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

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  “By this time, Michael’s children—Michael Jr. [fifteen], Kyle [fourteen], and Rory [ten]—had also gotten to the scene,” said R. Couri Hay, a reporter and family friend who was also present. “Crying, they fell to their knees and began to pray, their prayers interrupted with cries of ‘Please, God, not my daddy. Not my daddy.’

  “Finally the paramedics arrived and started working on Michael, but it was too late. He was gone. Rory tried to shield the children from what was happening as the paramedics put a cervical collar on Michael and then placed him on a toboggan. She continued to urge the kids to pray for their father.

  “I started to back away from the scene because I realized that this had suddenly become an intensely personal and tragic family moment,” R. Couri Hay continued. “As the toboggan took Michael down the slope, I took his poles and slowly skied behind it. At this point, it was just silent. Everyone was in shock. It was surreal. Eerie. Cold.

  “I looked around. People were crying. The sun was setting. It was getting dark.”

  Lost Soul

  The days that followed Michael Kennedy’s sudden death were a blur.

  There was the wake in Hyannis Port at the compound, Michael lying in state in the drawing room of his mother’s home, just as had been the case with his brother David. His family members and friends passed by his casket, each kneeling before it, crying and praying. All nine of Michael’s siblings and their spouses as well as their children tried to console one another. Meanwhile, photographers in helicopters and airplanes flying above the compound tried to get blurry shots of the Kennedys on the beach walking together quietly.

  Vicki was bereft. Who knows what the future would have held for her, Michael, and their three children? The book was now closed for good, though, and the ending more tragic than she could ever have imagined.

  At the center of this circle of grief was the family’s matriarch, Ethel, doing her mighty best to lift everyone’s spirits while she herself was all but crushed by the weight of her own despair. It had been almost thirty years since her husband’s murder, but somehow this latest family tragedy returned her to its pain and sorrow. She missed him more than ever and felt that if he were alive he would know better than she how to handle their son’s death.

  Seeing her children’s longtime governess, Ena, now eighty-nine, walk through the door with her daughter, Fina, fifty-nine, was almost more than Ethel could bear.

  By this time Ena was retired; she’d reluctantly left the household a few years earlier simply because she was just too old to continue working. Ethel had kept her on as long as she could because she understood that Hickory Hill had been Ena’s home since the day it was purchased in 1956. By the beginning of the 1990s, when Ena was in her early eighties, Ethel suggested that Fina move back into the estate to care for her. Fina, now divorced, obtained a transfer to Virgina from her employer, American Express, so that she could, again, live with the Kennedys. Ena would then continue to work at Hickory Hill and at the Kennedy compound well into the decade doing easy jobs like arranging flowers or polishing the silverware, with Fina always keeping a close eye on her. Finally, when the winters became too hard on Ena, Ethel set her up in a house in Florida, which is where she now lived. It just so happened that mother and daughter were together for the birth of Fina’s grandson in Washington, where Fina lived, when they saw the news about Michael’s death on television in the hospital’s waiting room. The two then flew up to Hyannis Port to be with the Kennedys.

  People in the room immediately rose out of respect as soon as they saw Ena. Ethel collapsed in her arms, her ironclad façade crumbling before everyone’s eyes. “Oh my God,” she exclaimed. “I can’t believe you are here, Ena. What in the world are you doing here?”

  “Where else would I be, Mrs. Kennedy?” asked the elderly woman.

  As she remained in her embrace, Ethel then noted that Ena had been at her side the day Michael was born. Ena comforted Ethel as best she could, but she, too, was upset. She seemed to be trembling. “You did very well with him, Mrs. Kennedy,” she managed to say. “This is not your fault—”

  “I know that,” Ethel said, cutting her off.

  “It’s nobody’s fault,” Ena continued.

