Kennedy Wives: Triumph and Tragedy in America's Most Public Family (9 page)

5

Bobby’s Wife

Faced with a choice between being Bobby’s wife and becoming a
nun, Ethel took the secular path and never looked back. Despite how different their personalities were, Ethel seemed the perfect match for Bobby, according to just about everyone who knew them. Bobby was the son that came after four straight daughters, and he wouldn’t get another brother for seven long years. He looked up to Joe Jr. and Jack, just as Ted would look up to him. Art Buchwald, the
Washington Post
humorist who became close friends with Bobby and Ethel, said that Bobby had an inferiority complex. “He just couldn’t live up to his brothers,” Buchwald said. “And he was caught in the middle there. I don’t think he got as much attention as the other kids. Therefore, he was always shy and always unsure of himself.” That changed, Buchwald said, when Bobby met Ethel. “Ethel was the one that changed him and gave him complete loyalty and ego building.”

The two announced their engagement at a lunch gathering at the Skakel home in early 1950. “Ethel was head-over-heels in love with Bobby. That’s all she talked about and wanted,” said Ann Marie O’Hagan Murphy, a friend. “She couldn’t wait for the weekends so she could see Bobby. As soon as she started going with him, it was
Bobby, Bobby, Bobby
; it was
Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy
—and not so much Skakel anymore.”

Her engagement ring was a showstopper, a beautiful marquise diamond that Ethel had selected from a huge tray of rings from Cartier’s that Bobby had delivered to Rambleside. The engagement made Bobby’s hometown paper, the
Boston Globe
, May 28, 1950, with a story that declared the union the “ideal romance.” A photo of Ethel’s young, fresh face, with a button nose and large teeth accentuated by her thin upper lip,
accompanied the inside-page story. “The difficulty in writing about Miss Skakel, a tiny brunette with large brown eyes, is that everyone makes the identical comments,” wrote Mary Cremmen in May 1950. “Each person to whom I spoke mentioned her excellent swimming ability, the many blue ribbons she had won for horsemanship at Madison Square Garden, and then shifted to her personality.” Among the descriptions: charming, vivacious, and unaffected.

Bobby and Ethel’s impending wedding was the talk of Greenwich. Every hotel room in town was booked. The Skakels and Kennedys separately would have spared no expense, and united, they hosted one of the most lavish events Greenwich had ever seen. This, even as the two families predictably butted heads—reportedly because the Skakels refused to invite Joe and Rose to stay at Rambleside for the festivities, forcing the elder Kennedys to find a hotel room. But whatever tensions there were, the families buried them for the big day. The ceremony was held at the ornate St. Mary’s Church, where Ann went to daily mass. Inside, the stone building was filled with white peonies, regal lilies, and dogwood. Jack was Bobby’s best man; Teddy was one of the many ushers. (Ethel would later recall he had twenty-one.) Pat Skakel Cuffe, once Bobby’s girlfriend, was matron of honor; Little Ann, Ethel’s youngest sister, was maid of honor. As Ethel readied to walk down the aisle, the church filled with the tenor singing of Michael O’Higgins, a vocalist from the Royal Irish Academy of music who was flown from Dublin for the affair.

The twenty-two-year-old bride looked lovely in a modest white satin gown with a bateau neckline and a fitted bodice. Her long veil was double tulle attached to a cap of Point Venise lace, and she had a simple, single strand of pearls on her neck. In her hands, a bouquet of stephanotis, eucharis lilies, and lilies of the valley. “There were fountains of champagne,” Ethel remembered. “Lots of dancing, lots of dogs all over everything.” The reception was at the Skakels’ opulent home, transformed to accommodate some six hundred guests. It was there that Bobby swept Ethel onto the dance floor. Soon, Jack cut in, and after a few spins, Ted approached to have his turn with the bride. But by then, Joe had grown impatient, so he walked out and elbowed his way in front of Ted to dance with his first daughter-in-law.

Ethel was the first Kennedy wife of the new generation, and she immersed herself completely in the role. After the wedding she and Bobby flew to Hawaii to start their three-month honeymoon. They stayed in the most lavish suites money could buy in plush resort hotels on Waikiki Beach and Maui. Each day, the bridal suite was filled with fresh, fragrant orchids. Once they were done strolling the beaches and lounging beneath the coconut trees, they flew to Los Angeles and bought a convertible to drive across the country. It was “just will of the wisp,” Ethel would later say. “We’d go to Montana, and then we’d go to a southern state. We went wherever we had friends.”

