Eunice was just as angry, but she knew where to draw the line—she definitely wouldn’t call her Bobby names or throw him out of the house; that wasn’t her style. Instead, she sent him to his room for a couple of days and waited for Sarge—who had been in California—to return. After the Shriver parents reasoned things out with each other and decided on a course of action, Sarge sat down with Bobby and talked to him. Looking downcast, Sarge said he was gravely disappointed in his son and hoped to God he’d never repeat this mistake. Importantly, he also reassured him he wasn’t a bad kid. He said he was a good son who’d just made a bad choice. Bobby Shriver recalls the way his father dealt with this episode as being a seminal moment in his life. “I knew from that moment on that my dad would have my back,” he said, “and then I spent the rest of my life trying to make sure it wasn’t necessary. When you know your father is there for you, it makes a big difference in the life of a teenager. I just wished Bobby had had this same kind of support. He’d really suffer because of a lack of it.”
Bobby Shriver said he never did drugs again after that troubling incident. The same couldn’t be said for Ethel’s boy. Not only did he continue smoking marijuana, he moved on to heroin and other narcotics—and he even liked to brag about it. “Don’t even pretend to understand me if you haven’t done acid,” Bobby would tell people.
One family friend recalls, “I remember Bobby and I got our signals crossed about something having to do with his drugs. He completely overreacted. He threw me up against a wall. ‘I am the last person you want to fuck with,’ he screamed at me, ‘because I will fuck you right back.’ I thought, Okay, this guy’s a loose cannon you don’t want to ever cross.”
Ena Bernard would take Joe and Bobby, sit down with them in the kitchen, and try to reason with them. “You have to be better boys,” she would tell them while serving them heaping bowls of chocolate ice cream. “Why do you have to be so bad? Do you know how much you’re hurting your mother?” She warned them that if they didn’t behave, “I’ll give you a pow-pow.” That was her way of saying she was going to give them a spanking, though never once did she ever lay a hand on them. At the time, the kids were getting ready for a photo shoot for Look magazine, for an article about how well the family was faring after Bobby’s death. Most of the Kennedy children disliked such photo sessions, where, as Bobby put it, “we have to be this nauseatingly smiling family when none of it is true.” Ena promised the boys that if they would just tolerate the photo session they could then go horseback riding. All of the kids had horses in the Hickory Hill stalls and had been riding through the Virginia woods from a very early age, taught by Ethel to jump fences, high hedges and, on occasion, even automobiles. Ena could get the boys to do pretty much anything if she just promised an afternoon gallop as a reward.
By this time, Ena was deeply entrenched in the Kennedys’ world. “My mother’s nickname in our family became Banco de Costa Rica [Bank of Costa Rica],” Fina recalled with a chuckle, “because we would always go to her for money since we knew she could get it from Mrs. Kennedy. For instance, I once ran my American Express card up to six thousand dollars and couldn’t pay it. I was so upset about it, as was my mother. ‘I will take care of it, don’t worry,’ Mrs. Kennedy said, and she paid the whole thing off. So my mother felt a real responsibility to the Kennedy kids, to make sure they were all right, to be a mom to them when they were unhappy with their real mom. ‘These boys are hurting,’ she would say. ‘They miss their father. I will not give up on them.’”
The Sensitive One
David Anthony Kennedy, born on June 15, 1955, was the fourth of Bobby and Ethel’s eleven children. He’d always been a wiry little blond kid, somehow more handsome than his brothers with his cobalt-blue eyes being his most spectacular feature. They were alive with what seemed like immense intelligence, even when he was a little boy.
“Of all of us children, David was the closest to my father, and the most vulnerable and dependent upon him,” Bobby Kennedy Jr. recalled. “My dad had a special bond with David. They were very much alike: shy, vulnerable, tough, fearless, kind, loyal, and principled. Of all his children, my dad reserved a special love for David, and David thrived on his affection.”
Of course, like the rest of his family, David carried a heavy burden of trauma due to his father’s death, but maybe even in a more direct way: he’d actually watched his father’s murder on television. While his brother Bobby was thousands of miles away at boarding school, David was right there in Los Angeles when the tragedy happened. “David was with his mother and some of his siblings,” recalled Noelle Bombardier, who became close to the boy she called “my sweet David.” She continued, “Tragically, he saw the whole thing on TV at the Beverly Hills Hotel, in which the family was staying.”