  “Ena, I know that,” Ethel again said. While she was obviously devastated, she wasn’t going to blame herself. All of it was God’s plan, she concluded, and she’d accepted it. When Ena asked if there was anything Ethel needed, she said that all she needed were her prayers. “May God bless Michael,” Ena then said, “and welcome him home.” Then Fina took Ethel into her arms. Like her mom, she, too, had helped care for the infant Michael. “He was a good boy, Mrs. Kennedy,” Fina said, “and a good man. I have so many wonderful memories of him.” She and Ethel then held a long embrace.

  A funeral Mass at Our Lady of Victory Church was attended by all the family, their friends, as well as many politicians, with, of course, Vicki and her and Michael’s three children in the front pew of the church.

  Maybe it was understandable that Bobby Jr. would seek to frame his brother in a positive light in his moving eulogy of him. Of course, privately, the Kennedys knew the truth: Michael had gone down a bad road and had ruined any number of lives in the process, including his own. But the question remained: Why? What drove him? Was he traumatized because of his father’s death? Was he crippled because of drugs? Was he suffering from a mental disorder? His family remained at a loss to explain it. All they knew with certainty was that they must honor him. No matter his faults, he was their beloved Michael, and they would preserve his memory. Some observers felt Bobby’s words during the service didn’t really reflect the reality of Michael’s experience, though. Instead, they felt it to be a romanticized version of events. However, there are still kernels of truth in Bobby’s words and, no doubt, the sentiment behind them was heartfelt.

  Bobby said, in part: “I was so proud of him this past year. He handled the chaos with characteristic calm. The personal issues with which he struggled were not about malice or greed. They were about humanity and passion. His transgressions were the kind that Christ taught us are the first and easiest to forgive. He died, three years sober, on a forty-degree day under a blue sky in the company of his children, his family, and friends he loved. He caught the ball, turned to a friend, and said his final words: ‘This is really great!’ The last thing he saw was his children. The next thing he saw was God.”

  “By the time we got to the cemetery, everyone was feeling such tremendous grief, you couldn’t even speak,” said football star Brian Holloway, a close friend of the family’s. “We just put our arms around each other because there weren’t any words. I was standing right next to John at the family plot where David was also buried. John and I looked at each other and nodded sadly, and then I put my arm around his shoulder. He did the same, put his arm around mine.”

  A few months earlier, John had addressed Michael’s and Joe’s problems in George, penning an editorial that some viewed as a harsh indictment of them. Actually, it was a condemnation of the media’s coverage of the dual scandals and of the public’s opinion that high-profile people like the Kennedys aren’t allowed human foibles. However, Joe didn’t quite see it that way and told the press, “I guess my first reaction was, ‘Ask not what you can do for your cousin, but what you can do for his magazine.’” John didn’t much care about his opinion, though. He was more concerned with how Michael felt about it, and called him to make sure he understood. He said he was fine, but worried about John’s relationship with Joe. Days later, he got the two of them box seats to a Boston Red Sox game and suggested they go together. Of course, John and Joe didn’t want to do so, but Michael insisted. The cousins then had a great time at the game and, remembering their bond as kids, couldn’t help but wonder how they’d ever become so estranged. Joe took the blame. “While I was trying to figure out how to be a good politician, you were trying to figure out how to be a good person,” he told John, according to this account. John confessed that he always
felt naive and soft next to Joe. He respected the fact that Joe took his work in Congress so seriously. He urged Joe to stay in the game and not allow Michael’s scandal and Sheila’s book to ruin things for him. He also promised to campaign hard for him if he decided to run for governor. The cousins had reached a détente, and it was all because of Michael—the one John had always referred to as “the peacemaker.”

  * * *

  THE TRAGIC DEATH of Michael LeMoyne Kennedy would have a reverberating effect throughout the whole family, especially on his brother Joe’s political career. Joe spent a lot of time discussing his future with Ethel, Ted, and others in the family who’d always believed—hoped—he would one day be President. In a few months’ time, though, he would leave politics altogether, citing “a new recognition of our own vulnerabilities and the vagaries of life.”

