Pun Salad

I'm not proud of reading this book, but it was available at Portsmouth (NH) Public Library, and I guess I was in kind of a trashy mood, so…

The author, Maureen Callahan, has a simple theme: women who get involved with Kennedy men (and also women born into the Kennedy family) are destined for various kinds of misery and tragedy. Some picks are obvious: Jackie, Mary Jo Kopechne, Marilyn Monroe. Others are slightly more obscure (if you, like me, don't peruse the gossip mags and tabloids): Carolyn Bessette, Mary Richardson Kennedy, Joan Kennedy, Rosemary Kennedy, "Kick" Kennedy, Martha Moxley, the matriarch Rose, Pamela Kelley, Mimi Beardsley, Diana de Vegh.

Callahan leads off with an apt quote from The Great Gatsby, the one about "careless people". And she proceeds to provide plenty of examples of that carelessness, and shows in great detail just what that carelessness leads to. Some of these details are cringe-inducing: Jackie getting splattered with JFK's blood and brains; a clinical description of Rosemary's lobotomy; JFK Jr's plane crash, killing himself and wife Carolyn; Mary Jo Kopechne's probable lengthy struggle to survive in the back seat of Teddy's sunken Oldsmobile; … Yeesh!

The plain "everyone knows" facts are bad enough, but Callahan dips at times into rumor, speculation, and amateur (probably simplistic) psychosocial analysis of the participants and their milieu. Her prose is lurid; but to be fair, she's describing some pretty lurid behavior.

The book could have used some fact-checking; for example, Callahan claims that JFK set the goal of a 1960s American manned moon landing in his inaugural address; it was actually in September 1962. Also copy-editing: Callahan misuses "passive voice" and "begs the question". Neither being a big deal, but makes one wonder how solid her more serious claims are.