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

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Ena Bernard would remain with the Kennedys, obviously knowing her “part,” for at least another twenty years. The family also remained close to her after she retired; she and Ethel remained friends. Their relationship, and that of Ethel’s with much of her help, might also act as proof that she is not a racist, as some have tried to claim over the years. As recently as July 8, 2018, a columnist for the Boston Herald wrote of her: “Her disdain for the black and brown women who have worked for her is well-documented.”

  Of course, just because a person is friendly with someone of a different race doesn’t necessarily mean that person isn’t a racist. But according to those who have known Ethel for many decades, the accusation is simply not true. The origin of this pernicious lie goes back more than twenty years to when an unkind book was published about her that stated that Ethel had, in her days as the out-of-control matriarch (the late sixties through the eighties), been especially unkind to her black employees, sometimes using a racist word to describe them. When the book came out, Fina brought it to her mother’s attention. Ena was angry about it. “Never would Mrs. Kennedy call me such a name,” she insisted. “That never happened.”

  While she would never use racist language, Ethel could still sometimes lose her head. “Yes, she could be mean to some of the black help,” recalled Noelle Bombardier, but when she was under pressure, she could also be short to the whites, the Hispanics … Few escaped her temper during those difficult years after Bobby died.

  “I remember witnessing a volatile disagreement she had with one of our housemaids, a Spanish woman named Connie,” recalled Noelle. “Mrs. Kennedy and I were racing around her bedroom looking for a pair of designer shoes she wanted to pack for a trip to New York. She was agitated, upset that we couldn’t find them. As we were ransacking the room, she hollered out for Connie to fetch a jar of her special face cream, which she also wished to pack. Connie didn’t seem to understand. She disappeared for a moment and came back with, of all things, a box of tampons. Mrs. Kennedy became angry and said a few things. Connie stood up to her and told her to never speak to her that way; she was definitely going too far. Before I could calm the situation, Mrs. Kennedy just took a big swing and slapped her hard across the face. Connie raced from the room, sobbing. Overcome, Mrs. Kennedy then collapsed into a chair, also crying.”

  Ethel immediately felt bad about the incident. “I’m sorry I did that,” she told Noelle, still trembling. “That’s not how we do things around here.”

  “Well,” Noelle said, treading carefully, “we generally don’t answer rudeness with rudeness, that’s true, Mrs. Kennedy.”

  “But she pushed me into it,” Ethel said in her own defense. “How dare she talk to me like that? Fire her, Noelle. There are rules to this way of life, and our maids have got to follow those rules. I want her out of here. Tomorrow.”

  Noelle recalled, “I managed to talk her out of it, saying we were already having a hard time finding good maids and Connie really was a good worker. I convinced her that it had all been a misunderstanding. Then I had Connie apologize to Mrs. Kennedy and told her to just stay clear of her for a while.”

  About a week later, Ethel hosted a party for Anatoly Fyodorovich Dobrynin, the Soviet Ambassador to the United States whose meetings with Bobby had been critical in solving the Cuban Missile Crisis back in 1962. It wasn’t unusual for Ethel to host such receptions for important dignitaries such as Dobrynin. This one was attended by a wide array of political movers and shakers, as well as a host of family members, including Jackie, who moved with grace about the drawing room, engaging each guest as only she could. Her children, John and Caroline, were also present, as were Senator Ted Kennedy and his wife at that time, Joan, and the Shrivers, Eunice and Sargent. The servants had been preparing for this occasion for at least a week; Ethel had a long list of concerns having to do with everything from the preparation of the gourmet food to the placement of massive floral displays. Once a carefully planned party such as this one was finally under way, the staff always felt a great sense of accomplishment even though they wouldn’t actually get to experience the festivities. “We would gather in the kitchen and peek out at the well-dressed, glamorous guests,” recalled Noelle Bombardier. “In those moments, the stark difference in social standing was always so, I guess, understood, is the word, we in our starched uniforms gazing out at all of the beautiful people in their tuxes and gowns. We felt such satisfaction knowing we’d done our part to contribute to another special evening at Hickory Hill.”