  “Not only did Joe fear he’d never gain political traction again due to recent family travails, he didn’t want to try,” recalled Richard Burke, who had been an aide to Ted Kennedy. “He was exhausted. Politics had taken a toll on him; he wanted a different life. He once said something about being a politician, and Ted corrected him: ‘You’re not just a politician. You’re a Kennedy.’ That had always been a lot to live up to. He might have survived Sheila’s book if that had been the only thing working against him. But combined with what Michael had done? It was like a whole river of shit engulfing him.”

  Though Ethel was gravely disappointed, she wasn’t particularly surprised. After all, she’d always known that Joe’s career could be adversely impacted by Michael’s actions if they ever became public, and she had a bad feeling about the way Joe had treated Sheila before she’d even written the book. That didn’t mean she wasn’t crushed, though, by the knowledge that Joe would now be the first Kennedy to ever drop out of politics. In all, he spent six terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, until January 1999. In his last speech on the floor, he delivered a passionate speech asking for unity and forgiveness in the midst of Congressional debate regarding the articles of impeachment of President Bill Clinton.

  Gayle Fee, the reporter for the Boston Herald who covered the story of Michael and Marisa extensively, says that according to her sources, the Verrochi family was purely satisfied by the way things had worked out. “They didn’t really even do anything to exact their revenge, did they?” she noted. “They didn’t testify against Michael, seek to have him charged with statutory rape, or push to have him incarcerated. Yet they’d still managed to get justice just by letting things unfold naturally and, in a sense, altering American history forevermore. After all, Joe had been on the road to becoming governor, and probably later President. But now that was never going to happen, was it? In their eyes, it had been better for them to just sit back and watch the favorite son be completely destroyed by his brother’s transgressions than it was for them to even get a financial settlement. While they’d probably never be completely okay with the way their lives had been blown up by the Kennedys … this helped.”

  PART VIII

  The In-Laws

  The Outsider

  Two days after Michael Kennedy’s death, while the family was still in shock and sequestered in their homes at the Cape, there was a bit of controversy caused by Kerry Kennedy’s husband, Andrew Cuomo.

  Mary Kerry Kennedy—known to all as Kerry, born on September 8, 1959—was the seventh child of Bobby and Ethel. She and Andrew Cuomo had been married since 1990. When she married him, Kerry was young, blond, and gorgeous at thirty, two years his junior. A graduate of the Putney School, where she and Mary Richardson had become best friends, and Brown University, she received her law degree from Boston College Law School. Like her sister Kathleen and many of her brothers, she had a real hunger for politics, but unlike Kathleen, felt it was not a good fit for her. She wanted to find other ways to be of service.

  Kerry began working as a human rights activist in 1981 as an intern with Amnesty International, traveling to El Salvador to investigate claims against the U.S. immigration system relating to refugees from that country. She would, in years to come, travel to Kenya, South Korea, Northern Ireland, China, Vietnam, and India among other countries, leading delegations devoted to children’s and women’s rights, domestic violence, workplace discrimination, and other violations. She became the president of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, founded by Ethel and designed to urge Congress to keep human rights violations front and center among its concerns, and also to supply activists around the world with funding to continue their good work. Over the years of being a public servant, Kerry’s résumé has become long and impressive; she hasn’t stopped fighting for people since the day she started doing so in 1981.

  Of Italian American descent, Kerry’s husband, Andrew Cuomo, was lethally attractive. Tall and dark, with black hair and deep-set eyes, Ethel once called him “a picture-postcard career politician,” meaning that, in her view, he looked exactly as a politician should look and, sometimes to the dismay of certain of her family members, acted liked one, too, which, it would seem, was the problem after Michael’s death.

