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

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  A Gathering of the Original Eleven

  In April 1984, Ethel wanted to host a gathering at Hickory Hill of what she called “the Original Eleven.” This was a congregation of all her children but no spouses—at this point just Kathleen and Bobby Jr. were married—or significant others, boyfriends, girlfriends, or other people who always seemed to be hanging around the estate. Sometimes getting “the Original Eleven” together was a lot of trouble; everyone always had commitments, some lived a great distance from Hickory Hill, some just didn’t want to show up because they didn’t know what to expect, especially lately. The problem with the Kennedys was that things could change dramatically in just a day or two; there was no telling what the temperature might be by the time the gathering was to take place. Often, these meals ended with a family dustup or, as Bobby would call it, “typical Kennedy family drama.” However, Ethel maintained that it was important for the family to get together, check in with one another, and update one another on whatever was going on in their lives. Therefore, she would plan these dinners far enough in advance so that no one could beg off.

  On this night, it was extremely tense as everyone gathered around Ethel’s dining room table, obviously because of David’s problems. “They tried to ignore what was happening to him so that they could just have a nice meal together,” Leah Mason, Ethel’s employee who was helping out with kitchen duties that day, recalled, “but it was impossible. Talk about the elephant in the room. Ena and the waitstaff kept bringing out one dish after another while Mrs. Kennedy and Kathleen kept oohing and aahing over the food, trying to keep everyone upbeat. Bobby and Joe were talking in an animated way, joking with each other. I kept peeking out from the kitchen, trying to see if everything was okay. At one point, I saw David slipping down in his chair. His brother Max kept nudging him, but it wasn’t working. I didn’t want Mrs. Kennedy to notice, so I came out of the kitchen with some Irish-style mashed potatoes, put the serving dish down on the table, and then whispered urgently in his ear, ‘Sit up. David. Right now.’ And he did. I knew that Mrs. Kennedy saw me out of the corner of her eye; I caught her scowling at me as I slipped out of the room.”

  After the first couple of courses, David began nodding off. Though his mother and siblings talked rapid-fire around him about current events and kept trying to bring him into the conversation, he was disinterested. It became clear that he wasn’t going to last through the entire meal.

  “David, sit up,” Ethel finally exclaimed, unable to continue to act as if he were okay.

  “Oh my God. Just get off my case, will you please?” he grumbled. According to the witness, Leah Mason, there was silence, or as she put it, “you could hear a pin drop.” Ethel stared intensely at David for a moment before saying in a loud voice, “If you want to go, David, just go. But don’t expect any of us to care about you if you don’t want to be a part of this family. I have had it with you. I swear to God.”

  David looked at his mother with disdain. “Figures you would say that,” he remarked. At that point, a couple of his siblings tried to talk to him, murmuring in low voices for him to be calm, to not cause a scene, to “please, just for once” let mealtime unfold without drama. It was too late, though. Ethel slammed both hands on the table, causing the plates and silverware before her to rattle. “I don’t know what you want from me,” she shouted at her son angrily. “What do you want me to say?”

  David jumped out of his chair, stood up, and faced his mother, his face beet red with fury. “How about that you love me?” he screamed at her. “How about that there’s nothing wrong with me? How about that you’re proud of me? How about any of that?” He then ran out of the room.

  Ethel stared straight ahead, not making direct eye contact with anyone at the table. There was a moment of silence—maybe a minute, maybe less—before Kathleen began to apologize profusely for her brother. “He didn’t mean it, Mummy,” she said. “He’s just.… he’s just … he’s just…” Ethel didn’t want to hear it. The Kennedy matriarch slid her chair out from under the table, stood up, said “Excuse me,” and left the room.