  “During the gathering, Connie, the maid, sliced her finger with a knife while helping to prepare the food,” Noelle continued. “It was pretty bad; blood everywhere. I went out to the drawing room and found Mrs. Kennedy. I whispered in her ear that I needed to take Connie to the ER. She said no, let me do it. She then stood in the middle of the room and told her guests, ‘I have a lot of valuable people working for me here, and one of them has just been injured. I have to tend to it.’ She left, and the party just continued on its own steam. An hour later, Mrs. Kennedy returned with Connie, who was now fine. She then swept into the drawing room and rejoined the party without missing a beat. I thought that spoke so well of Mrs. Kennedy and how she felt about those of us who worked for her, no matter our color.”

  The Mentor

  Another person who had great influence over the new generation of Kennedys was a man who had been close to the family since the 1930s, someone they all loved and respected despite his eccentricities—and maybe even because of them. His name was Kirk LeMoyne Billings, known to all as “Lem.” No examination of the third generation of Kennedys could ever be complete without an understanding of Lem.

  Lem was born in 1916 in Pittsburgh. In 1933, at the age of sixteen, he became best friends with the then-fifteen-year-old John F. Kennedy while the two were students at the Choate preparatory school and then later, for a year, at Princeton. “He was well-liked and someone to whom all of the other students seemed to gravitate, including Jack, who had really taken a liking to him,” Senator George Smathers once said. “From the time Jack brought Lem home to spend Christmas with the Kennedys at Palm Beach [in 1933], Lem was a part of that family. Jack told me there was this instant camaraderie between not only him and JFK but with the whole bunch of ’em. There was always a lot of strange excitement around Lem. For instance, Jack told me that during the summer break of ’34, Lem was burned by a defective hot water valve in the shower at the Kennedys’ home and had to be hospitalized for three weeks. Whoever heard of such a thing happening? Only to Lem.”

  Lem was a tall, gangly fellow at six foot four with curly dirty-blond hair and large, thick glasses. One could tell that, in his youth, he’d been a college wrestler and crew captain. As an older man, there was imperiousness in the way he held his head; he walked with pride as if he knew his worth. Maybe he wasn’t handsome in the accepted sense of the word, but his vitality made him seem somehow better-looking. He was well-mannered, extremely meticulous about all things, especially his appearance—only the best, most expensive wardrobe, for instance. While some might say he leaned toward being effeminate, no one in the family ever made fun of him; he was much too beloved. Sure, when he first entered the White House after Jack was elected, he stood between Pat Lawford and Eunice Shriver and, motioning all around him, struck a flamboyant pose and stole a line from Butterfly McQueen in Gone With the Wind: “Lordy! We sure is rich now!” But that was just Lem. He had his little quirks; for instance, though he was a year older than JFK, he fibbed during the first of his eleven oral history interviews for the JFK Library (in 1964) and said they were the same age rather than admit to his true age.

  Lem would always have unfettered access to JFK and the White House throughout Jack’s term as President. When Bobby and Ethel had their sixth child in 1958, they named him after Lem—Michael LeMoyne Kennedy. After Jack died in 1963, it was as if Lem, who was then forty-seven, had nothing to live for, his grief was so debilitating. Though he did go on, he was never quite the
same.

  Lem was delighted when Bobby decided to run for President in 1968, feeling as did everyone else in the family that this was their moment to reclaim what they’d lost with the murder of Jack. Of course, it wasn’t meant to be. While losing Jack had been devastating, Bobby’s death was more than Lem could handle. He completely spiraled out of control, turning to drugs and alcohol in his grief.

