The Kennedy Heirs: John, Caroline, and the New Generation

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  John chose Cumberland Island off the coast of Georgia as the wedding location, “as far off the beaten path as you can get,” he told John Perry Barlow, who attended the ceremony. In the end, John would get his wish: not one photographer would be in sight to capture Carolyn’s shining and eager face during the private and romantic ceremony. It took place in small wood-framed First African Baptist Church on Cumberland on September 21, 1996. The only lens man present was Denis Reggie (no relation to Vicki Reggie), who had been photographing Kennedy weddings since 1980.

  Carolyn looked stunning in a forty-thousand-dollar pearl-colored silk crepe gown with a tulle silk veil, along with beaded satin Manolo Blahniks. She also wore long silk gloves. Her hair was pulled into an elegant chignon, the bun pinned with a clip that had belonged to Jackie. John looked perfectly attired in a single-breasted dark blue wool suit with a pale blue silk tie, white piqué vest, and his father’s wristwatch. The photo of him kissing his wife’s hand as the two left the church, taken by Reggie, is a classic. Anyone who has ever laid eyes on it remembers it fondly.

  Of course, John’s best man was Anthony, who was doing a lot better these days. For John, seeing him looking vital and handsome in a natty suit and tie on this special day was a real treat. “When you spot a John waiting out in the rain,” Anthony said to John as he straightened his tie. John finished, “Chances are he’s insane as only a John can be for a Jane.” As usual, no one around them knew what in the world they were talking about. Never would they have guessed that these were lyrics from Guys and Dolls—so typical of John and Anthony.

  PART IV

  Family Secrets

  The Problem with Michael

  To state that the cultivation of the family’s public image was everything to the Kennedys seems somehow absurd. Of course they cared about how things looked. One would think, then, that they would have been able to find some way to stay clear of controversy. However, that’s easier said than done for powerful, high-profile people like the Kennedys simply because the premise ignores the obvious: families are made up of individuals, and each person’s life story is a unique combination of influences and circumstances. Put it this way: when someone from an influential family closes his eyes to go to sleep at night, his thoughts in those solitary moments usually don’t have to do with the greater good as much as they do with whatever is ailing him personally—his vices, his challenges … his pain, his sorrows … his hopes, his dreams for his own life. If those concerns somehow dovetail with what’s best for his family, all the better. Often, though, they don’t. Certainly Michael Kennedy’s experience was that he didn’t much care about what was best for the family. He barely cared about what was best for him—and that was the problem.

  To the outside world, it seemed as if everything came easy for Michael. By 1994, at the age of thirty-six, he seemed to be well-adjusted, successful, and even happy. Of course, that was also the case with most Kennedys of his generation. Privately, though, just as was true for many of his siblings and relatives, it was a different story. Behind closed doors, Michael had been struggling for most of his life.

  Michael LeMoyne Kennedy, the fourth of Bobby and Ethel Kennedy’s sons, was born on February 27, 1958. As a youngster, he was good-looking, with a thick head of dark hair, hazel eyes—almost green—and a gleaming but bucktoothed smile. One couldn’t help but also notice that Michael had a weak chin, unlike his more square-jawed siblings. The way his face sloped to a point made him appear less powerful, maybe less formidable, than most of his relatives, but definitely more endearing. Even in photographs taken of him as an adult, he still looked like a little kid.

  From the time he was about ten, Michael was a relentless loner, no easy feat given the number of boisterous family members in the household and how little opportunity there was for anyone to have a moment of solitude. Michael used to find ways to be by himself, though. There were times his mother couldn’t even find him. When he was eleven and seemed to vanish, Ethel discovered him under a bed in one of the thirteen bedrooms of Hickory Hill. “What are you doing under there?” she asked. “Hiding,” he answered. “From who?” The answer back was, “Everyone.” He shared with Fina Harvin that his favorite hiding spot was in the hayloft of Hickory Hill’s barn in a fort he’d make from hay bales.

