Kennedy Wives: Triumph and Tragedy in America's Most Public Family (11 page)

Rose was said to disapprove of Ethel’s wild parties. “Rose Kennedy thought Ethel’s parties were outrageously overdone,” Barbara Gibson, Rose’s secretary, said years later. Certainly Rose, who esteemed civility and formality—some of her fondest memories being of parties at the
English court when her husband was ambassador—would have preferred parties more reflective of the dignity of her sons’ offices.

The parties usually featured live music that blared well into the morning hours. Though Hickory Hill was spread across six acres, the tunes wafted into neighbors’ homes. Some took advantage of the entertainment. “At 3 o’clock in the morning, with all that wonderful Lester Lanin music coming in our windows, we got up and danced in our bare feet right in our bedroom,” one neighbor said.

Others weren’t as embracing. At one party, the orchestra leader kept bellowing over a loudspeaker, “Any more requests?”

A neighbor called back, “How about a little more peace and quiet!”

Ethel transferred more than just Rambleside’s parties to Hickory Hill, however. She also introduced monthly seminars to discuss a variety of issues, much as Big Ann had done in the stately library of the Greenwich home. Sometimes those invited were deep thinkers. Many were politicians. The gatherings, dubbed “Hickory Hill University,” were also influenced by Bobby’s Student Legal Forum days, and sometimes the “classes” were held at other locations, though the Hickory Hill University moniker remained. Usually twenty people attended the seminars, including some of Bobby’s cabinet colleagues. One regular recalled Ethel attempting an intellectual battle with British philosopher A. J. Ayer, challenging him to explain why he rejected metaphysics. When Ayer asked Ethel to define the term, she hesitated, and then said, “I mean whether conceptions like truth and virtue and beauty have any meaning.” And the debate ensued.

Ethel’s childhood prankster ways never left her, and as her husband ascended politically in Washington, she earned the reputation of a cutup. General Maxwell Taylor, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, arrived at an early 1963 party in his honor to find a life-size dummy hanging from a tree by a parachute harness. Ethel had hoped it would make Taylor, who had parachuted into Normandy on D-Day, feel more “at home.” She once sprayed a young member of a European royal family with shaving cream. Another time, she used live bullfrogs as centerpieces for a St. Patrick’s Day dinner party. The antics earned her the nickname of America’s new “knacky baby” in London, where she once arrived at a
party with a suitcase and disappeared to change into a rhinestone-studded black shift that was far shorter than most dresses Ethel tended to wear. The risqué gesture was calculated, on her part, to lighten the mood. Ethel declared, “Everybody was talking about Vietnam and I thought we all needed a change of pace!”

8

A Tidal Wave

On Friday, November 22, 1963, as Ethel and Bobby entertained
guests poolside at Hickory Hill, the telephone rang. Ethel pulled away from her hosting duties to answer it and was surprised to hear J. Edgar Hoover on the line, as the FBI director had never called the house before. Director Hoover and Bobby had a fraught and complicated relationship. While Bobby, as attorney general, was nominally the FBI director’s boss, the de facto power that Hoover wielded was unprecedented for a nonelected official. The files he hoarded—containing scandalous personal information on major Washington and Hollywood figures—served to ensure his position and influence. Throughout the Kennedy administration, Hoover had periodically and with great relish contacted the attorney general to let him know about some damaging new piece of information he possessed, usually about JFK’s prodigious sex life. It was always couched in courtesy, but the meaning of these calls, if oblique, was unmistakable: Hoover had a lot of dirt, and he was not to be messed with.

For his part, Bobby chafed against the bullying and resented the fawning that Hoover seemed to expect as a matter of course. He also had more substantial problems with the director: for example, Bobby wanted to wage a war on organized crime, while Hoover steadfastly denied the existence of the Mafia. Their relationship was one of distance and ornate courtesy, punctuated by overt clashes. Ethel, naturally, shared her husband’s antipathy: She once left a note in the FBI’s suggestion box helpfully proposing that the agency find a new director.

Bobby took the phone call from Hoover. After a beat, he put his hand across his mouth. “Jack’s been shot!” he said. Ethel ran to him and
wrapped her arms around his waist to support him, as she would over the dark months to come.

Just as she had when her parents died, Ethel held fast to her faith. When nostalgia arose, she would say that Jack was in heaven, looking over the family. “
That’s
the wife of the Attorney General speaking,” Bobby icily replied. He wasn’t as comforted by his faith, and he struggled with this latest loss—the third of his siblings to die, and the one with whom he was closest. While the rest of the family gathered as usual at Hyannis Port for Thanksgiving dinner the week after Jack’s funeral, Bobby chose to stay away and instead spend the holiday with Ethel and the children at Hickory Hill. Bobby swallowed his tears, trying to abide by the family dictum “Kennedys don’t cry.”