  “The adults in the lives of the younger generation didn’t spend a whole lot of time talking about Jack or Bobby because it always took them down a road that was off-limits,” observed Ben Bradlee. “When they did speak of them, it was serious and solemn. But good ol’ Lem had no fear of the subject. In the years after Bobby’s death, he became even more open and excited about sharing his stories of the fallen Kennedy men. He was the one with the incredible scrapbooks full of correspondence, photos, and all sorts of other mementos. He was a font of information for pretty much every member of the younger generation. I think he made Jack and Bobby come alive for them with his great stories of courage and wisdom, and his hilarious tales, too. He made them human. He was, in many ways, a surrogate father, though he would always bristle at that notion. He never wanted to be thought of as a father figure, but rather a friend or perhaps a mentor. Thank goodness he was in the lives of Jack’s and Bobby’s kids, as well as Ted’s, Eunice’s, and all of them.”

  “You must stop turning away from your rightful place in history,” Lem would tell the young Kennedys, especially brothers Bobby and David Kennedy and their cousin Christopher Lawford, the three to whom he had become closest. While he understood their need to search for their own identities outside the Kennedy legacy, he never wanted them to risk losing their true selves and abandoning their real responsibilities in the process. “Embrace your destiny, don’t turn away from it,” he would tell them. “And remember what Grandma Rose used to say: ‘Never forget that you are a Kennedy. A lot of work went into building that name. Don’t disparage it.’”

  * * *

  THOUGH THEY DIDN’T really have much to do with each other in that they were at different stations in the family pecking order—one a close family friend, the other an important household staff member—their loyalty and devotion to the Kennedys, as well as their pride of association, is what Lem Billings and Ena Bernard had in common as family caretakers. They played their rightful “parts,” as Ethel Kennedy might have put it, in regard to the upbringing of her many children. In the process, both would find themselves depended upon during the most challenging of times, especially in regard to the difficulties brought on by her most troubled sons—Bobby Jr. and David.

  PART VI

  A Tale of Two Brothers

  Misfits

  It always comes as a surprise to those who have studied the Kennedy family that some of the younger generation were so eager to shed their identities as scions of one of the most powerful American families and seek out a darker underside of life. Maybe it shouldn’t be so unexpected, though. Many of them, especially the young men, were raised by parents who had such great hopes for them that there was no way they would ever meet them, or so they felt. Before they knew who they were, they were required to know what they wanted to do with their lives, to be of service to others and—who knows?—to one day even become President of the United States. Given the tragedy of the murders of their beloved relatives and, in the case of Ethel’s kids, the fact that they were being raised in an unstable atmosphere, it wasn’t surprising that some of them turned to drugs and alcohol, and also not surprising that some of them wanted anything other than to be Kennedys.

  In the summer of 1970, there was one Kennedy son—a fifteen-year-old with big, defiant eyes that were so blue they were almost turquoise, a tangled mop of blond hair, and an emaciated, malnourished physique—who found himself in dire straits. His clothing was damp and dirty—worn-out black jeans, a red T-shirt with holes in it, and a ratty blue denim jacket. The bottoms of his sneakers were falling apart. He wore no socks; didn’t believe in them, or so he said. He was a runaway to big-city Manhattan, an escapee from the Kennedy compound in Hyannis. He and his cousin were standing at the foot of an escalator on the ground level of Grand Central Terminal. As a train stopped and passengers began to disembark and make their way to the escalator, the cousins would approach. “Got any spare change?” one would ask. Usually, he’d be ignored. Sometimes, though, he would get lucky and end up with a buck or two. Then, the two would take the money and hightail it to Central Park. Once there, they would score a small bit of heroin.

  At this same time, three thousand miles away in Los Angeles, there was another Kennedy kid, this one sixteen. He looked like a true bum with disheveled, smelly clothing, his long hair past his shoulders and so skinny his cheekbones looked like small rocks on otherwise smooth adolescent skin. Sitting in the corner of a train’s boxcar, he shared a joint with two other refugees from the Cape. While the train chugged along at a nice clip, this Kennedy kid turned to one of the other boys and asked, “So, where we headed?”

