Tuesday, July 16, was the 25th anniversary of John F. Kennedy Jr.’s death. Now that Democrats are even less enthusiastic about Joe Biden than vaccine makers are to see Robert F. Kennedy Jr. receive good press coverage, there will surely be pining for what could have been with JFK Jr.

But journalist Maureen Callahan, in her new book Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed, shows that America is fortunate to be spared a JFK Jr. presidency. When he died, the media portrayed him as suave, stylish, and intelligent. The truth is he was a fool with a death wish.

Callahan encapsulates JFK Jr.’s idiocy in an anecdote about one of his business ideas, a rent-a-dog service. He assumed there would be a market for this since people always stopped him whenever he was out walking his dog. He abandoned the scheme when one of his business partners suggested that people probably weren’t stopping him because of his dog.

“John’s habit of being careless with his own things and those of others was his defining character trait,” Callahan writes. “Responsibilities were for other people, not him.” One of his first displays of recklessness occurred in 1986. He insisted on taking his then-girlfriend, Christina, kayaking on the open ocean, despite knowing nothing about it. He and Christina nearly drowned.

“John, we could have died,” Christina said. “Yeah, Chief,” he replied. “But what a way to go.”

Nevertheless, Carolyn Bessette assumed she had landed a prize, “America’s Prince,” when JFK Jr. proposed to her. It didn’t take long for her friends and family to realize that JFK Jr. was more like a booby prize. They tried to warn Carolyn off. Her mother, Ann, was so concerned that she made a last-ditch attempt to stop the wedding during the rehearsal dinner. When it was Ann’s turn to toast the couple, she stood up and said, “I don’t know if this marriage is good for my daughter. I don’t know if John is right for her.”  

JFK Jr. had treated Carolyn shabbily even before they tied the knot, and marriage did nothing to make him more sensitive. When the press attention became too much for Carolyn, JFK Jr. was unsympathetic. Much like his father and uncles, one woman was never enough for him. He cheated on Carolyn before and after their wedding, by one account having a fling with an ex-girlfriend barely 48 hours before the fatal plane crash.

After the crash, Ted Kennedy sprung into action, having JFK Jr’s remains cremated after arranging a rush autopsy and sealing the medical examiner’s report. Presumably, this was done to protect JFK Jr.’s image should he have flown drunk or stoned (he hadn’t). In subsequent years, some commentators blamed Carolyn for the crash, claiming JFK Jr. wouldn’t have been flying at night if Carolyn hadn’t arrived late.

This is what Callahan calls the “Kennedy machine,” a network of family members, advisers, and media sycophants who protect the image of the Kennedy men every time one is involved in a scandal. They deflect blame by smearing the name of any woman involved.

Most recently, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been the beneficiary of the Kennedy machine. When his second wife, Mary Richardson, took her own life in 2012, Newsweek allowed noted Kennedy historian Laurence Leamer to portray Mary as the real actor in the tragedy. While acknowledging RFK Jr.’s faults, Leamer claimed that “perhaps Bobby wasn’t guilty. Perhaps nobody was guilty. Perhaps Mary Richardson Kennedy was, and had been for some time, a desperately sick woman. That’s the portrait that emerges from a sealed, 60-page court affidavit filed by Bobby during divorce proceedings.”

In any case, Bobby reportedly made Mary’s life a living hell. He paid scant attention to Mary and not much more to their four children. He resented her when her charm and intelligence worked to his benefit. His infidelities (surprise!) were rampant. His diaries, as Mary discovered, included pages with the heading “cash accounts” that ranked the women he’d slept with. In 2010, he filed for divorce. Shortly before Mary killed herself, he reportedly cut off her credit card that she used for living expenses and child support.

In a recent interview with Megyn Kelly, Callahan stated that RFK Jr.’s mistreatment of Mary is something that “should be central to his [presidential] candidacy and that he should really be questioned about.” So far, no one in the media has confronted RFK Jr. about his actions, likely due to the Kennedy machine’s success at absolving him of any blame.

Although the subject of the book is by its nature both scandalous and heart-wrenching, Callahan weaves in some nuance. While Carolyn and Mary were victims, they also had substance abuse problems and volcanic tempers. Even Ted, arguably the most callous and self-centered of the bunch, receives some sympathy. “Ted had no memory of his childhood after age seven — that everything was a blank until he hit his teenage years, all that emotional trauma blacked out,” Callahan writes. “He had been bullied mercilessly by his stronger, fitter, smarter older brothers, who liked to call him ‘fat stuff.’ Ted had been a very sensitive child, one … [with] troubles with reading and writing.”

JFK Jr., by contrast, had been raised as royalty. “John was like Seinfeld’s Bubble Boy, so coddled and spoiled that he didn’t know what he sounded like to others,” Callahan notes. “John didn’t live in the real world and never had; he lived on Planet Kennedy, where he was king, and his main experience was a feedback loop of awe at his looks, his lineage, his fame, his politeness.”

The resulting hubris is what led him to go up in a plane he had no business flying. Although most private pilot certifications require at least 75 hours of flying time with an instructor, he had only 55. He wasn’t instrument-rated. He was warned by other pilots not to fly that night given the poor visibility. In its report, the National Transportation Safety Board faulted him for failing to file a flight plan and maintain contact with air traffic control. The plane went into a spiral, hitting the water at 200 miles an hour, killing JFK Jr., Carolyn, and her sister Lauren.

Callahan suggests this may have been more than the result of negligence and recklessness:

[W]as there a part of him, subconscious or not, that didn’t care if he died, taking his wife and sister-in-law with him? His magazine [George] was on the verge of collapse. His marriage was failing. His sister, upset that John was trying to stop her from auctioning off their mother’s possessions — Jackie’s deathbed suggestion — was now barely talking to him. His life was coming apart on all fronts, and John did not have great internal resources to draw upon, the kind of inner strength forged only from being humbled, humiliated, pushed down, and then forcing oneself to get up again.

If the book has one flaw, it is that Callahan fails to acknowledge that the Kennedy machine is not the overwhelming force it once was. “The Kennedys have a way of quashing anything or anyone — a book, a miniseries, an interview — that contradicts their golden image,” Callahan states. “They typically do this through power or payoffs.” Indeed, it still wields power. But it is near impossible to imagine in this day and age the machine could perform the type of damage control it did at Chappaquiddick.

Indeed, it has been weakened by multiple blows after Ted drove into Poucha Pond in 1969. As Callahan notes, in 1972, National Lampoon ran a parody of a Volkswagen ad that read, “If Ted Kennedy drove a Volkswagen, he’d be president today.” A 1979 “Saturday Night Live” sketch featured Bill Murray as a soaked, seaweed-adorned Ted Kennedy. Callahan’s book is the latest in a long line that has given the lie to Camelot: Senatorial Privilege: The Chappaquiddick Cover-Up; Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter; Once Upon A Secret; and The Dark Side of Camelot. The machine was unable to prevent the 2017 film “Chappaquiddick,” a scathing drama about how Ted left Mary Jo Kopechne to suffocate.

Acknowledging that the machine is weakened would encourage more people to produce the books, movies, and documentaries that are needed to examine the long list of women the Kennedy men mistreated: Rosemary Kennedy, Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, Mimi Beardsley, Diana de Vegh, Pamela Kelly, and, of course, Jacqueline Kennedy. One lesson we need to take out of this is we should never allow any presidency to again take on a myth of Camelot. People attracted to power are some of the most selfish, venal, and narcissistic human beings. Callahan’s book moves us further toward acknowledging that ugly reality.