It’s been reported over the years that David was alone when he saw the news reports about his father. That’s not true. He was actually with Bob Galland, the Hickory Hill staff member whose job it was to teach the boys sports, camping, and other outdoor activities. “We were watching TV and it just came on,” said Galland. “I mean, there it was, Bobby shot and on the ground, and I jumped up to turn the channel, but I think I left it on for maybe five or six seconds longer than I should have, and David sat there just sort of transfixed. I think he was in shock. He was thirteen. What do you say? I told him, ‘Let’s go for a walk, let’s get out of here and talk.’ He looked at me with a sort of resigned expression, and I’ll never forget what he said. He said, ‘Man, they got him, too, didn’t they? It’s over. They got him, too.’”
Losing his father the way he did was something David, like all his siblings, could never reconcile. He wrote to his mother in a Christmas letter in 1968: “There will be no more football with Daddy, no more riding and no more camping with him. But he was the best father their [sic] ever was and I would rather have him for a father for the length of time I did than any other father for a million years.”
Though David had always been close to his brother Bobby, they seemed to go their separate ways after their father died. Some felt it was Bobby who pulled away, and that the reason was because he was the one who’d encouraged David in drug abuse. “He was the older brother, and yes, David looked up to him,” said one person on Ethel Kennedy’s household staff. “When Bobby started with the drugs, David followed him down that road. The two boys enabled each other for a while until Bobby began to feel guilty about it. I think it caused a rift between them. A little while later, there was a strange moment when David started talking about being a railroad hobo, and Bobby got upset. ‘He stole that story from me and made it part of his legend,’ Bobby complained. Legend? I thought, My gosh, these kids are thinking about their legends, not their lives.”
“Mrs. Kennedy had kicked David out of the house, as was unfortunately her way at the time,” said Sister Pauline Joseph. “She thought he’d be in the backyard somewhere. He wasn’t. She called me, frantic. I went to see her. She was in the kitchen, washing dishes with an apron on and looking like a typical mother. She had a lot of help for that, so I knew if she was doing chores herself she was upset.”
“That boy has just vanished,” Ethel told the nun while she scraped a plate hard, as if taking out her anger on it.
“Permission to speak freely?” the nun asked. She always asked the question when she was about to broach a sensitive topic. She never wanted Ethel to think she was being presumptuous.
“Yes,” Ethel answered.
“It’s not good to send your children away, Ethel,” the nun said. “God’s design for you as a mother is to always be there for them, no matter what. I know it’s hard with teenagers, but why would you banish him?”
“Drugs,” Ethel said, without turning around.
“Staying focused on her work, she told me she’d warned him that if she caught him smoking reefer in the house, he’d be gone,” recalled the nun many years later. “She said she needed to set boundaries and stick to them. I think what really struck me, though, was that s
he said she felt so completely unappreciated. She believed her boys didn’t value all she continued to do to make sure they had a good and safe life at Hickory Hill. ‘Anyway,’ she told me, ‘I caught the boy smoking reefer and now … he’s gone.’”
“Then we should pray for him, Ethel,” said the nun.
Still not turning around, Ethel shook her head vehemently in the negative. Finally, she faced Sister Pauline Joseph. “Here’s an idea,” she said, “you pray for him.” She then took off her apron and handed it to the nun as if she were a servant. “I’m fresh out of prayers today,” she added as she walked out of the kitchen. A second later, she came back into the room and said, “Oh, and by the way. You know what? I would appreciate it if you called me Mrs. Kennedy,” and then left again.
David had hightailed it to New York with Christopher Lawford. “A hitchhiked ride here, a bus ride there, a train ride onward, and the next thing we knew we were in Manhattan,” Christopher recalled. “My mom lived in New York. We thought we’d bunk with her, but she said no way. She didn’t have a lot of patience for runaway Kennedys,” he said with a chuckle. “My father [Peter Lawford] was no help, either; he had his own addictions, his own issues, in California. So, for me, a child of two addicts, turning to drugs was a no-brainer.