  “Beats me,” said the kid as he passed a joint. “Doesn’t matter, does it?” he asked.

  “Not really.”

  The first kid, the one in New York? That was David Kennedy.

  The other one, in California? His brother Bobby.

  The Tough One

  One day, when Robert Kennedy Jr. was about six months old, he was being cared for at his parents’ home at the Cape by Fina Harvin. There was a knock on the door; it was the milkman making his regular delivery. Fina ran to let the serviceman in and, while in the kitchen, she heard a thud and a loud squeal. She then ran back to the bedroom and realized that little Bobby had rolled right off the bed and onto the floor. She scooped the crying infant up into her arms, sure she’d done the baby harm. At that moment, the phone rang. It was Bobby Sr., the baby’s father. “I think I broke little Bobby,” Fina said, crying. She explained what happened. “How high is the bed?” Bobby asked. She said it was about four feet. “Oh, that’s okay,” Bobby said, laughing. “Another foot, though, and the poor kid would probably be a goner.” Thirty years later, when Bobby Jr. was giving a speech in Boston, he quipped, “People always ask me all the time how I turned out the way I did. Well,” he said, pointing at Fina, “it’s because that woman right over there once dropped me on my head.”

  Born on January 17, 1954, Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. was the third of Bobby’s and Ethel’s eleven children. He was nine when his uncle Jack was assassinated and fourteen when his father met the same terrible fate. As it happened, Bobby was one of the Kennedy children who was not in Los Angeles when his father was killed. At the time, he was in a Jesuit boarding school in North Bethesda, Maryland. A priest jostled him awake to tell him that there was a car outside, waiting to take him back to Hickory Hill. He didn’t say why. It was one of his mother’s secretaries, Jinx Hack, who told him that his father had been shot.

  Hours after the shooting, Bobby found himself on Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey’s plane, Air Force Two, with his older siblings, Kathleen and Joe, to meet the rest of his family already on the coast. He was at his father’s bedside at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles when Bobby passed away. He then served as one of the pallbearers at his funeral. In the years that followed, he would speak of these memories with a certain detachment, as if it all had happened to someone else. Though he seemed to not connect to it, his entire life would be shaped and defined by this tragedy. It wouldn’t be until he was perhaps in his forties that he really understood it.

  “I have to say that I think it was simply because he was named after his pop that the adults in the family always thought Bobby was the leading contender in the race of who could one day be President,” Christopher Lawford once observed. “He really didn’t show any interest in social studies or politics, and I think he went out of his way to avoid such subjects in school. As much as the adults—especially his mother—wanted Bobby to be that person, that’s how much he didn’t want to be that person. He went the other way, as
if to say, ‘You know what? I am going to so not be that person, you won’t believe how not that person I am going to be.’”

  Being alone in the house with his mother was the last thing Bobby ever wanted, even when his father was alive. When RFK decided to campaign for the presidency in 1968, his namesake begged to be sent to a boarding school just so that he wouldn’t have to deal with Ethel. “Are you scared of your mother?” Ena had asked him. “Of course, I am,” he admitted. “Isn’t everyone?” Ethel gladly sent him away. “I seldom lasted longer than a few days at home when I returned from distant schools for vacation,” Bobby later recalled. “My homecomings were like the arrival of a squall. With me around to provoke her, my mother didn’t stay angry very long—she went straight to rage. Her moods were like milk on a hot stove: one moment everything seemed fine and a second later the stove had disappeared.”

  In July 1970, a skirmish with the law would be the catalyst for Bobby’s railroad odyssey. He and his cousin Bobby Shriver were busted for selling pot to an undercover police officer. Ethel didn’t handle it well. It was just a year after Ted’s misadventure at Chappaquiddick and was the last thing she and the rest of the family needed at that time. “She went on a tirade after the arrest and really laid into Bobby, tossing his skinny ass into the bushes outside their home and then evicting him from the house,” said Joseph Gargan.