Kennedy Wives: Triumph and Tragedy in America's Most Public Family (10 page)

On October 3, 1955, Skakel’s plane exploded in the air over Oklahoma. He and Ann were killed instantly, as were two others flying with them. Georgeann, Ethel’s oldest sister, learned the news when Ann’s social secretary called her in the morning and asked, “What’s all this nonsense I hear about your parents being dead?” The news had been splashed across the
Greenwich Time
as the front-page banner headline: “Mr., Mrs. Skakel, 2 Pilots Die in Plane Crash . . . Exploded in Mid Air over Oklahoma; Were Flying to Coast on Business Trip.”

For years, Ethel would refuse to talk about her parents’ death. In 2012, after her daughter Rory, by then an Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker, asked to make a movie about her mother, Ethel opened up just slightly. “It was hard on everybody. It was,” Ethel said somberly about her parents’ deaths. Bobby—once again managing his brother Jack’s senatorial campaign—was supportive, she said. “I remember he was campaigning and I really felt it would be good to be with him, and, God love him, he got off the train and drove home. He had to drive all the way through the night, and he did it.”

As hundreds of people filled St. Mary’s on October 7 for the funeral, Ethel arrived with Bobby. Virginia Skakel remembered hugging her sister-in-law. “There were no tears from her, or from any of them,” she recalled. “Instead of crying, they laughed. It was their way of coping. It was the only way they could cope.”

It was the first of many tragedies that Ethel would experience, and she handled it the only way she knew how: with prayer and deflection. “She does go to mass every day,” her eldest daughter Kathleen would later say, “and you always see her holding the rosary, but she certainly doesn’t talk about it and she doesn’t discuss it and she doesn’t reflect on it. She wanted a lot of people around and, I would say, not solitude. I think that’s how she got through a lot of the really, really tough things.”

While Rose’s faith provided a framework within which she could ruminate quietly over her losses, Ethel’s faith seems to have been more reflexive, its consolations more automatic. Rather than providing a vocabulary for the process of grief, as it had for Rose, Ethel’s faith
replaced
grief. Those she lost were in heaven. God had a plan. That was the beginning, middle, and end of the story.

The deaths of George and Big Ann put an end to the madcap era of Rambleside. None of the children wanted the sprawling estate, and it sat on the market for five long years until it finally sold for $350,000. For Ethel, there would be no point in mourning its loss. She and Bobby were about to create their own magical kingdom for their kids on a similar estate near Washington.

7

Hickory Hill

When Ethel and Bobby first spied Hickory Hill—the estate
that would forever be linked to their legacy—it actually belonged to Jack and Jackie. The Georgian spread, which they bought for about $125,000 from the family of a late Supreme Court justice, stretched across six acres of beautifully landscaped grounds across the Potomac River from Washington. It was Jack and Jackie’s first time owning a home, and Jackie was hard at work designing and overseeing the renovation of a nursery for the baby, expected in September of 1956. However, after the little girl was delivered, stillborn, by cesarean section in August, Jackie couldn’t bear to stay in the McLean home anymore, so she and Jack sold it to Bobby and Ethel, who found it ideal to accommodate their fast-growing family. It was a beautiful, thirteen-bedroom, thirteen-bath estate of white brick with roots in the Civil War era—George Brinton McClellan, the general in charge of the Union Army during the war’s early years, made the home his headquarters. Like Rambleside, it was known for its trees—this time, hickories rather than elms—though it was far less opulent than Ethel’s childhood home.

She and Bobby bought it in 1956 and moved in with the children—which by now also included No. 5: a daughter named Courtney, born September 9, 1956. Ethel found out she was pregnant again just months after the family settled into the house. Michael was born February 27, 1958. After Michael, Ethel actually managed a nine-month rest before conceiving again.

Bobby’s prestige was steadily growing, first prompted by his head butting with Roy Cohn in the 1954 Army–McCarthy hearings. Cohn was the man whom McCarthy had hired as chief committee counsel to the Subcommittee on Investigations—the job Bobby had wanted. But as McCarthyism gained steam, the senator’s targets had widened to include many government agencies, universities, the defense industry, and the United Nations. His critics were hesitant to speak out for fear they’d be labeled Communists, an association that could cost them their jobs and livelihoods. McCarthy finally made a critical miscalculation when he launched a two-month investigation into Communist infiltration of the army. The assault backfired, incurring the wrath of not only army brass but also President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who’d devoted his life to the institution. The hearings that followed were televised and riveted the nation, and Bobby joined in, feeding questions to Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington and snickering as Jackson ripped apart McCarthy and Cohn. As Evan Thomas wrote in
Robert Kennedy: His Life
:

During a recess, Cohn stormed across the hearing room to Kennedy and threatened to “get” Senator Jackson. “You can’t get away with it, Cohn,” Kennedy snarled. The conversation rapidly deteriorated. “Do you want to fight right here?” Cohn demanded. He started to swing at Kennedy, but aides pulled them apart. With a tight smile, Kennedy turned away. The papers found sport the next morning: the headline in the
New York Daily News
was “Cohn, Kennedy Near Blows in ‘Hate’ Clash.”