  Michael didn’t always need to find a hiding place, though; he could somehow blend in, disappear into the crowd as if he wasn’t even there. “Michael could hide in plain sight” is how Fina put it. “Mrs. Kennedy was concerned about him at an early age. The thing about Michael is that he was born with webbed feet. Maybe he felt insecure about it, I don’t know. I only know that Mrs. Kennedy forbade everyone from ever mentioning it. She began to pay special attention to him. They got very close. The other kids started saying he was her favorite, and maybe he was.” Michael always regretted that Ethel had had his toes surgically corrected. Joking, he used to say he felt the webbing might actually have helped to make him an Olympic swimmer.

  Bobby Kennedy Jr. put it this way in his book, American Values: “Michael was Mummy’s favorite. But no one was jealous of her love for him because he was everybody else’s favorite, too.” He also wrote, “My mother’s perpetual annoyance at me seemed less a rational response to my mischief than the outcome of some volatile chemical reaction; my mere presence seemed to agitate her. Michael provoked the opposite reflex: his proximity triggered in her a calming, soporific effect. When my appearance pitched my mom into a fit, my siblings knew to summon Michael to pacify her.”

  Prior to the age of ten, Michael had been an engaging child; he was funny, he loved to play, he was full of good humor. He would go into the servants’ dining room and beg Ena Bernard and the other live-ins for cookies, and they couldn’t resist giving them to him because he was just so cute. He’d always be sure to put extra ones in his pockets for all his siblings, counting them carefully to make certain he had enough. Ethel would chastise him, saying, “Leave those poor people alone,” speaking of the help. “They have enough problems.” Everyone loved him, though, and would smile whenever he came tearing into the servants’ quarters. However, all that seemed to change in June 1968.

  Like the rest of his siblings, Michael’s eyes had always lit up whenever “Daddy” walked into the room. Bobby had been the kind of father who took the time to bond with each of his kids, and there were many of them by 1968, ten in all. Little Michael loved, in particular, those bedtime moments when Bobby would read stories from the Bible that somehow—at least the way Bobby read them—always seemed so exciting. While his son was just one of many, Bobby had a way of making him feel special, just as he did his other children. Nothing was more fun for Michael than when his father would take the boys into the bathroom and teach them how to shave—and this was years before puberty had set in for most of them—with just a bladeless razor running across cream-lathered, smooth faces. While Ethel was usually withholding when it came to doling out affection, Bobby was more forthcoming.

  Michael was particularly affected by the war that was presently raging in Vietnam; February 1968 marked its deadliest period, with more than 500 Americans killed in action and more than 2,500 wounded. It was customary for all the kids to gather in front of the television and watch the news in order to stay informed. There was a point when Bobby thought maybe the smaller ones shouldn’t watch the news, but Ethel disagreed, saying she felt they all needed to be aware of what was going on. While the others seemed able to take the bad news and not internalize it, Michael was somehow more affected by it, maybe even more scared of it.

  When Bobby was taken from them, each child responded in his or her own way. Michael, for his part, just shut down—and he never opened up again. The change in his personality was instant, and permanent. It was as if life at Hickory Hill was just too much for him, what with all the kids, not to mention the animals—the snakes, hamsters, hawks, sheep, dogs, rabbits, pigs, iguanas, “and we even had goats, burros, and a bear,” exclaimed governess Ena Bernard’s daughter, Fi
na. “There was constant madness,” she said. “When he was ten, Michael used to answer the phone, ‘Confusion, here.’ My mother became closest to Michael in a lot of ways. Mrs. Kennedy trusted him to her to make sure he got the attention he needed, to make sure he didn’t get lost in the family. There were a lot of times you’d hear my mom and Mrs. Kennedy whispering about Michael, trying to figure out what else could be done for him. He was always a big concern.”

