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

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Obviously, the timing of the news about Michael couldn’t have been worse for Joe. He’d already taken a big hit in the polls because of Sheila, and now this latest story threatened to complete his undoing. “Well, it’s a big family,” he said on Capitol Hill during the first week of May 1997. “There will always be a few little problems along the way,” he added, sputtering. “And this one might not be such a little one for everybody, but, you know, I am proud of my family.”

  It was now felt by much of Joe Kennedy’s base that he was being unfairly tarred by his brother’s scandal, that a good man might be kept from being of future service through no fault of his own. “It’s the spontaneous combustion problem,” noted the political consultant Lou DiNatale. “You’re standing next to someone who goes up in flames, and you’re covered with gasoline. What happens? You go up in flames, too.” With this one-two punch—Sheila’s book along with Michael’s misdeeds—Joe could see nothing but a raging fire engulfing him as his political career went up in smoke.

  Ethel Schools the Next Generation

  As her son Joe’s political career was being decimated by the actions of his brother and his ex-wife, Ethel Kennedy continued to view what was going on as a problem bigger than just present concerns. She feared the way the next generation of Kennedys—the fourth—would interpret what was happening and how it might inform their view of politics. “They see what we’ve been through and they maybe start to think politics isn’t worth it,” she said in the spring of 1997 at the start of the new Cape Cod season. She and Joe and Beth were talking on the veranda of her home, along with Ted and his sons, Patrick and Teddy, and Ted’s longtime friend Dun Gifford. Gifford, a lifelong resident of Nantucket, had, after his time working for the Kennedys, gone on to create Oldways, a company whose mission was to promote healthy eating. His company would actually become a major force behind the rise in popularity of the Mediterranean diet in the United States. He was visiting the Kennedys with his wife, Gladys.

  “Kids see all this mud being thrown at our elected officials and they figure, heck no, that’s not for me,” Ethel said. Ted had to agree.

  “As the family matriarch, Ethel felt a responsibility to make sure the younger generation understood what was expected of them,” said Dun Gifford. “There was this sense that because of the recent shenanigans, some of the kids might grow up thinking politics was not for them,” he recalled. “I happened to be at her home with Ted on one of those days Ethel got the kids together to talk a little about the family business. ‘Does she do this a lot?’ I asked Ted. ‘All the time,’ he told me.”

  After Ethel went to fetch one of her many dusty scrapbooks, she sat down on one of the wicker chairs. She then gathered around her some of those youngsters of the next generation. Among them were Joe’s twin sons, Joe III and Matthew, who were sixteen; Bobby’s son Bobby III, who was thirteen; and his daughter Kathleen, who was nine. As they sat around their grandmother, Ted and Dun sat directly across from her, smoking cigars and sipping tumblers of scotch.

  According to Dun Gifford, beneath each photograph in Ethel’s scrapbook was a segment of an important speech correlating to the picture. “Ethel pointed to each photo and then read aloud the caption,” he remembered. “‘This is your uncle Jack when he was elected President in 1960,’ she said. Then she read aloud from his inaugural speech: ‘Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans…’

  “She showed a picture of Bobby after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 and read his famous lines: ‘What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another.’

  “Then from Ted’s Democratic National Convention speech in 1980: ‘For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end. For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.’

  “The kids listened, not saying a word, just immersed in their family history lesson,” said Dun Gifford. “‘This is what we do in this family,’ Ethel told them. ‘We serve. We lead.’ They nodded. ‘You must never be afraid to serve,’ she told them. ‘It’s a great privilege and honor to serve. If you listen to your heart, it’ll tell you how you can best do it. Do you understand?’ They all said yes. ‘Fine, now get outta here,’ she told them as she slammed the scrapbook closed. ‘Go play.’ They all scattered. Ted and I then watched the kids run down to the beach, tripping over each other, roughhousing with one another, just as Kennedys had been doing for as long as I had known them.”