“Once we got to New York, my mom made it clear that David was Aunt Ethel’s problem, not hers. I was barely her problem. She wasn’t about to babysit the two of us. She did call Aunt Ethel, though, to tell her that we were in Manhattan alone. ‘Great,’ Aunt Ethel said. ‘The two of them together couldn’t operate a transistor radio, and now they’re on their own in New York? Lotsa luck.’”
Thus it happened that while Bobby was in California riding the railways, David was in New York sleeping in cardboard boxes in subway stations with his cousin. “We were fearless and up for adventure,” Christopher Lawford recalled. “Looking back on it now, I guess we decided, you know what? We’ll never be what our parents want us to be; we sure as shit aren’t going to be anyone’s President. So we may as well just take off and have a good time and see how the other half lives. It was rebellion, as plain and simple and as cliché as that sounds. It’s what happens, though, when you’re a kid and you have no hope that you will ever amount to anything. That’s what you do. You lash out.”
Throughout this turbulent time, Christopher Lawford says he had a small thought in the back of his head that maybe things might one day be different if he applied himself to figuring out a better way. It was just a tiny seed of hope, but one he sensed might grow if he took the time to nurture it. When he wasn’t high, in those rare moments of lucidity when he could really take stock, there remained that persistent, almost nagging thought that maybe, one day, things could be different for him.
Sadly, David didn’t share in his cousin’s small measure of optimism. “Taking morphine was when I felt for the first time that things were okay in my life,” he would say. “The morphine was the thing that made me forget how miserable I had been since Daddy died. It was the thing that made me forget my pain.”
Footprints Deeper Than His Own
Spring 1971. “You’re the chosen one,” Lem Billings was telling Bobby Jr. in the living room of his Eighty-sixth Street apartment in Manhattan, this according to Christopher Lawford. “You’re the one. You’re named after your dad. You have the looks. You have the charisma. You’re smart. You’re the one, Bobby. “You’re the one.”
In Bobby, Lem saw not so much his father, but rather a reflection of his uncle Jack. Like Jack, Bobby was imaginative, he was interesting, he knew how to relate to people and, maybe more important, he was humble. Bobby’s father had been more of a warrior, and his son was the same. However, Bobby Jr. also had a certain vulnerability and empathy that, at least in Lem’s mind, was reminiscent of Jack. In the eyes of many observers, though, Lem had transferred the deep emotion he’d had for his best friend to Bobby Jr. His biggest concern now had to do with the boy’s education. After getting kicked out of Millbrook, young Kennedy would also be ordered to leave Pomfret in Connecticut in the spring of 1971 for using drugs. Lem wanted him to buckle down and be a good student. He knew what Bobby Jr. would be up against when measured by his family’s ancestral heroes. “Jack was lucky,” Lem once said. “He didn’t have a lot of Kennedys getting there before him. Everywhere a boy like Bobby looks, there are footprints, all of them deeper than his own.” Lem just knew Bobby was special and could become President one day.
So adamant was Lem about Bobby’s chances, the young man actually began to take his direction to heart. “I began to feel this strange pull that maybe it really was my destiny to be President,” Bobby recalled, “though I was at odds with it. I knew it was what Lem wanted. But was it what I wanted? I wasn’t so sure I was cut out for it. First of all, I wanted to be a veterinarian, and I knew that for sure. Also, I had a secret life that kept me … preoccupied.”
Bobby was talking about his drug habit. Several nights a week, he would sneak out of Lem’s apartment and meet his friend Allan Burke. The two would take off to Harlem, where they’d camp out with homeless drug addicts and act as if they were a part of the gang; still, Bobby wanted to be someone else. “We’d go to 116th Street and pay thirty dollars at one end of the block and then pick up the drugs at the other end of the block,” Allan Burke recalled. “Or we’d go to what was called ‘the shooting gallery,’ an alley of addicts all shooting up. We’d do heroin with them and then fall asleep in a corner of the alley covered in vomit. The next morning, there would be poor Lem, pissed off at us, shaking us awake. I imagined the poor guy searching the ghetto, scared out of his mind, waking up homeless people, asking if they’d seen this kid as he frantically flashed a picture of Bobby. Eventually, he’d find us and drag us back to his apartment.”