Bobby was in his last year studying at the University of Virginia School of Law—itself a storied institution, founded as part of Thomas Jefferson’s famed “academical village” in 1819—and Ethel settled in as a homemaker. She was, by all accounts, horrible at it. Her children would later remember her trying to fry a banana in petroleum jelly. This was one challenge she didn’t feel like rising to meet, so she hired a cook; from then on in their marriage, she cooked only in emergencies.

Unlike some of the later Kennedy unions, Ethel and Bobby truly seemed to enjoy spending their leisure time together, often walking hand-in-hand to morning mass at Holy Comforter, a small Roman Catholic church near campus, and later to the Farmington Country Club to battle on the tennis court until it was time for dinner. The new wife wanted her marriage to be a partnership, so she set out to support Bobby in whatever goals he set for himself. When Bobby would give a speech, Ethel would be there to listen. When he began making court appearances, she attended as many as she could. “I like to see Bobby in action,” she once said. Even after she began having children, she would take all but the youngest with her to watch their father at work.

Bobby’s work ethic was stellar and his goals lofty. He was elected president of the Student Legal Forum, which invited big names to campus to lead discussions on the issues of the day. Bobby at times would turn to Joe for help in recruiting national figures, and when the father and son worked together, the sessions were packed. “He was careful to
choose them from all shades of political and social opinion,” author Lester David wrote. Among the guests: liberal Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, and Thurman Arnold, President Franklin Roosevelt’s assistant attorney general, known for his trust-busting campaign. But it was Bobby’s invitation to Ralph Bunche that would expand Ethel’s horizons. Bunche, a United Nations official, was the first African American to win a Nobel Peace Prize. He accepted the invitation to speak on the condition that he be allowed to speak to an integrated crowd—a tricky request in Charlottesville, Virginia, where the law called for separation of races in all public places. The request naturally incensed the segregationists in the small Southern town, but Bobby pleaded Bunche’s case. He argued the case to University President Colgate Darden by pointing to a Supreme Court decision based in Texas that decided that any educational event at any law school in the country must be desegregated. Darden agreed. “When, at long last, Dr. Bunche arrived at Cabell Hall, it was filled to capacity,” US Attorney General Eric Holder would tell a group of students graduating from the UVA law school in 2011. “And, for the first time in history, nearly a third of the seats were taken by African Americans.”

Bunche’s impact on the young Kennedy couple wouldn’t end there. Because of the angry threats lobbed at the doctor, Bobby and Ethel decided the safest place for him to stay would be their home. “He was so charming and non-complaining,” Ethel later recalled, “but they did throw things at our house all night long. It was so unthinkable and outrageous. You got a little taste of what black people in our country had to go through at that time.”

Joseph McCarthy’s visit was almost as upsetting to the liberals on campus. The Wisconsin senator was gaining national attention with his allegations that members of the Communist Party had infiltrated the government in high places. He tossed around words like “treason,” “espionage,” and “corruption.” The Skakels had long been anti-Communist and idolized McCarthy as soon as he entered the scene. Ethel’s sister Pat had even lectured to students that “Christians should work as hard for Christianity as Communists were working for communism,” and she and her brother George Jr. would intercept and toss out literature and pamphlets
they deemed too left-leaning. When Bobby invited McCarthy in the fall of 1950, Ethel was thrilled, and friends said she began planning her most lavish party yet.

Years later, when asked if she truly had worried about the “Communist threat,” Ethel didn’t hesitate: “Yes, I did,” she said. “Especially growing up in a Republican atmosphere, they were always talking about the Communists.” McCarthy had been a personal friend, too, having dated two Kennedy girls, Pat and Eunice. Bobby later would join McCarthy’s Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, and then he would leave when he determined that McCarthy’s allegations were overblown and his tactics questionable. He left McCarthy’s orbit before McCarthy completely self-destructed, but their association would be an embarrassment for the rest of Bobby’s life. In the mid-1960s, he told writer Peter Maas that, “at the time, I thought there was a serious internal security threat to the United States . . . and Joe McCarthy seemed to be the only one who was doing anything about it.” Bobby paused, and concluded, “I was wrong.”