  As a teenager, because of his retiring personality, everyone began to think of Michael as being the most sensitive of the bunch. “Michael was a peacemaker,” recalled his brother Bobby. “A family friend once made the observation that if Michael entered a room where a fight was about to break out, he would have a calming effect that would avert the conflict. As for himself, he never lost his temper and he never got flustered. Everyone who knew Michael eventually remarked on his extraordinary capacity to function in perfect calm amid chaos, whether it was dinner with ten screaming siblings, paddling a kayak through the most ferocious white water, or bringing a sailboat home through a gale. Most remarkably, he had the ability to inspire a similar composure in others.” While it was true that some in the family viewed Michael as a calm center in the middle of a storm, others had a different view. “What we began to see is that there’s a big difference between easygoing and sensitive and sad and isolated,” said Noelle Bombardier, the property manager at Hickory Hill. “If anything, not only was Michael different, seeming disconnected and not really a part of things, as he got older something else seemed amiss: I think he actually began to lack simple empathy.”

  “If one of Michael’s siblings was hurt playing or injured in sports, Michael shrugged it off, while the others glommed onto the wounded Kennedy,” Joseph Gargan once recalled. “When one of the many animals that lived at Hickory Hill was ill, all of his siblings would be sick with worry—but not Michael. He didn’t really seem to even care about his mom, or at least he didn’t know how to show it; on Mother’s Day, all of the children would make cards for Ethel, spending hours on their projects and then presenting them proudly on the special day. Not Michael.”

  It was true. Fina Harvin would sit Michael down and ask, “Don’t you love your mummy? How come she didn’t get a present?” He would look at her and just shrug. “Okay, but next year,” she’d say, “your mummy gets a card.”

  “Once, his uncle Ted was playing football with the kids and Michael took a tumble,” recalled Leah Mason. “The Senator and Mrs. Kennedy and everyone else ran over to him to make sure he was okay, and Michael just sat there staring into space. ‘Jesus Christ. This kid wouldn’t know a real emotion if it hit him over the head,’ the Senator said. Mrs. Kennedy smacked Ted hard across the chest. ‘Don’t say that, Teddy,’ she exclaimed. ‘That’s not true.’”

  Michael was self-aware enough to realize that something was different about him, as evidenced by a statement he once made to one of his closest friends when he was in his late twenties: “I act like I care. People think I care. But if I really analyze it, I mean if I really think about it, I realize that I actually don’t care about much.”

  As he grew up, one thing was certain about Michael Kennedy: when it came to athletics, no one could hold a candle to him. “He was the greatest athlete of our generation,” said Bobby Kennedy. “Timmy Shriver, a spectacular athlete, told me that Michael was so gifted that at one point he stopped being jealous and reconciled himself to admiring him. His speed was legendary. He could run circles around any of us in football, and I never saw him beaten in a sprint even when he raced two NFL fullbacks on Grandma’s lawn. He could master any sport—squash, windsurfing, snowboarding, paddle tennis, golf—in days. More than once, his athletic ability saved his life. A skidding car threatened to crush him against another vehicle on an icy Boston street. Michael vaulted vertically, landing with a foot on each car before the crash, then surfed down Boylston Street.”

  “Even though athletic risk-taking was certainly par for the course for Kennedys, Michael was really over the top with it,” added one friend of his who knew him as a young man. “This he cared about. This. Escaping death while kayaking or sailing or skiing was, from my perspective anyway, the one thing that truly animated him. Being a junkie for danger was okay, I thought. But it bothered me a lot when he would say, ‘I’m just trying to figure out some way to feel alive.’”

  When he was a teenager at St. Paul’s boarding school in Concord, New Hampshire, Michael met the blond and lovely Victoria Denise Gifford—Vicki. Her father was the famous football player and television announcer Frank Gifford, and her stepmother the talk-show host and singer Kathie Lee Gifford. In the 1970s, Ethel had dated Frank, though not seriously.

  Michael and Vicki had a whirlwind relationship before marrying in a Catholic ceremony at St. Ignatius Loyola in Manhattan on March 14, 1981. They would go on to have three children, Michael LeMoyne Jr. in January 1983, Kyle Francis in January 1984, and Rory Gifford in November 1987.