  * * *

  ETHEL KENNEDY, a woman still so traumatized by having witnessed the murder of her beloved husband, now found herself woefully lacking in her ability to deal with or even understand her son’s drug addiction. “One night soon after, Mrs. Kennedy hosted a party for the RFK Human Rights organization at Hickory Hill,” recalled Noelle Bombardier. “She tried to be upbeat, typical Ethel Kennedy, gay and happy and flitting about, the perfect hostess. At one point, though, she disappeared into the bathroom. She was gone a long time. I went to find her to make sure she was okay. When I put my ear to the door, I heard that she was crying. I was about to knock and ask if she needed something. However, I didn’t. I knew she would have been embarrassed. So I decided to let her have her privacy.”

  On April 19, David Kennedy flew down to Palm Beach, Florida, to be with some of his cousins as they visited their grandma Rose for the Easter holiday. About a week later, Ethel got the call: David had been found in his hotel room, dead of a drug overdose. He was only twenty-eight.

  Black Mist

  Not surprisingly, David Kennedy’s death cast a pall over Hickory Hill, with all its residents, Kennedys and staff members alike, trying their best to process many different layers of grief and trauma. “Usually, the estate was filled with noisy activity, but after David’s death there was such immense sadness, I didn’t think any of us would get through it,” said Noelle Bombardier, speaking for the household staff. “We went about our duties as if in a daze. I would find myself struggling to hold back tears. As much trouble as David had been, he’d also been such a gentle soul. He would come into the servants’ dining room and sit with me sometimes. We would talk about marriage and children, and he would say, ‘I don’t think that will ever happen for me, Noelle.’ I would ask, ‘But why, David?’ And he would answer, ‘Because I’ll never be special to anyone.’”

  After David’s death, her coworkers felt that Ena Bernard, who was sixty-six, should take some time off. After all, she had known David since the day he was born and had helped care for him as an infant. “She almost had what they used to call a nervous breakdown,” said Noelle Bombardier. “She seemed to not be present. You’d talk to her and she wouldn’t hear you.

  “I remember the family had David laid out in the drawing room in his casket. It was open and people kept going in, falling to their knees, crying and praying. Ena refused to look at David that way. She simply couldn’t do it. I asked, ‘Why are we doing this? Why such torture?’ and one of the boys said, ‘I don’t know why, Noelle. It’s killing us, but it’s tradition and it’s what Mummy wants.’”

  Immediately after the funeral, Ena had to go to the graduation of her grandaughter—Fina’s daughter—from Florida State University. “Somehow we got her on the plane,” said Leah Mason, “and she went to the ceremony. But by the time she got back after a few days, she was really undone. We were all concerned about her.”

  Many of Ethel’s grown children who lived elsewhere came back to Hickory Hill with their own spouses and children for a while just to be together under one roof. As is the case with many families who suffer such trauma, though, David’s death was rarely openly discussed. There were isolated camps of siblings where the subject was raised—one brother might feel free to discuss it with another over a beer while two sisters might find emotional refuge in each other at lunch—but there was no true family reconciliation of the tragedy. Once David was gone, his passing was just viewed as too painful to process. Exactly as they’d handled JFK’s and RFK’s deaths, the Kennedys—and not just Ethel’s family, but all of them—tried to avoid the subject. Something was missing, though, a piece of them, and they all knew it. Bobby, in particular, took it badly. He realized it could have been him. Had he not found a way to deal with his own problems, there was no way he would have survived it. He wondered why he was so fortunate and David not as blessed.

  “Mrs. Kennedy went
into a deep depression that I would say lasted at least a year,” said Leah Mason. Ethel still had many social and philanthropic obligations. She was determined to keep her schedule and maintain that stoic “Kennedys don’t cry” image the world had come to expect of her. However, it was now more work for Ethel than ever before, than even after Bobby was assassinated. Maybe it was because she was older and not as resilient as she’d been back in 1968. Plus, the deep wound from Bobby’s death was still present. While she could appear remarkably unruffled in public, she was actually deeply sedated. She was also going to Confession twice a week, as if grappling with some sin she felt was beyond atonement.