  Not Every Wrong …

  Though it had been building for years, the scandal of Michael Kennedy and Marisa Verrochi was resolved so quickly that one of Michael’s siblings described its resolution as “a house of cards that just sort of folded in on itself.”

  Any case against Michael fell apart in May 1997 when Marisa and her parents, Paul and June, each gave conflicting stories about Marisa’s relationship with Michael and when it began, whether at fourteen or sixteen. Then they said they didn’t want to proceed with any charges. June was too sick with her alcoholism to ever withstand a trial, and Marisa just wanted to get on with her life. Meanwhile, Vicki refused to testify against her husband, still loyal to the Kennedys despite everything she’d been through. As it turned out, the only one committed to justice seemed to be Michael Skakel.

  Skakel stated to authorities that Marisa had told him the relationship started when she was fourteen. It didn’t matter, though. His statement would be considered hearsay evidence in court and thus would be inadmissible. It would ruin his relationship with the Kennedys, however, many of whom now felt sure he was a turncoat, as they had expected. When they confronted Skakel, they almost ended up in a bar fight. Skakel asked for understanding and told Joe Kennedy he thought of him as a brother, to which Joe shot back, “Oh yeah? Think again.” Even Ethel was done with Skakel now. The only Kennedy on his side was Bobby Jr., who still thought of him as a good man. “He’s been trying to save everyone, left and right,” he said at the time. “But you know what they do to saviors,” he added. “They crucify them.”

  As hard as it was to believe considering all the damage it had caused, the entire Marisa Verrochi saga was wrapped up in a few days. Michael simply couldn’t believe it. According to one of his attorneys, when he realized he was in the clear, he blinked several times as if he wanted to cry. But there were no tears.

  Once it was all over, there were rumors that the Verrochis had been paid off by the Kennedys to make it all go away. While it certainly makes sense that a prominent, wealthy political family might attempt to settle an ugly situation with a cash payout, not a shred of evidence exists to support the allegation. Paul Verrochi, who was quite wealthy, has strongly denied it. However, if one were to ask him today when his daughter and Michael started having sex, he would probably say fourteen. Be that as it may, he decided to take the difficult position that not every wrong has its remedy.

  Meanwhile, despite everything that had happened with his brother and ex-wife, it would seem that Joe Kennedy’s political career wasn’t over, at least not yet. He was still hoping to salvage it. On June 8, he spoke before nearly three thousand delegates at a state Democratic convention in Salem, trying to raise money for a bid for the party’s nomination for governor in 1998. Mostly, he was trying to gauge the public’s reaction to the idea. He told the crowd: “I had had a marriage that didn’t work out. I can’t tell you, and I can’t put into words, how sorry I am about that. I said things that I wish I’d never said, and I did things I wish I had never done. I’ve told you [turning to his wife, Beth], I’ve told Sheila. I’ve told anyone who cared how sorry I am. On the matter of my brother. I am so terribly sorry, so very sorry for what has happened to the Verrochi family. I extend to them the deepest apology I can summon. I love my
brother very much. I will always love my brother, and I will stand with my brother.”

  Unfortunately, polls conducted after Joe’s speech made it clear that the tide had turned against him. Two months later, in August, another family meeting would be called to determine a course of action. The road ahead was obvious: Joe would have to drop out of the running for governor. “This was tough,” recalled Christopher Lawford, who wasn’t at that meeting but, of course, knew of its particulars. “Aunt Ethel, Uncle Teddy … Bobby Jr.… Kathleen … Michael … all of them … all of us … everyone was devastated. Talk about shock and awe.”

  Postscript

  In 2000, Michael Skakel was finally arrested and charged with the murder of Martha Moxley. Two years later, he stood trial. Most of the Kennedys—like Joe—were not surprised and leaned toward his guilt. Others—like Bobby—continued to believe in his innocence. Skakel was convicted of Martha’s slaying and sentenced to twenty years to life in prison. However, in 2013, a judge granted him a new trial, citing evidence that his lawyer hadn’t properly represented him in the original proceedings. Skakel was then released from prison.

