shot. In addition to this there were injuries to other victims. (See for example, pp. 258-63) She has also unearthed other suspects like Michael Wayne (Pease, p. 313-14) and Thane Eugene Cesar. They were in much better positions to shoot Kennedy than Sirhan was. Sirhan was in front of the senator, slightly off at an angle, yet all the bullets that struck RFK came from behind, at extreme upward angles, and fairly close range. in fact the fatal shot to the skull was at contact range 2-3 inches. (Pease pp.68-69) Sirhan was never that close. Cesar was. But further, although Cesar said he had a gun similar to the one used in the assassination, he said he had sold it prior to that event. This was later proven false. He had sold it after the assassination.(Bill Turner and Jonn Christian, The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, p. 166)
So what Callahan says about the murder of RFK is wrong on all counts.
In her reference section, Callahan lists the Warren Report. (p. 337). I assume she read it. Therefore she knows that the Commission concluded that Oswald fired all the shots that struck President Kennedy, Governor John Connally and bystander James Tague. And since Oswald was allegedly inside a building behind the limousine, all the shots came from that direction. This is the major conclusion from the Warren Report. No one who reads it can miss it.
Yet early in the book, in describing the Dallas assassination scene, Callahan first tells us about Jackie leaning out the back of the car after the fusillade in order to retrieve a part of her husband’s skull. (p. 25). She then tells us that, as Secret Service agent Clint Hill jumped on the car from the trunk, he saw through the back of Kennedy’s skull. (ibid). Yet she never comments on this paradox with the Warren Report. If the Commission was correct, then how could Kennedy’s skull eject backwards out of the car. Secondly, how could there be a large hole in the rear of his skull. Entrance holes are usually small and neat, it is exit holes that look like what Hill saw. In other words, Callahan has just shown the Warren Report is dubious. But she does not want to dwell on that, so she passes it over like its not important. When in fact it is crucial.
V
In her prologue, when Callahan says her book is not ideological or partisan, these claims ring hollow due to the evidence adduced above. Further, in her stream of consciousness style, she says that Jackie Kennedy realized that all the claims made about JFK at the tenth anniversary were lies, among them being he was a good man who would have been a great president, (Callahan, p. 227). Again, can she be serious?
This is undermined by her interview with Theodore White for Life magazine, and blasted into orbit by the book Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy. That volume was so valuable in its insights about her husband’s policies that Monika Wiesak used it in her fine analysis of Kennedy’s presidency, America’s Last President.
After writing this 3 part analysis, one that Megyn Kelly was averse to doing, contrary to Callanan’s plea, I think the book is ideological and partisan. No one could have so consistently used the sources she did as a haphazard decision. By chance, no one could have been as selective as she is in her use of evidence. No one could have been so eager to rush to such questionable conclusions in each case if they were at all trying to be objective.
In fact, right at the beginning, she makes this clear by going after Robert Kennedy Jr. and his presidential candidacy. She calls him “a prominent conspiracy theorist and anti vaxxer who has made racist and antisemitic comments…” (p. xii) She prefaces this by saying that “The Kennedys remain a powerful and frequently destructive force, both in our politics and our culture.” Well if you leave out JFK’s withdrawal from Vietnam, and his masterful handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, you can say that.
But beyond that, this completely clashes with historical fact. Because in Larry Sabato’s book, The Kennedy Half Century, the author did interviews with focus groups on this subject. The public came to a contrary conclusion. The vast majority thought that Kennedy’s assassination changed the country. It took away America’s innocence and it was, in retrospect, an unthinkable act.
Those alive at the time can attest to the deep depression that set in across the country, as the optimism that had mainly prevailed since the end of World War II seemed to evaporate. …Kennedy’s murder, marked the end of an era of peace and prosperity.. (p. 416)
It seem to me that Callahan’s agenda, like Sy Hersh and Thomas Reeves before him, is to do what she can to somehow alter that public consciousness. In fact, its pretty clear from her prologue that this is her intent. Which is probably why Megyn Kelly and then Fox have supported her. And Kelly has had her on more, this time to go after Kamala Harris. Which kind of gives the game away. A pseudo journalist, teaming with a pseudo historian to attack the woman who endangers the GOP nominee.
Especially in light of the following. Donald Trump has been in court twice over a sexual assault charge from advice columnist E. Jean Carroll. And he lost both of those cases. In the second one he defamed her and was ordered to pay over 80 million. Trump had an affair with Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model, while he was married to his current wife Melania. In an interview with Anderson Cooper, McDougal said that Trump tried to pay her after sex, their relationship lasted ten months and she saw him dozens of times. She was paid $150,000 by the National Enquirer in order to kill that story for political purposes. Trump also has been adjudicated as to paying to have sex with Stormy Daniels, a porn star—while his wife was pregnant--and then trying to conceal that act, again for political purposes. He also began an affair with Marla Maples-his future wife-- while he was married to his first wife Ivana.
For someone like Kelly, and for Fox, Callahan’s book creates a nice diversion from their man’s serious character problems. Which, unlike say Marilyn Monroe, are real and actually adjudicated as true.