In his work for the UVA Student Legal Forum, Bobby sometimes drew his speakers from a little closer to home. Joe was invited, as was Jack, who was about to launch his first senatorial campaign. His forum speech went well, but the visit caused some tension with Ethel, who, in a flurry of uncharacteristic domesticity, had readied a room for Jack in the couple’s modest Charlottesville home and had overseen the preparation of an elaborate dinner in his honor. Jack arrived at dinner late, and when he finally appeared, he wasn’t alone. With him was a French girl dressed in a short, tight skirt, tight top, and platform heels. Jack announced he’d be staying at a hotel rather than with his brother. Ethel fumed. “You know I told you I was fixing up the guest room for you. I had flowers in the room and everything!” she complained.

While Jack’s sexual appetite was well known and eventually well documented, Bobby’s wasn’t as voracious, and certainly wasn’t as visible. Before marrying Ethel, he had fallen in love with a beautiful British actress named Joan Winmill, whom he’d met on a visit to London in 1948, not long after Kathleen’s death. While there, he had attended a play called
The Chiltern Hundreds
, about a beautiful young American millionairess who—in defiance of her Catholic family—marries the Protestant
son of an English Earl. It was transparently based on Kathleen’s story, and twenty-seven-year-old Winmill played the lead, which was based on her. The two began a love affair. Bobby had stood at a crossroads, torn between two women who represented two entirely different paths in life, and he’d chosen exuberant, energetic Ethel. After marriage, Bobby, like his brothers, may have had affairs outside of marriage. Over the years, a long list of alleged conquests has surfaced. Some of the names seem plausible—Marilyn Monroe, for example—and others less so, but if Ethel knew about any such dalliances, she has never acknowledged them.

From the beginning of their marriage, Bobby seemed utterly devoted to his wife, and she invested everything into his career and happiness. In June 1951, as Bobby graduated middle of his class with a mediocre grade-point average of 2.54, Ethel was about to make him a very happy husband indeed: She was ready to give birth to their first child.

6

First Births, First Deaths

While the couple was thrilled to be the first to make Rose and
Joe grandparents, Ethel was less stoked about the physical symptoms of pregnancy. She was used to running around and being active—and, with later pregnancies, she’d make headlines for doing just that—but this first experience was uncomfortable and, even worse, limiting. The nausea, the physical twinges and heartburn—all of it prompted Ethel to stop the tennis playing and the swimming and instead act, as biographer Jerry Oppenheimer put it, “like a patient preparing for major surgery.” Sue Drake, a friend of Ethel’s, recalled that the mom-to-be was sick and miserable initially. “She was basically terrified by the whole thing,” Drake said. “She wanted to do what was right, but she was scared.” It didn’t help that the baby hung on a good two weeks past Ethel’s due date.

Bobby and Ethel had moved into a Rambleside guesthouse in the summer of 1951 to await the birth. One night as they watched television with the family in the sitting room, Ethel let out a scream. Bobby rushed his twenty-three-year-old wife to Greenwich Hospital and called on trusted Nurse Hennessey to help.

“He called me and said, ‘Ethel has gone to the hospital, and the doctor is kind of worried. . . . Will you come down? Will you fly right down?’ ” Hennessey hesitated. She didn’t like to fly at all, but she refused to fly alone, so Bobby flew up, met her at the airport, and boarded with her on a return flight, and the two arrived in Greenwich to be by Ethel’s side.

On July 4th Ethel gave birth to a healthy daughter they named Kathleen, after Bobby’s late sister, Kick. Senator Joseph McCarthy—for whom Bobby was still working—would be the child’s godfather. Hennessey, who would attend the birth of all of Ethel’s eleven children, recalled that the young mother was anxious and depressed after the birth. “Ethel had a lot of problems,” the nurse later said. “I wouldn’t call it a nervous breakdown. I would say it was exaggerated anxiety. It was a very difficult, quite hard delivery for Ethel and she was suffering when I got there.” Physically, it had been a grueling delivery, one that would leave Ethel aching for days with an internal injury caused by the baby being so big—likely in part because it was overdue—inside of Ethel’s petite frame. It didn’t help Ethel’s mental state that she had trouble nursing Kathleen and had to bottle feed her instead, Hennessey said.

