As the party asks who is to blame for the US president’s poor performance against Trump, calls grow for Biden to widen his team

When Joe Biden became engulfed in a plagiarism scandal during his first US presidential campaign in 1987, his adviser and friend Ted Kaufman was blunt: “There’s only one way to stop the sharks, and that’s pull out,” he said.

When Biden was contemplating another run for the White House in 2015, it fell to another longtime confidant, Mike Donilon, to deliver the verdict. “I caught him looking at me and gestured, What is it, Mike?” Biden later wrote in his memoir. “‘I don’t think you should do this,’ he said.”

Maureen Callahan’s eye-opening exposé looks back at the Kennedy men and the women they ‘destroyed’, digging into a long and grisly history

“The whole lot of Kennedys were lady-killers, and they always got away with it,” baseball star Joe DiMaggio, who blamed the political dynasty for the death of his ex-wife, Marilyn Monroe, told his biographer. “They’ll be getting away with it a hundred years from now.”

Death by air crash. Death by water. Death by suicide. These are just some of the fates of women who have associated with the Kennedys, as chronicled by investigative journalist Maureen Callahan in Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed, a book published on Tuesday that explores the “real Kennedy Curse” and reads like a grisly soap opera.