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Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) November 27, 2024: I published my first op-ed commentary in my high school student newspaper in 1961. In it, I quoted President John F. Kennedy's 1961 inaugural address challenging us not to ask what our country can do for us, but what we can do for our country.
I was sixteen when I wrote my first op-ed commentary, and I was idealistic. I was too young to vote, but I followed Senator Kennedy's 1960 campaign. He was of Irish descent, and my paternal grandparents had immigrated to this country from Ireland. He was a Roman Catholic, and so was I. Born in 1917, he was about the same age as my parents; my father was born in 1916; my mother, in 1918. Kennedy was in the navy in World War II and was a hero. My father was in the Army in WWII and was decorated for his bravery.
As you might expect, I was heart-broken when President Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas - 61 years ago.
As you might expect, I was seriously disenchanted subsequently when revelations of Jack Kennedy's sexual promiscuity before and after his marriage to Jacqueline Bouvier began to surface. And I was further disillusioned about Jack Kennedy when subsequent revelations came out about his medical history.
For information about Jack Kennedy's medical history, see Robert Dallek's An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (Little, Brown and Company, 2003).
For information about Jack Kennedy's sexual promiscuity, at least up to 1956, see Fredrik Logevall's JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956 (Random House, 2020; for specific page references concerning his sexual promiscuity, see the "Index" [p. 767]).
In any event, in the American journalist Maureen Callahan's 2024 feminist book Ask Not: The Kennedys and the [Thirteen] Women They Destroyed (Little, Brown and Company/ Hachette Book Group) reviews various revelations about Jack Kennedy's sexual promiscuity before and after his marriage to Jackie Kennedy.
Maureen Callahan's cogent analysis caught my attention, and so in the present essay, my 650th OEN article, I want to discuss certain highlights in her 2024 feminist book Ask Not - which is, in my estimation, represents feminist analysis at its best.
Now, whatever else may be said about John F. Kennedy (1917-1963), he was not a feminist. Today we tend to take the critique of society advanced by second wave feminism in the United States as a given. But John F. Kennedy lived and died before second wave feminism became influential in American culture.
Now, in theory, we might say that when we view the various women that John F. Kennedy had sex with as his conquests, we are thereby invoking a patriarchal view. In a hypothetical non-patriarchal view, we might say that when each of those women had sex with John F. Kennedy, she was thereby making her conquest of him.
But Mareen Callahan does not engage in taking such a hypothetical view. For this reason, her view might be considered by some readers as patriarchal in spirit, even though she is writing what I consider to be a feminist critique of the patriarchal view.
Now, according to the Wikipedia entry on "Maureen Callahan", "Callahan worked as a writer, editor and later columnist for the New York Post from 2002 to September 2022. She has worked as a columnist for Daily Mail since October 2022.
"In 2024, Callahan published Ask Not: The Kennedys and the [Thirteen] Women They Destroyed. Ask Not became an instant New York Times bestseller":
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