Bobby would finally earn his high school diploma in June 1972 from Palfrey Street School in Watertown, in which he had been enrolled by Lem. It wasn’t a boarding school, so Lem arranged for Bobby to live with a family in Cambridge and then with him in New York on weekends.
In the spring of 1972, Bobby somehow managed to get into Harvard, mostly on the Kennedy name and influence, certainly not because of his grades. His drug abuse continued unabated. Making things worse for Lem was the way Bobby lied about it. Once, when Lem chastised him about it, Bobby shouted at him, “What? All of a sudden we have a big problem with lying?”
What did that mean? Was he referencing Lem’s possible closeted homosexuality? Maybe so, since that was the one thing Lem seemed to be concealing. Whatever the case, this amorphous notion that Lem was hiding something from Bobby, someone to whom he was so close, suddenly became a running theme in their friendship. “When Bobby started accusing Lem of not being honest with him, it hit Lem hard and made him feel as if a gulf was developing between them,” recalled Allan Burke. “Before I knew it, the old guy was doing drugs with Bobby just to ensure commonality with him. It was such a violation of his role in Bobby’s life, though, and Lem knew it. But Lem kept saying it was a way to be with Bobby on a deeper level. Bobby, though … well, Bobby just wanted to do drugs. He had no agenda other than to get high. I once asked him if doing drugs with Lem was maybe a way of bonding with him. He lashed out at me and said, ‘When are you going to get this through your fat head? I don’t bond.’”
The Worst That Could Happen
Bobby Kennedy Jr. was about twenty-five in 1978 when he met Emily Ruth Black, a fellow student at the University of Virginia Law School in Charlottesville. A graduate of Indiana University who had majored in political science, she was petite, bookish, five foot four with auburn hair and a bright, engaging smile. One of three children, she’d had a modest upbringing; her mother was a schoolteacher, her father owned a family business in wood lumbering. He’d died of a heart attack at a young age, just thirty-four, when Emily was two.
“I went with Emily and Bobby to a picnic one afternoon at a park in Liberty Hill in West Virginia,” recalled Marjorie Dougherty, who had known her since childh
ood. “I remember he had this huge black-and-white falcon perched on his right hand. This enormous bird jumped from his right hand to his left when Bobby went to shake my hand, as if on cue. Bobby kept bragging to Emily that one day he was going to be President, and she believed him. It was intoxicating. She later told me that when Bobby took her to the compound to meet the family, her head was swimming. ‘I felt like I was dreaming,’ she told me. ‘There I was on the beach, having a daiquiri with Jackie O. How can you not love that?’”
In 1980, Bobby went to work on his uncle Ted’s failed campaign to challenge President Jimmy Carter for the Democratic presidential nomination; he was responsible for galvanizing voter support in the South. That same year, in August, Bobby asked Emily to marry him.
“Bobby’s engagement to Emily was the worst thing that could ever have happened to Lem,” observed Allan Burke many decades after the fact. “For sure, Lem felt he was losing Bobby. I remember being at his new Upper East Side home near the Guggenheim Museum one night with Bobby, David, and Christopher. Lem looked terrible, his enormous frame slumped into an easy chair, his face bloated, his eyeglasses all askew. I asked what was wrong and he said, ‘I’m upset about this Bobby and Emily business. It’s not right.’
“I also have this distinct memory of Lem sitting next to Bobby on a long couch going through an old family scrapbook, telling one great Kennedy story after another,” said Allan Burke. “And as they were turning the pages, he moved just about a half inch closer to Bobby. Bobby moved a half inch away from Lem. Then Lem moved a half inch closer. Again, Bobby inched away. They kept doing this dance, all the way down to the other end of the couch. Finally, Lem got upset and said to Bobby, ‘You won’t even let our legs touch. Why is that, Bobby? Why is that?’ Bobby shot back, ‘Because it makes me feel weird, Lem.’ Lem was mortified. The lines had definitely become blurred between being paternal and being, I don’t know … maybe something else. And this longing or just this sense of things being not in alignment ate away at Lem.”
The Kennedy Heirs: John, Caroline, and the New Generation Page 19
