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August 13, 2024 • 17 mins
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
To Brother Lee Roy and the Jimmy Lakey Mass Choir.
Glad to have them every hour singing my name and
thank you.

Speaker 2 (00:06):
I appreciate you very very much.

Speaker 1 (00:09):
Final hour of today's award winning broadcast, and after that
we make way for the big dogs of talk radio,
Clay Travis and Buck Sexton. As I said, I put
away my microphone manufactured by Fisher Price. And you know,
Russeling Ball had the old golden e IB microphone. I
don't think anybody will ever maintain that again. But I
think at least Clay Travis and Buck Sexton that they

(00:30):
probably get something like a Sterling silver microphone. I don't know,
maybe a broad I don't know, but I get Fisher Price.
That's my microphone, all right. I've been excited about this
interview for a while, ever since I heard about the book,
and it is a fascinating conversation we're about to have.
It's called Ask Not the Kennedys and the Women They Destroy.

(00:51):
New York Times bestselling author Marreen Callahan is on the hotline,
written this new book, just released in the last month
or so. Mareen, welcome to the program. Glad to have
you here in Colorado.

Speaker 3 (01:01):
Oh Jimmy, thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 2 (01:03):
Well, I want to dive in here.

Speaker 1 (01:04):
I'm reading the extracts from the books that I've been
able to digest and kind of reading some of the highlights. Man,
these guys, what a dysfunctional family. How did we come
up with the image of Camelot versus the reality that
you document in the book? Camelot was not all that glorious.

Speaker 3 (01:22):
Was it. It was not, And ironically, it was none
other than Jackie Kennedy herself who came up with the
Camelot myth in the days after JFK's assassination. So, in
a nutshell, the book tells the story of thirteen women,
some of them extremely famous, such as Jackie, who we

(01:46):
never really have met through this lens, and the book
is written like a novel, so that you're in the
hearts and the heads of these women as they go
through these extraordinary experiences. But it is truly stranger than fiction.

Speaker 1 (02:04):
Marien Callahan, my guess the name of the book is
called asknaut. You tell the story in the book that
Jackie might have created the image of the narrative of Camelot,
but there were many times that Jackie was ready to
walk away from JFK. Talk about that, I know, the
birth of their first child that did not survive. It's
just allegations of womanizing, sexual transmitted diseases. It's crazy. I

(02:30):
talk about those times that Jackie didn't want to stick around.

Speaker 3 (02:34):
Yes, so Jackie first thought she would actually divorce jack
while he was a US senator, before he was president.
She was in the hospital, gave birth to a daughter
who was still born. Jack was on vacation in the
Mediterranean on a yacht with a bunch of other women,

(02:57):
and when his brother Bobby called to tell him that
Jackie had given birth to a stillborn baby girl, jack said,
what does it matter, the baby's dead. I'm not coming back.
So Jackie spent eight days alone in a hospital bed,
mourning a baby she never got to hold, never got
to bury, waiting for her husband to decide he was

(03:19):
done partying with other women. That was the first time
she almost divorced him. The second was after that infamous
performance by Marilyn Monroe at Madison Square Garden cooing Happy
Birthday to the President of the United States JFK, all
but announcing that she and the married president were in

(03:40):
fact having an affair.

Speaker 2 (03:44):
What kept Jackie there? Why not leave?

Speaker 1 (03:47):
Her instincts were screaming, her Spidey senses were going off,
I'm out of here?

Speaker 2 (03:50):
What kept her around?

Speaker 3 (03:52):
Such a great question, because Jackie was nobody's fool. She
was highly intelligent, both intellectually and emotionally. The first time
she actually after Arabella, the baby was a stillbirth. She
consulted with a major media mogul, Walter Ridder, and she said,
how would this divorce play out? She was really savvy.

(04:15):
She knew the media would be all over it. And
Walter Ridder essentially said to her, if you divorce him,
you are going to cost the country potentially a great president.
Can you live with yourself? And she really took that
to heart. She was so distraught and still so in
love with Jack that she couldn't see that this wouldn't

(04:36):
be something she was doing to Jack. But these were
things that Jack was doing to Jack.

Speaker 2 (04:42):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (04:43):
The voice of Marireen Callahan, New York Times best selling author.
This latest book is called Ask Nod, The Kennedy's and
the Women They Destroyed. Jack wasn't the only one in
the Kennedy family that had a proclivity for not just womanizing,
but the using women as almost a throwaway item. It's
I mean, obviously you have Mary, Joe Copennick and Ted

(05:05):
Kennedy and the car crash and the woman Dad probably
kept him from the presidency.

Speaker 2 (05:10):
Did it start with the generation of Robert F. Kennedy,
Ted Kennedy and John F. Kennedy? Did this go back
to Dad? I mean, how far back do we go here?