As happens with many new moms, the expected feelings of motherly love and joy didn’t immediately wash over Ethel, and some of her recent worries bubbled to the surface. She told Hennessey that she’d been lonely in the little house in Charlottesville, where Bobby studied all the time and she mostly had superficial friends. “With her old friends she could discuss intimate things,” Hennessey later said. “In Charlottesville, Ethel didn’t have that luxury. She didn’t have her mother or father or an aunt or an old friend to help her. She felt she had been thrown into pregnancy far away from home.” And now that the baby was born, she worried about the family’s next step. “Nothing in her life was settled and that bothered her,” Hennessey said. “She was concerned that she didn’t have her own home with Bobby to go back to. She didn’t feel it was natural going back to her parents’ house.”

It was a rare, unguarded moment for Ethel, who usually put on a happy front for others, and this instance of atypical vulnerability wasn’t shared with the rest of the family—possibly not even Bobby, Hennessey said. When Ethel finally left the hospital for Rambleside two weeks after giving birth, she immediately ordered a dozen red roses for Rose Kennedy, starting a tradition that she’d keep for ten more births—a tribute to the family matriarch and Ethel’s acknowledged role model. Hennessey moved into a guesthouse with the baby, and every morning, she’d bring Kathleen to Ethel in the main house, where the new mom stayed with Bobby. The proud father seemed
thrilled to have a girl because he could cuddle her. “Little boys are different,” Hennessey remembered him saying. “You can love a little girl.”

That summer, Ethel was active again. Returning to Hyannis Port, she and Bobby swam, sailed, and took long walks along the beach. But Bobby was still weighing his next career move, and he was gone for long stints at his father’s behest while he sorted out the future. Bobby debated joining a law firm in New York, but public service had been hammered into him so much as a young man that entering private practice would have been a betrayal of the family ethos. He decided to put his connections to use: Senator McCarthy helped him get his first job with the Department of Justice’s Internal Security Division, where Bobby would earn $4,200 a year investigating records kept by suspected spies. Ethel was thrilled that they’d be able to settle down, especially as she learned in the fall of 1951 that she was already pregnant again. But the flirtation with stability would be short-lived. Jack was going to run for the Senate in 1952, and he tapped Bobby to be his campaign manager. Bobby had worked for the Justice Department for just three months. “It was a major decision,” Ethel recalled. “He felt he was just starting out his own career and he had to put it on the back burner. It was a big sacrifice.”

Ethel already had tasted Kennedy campaigning during Jack’s congressional bid, but now, as a wife and full-fledged member of the family, she would be expected to play a much more visible role. She joined Rose and Jack’s sisters in hosting the famous tea parties and remained front and center as the summer waned, even as her stomach ballooned in the later months of her pregnancy.

Privately, Ethel worried about her unborn baby. Her sister Georgeann, also pregnant, had been stricken with rubella—German measles—which was known to affect fetuses in utero. Fear plagued Georgeann’s pregnancy, and unfortunately, Alexandra was born blind and deaf, with profound developmental disabilities. She labored to breathe and eventually was placed in a home for the terminally ill. Ethel prayed on her rosary that her own unborn child wasn’t affected, as she had been in contact with Georgeann when the vicious illness developed. Her worries proved unfounded: on September 24, 1952, Ethel gave birth to a healthy boy that Bobby chose to name Joe, after his departed older brother.

“All of her prayers had worked,” Hennessey later said, providing a clue to understanding her and Ethel’s basic affinity. “As soon as she was told the baby was fine, she visibly relaxed.” It was not the only good news the Kennedys enjoyed that fall: in November, Jack won election to the Senate.

By the time she was married, Ethel had parted ways with her Republican upbringing so much that she would later wince when admitting that her parents weren’t “bedrock Democrats.” “I just totally put the Republican part behind me,” she later said. The Skakels took notice, she added with an eye roll: “I think they thought I was a little Communist.” The political divide eventually translated into a personal one, family members told Oppenheimer. Though the two families were seemingly similar on paper—large, Irish Catholic, rich—theirs was a clash of personalities. The Kennedys saw the Skakels as obscene and boorish; the Skakels saw the Kennedys as amoral hypocrites. Ethel’s mother, Big Ann, found it especially offensive that Joe engaged in such flagrant affairs, and she lost respect for Rose because of how much she tolerated his behavior. Neither Ann nor George cared much whether Jack won his Senate seat, nor were they impressed with the publicity Ethel was getting for helping the campaign. “The only talk about the Kennedys was the jokes the Skakels made about them,” said Virginia Skakel, who married Ethel’s brother Jim in 1952. “There was no closeness between the two families at all.”