The year after the hearings, Bobby became chief counsel of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. With McCarthy’s Communist hunts no longer en vogue, Bobby turned his attention to organized crime, working with the federal Bureau of Narcotics for a crash course in mobsters. He seemed fascinated by this lawless underworld. Here he was, the only Kennedy son so straight-laced that he was actually able to cash in on a $1,000 reward his father offered for not drinking or smoking until age twenty-one, joyriding with cops at night to learn about the dark forces that secretly ran the city. Once, a drunk in a bar recognized
Bobby’s photo from the McCarthy hearings and called him a “rich kid” and hurled insults at his father. Mel Finkelstein, a police photographer for the tabloids, was certain the drunk would slaughter Bobby in a fight, but as the man turned around, Bobby swung and caught him in the face, breaking his nose.

Soon, Bobby was zeroing in on the Teamsters Union. In 1957 an Associated Press story headlined “Senate Probers Link Rackets to Teamsters Union” laid out the latest allegations: “Senate investigators said today they will use secretly recorded gangster conversations and testimony from prostitutes, gamblers and others to show whether some West Coast officials of the Teamsters Union had ties with the underworld.” Bobby, by then a part of the Senate Rackets Investigating Committee, and its chairman, Senator John McClellan, were named in one newspaper report after another as the allegations surfaced: A Portland racketeer “spilled like Niagara Falls to a special Senate committee” that he was used as a front man to open up “gambling joints, houses of prostitution, punchboard operations and the like in Portland.”

Among Bobby’s targets: Teamsters president Dave Beck and vice president Jimmy Hoffa. It was harrowing work that earned Bobby plenty of enemies. The year before, syndicated labor columnist Victor Riesel had been attacked an hour after finishing a radio broadcast that assailed the leadership of a Long Island local of the International Union of Operating Engineers. A man emerged from the shadows and threw acid in Riesel’s eyes, leaving the columnist blinded for life. Once Bobby’s sights were turned on the Teamsters, he got an anonymous threat that the next victims of an acid attack would be his children. Unnerved, Ethel forbade the children to leave school at the end of the day with their classmates. Instead, they sat in the principal’s office until their mother came to pick them up in person. There’s no evidence, however, that Ethel even considered asking Bobby to back off for the sake of the family. In fact, quite the opposite.

“I think her inner Skakel came out and she was emboldened,” son Chris would say years later, “and I think that helped my father through that difficult time.”

Ethel became a regular fixture at many of Bobby’s racketeering hearings, often bringing the older kids with her. “I think it might’ve been a
little over their heads, but it gave them a taste of what their daddy did,” Ethel said later.

Sometimes she’d lead the youngsters in a cheer inside the car as they drove past Hoffa’s Washington headquarters. “What’s up there?” she’d ask, to which her children would reply, “The Teamsters Union!”

“And what do they do there?”

“Work overtime to keep Jimmy Hoffa out of jail!”

“And?” Ethel would prod.

“Which is where he belongs!” the children would squeal.

On September 8, 1959, when Ethel delivered Mary Kerry, who would go by her middle name, the family was gearing up for Jack’s presidential run. Three days after the birth, Bobby resigned from the Senate Rackets Committee. He and Ethel dove into the campaign without hesitation, leaving the children with nannies as they stumped nationwide. Later, daughter Kathleen—who turned nine the year of the election—said that she remembered 1960 mostly for “daddy’s absence.” He’d be gone for months-long stretches at a time, particularly during the hotly contested West Virginia primary, where each of the Kennedy wives was flown in to help. In September, Ethel headed to Chicago with her sister-in-law Joan. In three days, the two women attended well over a dozen rallies, meetings, and teas in private homes, primarily with women voters. The children sometimes joined the campaign, wearing special outfits and slapping “Nixon” stickers on stop signs to create a “Stop Nixon” message. “[Bobby] really wanted the children with him, so whenever we could, the children campaigned, too, and I think the children really loved it,” Ethel said.