  In academics was where Michael also shone, first at Harvard and then at the University of Virginia Law School, from which he graduated in 1984. He, along with his brother Max, also became one of the family’s keepers of the flame; both would carefully study the smallest details of their father’s life and times. When a writer wanted access to the Kennedy Library, it was usually Michael who would have to be convinced. “I’m going to sit behind you and watch you and make sure you get the right files and do the proper research,” he told this biographer when I was working on a previous book about his family. He wasn’t kidding. He did what he threatened to do, sat and watched and took his own notes on the research at hand, and he did so for more than six hours.

  After he graduated from law school, Michael was recruited by his older brother Joe to join the company he had started called Citizens Energy. Joe, when he was fresh out of the University of Massachusetts back in 1979, had started the venture to alleviate the burden of heating bills for the poor during the oil crisis of that year. Because he was so smart and industrious, Joe’s company absolutely soared, even though it was rooted in philanthropy. Eight years later, when Joe entered the family business of politics and was elected to Congress, he put Michael in charge of Citizens. Michael and his partner, Wilber James, a former Peace Corps volunteer who had been with the company from its outset, then split up the Citizens empire: Michael became president and CEO of Citizens Energy, the nonprofit end of the company, and James president and CEO of Citizens Corporation, the profit-making arm.

  During the course of about fifteen years, Citizens had all but moved away from its original strictly nonprofit mandate of delivering fuel and had become involved in global enterprises, with Michael strongly at its helm. Angola quickly became the most important foreign country of all Citizens’ connections abroad. Stakes in an oil concession there eventually became hugely profitable. Citizens would even build a college in Angola, further cementing its connections there. In 1994, Michael earned almost seven hundred thousand dollars, but that was just the tip of the iceberg where his personal profit margin was concerned. In terms of stock options, he held at least ten million, and probably more. Such success didn’t come without mounting pressures, though.

  It was around 1994 that Michael began to drink heavily and also do cocaine. Some felt it had to do with his workload, others with trouble in his marriage. It could just as easily have been another way to isolate. Whatever the case, Michael’s personality had now taken on a new and darker dimension. Whereas he used to be passive, when he started doing alcohol and drugs he became combative and angry, almost as if some sort of inner demon had finally been released. “I’m Michael fucking Kennedy and you don’t get to tell me what to do,” he shouted at one Citizens Energy officer during a contentious meeting. “I don’t respond to threats,” he said, his eyes flashing. “I make them. Now get out of my sight.” The company executive on the other end of that rebuke later recalled, “That was so not like him to lose his shit like that. We were all just so stunned to hear him t
alk like that.”

  “The memory of him that stands out was at a fund-raiser for Patrick [Kennedy] in August of ’94 at Hammersmith, our former family home,” recalled Jackie’s half brother, Jamie Auchincloss. “After Michael made his remarks and introduced Patrick, he didn’t engage or schmooze. His vibe wasn’t good, as if he had a chip on his shoulder. In speaking to him, he was so angry. It struck me that maybe he had some kind of chemical imbalance.”

  A week later, back at the Kennedy compound for the 1994 Labor Day celebration, Michael was still tense and unhappy, snapping at people. The poet Rose Burgunder Styron, wife of the famous novelist William Styron, was present with her husband and recalled Michael being “not very engaged. We always loved Michael, so we were worried. He had been a sweet boy who seemed to have changed. My husband suffered from severe depression,” she said, “and Michael’s behavior reminded me of it.” When Fina Harvin saw him smoking a cigar, she went up to him and good-naturedly said, “Michael! That’s not good for you.” He became belligerent. “I’m a grown man, Fina,” he said angrily. “I can smoke a cigar if I want to. So butt out.”

  “This ice cream smells funny,” John said to Michael at one point as he held a bowl in front of him. “Smell it.” It was an old joke, one John had played dozens of times. As his cousin slowly lowered his head to smell the dessert, John pushed his nose right into it. Michael was immediately enraged. In response, John said he thought Carolyn was the newbie on Kennedy turf, not Michael. Michael said all he expected of John was for him to act like a grown-up for once in his life. Then he took off.