“It was like a tidal wave of grief,” Ethel recalled of Jack’s death. “To see this vibrant man with all his character and sense of fun and wonderful judgment, it was lost. Everyone was devastated.” Ethel didn’t know how to reach Bobby. “It was like [he] had lost both arms,” she said. “It was six months of just blackness.”

“Daddy became much more withdrawn after Jack died,” said Kathleen, recalling her father spending more time alone reading poetry and the Bible. “I think that he tried to really feel the pain. He said, ‘I’m going to dwell in the pain, and I’m going to understand that something terrible has happened.’ ”

Ethel gently pushed her husband back into the world—encouraging him to go to New York, for example, to represent the family at a ceremony to change the name of New York International Airport to John F. Kennedy International Airport—and, eventually, his friends credited her for keeping him from drowning in his grief. In 1964, after months of reflecting on God and loss and his own mortality, and after seeing his little brother, Ted, nearly killed in a plane crash, Bobby refocused and set his sights on a US Senate seat in New York. If he succeeded, he’d be joining Ted, who’d first won a seat in the assembly four years earlier and was running his first reelection campaign. Though Ted would be confined to a hospital bed for much of the campaign recuperating from a badly injured back from the
plane wreck, he was staying in the race, with wife Joan making appearances for him.

Bobby obviously couldn’t run where he’d long lived in Massachusetts—Ted already possessed a Massachusetts Senate seat, and not even the Kennedys had the chutzpah necessary to claim both—and by moving to Long Island, he faced predictable backlash for being a fair-weather resident and carpetbagger. Bobby responded with a pledge: “Whether I win or lose this election, I’m going to stay in the state of New York.” Despite the controversy, he was given rock-star treatment as he campaigned, stirring up scenes of frenzy everywhere he went. Women left lipstick on his face, and his campaign convertible was showered with confetti and rice as he drove down the street. “Three times, while standing in the car to shake hands, he was almost pulled over backwards,” wrote the Associated Press’s Relman Morin from the campaign trail. “After that, one aide grabbed his belt and another a leg to keep him upright.”

On November 3, 1964, he won, though not by as much as he had hoped. While Lyndon Johnson carried the state by an overwhelming 2.7 million votes in the presidential contest, Bobby won by only 700,000.

Bobby’s transition to the New York political scene was pretty transparent: Ethel and the children were moving back to Hickory Hill by January, and by 1966 Bobby’s name was being floated as a possible challenger to Lyndon B. Johnson for the presidency. Asked about one poll that showed voters would prefer Bobby on the Democratic ticket in 1968 by 51 percent to President Johnson’s 49 percent, Bobby said he wouldn’t be a candidate “under any foreseeable circumstances.”

9

Run, Bobby, Run

While most people believed that Bobby saw the Senate as a
stepping-stone to the Oval Office, he insisted, almost until he declared his candidacy, that he did not. On January 4, 1965—the same day he was sworn in as the junior senator from New York—he playfully declared to the press, “I have absolutely no Presidential ambitions.” A Cheshire cat smile appeared on his face. “And neither does my wife—
EthelBird
.”

However kittenish he might’ve been in acknowledging his own deep-seated ambitions, Bobby was also a realist who had trouble imagining a viable run for the Democratic nomination. Though Johnson was deeply unpopular and Bobby felt that LBJ’s policy on Vietnam was catastrophically wrong, Bobby knew that the odds were against a successful bid to replace a sitting president on the 1968 Democratic ticket. Whatever Johnson’s dismal public approval ratings, in the sixties the nominee for president was decided by the party officials who controlled the delegates; with only fourteen primaries, the public’s voice in the decision was somewhat muted. And even a weakened Johnson was still the most gifted political dealmaker of his generation, and he could be expected to fight effectively for his own interests.

Further, Kennedy circle heavyweights like Teddy Kennedy and Ted Sorensen argued against his running: They reminded Bobby of the potential to split and weaken the party by challenging the presumptive nominee. They also argued that Bobby would be seen as a selfish spoiler, chasing the presidency to expiate grief over his brother, or simply because he believed it was due him by dynastic right.