  “I would catch her just staring into space, seeming lost,” said Leah. “It was as if she was in a black mist. I remember there was a lot of discussion about a photograph of David that was in a silver frame on the mantel over the fireplace. Should it stay? Or was it a bad reminder? How would it affect Mrs. Kennedy? The kids? Some days it was there. Other days Ena took it and hid it.

  “Mrs. Kennedy’s friend Liz Stevens would come by often and sit with her in the kitchen, trying to console her. I overheard Mrs. Kennedy tell her, ‘I have a hole in my heart that will never heal. I just have to live with it because when David died, my chance to be a better mother died with him.’ I remember feeling upset hearing those words; my knees felt as if they would buckle. I had to stand with my back against the refrigerator. Mrs. Stevens just held Mrs. Kennedy’s hand. There were no words.”

  In Her DNA

  Though Kathleen Kennedy Townsend had done all she could think of for her brother, she had to accept once he was gone that her efforts had been in vain. There was nothing she could have done, and for a woman who describes herself as “a results-oriented person,” this was not easy to accept. Her way of coping was by becoming incredibly busy. Maybe as a distraction from her sorrow, she began to balance motherhood with public service pursuits. Inspired by her work a couple of years earlier in 1982 as her uncle Ted’s campaign director for his Senate seat that year, she had already started to lean in the direction of politics as her way to fulfill the family’s mandate to serve. At first, Ethel wasn’t sure how she felt about it.

  In some respects, Ethel Kennedy still thought politics was a tough business better suited for men. She was a woman of her time in that she held fast to some old-fashioned ideas, some of which flew in the face of the reality of her life. “She was in transition by the 1980s,” said her daughter Kerry. “She would say, for instance, that women shouldn’t work, but then all of us knew that she worked harder than anyone. She was always packing her bags, going off on one important activist trip or another to distant corners of the globe. That was hard work, whether she viewed it that way or not.” Kathleen added, “Our mother was a feminist long before the phrase was coined and long before she even knew she was. She’d raised us girls to have minds of our own. She never wanted us to be limited by societal restrictions. Never. It was a slow process, I think, throughout maybe the seventies and eighties as our mother, like many women, came to terms with what their roles could and should be in society.”

  Like her mother, Kathleen, too, was in transition. Her journey to eventually becoming lieutenant governor of Maryland in 1995 really started with David’s death.

  In a lot of ways, Kathleen had wanted to be a stay-at-home mother. She had the perfect husband for it, too; David Townsend was nothing if not a family man. Still, Kathleen felt the pull of familial duty and honor to be a part of “the family business.” After all, it was in her DNA, wasn’t it? Kathleen says, “I think the women’s movement influenced me to recognize that maybe I had strengths in me I hadn’t known. Or at least it made me wonder if there was more for me.”

  Kathleen had inherited the burden of expectation, and she knew she had to carry it. On November 24, 1963, two days after her uncle Jack died, her father had written her a note that said, in part: “As the oldest of the Kennedy grandchildren you have a particular responsibility now … Be kind to others and work for your country. Love Daddy.”

  Four years later, in April 1967, Bobby Sr. toured the Mississippi Delta at the behest of civil rights lawyer Marian Wright Edelman to see firsthand the poverty there. Because of media coverage of the visit, many Americans would be stunned by the impoverished conditions and quite shocked to learn that this kind of terrible hardship was going on in their country. It would end up bringing to the national consciousness the seriousness of the hunger problem in America and start a real movement to reform food assistance programs. “He arrived home clearly moved and emotionally exhausted from seeing such dire poverty,” Ethel recalled of her husband. “I remember it was a lovely evening and the table in our dining room was set,” added Kathleen, who was sixteen at the time. “We had a really nice dining room with the chandelier and crystal glasses, a cook to cook dinner and somebody to serve it and Daddy was there and he said, ‘I’ve just been to Mississippi and I saw a whole family living in a room the size of this dining room. Do you know how lucky you are?’ He was shaking. ‘Do you know how lucky you are? You have to do something for our country. You have to give back.’” There was great injustice in the world on many fronts—poverty, illiteracy, racism—as Bobby kept reminding his children, and they should all try to do something constructive about it.