  With the passing of the years, Bobby Kennedy Jr. became even more convinced of his cousin’s innocence and worked hard to exonerate him in Martha’s murder. In 2016, he wrote Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison for a Murder He Didn’t Commit. Later that same year, the Connecticut Supreme Court reinstated Michael’s conviction.

  In 2018, Michael’s conviction was overturned by the Connecticut Supreme Court, forty-three years after the crime, citing what was described as representation by his attorney so ineffective that his right to a fair trial had been violated. Unless prosecutors decide to retry him, which is unlikely, Michael Skakel, now fifty-eight, will remain a free man.

  As for Marisa Verrochi, she went on with her life and today works in education and is happily married with children.

  Marisa’s parents, Paul and June, divorced in 1999. Two years later, June died of alcoholism. She was fifty-one. A year later, Paul married a socialite and businesswoman from the Boston area. He remains a health care professional as well as a philanthropist involved in a number of children’s charities.

  Tragedy on the Slopes

  “If there’s one myth about the Kennedys that ain’t no myth, it’s their incredible athletic competitiveness,” Frank Gifford once recalled. By 1997, Michael Kennedy’s father-in-law had long ago retired from professional football and was now commentating for ABC Sports. However, he still enjoyed the sport and loved to play with his relatives by marriage. “Playing touch football with them at Hickory Hill or Hyannis Port was insanity,” he remembered. “Even for a guy who played for twelve years with the Giants, it was dangerous. You had to stay constantly alert because they hurled their bodies around like kamikazes.”

  Probably no better example of the Kennedys’ obsession with competition and with pushing the envelope was the longtime family tradition of combining skiing with football—which they called “ski football.” Many outsiders considered it a reckless folly, which was maybe one of the reasons the Kennedys glommed on to it. For them, it was fun, it was thrilling, it was maybe even deadly—everything these lifelong daredevils felt they needed to make ski football worth their time.

  The family—adults of the third generation, Jack’s, Bobby’s, and Ted’s offspring, along with their young children, the fourth generation—would divide themselves into two teams and then take off down the slope at treacherously high speeds, often without helmets or poles. They would remain in close proximity to one another, weaving in and out as they hurled the ball at one another and achieved touchdowns at demarcations decided upon in advance, usually enormous aspen trees. Whenever the Kennedys played this makeshift sport, they were chastised by the ski patrol. However, since having the popular family on any icy slope was good for business, there was no way the Kennedys would ever be penalized or banned, regardless of how dangerously they played their hair-raising sport.

  After the Christmas holiday of 1997, many members of the Kennedy family decided to spend the week on the snowy slopes of Aspen. Ethel, who was nursing an injured shoulder from a recent fall, was happy these days, especially since Michael was out of trouble. She was worried about him, though. It was as if a light had gone out in him; he wasn’t quite the same, she said. Some wondered what she was talking about; when was he ever happy? “Man, you’re a Kennedy,” his brothers and cousins kept telling Michael. “You have to pull it together.” He was reminded that others in his family had also made terrible choices and that, somehow, they’d always managed to get past them, go on with their lives, and, most important, still find ways to be of service. “Come on. That’s just Kennedy 101,” said Ted’s son Patrick. Michael knew, though, that he would never be able to run for office. Of course, there were some Kennedys who didn’t hunger for politics, but at least they had a choice. Michael would never have it. “And for what?” asked one of his frustrated relatives. “For Marisa Verrochi? Really? For Marisa Verrochi?”