Speaker 3 (05:17):
So I trace this back to the patriarch Joseph Kennedy Senior,
who committed what I write about as two biblical original sins.
The first was while US Ambassador to Great Britain, right
before Germany began bombing England. Joseph P. Kennedy Senior was

(05:41):
a Hitler fan really not just an apologist, but thought
that Hitler had some great ideas was happily ready to
accept the death of Western democracy. The second was his
decision to secretly and forcibly lobottomize his beautiful young daughter Rosemary,

(06:02):
leaving her with the physical and mental capacities of a
two year old.

Speaker 1 (06:10):
So just unbelievable. Where did the moral bankruptcy come from?
I mean, a devout Catholic family? How did that become?
In these stories? Almost just morally bankrupt, kind of isolated,
not understanding the reality of humanity.

Speaker 2 (06:26):
Did that? What happened well, Joseph P.

Speaker 3 (06:30):
Kennedy, You know, definitely there was a level of psychopathy there.
You know, he was hell bent on proving his and
his family's worth in high society in Boston. They were
looked down upon as lace curtain irish. He was determined
to mass a great fortune, which he did, and determined

(06:52):
to make all of his sons, all four of his sons,
become president of the United States. That was going to
be his great once Fdr finally had him removed from
his ambassadorship during World War Two. So everything flows from there,
including the treatment of women. And you know, when Rosemary,

(07:13):
the most beautiful Kennedy's sibling, vanishes, she simply vaporizes. The
eight other siblings are not told where she went, what
happened to her, if she was even still alive. That
really set the tone for saying, without saying it out loud,
troublesome women are easily disposed of in this family.

Speaker 2 (07:37):
Wow, again the voice of Mariene Callahan.

Speaker 1 (07:40):
Her latest book is called as Not The Kennedy's and
the Women They Destroyed.

Speaker 2 (07:45):
You talk about.

Speaker 1 (07:46):
In the book about troublesome women, you have a section
called the rebels out there Carolyn Bessett Kennedy and Joan Kennedy.
I'm guessing these are the women that would be deemed
troublesome at times.

Speaker 3 (08:02):
Yes, they were troublesome because they wouldn't stick to the script.
They wouldn't happily play the part in which they had
been cast. So Joan was rebelling, especially in the eighties.
Joan gets a really happy ending in this book. Ted
Kennedy and the Kennedy machine castigated her for years as

(08:23):
the problem in their marriage, the problem dragging down Ted's
political ambitions, a hopeless drunk and Joan's story is so
much more complicated than that. And she was just used
and abused and treated terribly by Ted until they sort
of decided to take her out of the mothballs for

(08:44):
Ted's you know, hopeless campaign frankly for presidents of the
United States. But what he needed behind his by his
side was his beautiful, happy, charming wife to say to
the American people, this is a very domesticated, respectable man.
Despite leaving Mary Jokapecne to die in three feet of water,

(09:07):
the decade prior, you can trust him now and Carolyn
Beset you know who married JFK. Junior, got behind the
curtain and realized that America's Prince Charming actually was not
only kind of a dud, but he was entitled, He
was lazy, and he had a lifelong death wish that

(09:29):
not only was a constant throughout his life, but required
the women in his life, whoether it was an ex
girlfriend or now Carolyn, to also risk her life along
with him. And so in the book, when you go
through the moment by moment the TikTok leading up to

(09:51):
that plane crash, that wholly avoidable plane crash. JFK Junior,
by the way, almost crashed into a packed American Airlines
commercial jetliner that night, Wow, you will see exactly who
these women were dealing with.

Speaker 2 (10:05):
Well.

Speaker 1 (10:06):
Martin Callahan's new book It's called Asknot You mentioned Joan
Kennedy as Kennedy that needed to Ted Kennedy needed her
to look healthy and happy and just so happy to
be with him. You also have another generation, Robert F.
Kennedy Junior. Boy, he's got some bizarre behaviors and the

(10:29):
cameras turned on and he has an ex wife that
he comes out and wants to you know how concerned
and how loving of a husband he was. That was
a disastrous relationship. Talk about Robert F. Kennedy Junior because
the sins of the fathers passed on to the sun.

Speaker 3 (10:45):
Jimmy, I'm so glad you brought this up. Over the
past few weeks, we've seen a lot of outrage in
the media about these photos of RFK Junior with the
carcasses of dead animals, right, and it's sort of real,
like disgust and revulsion, like what is he doing with
these dead animals? It's nothing compared to how he treated
his estranged wife, Mary, the mother of four of his children.