Once, after the Senate campaign, Ethel’s brother George Jr. sailed with Jack in a race off Martha’s Vineyard. Jack barked at him to adjust the sheets, but George Jr. was sure that if he followed the instructions, they’d lose the race. “Look, Jack,” he shot back, “are you going to keep screaming at me to trim this sail when I know damned well better than you do how it ought to be trimmed?” Jack yelled at him to “shut the hell up and do as you’re told!” An insulted George Jr. flipped Jack the bird, jumped into the water, and swam two miles back to shore, leaving the senator without a crew.

The two families clashed when it came to money as well. Though Big Ann was always on the lookout for a bargain, she was not cheap, and she’d raised her children without any concept of budgeting. Once, when told
that her checking account was overdrawn, Ethel said naively, “It can’t be. I still have some checks left.” This caused some friction and prompted Rose to try to convince Ethel’s parents to help reel in their daughter’s shopping sprees, but Big Ann wasn’t interested in passing along the message. “If Bobby can’t treat Ethel in the manner to which she’s accustomed, we’ll just take her back,” she said, later adding, “I thought you Kennedys had nothing but money.”

Rose would tactfully try to rein in her daughter-in-law. Once, she wrote her a letter: “Bobby took me to the top floor of your house the other evening and I noticed a Jaeger-LeCoultre clock in one of the maid’s rooms,” she began, noting that the fancy clocks sold for “$50 or $60 in Switzerland.” “It is very easy to get a good electric clock for $4.95 and this would be most suitable for the maid’s room.”

Joe wasn’t as delicate. At a family gathering, he barked that all of the children were spending well beyond their means, except for Joan and Ted. “No one appears to have the slightest concern for how much they spend,” Joe said. Then he zeroed in on Bobby’s wife. “Ethel, you are the worst,” he said. “There isn’t the slightest indication that you have any idea what you spend all your money on. Bills come in from all over the country for every conceivable item. It is utterly ridiculous to display such disregard for money.”

“Dad, I think you have made your point,” Bobby interjected just as Ethel, red-faced and tearful, ran from the room. Bobby chased after her. After a few moments, they reemerged. “Ethel, don’t worry,” Jack said. “We’ve come to the conclusion that the only solution is to have Dad work harder.”

Bobby knew it was time for him to work harder, too. After Jack’s election, he again needed a job, and he again turned to Senator McCarthy for help. McCarthy had been made chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Government Operations Committee, more commonly called the McCarthy Committee. Bobby didn’t land the high-profile job he wanted—McCarthy had already promised it to Roy Cohn and Bobby still didn’t have a lot of post-graduate experience—but he was offered a job to be the committee general counsel’s assistant. McCarthy said Bobby could move up as he gained experience. After conferring with his father, Bobby took the gig, which paid just ninety-five
dollars a week. It didn’t last long. By November 1953, after a public confrontation with Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s right-hand man, Bobby had resigned and taken a job assisting his father on a presidential committee on government reform.

Ethel was sent to Washington to go house hunting, and she eventually found a furnished four-bedroom detached home—one of the few in Georgetown—near the entrance of Dumbarton Oaks. It was outside of the $500-a-month limit Bobby had set for Ethel, but she managed to charm the owner into dropping the rent. Finally, after more than two years of bouncing between her parents’ home and her in-laws, Ethel had an address she could call her own. Soon, she’d begin filling it with more children. On January 17, 1954, Ethel gave birth to the couple’s second son, Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. David Anthony followed on June 15 the next year.

Four months after David was born, tragedy struck the Skakel family. George and Big Ann had just thrown an anniversary party for their youngest daughter at Rambleside and were headed to California, where George had been shifting gears from petroleum coke to real-estate development. George loved to fly but wasn’t crazy about commercial flights, so he began buying surplus military aircraft from the government, which he’d then have converted for civilian use. He and Ann would set off on a whim, and access became a perk of working for Great Lakes Carbon. “George Skakel was quite fond of the old bomber, but others found the plane uncomfortable,” Oppenheimer wrote. “Passengers were forced to sit in the bomb-bay section and had to crawl on their bellies to get from one end of the ship to other. And a few had recently questioned its safety.” Some said they smelled the sickly stench of fuel inside the plane, but when they alerted the pilot, he shrugged off the concerns.