Women and girls historically do not fare well with Kennedy men – be they wives, girlfriends, mistresses, sisters or daughters.

Patriarch Joe Kennedy, a former US ambassador to Britain, was not only politically and financially ruthless, he was also sexually deviant and violent.

Well before he was president, John F. Kennedy would warn any overnight guests of his sisters — many of them teenagers — to lock their bedroom doors at the famed family compound in Hyannis, Massachusetts. ‘The ambassador,’ JFK would say, ‘has a tendency to wander at night.’

A young JFK, meanwhile, was already evincing what would become manifest among generations of Kennedy men: a sinister incestuousness that would see them all attempt to bed each ­other’s conquests.

When JFK was running for ­president, Janet Des Rosiers joined his campaign and one day he slipped her a note. ‘Don’t you think,’ he wrote, ‘it’s about time you found me attractive?’

In 1953, he met the young ­Jacqueline Bouvier — a highly educated debutante from New York City, with the looks, charm and sophistication to match.

He was a 34-year-old US senator and she a 24-year-old ‘inquiring photographer’ for the Washington Times Herald. She was so smitten that she dumped her fiancé, stockbroker John Husted.

Jackie never uttered a word. She simply removed her engagement ring, slipped it into Husted’s suit pocket and walked away.

Jackie wanted Jack Kennedy – and the big life that was sure to follow – no matter the cost.

Then there was Marilyn Monroe. She was the biggest movie star on the planet, a sex symbol desired by every red-blooded American male, and not only was she having an affair with President Kennedy, she was also having an affair with his brother, US Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.

Very few people knew, but among those who did was ­Marilyn’s therapist, Dr Ralph Greenson. He was greatly alarmed by what the Kennedy brothers were doing to his patient, and wrote as much to a colleague.

‘Very destructive people,’ Greenson said of the two brothers.

And they were indeed doing grave damage. With JFK having cut off communication with ­Marilyn after she sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to him at Madison Square Garden in May 1962 — practically announcing to all the world that she and the president of the United States were having an affair — Bobby had been left to crisis-manage Marilyn, who was now threatening to hold a press conference and tell the truth.

On August 4 that same year, Bobby paid a visit to Marilyn’s home in LA. He did not know – nor did she – that the FBI and CIA had wiretapped Marilyn’s house. On these tapes, recovered decades later, Bobby can be heard yelling at Marilyn viciously.

‘Where is it?’ he demanded. ‘Where the f*** is it?’ Next came the sound of something, or someone, hitting the wall.

Marilyn was found dead the next morning, in her own bed, at the age of 36. Her ex-husband, the ­legendary baseball player Joe DiMaggio, was sure that the Kennedy brothers were, in some way, to blame.

‘I always knew who killed Marilyn,’ he later said. ‘But I didn’t want to start a revolution in this country.’

Jack and Bobby never looked back. Why would they? Women had always been disposable. Their father had made that clear, not just with his philandering and raping but with the disappearance of their sister, Rosemary.

She was 23 years old when she vanished, her name never mentioned at home again.

It was only after Joe died in 1969, at 81, that her siblings learned the truth: Joe had secretly, forcibly lobotomised Rosemary, leaving her with the mental and physical capabilities of a two-year-old.

Joe, a Nazi sympathiser who had taken Rosemary to ­London as his ‘companion’ while serving as ambassador, had likely been sexually abusing his daughter, whose increasingly volatile outbursts threatened to expose him. And so he had her silenced and shipped across America to be cared for by nurses and nuns.

Rosemary suffered a fate worse than death.

The litany abounds: Mary Jo Kopechne, the 28-year-old aide who JFK’s younger brother, ­senator Ted Kennedy, left to die in 1969 after his car veered off a bridge and plunged into a pond on Chappaquiddick Island.

Kopechne was alive for hours, struggling to breathe through a tiny air pocket, while Ted made his escape, passing houses with lights on, pay phones and the fire department, before reaching his inn and going to sleep.

Pamela Kelley, a teenage girl who, one decade later, was left paralysed for life by Joe Kennedy II (Bobby’s son), who recklessly rolled his Jeep in Nantucket. The media called this Joe’s ‘mishap’ and he walked with a $100 fine.