  After Michael’s passing, much of the grieving Kennedy family was gathered in Ethel’s living room, watching television news reports. They were so numb, they could barely speak to one another. Suddenly, there before them on television appeared Andrew, explaining to a reporter that the Kennedys were all mourning, that it was a bad time for them, and that they hoped for the space to mourn in private. What he said was actually quite benign, and also true. The fact that he said it at all, though, was the problem. “Who made him a Kennedy spokesman?” one of the family members said, bolting up from his chair. According to this relative, “Everyone had been so solemn and then, suddenly, so agitated as we reacted to this breach. You just didn’t do that. You didn’t break ranks and go rogue like that. It felt like Andrew just wanted attention, that it was an opportunity for him to get in front of a camera. No one was happy about it.”

  Rory, still traumatized by the ordeal of having tried to save Michael’s life with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, confronted her brother-in-law as soon as he walked back into the house. “Andrew,” she exclaimed, “why did you do that?” Confused by his sister-in-law’s annoyance, he explained that he felt someone needed to address the media. He said he realized that the Kennedys were all too distressed to do so and he thought he would step in for them. He thought they’d be grateful, not upset. As he explained himself, he began to get a little defensive. “First of all, Andrew, I would correct your attitude,” Rory told him, sounding much like her mother. “And second of all, you shouldn’t have done it.”

  Even the visiting Ena Bernard knew better, Rory noted. When Ena picked up the phone and it was a reporter, she told him, “I take care of the Kennedys. I don’t help you write stories about them.” She then slammed the phone down, exclaiming, “Ay caramba!” How was it, Rory wondered, that Ena had more sense than Andrew? She then turned around and left the room; Andrew also stormed out. “You know what I like about that guy?” one of the Kennedy brothers asked no one in particular. “Nothing.”

  The next day, Andrew complained to Bobby’s wife, Mary, that Rory had been dismissive of him and that the two had had a bit of a dustup. Mary wasn’t the one for him to turn to, though; she’d never liked Andrew. She found him rude and abrasive and only tolerated him because she knew he made her best friend happy. If it had been up to her, though, she would never have selected him for Kerry. “I’m sorry, but I don’t want to hear your outrage right now,” she told him in front of some of the other Kennedys. “Poor Michael is dead. Show some respect.” Andrew made a few excuses, and then, flustered, announced to everyone in the room, “Look, I’m out of here. You won’t be seeing me for a while,” to which one of the Kennedys responded, “Well, that’s the dream, anyway.”

  Of course, Andrew Cuomo is today serving his third term as governor of New York. However, his early days with the Kennedys are considered by many political historians to be his or
igin story. By 1997 he was Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. A member of President Bill Clinton’s administration, he was the former assistant secretary for Community Planning and Development. Philanthropically, he had also distinguished himself in myriad ways, not the least of which by establishing HELP, a successful foundation dedicated to the assistance of the homeless. Even though he and his family were obviously already quite influential in government, it was as Kerry’s husband and because of his high-profile link to the Kennedys that Andrew became really well known to most of the country. To the Kennedys, though, he seemed as if he liked the spotlight just a little too much, and if a Kennedy thought a person was hungry for attention, that was really saying something. Moreover, they also felt he wasn’t kind, that he was brash and inconsiderate. However, he was married to one of their own. So, of course, they had to accept him. For Kerry’s brother Douglas, though, that one hostile moment that everyone had observed between his sister and brother-in-law over the television appearance was a bit of a revelation: “That’s where I started to think, This is just a bully.”

  The Cuomos

  Kerry Kennedy had always been clear that she’d never endure the sorts of unhappy marriages she’d seen all around her from the time she was a child. A romantic at heart, she always felt she’d be one day swept away by someone like her father and have a storybook romance like her mother’s. “I envy your beautiful memories of Daddy,” she once told her. She’d been engaged to a young man in college, someone for whom she fell hard. Tragically, he had a heart attack and died while having a snowball fight. It was devastating. Therefore, at the time she met Andrew, in 1989, Kerry was fragile. He helped heal her heart. He was warm and open, from a family that reminded her of the closeness of her own. Friends would note that when he looked at Kerry it was as if he were gazing at an apparition; he seemed to not believe his good luck in finding and then falling for her. He proposed on Valentine’s Day 1990.