As of the mid-1960s, however, Bobby still had time to decide. In the meantime, he was a senator. While he and Ethel bought a five-room apartment on the east side of New York City, in the United Nations Towers, they spent little time there. The majority of their time was spent at Hickory Hill, and Ethel’s life continued largely as before: overseeing a rowdy brood of children, throwing raucous parties, and serving as Bobby’s cheerleader, confidante, and comfort. Parties during that time included a 1966 gala thrown in honor of Ambassador-at-large W. Averell Harriman’s seventy-fifth birthday, where Peter Duchin’s orchestra provided the evening’s entertainment. The next year, only a few months after the premature birth of Douglas Harriman Kennedy—child number ten—Ethel and Bobby celebrated their seventeenth wedding anniversary with marathon festivities.

Beginning on Embassy Row, the progressive party eventually made its way to Hickory Hill, where three film projectors showed quick-cut footage on the walls of the empty swimming pool; the Duchin orchestra was again the accompaniment, until three o’clock in the morning, when a jukebox took its place. The party was still going in the morning, when Ethel served breakfast for those assembled before leading the entire sleepless crew to mass for Douglas’s christening.

The Senate years were not all fun for Ethel. In September of 1966, her beloved older brother, George Jr., died when a small plane, piloted by an off-duty Air Force Master Sergeant and carrying George and three friends, botched a tight canyon landing and crashed at a remote ranch in the Idaho wilderness. George had lived a flamboyantly dangerous and hedonistic lifestyle—his funeral would be attended by several of his blonde, blue-eyed mistresses, known to family and friends as the Swedish Girls. His death as a heedless adventurer, crashing in a plane loaded down with guns and liquor for a twenty-person hunting expedition, was completely in character for George Jr. His adoring younger sister was devastated. Ethel dutifully attended the funerals of not only her brother but of another of the passengers, CIA official and RFK’s friend Dean Markham.

According to friend Sarah Davis, Ethel handled her brother’s death “with incredible grace and incredible bravery. She never got maudlin or dramatic. She never shed tears that anyone saw. She dealt with it by
ignoring it.” This stoic approach to death—the approach she took with her parents and her brother, and which she would later take to the deaths of her husband and two of her sons—is jarring in the hypertherapeutic era. Though professional grief counselors preach that there’s no wrong way to grieve, there’s something in Ethel’s approach to bereavement that strikes the contemporary observer as obtuse. But for a woman who survived so much, perhaps a little obtuseness is excusable. There’s a certain depth of loss where the fact of surviving it is more important than how it was survived.

As 1968 arrived, Bobby began reflecting with more urgency on whether to enter the presidential contest. His most enthusiastic cheerleader was Ethel, who in January got the kids to hang a “Run, Bobby, Run” banner out a bedroom window at Hickory Hill. At a January dinner Bobby worried that a presidential run would “go a long way toward proving everything that everybody who doesn’t like me has said about me . . . that I’m just a selfish, ambitious little SOB that can’t wait to get his hands on the White House.”

Ethel piped up: “You’re always talking as though people don’t like you. People do like you, and you’ve got to realize that.”

At a February meeting at Hickory Hill where RFK weighed a run with friends, aides, and allies, Ethel’s advice was direct and unequivocal: “Run. You’ll beat him. Run. Do it.” One of the meeting participants remarked that, since Ethel had spoken, the debate was over. Bobby insisted that it wasn’t Ethel’s decision, though he was clearly buoyed by her confidence.

One concern on most everybody’s mind—which Ethel never outwardly acknowledged—was Bobby’s physical safety should he seek the presidency. Jackie Kennedy gave her blessing directly to Bobby but later shared her true feelings with Arthur Schlesinger Jr.: “Do you know what I think will happen to Bobby? The same thing that happened to Jack,” she said. “There is so much hatred in this country, and more people hate Bobby than hated Jack . . .” The fear that Bobby—like his brother—would be cut down by an assassin was very real, and it was shared by many in the Kennedy family and entourage.

Blackmail was also a worry, though not one that Bobby ever openly acknowledged. President Johnson, with the help of a very eager FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover, had been gathering dirt on the Kennedys since Jack’s administration. LBJ was in possession of untold amounts of damaging information: on Bobby and Jack’s Cuba plots, on the brothers’ sexual escapades, on the little known fact that, as attorney general, Bobby had authorized wiretaps on Martin Luther King and others in the civil rights movement. Some in his circle worried that a ruthless LBJ wouldn’t hesitate to release information to capsize the campaign of a man with whom there was such long-standing mutual enmity.

But the voices urging him to run gained volume, and, as 1968 progressed, events made his decision easier. In February, a massive uprising by the Viet Cong—the Tet offensive—caught US forces in Vietnam flat-footed and gave Bobby more evidence that the war was a strategic and moral quagmire. And Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy entered the race and proved with a strong showing in New Hampshire that Johnson was not invulnerable. On March 16, 1968, Bobby Kennedy announced his candidacy.