In July,
Boston Globe
reporter Thomas Winship wrote a whimsical story describing the circuslike atmosphere that six of the youngsters created as Jack officially became the Democratic nominee in Los Angeles. “Kids spilling cokes on their pretty dresses and blue top coats, empty paper bags and broken balloons under the chairs,” Winship described. “Louella [
sic
] Hennessey had her hands full but her calm smiling face belied it. Somehow the kids never strayed very far from her.” Three of the
children had Brownie cameras in tow, though they seemed too distracted by all the balloons floating toward the ceiling to use them.

Ethel, while uncomfortable with public speaking, filled the role whenever it was asked of her. She and Bobby appeared on
The Tonight Show
with host Jack Paar, who jokingly introduced Mrs. Kennedy as “this lovely little girl here, the mother of seven children, who has given birth to her own precinct.”

“Do you have any news for us?” Paar prodded.

Ethel, catching the pregnancy innuendo, laughed. “No, I don’t!”

Asked what her children thought of the campaign, she quickly replied, “Mostly they think it’s taking an awfully long time for Uncle Jack to become president.” The audience laughed.

It was a grueling pace, but when the votes were counted, everyone was too excited to be exhausted, Ethel later recalled. The family gathered at the Hyannis Port house for a portrait. “Nobody looked tired in the photograph,” Ethel reflected. “I was just so full of joy knowing that the rest of the world would now know how great Jack was.”

The newly elected Jack needed someone in the cabinet he could trust absolutely, and over Bobby’s initial objections—and after Adlai Stevenson and Connecticut governor Abe Ribicoff both turned the position down—he appointed his little brother to the post of attorney general. Predictable charges of nepotism followed, but Bobby was easily confirmed.

The energetic faces of the “New Frontier” were enormously popular, especially when any of the kids were part of the equation. Seven-year-old Bobby Jr. once visited Uncle Jack at the White House bearing a gift: a wriggling salamander. A news photographer captured an image of a bemused Jack watching as Bobby made a home for the lizard in a vase. The accompanying story was appropriately perplexed: “There was this salamander named Shadrach presented to the President of the United States today, and the question is what does he do with it?”

Bobby Jr. had found the creature in his back yard, which was hardly a surprise. Much like the Rambleside of Ethel’s childhood, Hickory Hill was like an unregulated zoo, with ponies, horses, goats, pigs, cows, and chickens. Ethel once brought home a seal. “He had to be fed fish every day but he didn’t like the eyes, so there were always hundreds of eyes
all around,” Ethel later recalled. “Ugh. That we could’ve done without.” (The seal eventually was donated to the Washington Zoo after pushing Kathleen into the pool.) Ethel said the animals helped make Hickory Hill magical. “You’d be walking up to the front door and a herd of horses would come galloping by,” she said. “It was kind of unusual.”

Ethel also would host pet contests—sometimes for the best, sometimes for the most bizarre—and the Kennedy children, taking after their competitive mother, played to win. A supposed conflict of interest arose for family friend and humorist Art Buchwald, who was asked to help judge one of the contests. He later defended his calls in a tongue-in-cheek piece he wrote
in the
Boston Globe
under the headline “Judge Stays Impartial under Terrific Pressure.” “Then we got to the most unusual pet class,” Buchwald wrote. “This was a tough one, because one of the Kennedy children brought in either a large lizard or a small alligator. My 8-year-old daughter had entered a hamster and I was in a tough spot. Mrs. K
ennedy kept tugging my arm and my daughter kept tugging my shirt. I decided that there was a tie for first place.”

Ethel became a regular fixture in newspapers’ society sections, and the parties she threw at Hickory Hill surpassed the legends created at Rambleside. The press labeled her “Washington’s No. 1 Hostess” and filled their pages with tales of raucous poolside antics. Guests in fancy attire were routinely tossed into the pool in a rite of passage that came to be called “dunking.” The water capers climaxed in June 1962 at a party for Ethel and Bobby’s twelfth wedding anniversary, which was attended by some three hundred guests. Ethel laid some wooden planks across the pool and put a table and some chairs on top of the makeshift bridge. She and astronaut John Glenn tiptoed out and sat at the precariously positioned table, which predictably lurched, tossing Ethel into the water. Arthur M. Schlesinger—a Harvard historian, speechwriter, and special assistant to the president—plunged in next. “We changed our clothes and the party went pleasantly on,” Schlesinger recounted.