Callahan refloats unfounded claims that suggest both JFK and Robert F. Kennedy were somehow involved in Marilyn Monroe’s suicide ... Callahan has a good eye for lurid details ... The anecdotes that make up this book are not news, but Callahan strings them together in a way that makes the House of Kennedy look like Bluebeard’s castle of horrors.
What does Callahan hope to add to this vale of tears? Only her residual and, yes, partisan and ideological suspicion that despite ample testimony (in many cases from the victims themselves), the Kennedy men have somehow gotten away with it all ... Callahan, despite her insistence that "the Kennedys remain a powerful and frequently destructive force," is essentially writing a history. That being the case, we should note that her sources include The National Enquirer, journalist-ragpickers like Kitty Kelley and a rotating crew of ax-grinders.
Lacerating ... An angry sympathy for the women "broken, tormented, raped, murdered or left for dead" by the Kennedys inflames and sometimes envenoms Callahan’s writing ... The book tries to conclude with a quietly triumphal coda.
Drawing on archives, interviews with surviving family members and friends, and biographies, memoirs and contemporaneous news reports, Callahan details the stories of several more women whose lives were upended by the Kennedys.
A sharp-edged exposé ... Drawing on interviews and archival sources, the author provides ample evidence of the "perverse double standard—in the press, in the justice system, and in the court of public opinion" that allowed the men’s insidious behavior to persist.