He stood in the US Capitol, at the same podium where his brother had started his campaign a little more than eight years before. Ethel and nine of their ten children sat in the front row. Ethel’s adoring attention was only interrupted by hopeless attempts to corral the rowdier children. Kerry, then eight years old, raced around the Senate chambers. Four-year-old Christopher kicked a reporter in the shin; Matthew Maxwell wrestled with him.

“I do not run for the Presidency merely to oppose any man but to propose new policies,” Bobby said in his Boston-tinged monotone. “I run because I am convinced that this country is on a perilous course and because I have such strong feelings about what must be done.” He vowed to end the bloodshed both in Vietnam and in our cities at home, and to “close the gaps between black and white, rich and poor, young and old, in this country and around the world.”

The initial response was rapturous—for Bobby and for Ethel. “If Ethel Kennedy becomes First Lady,” Paul Healy wrote in the
New York Daily News
, “the White House will have the swingingest First Family
since Teddy Roosevelt’s day.” The day after the announcement, Bobby spoke to crowds of fifteen thousand and seventeen thousand screaming supporters at Kansas State University and the University of Kansas, respectively. The Kennedy camp was reassured by the excitement he had generated even in the heartland: The people at the Kansas rallies weren’t radical rabble-rousers, but clean-cut Middle Americans. “This is Kansas, fucking Kansas!”
Look
photographer Stanley Tretick exclaimed at one of the deafening Kansas events. “He’s going all the fucking way!”

The nomination still wasn’t a sure thing. More than half of the delegates were controlled by the South, where Bobby was hated for his pro–civil rights stance, or by party bosses beholden to Big Labor, whom he’d antagonized as head of the rackets committee, as attorney general, and as a senator. He had no particular liking for or rapport with the business community. And among the politically motivated student movements, support for Eugene McCarthy was strong; many young people saw in Bobby an opportunistic spoiler. He somehow had to create, in the words of Evan Thomas, a “coalition of the have-nots,” while simultaneously wooing any party boss he could get under his tent.

Ethel was, as ever, Bobby’s most avid supporter. She was with him as often as she could be for the campaign, and various minders looked after the younger Kennedy children at Hickory Hill. Kathleen and Joe, sixteen and fifteen, respectively, were both away at boarding schools, and the five youngest children, from one-year-old Douglas to ten-year-old Michael, were the charges of two nurses and a secretary. But Bobby Jr., fifteen, David, twelve, and Courtney, eleven, were less supervised. Ethel hired a handsome twenty-one-year-old named Bob Galland to look after them. Galland was a college dropout, but a devout Catholic; as a former Boy Scout, Ethel reasoned he could be their instructor in camping and sailing. He discovered soon after taking the job that he was more of a live-in nanny. He also discovered that, though often far away, Ethel had very specific ideas of how the children were to spend their time.

“One of her rules was, ‘You will watch the six-o’clock news every night because your father might be on,’ ” said Galland. “We did that religiously. They’d get real excited to see their parents. There was a lot of elation—‘Yea, there’s Dad! This is great!’ ” The fact that she and Bobby were so often
in the media was important to Ethel, and she kept a wary eye on the press. After Washington newspaper columnist Richard Harwood accused Bobby of being a “demagogue,” Ethel responded by approaching him on the campaign plane, crumpling up the offending newspaper, and throwing it in his face. When Ethel was campaigning in Indiana, a tongue-tied local TV reporter asked her about Bobby’s reputation among fellow senators as “worthless.” The reporter had meant to say “ruthless,” which would have been bad enough; “worthless” was beyond the pale. Ethel’s eyes took on a reptilian hardness. “I would use ‘brilliant’ to describe him myself because that’s what he is,” she hissed and then walked away.

Just two weeks after Bobby announced his candidacy, Johnson revealed to the nation that he wouldn’t be seeking reelection. Bobby was shocked. “Well, he didn’t deserve to be president anyway,” Ethel said to a near-catatonic Bobby, who’d gathered his advisers at the New York apartment. Bobby was quiet, his eyes glued to the television coverage. Ethel brought out the Scotch.

A few days later, on April 3, LBJ reluctantly received Bobby at the White House and assured him of his neutrality in the upcoming presidential contest. Both men knew he was lying. After Bobby left, Johnson met with Vice President Hubert Humphrey and pledged his behind-the-scenes backing. He also met that day with Eugene McCarthy, who’d won the Wisconsin primary on April 2. When Robert Kennedy’s name came up, a silent LBJ “drew the side of his hand across his throat.”

The next day, April 4, on his way to a campaign appearance in inner-city Indianapolis, Bobby was informed that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot in Memphis. By the time his plane had landed, it was confirmed that King was dead.