  In 1986, when she was thirty-five, Kathleen officially decided to take the leap and enter the political arena by running for a seat in the House of Representatives in Maryland’s Second Congressional District, which, by the way, was strongly Republican. From the start, it was clear she would have some work to do to be a good fit for politics. “Her voice is high-pitched and not authoritative sounding,” noted one of her cattier critics in The Boston Globe. “She has thick glasses. She’s not really attractive, is she?” Time couldn’t help but notice “her slip showing and her hair a mess.”

  “Sexism is something Kathleen had to deal with from an early age,” recalled Noelle Bombardier. “Maybe she wasn’t as pretty as her sisters, but Kathleen was never one to obsess about fashion and makeup. She was anything but superficial. Still, she was stung by criticism of her appearance, as was Mrs. Kennedy. ‘So this is what it comes to now in being of service?’ Mrs. Kennedy raged. ‘It comes down to how pretty we are?’ We all felt it was ridiculous, but despite the great advances made in the seventies, these were still the times in which we lived.”

  Besides any apparent image problems, a big mistake for Kathleen in 1986 was her decision not to use her Kennedy family name, eliminating it from most campaign posters and bumper stickers. “She wasn’t ‘Kathleen Kennedy,’ she said. She was ‘Kathleen Townsend,’” recalled David Burke, who had once been her uncle Ted’s chief of staff, in a 2000 interview, “and she was proud of her husband and her children and the nuclear family she created for herself. ‘I’m running as my own person,’ she said. But I remember thinking it was a risk. Ted felt the same way. The Kennedy name obviously had a lot of cache. Kathleen was a risk-taker, though. I think that said something about her.”

  “My mother wasn’t so sure that dropping the Kennedy name was a good idea for me,” Kathleen said. “‘It carries a lot of weight,’ she said, so why would I not take advantage of it? I think my mom realized she couldn’t have it both ways,” Kathleen concluded with a smile. “Either she had raised a daughter to believe she was capable of making her own important decisions, or she hadn’t. Of course, she had.”

  “As women, it is time to stand up for ourselves and for our ideas,” Kathleen said at one campaign rally. She wore a sensible navy-blue skirt and white long-sleeved blouse with a high-buttoned collar. She had a simple gold necklace around her neck, a pin at her shoulder, and a large diamond ring on her finger, the only thing that suggested Kennedy status. Her earnestness was her best quality. While she spoke to a small crowd in the parking lot of a schoolyard, her sisters Rory, Kerry, and Courtney stood at her side, beaming. Kathleen was strong and persuasive.

  The next day, an editorial in the press noted that Kathlee
n was “big on rhetoric, short on specificity. People do seem to gravitate to her, though,” the writer pointed out, “but likely not because of what is being said but because of who is saying it. One can’t help but be transfixed by the lineage of Camelot. Now, if only Ethel and Ted would show up at one of these rallies.”

  When strangers asked her about her father, Kathleen was able to talk in detail about his achievements and the effect he still had on those who remembered him well; the same held true for her uncle Jack. However, she would visibly bristle when asked about Kennedys not in public service. “Tell me, were you upset when your aunt Jackie married that awful Greek?” an older woman asked Kathleen as she stood before her, paper in hand for an autograph. Kathleen caught her breath in surprise. A flicker of annoyance crossed her face. Then, looking directly into the stranger’s eyes, she asked, “Would you not agree that a woman has the right to choose who she wants to be with, and that the rest of us should hold no judgment about it?” The stranger looked at Kathleen with a blank expression, muttered, “Um … sure, why not?” and then thrust the paper at her for her signature.