  Even Ethel had a change of heart where Michael’s marriage was concerned, which surprised some in the family. After Vicki cleared Michael in the Verrochi case, her mother-in-law told her she would understand if she went through with the divorce. She felt that Vicki had proven her loyalty to the Kennedys and that she had more than enough reason to no longer be married to her son. She told her it was her decision and that she would not interfere with it, and also she assured her that if the couple divorced she would always consider her a daughter and a Kennedy. “Because you have been loyal to us, we will always be loyal to you,” she told her. “On one hand, Vicki appreciated it,” said a friend of hers, “but on another, she was like, ‘You know what? I don’t need your permission to do anything.’ She had some deep-seated resentment toward the Kennedys by this time; it was hard not to.”

  It was all Vicki could do lately just to be in Michael’s company. Every time she looked at him she wondered how her life had gone so wrong. Family members were stunned in the days before the skiing trip when she and Michael had a loud argument. “I was wrong and I swear to you, I’m very, very sorry,” Michael told her. Whatever was at issue in that particular moment, Vicki wasn’t prepared to accept an apology for it. Instead, she said a few angry words to Michael and rushed off. Embarrassed, he turned to uncomfortable observers and said, “As you can see, my wife and I are working on open and honest communication. So far, so good.” Deep down, he knew the truth: he’d ruined their life together and would likely never be able to make it up to her.

  Vicki had to admit, though, that she was still vacillating about the divorce. Though she’d filed the papers and they would be finalized in about a month, to say she was absolutely certain that she wanted to break up the family would be untrue. There was still a small chance that she would take Michael back, if only for the sake of their kids.

  Though he had lost so much, he still had his children. “I tell my kids every day that I love them,” he once said, “because I want them to be very clear about that.” One relative recalls Michael right after the holiday playing touch football with his son, his namesake, Michael, who would turn fifteen in about a month. “Little Michael was peppering him with observations about the Patriots, his favorite team,” recalled the source. “He’d make a statement and then eagerly add, ‘Right, Dad?’ Then another and … ‘Right, Dad?’ Michael still walked on water where his kids were concerned, especially his son, and he felt the same about them. Nothing could ever change that.”

  On New Year’s Eve—December 31—the family congregated at the Sundeck restaurant atop Aspen Mountain, waiting for the other skiers on the slopes to clear out so that they could have enough freedom to play ski football without interference. The ski patrol was constantly warning them not to play the makeshift sport because of the obvious danger attached to it. Inevitably, one of the family members would always end up declaring, “Too bad. We’re the fuckin’ Kennedys,” and that would be the end of the debate; the
game would continue.

  As melancholy as he was at this time in his life, Michael Kennedy was always enlivened by skiing. “In all my life I’ve never seen anyone ski as beautifully as Michael,” said his brother Bobby. “He had the quick feet of a professional mogul skier and as fluid a movement as I’ve ever seen on any skier. Bob Beattie, who coached the U.S. Olympic team, once said that Michael was the best natural skier he had ever seen.”

  Though Michael loved it and was the best at it of all the family members, Vicki hated ski football. For years, she’d been telling anyone who would listen—not many—that she thought it was risky. She would just as soon not even watch, though she did trust Michael to make sure their kids were safe. Therefore, she stayed behind in Vail at Frank and Kathie Lee’s home while the other Kennedys went to the Aspen slopes.

  What happened that day occurred so swiftly and was so shocking, some of those who witnessed it can’t really remember it clearly. The fact that it happened to Michael, of all the Kennedys, the one who was the most athletic, the most daring … the best at everything sports-related, made it all the more impossible to fathom. It happened at lightning speed, too, not allowing time to process it or to even later clearly recall it. When trying to catch a pass of a blue Nerf football, Michael somehow misjudged things and skied right into a tree, his head hitting first with a stomach-turning cracking sound. He wasn’t wearing a safety helmet. Of course. Everyone ran to him, stunned. As others gathered and became hysterical at the sight of Michael’s crumpled body, Rory started to pound on her brother’s sternum until she managed to elicit a weak pulse. She turned him onto his side so that he wouldn’t choke. “Michael,” she screamed at him, “you have to fight! Don’t leave us, Michael. Please. Please.”