(11:09):
Her chapter is unbelievable. It is informed by people close
to Mary who spoke to me for the book because
they wanted Americans to know exactly who they were getting
with Robert F. Kennedy Junior. This is a man who
gas lit her, who shredded her reputation, who cut off
her finances, who made her life a living hell, and who,

(11:33):
after she killed herself, made a huge fanfare of burying
her up in the Kennedy family plot in Massachusetts in
full view of the media celebrities at this funeral weeping
over Mary and how he tried to help her. Jimmy.
One week later, in the middle of the night, without
proper permits, he had her coffin secretly exhumed seven hundred

(12:00):
feet away and buried alone on the side of a hill.

Speaker 1 (12:04):
Wow in that burial that he did with great fanfare,
that was done. He actually fought Mary Richardson Kennedy's family
and her siblings because she didn't want to be married
in the Kennedy family plot. He went to court to
force that, and her family did not want that to happen.

Speaker 2 (12:21):
Am I correct? There?

Speaker 3 (12:22):
You are absolutely correct. Her siblings fought him for her remains.
All they wanted was their sister to bury her. Her
life had been a misery with the Kennedy family, she
said to her divorce lawyer, who talked to me, the
Kennedys could destroy me. She said that more than once.
And what really really caused her decompensation to accelerate was

(12:48):
discovering RFK Junior's sex diaries. Okay, these were thick bound
red diaries in which he listed the multiple women, some
of them celebrities, some of them very close friends of
Mary's that he had had sex with ranked from one
to ten, sometimes more than one in a day. Of course,

(13:11):
she was distraught.

Speaker 1 (13:13):
Well, the voice of Marien Callahan, it is a must read.
It's called ask Not the Ask Not the Kennedy's and
the women they destroyed. Why is it that even after
the passing of Ted, or after the passing of Robert F.
Kennedy or John F. Kennedy, that the women that survived
still never really told their story?

Speaker 2 (13:35):
Did they?

Speaker 1 (13:35):
They didn't write a memoir, they didn't publish publish a book.
Jack Jackie remarried and kind of moved on. It's taking
someone like you to tell the story. Why, even when
they had moved on from the family, or the family
had passed away, that these ladies don't tell their story.

Speaker 3 (13:52):
Some have tried, And it's a real uphill battle because
so much of the corporate mainstream media is still very
invested in protecting the camelot myths. And I will tell
you from my personal experience with this book, I have
been told directly major networks in America, like the three

(14:13):
major ones, we're not going to touch it. It says
bad things about the Kennedy family. We couldn't possibly we
don't want to hurt the Kennedy family. There is a
story in this book about a woman, then teenage girl
named Mimi Beardsley, who did write a memoir in twenty
twelve and was taken to the wood shed by the media.

(14:33):
She is in this book. She has two chapters on
her first day at the White House. She is a
nineteen year old virgin. She is invited up to the
residence where the president materializes. JFK gets her drunk, throws
her on a bed. Within three minutes, he has taken
her virginity. She doesn't know what this is, but she
did say, short of screaming, there was nothing I could

(14:56):
have done to get him off of me. Three days later,
JFK calls her to the White House pool where he
basically orders her to perform oral sex on one of
his aides, sitting on the edge of the pool while
he watches, which she, to her great shame, felt she
had no choice but to do.

Speaker 2 (15:18):
It's just crazy. But she never got traction.

Speaker 1 (15:21):
She tried to tell the story even as LA's twenty twelve,
and nobody would listen.

Speaker 3 (15:26):
You know, here's the interesting thing. At the time, I
was working at the New York Post and my colleague
Susanna Kahlen fished that book out of a pile and
was like, this book is explosive. And the Post put
it on the front page and suddenly it shot up
the bestseller charts. But even the media that did deign
to cover her, for the most part, castigated her and

(15:49):
positive jfk as the victim. Here you could go look
this up. Mimi appeared on the View and Barbara Walters,
that trailblazer for woman for women, says to Mimi, why
would you do this to the Kennedy family. Why couldn't
you just let this go? The New York Times had

(16:10):
a female reviewer review Mimi's memoir and that that review
was headline, sure, mister president, if you really want me
to and depicted Mimi as a seductress who was exploiting
her time with the president. So this is it's very
difficult still even now for women in that family to

(16:34):
come forward because very few people are willing to listen.

Speaker 1 (16:38):
Well, the voice of Mareen Callahan, New York Times bestselling author, Mareen,
you told me you didn't have a heart out. I
want to keep you just a little bit longer. If
you can just kind of take a break, give a
cup of coffee or a glass of water. And again
the name of the book is called Ask Not the
Kennedy's and the women they've destroyed. I'm telling you it's

(16:59):
Camelot was a myth baby. It wasn't just JFK.

Speaker 2 (17:02):
There was a it's an evil some evil stuff going
on here. Standby.

Speaker 1 (17:07):
We'll come back with Marien Callahan next on six hundred
K col
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