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

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  “When the engagement was announced, the media was giddy with anticipation about the melding of these two powerful political families,” legendary White House reporter Helen Thomas recalled in a 1999 interview. “The usually staid New York Times wrote something like ‘This story has just about everything: love, politics, history’ … the whole shebang. There actually were some similarities between the two families: both hailing from immigrants—Ireland and Italy—both beginning journeys as underdogs in America, gaining money, power, and influence along the way, and then using it to do battle on the political landscape. But the Kennedys had so much more clout than the Cuomos on a national stage. I think some of them wondered why the heck they were even being compared to the Cuomos. They considered themselves so much more of a dynasty with so many more political power brokers. Andrew’s father, Mario, had long been in Democratic politics; he’d served as the fifty-second governor of New York for three terms, from 1983 to 1994. So the Cuomos basically just had him at the top of the family tree and Andrew on the next limb down. Still, when he and Kerry married, a lot of people looked at it as the merger of two political powerhouse families.”

  Some reports had it that the Cuomos hoped that being linked with the Kennedys would advance Andrew’s political aspirations. However, because of the scandals that had long been a hallmark of Kennedy history, Mario wasn’t sure that aligning with the beleaguered family would do him or his son much good. “We don’t engage in scandal” is how Andrew put it. “That’s not who we are.”

  The Kennedys would soon learn that Andrew wasn’t necessarily a lighthearted person; many people found him to be downright humorless. What had always been true about the Kennedys was that, despite any problems, they liked to have fun. In that respect, Andrew didn’t fit in with them. When he was with his brothers-in-law either at Hickory Hill or at the compound, he wanted to discuss policy, while they wanted to play football. For them, policy was dinner-table conversation, not really for the outdoors. However, even in that dining arena, Andrew didn’t seem to blend in. He was never able to squeeze in a word between the many viewpoints, opinions, and criticisms. He actually began to not enjoy being around the Kennedys. That was fine with Kerry, at least at first. She’d had enough of her family anyway and was eager to get to know his. Typical of their differences, when the families began to plan the wedding, Andrew said he didn’t want any toasts to be offered at the reception. This took the Kennedys by surprise; the giving of a toast was a family tradition at any gathering, big or small. However, Andrew was worried about what the Kennedys might say that would embarrass him or his relatives.

  There were probably going to be familial differences no matter who it was Kerry married; she was experienced enough in life to make up her own mind about things. She married Andrew on June 9, 1990, at St. Matthew’s Cathedral in Washington, D.C. The couple then moved into Hickory Hill while they searched for a home in Queens at about the same time that Andrew got a top cabinet position as an assistant secretary of HUD. Living in his mother-in-law’s manse would definitely not be easy, though.

  Cuomolot

  Andrew Cuomo, tall and lanky in his checkered swimsuit, was lounging by the pool one day with one of Kerry’s brothers when Ethel approached in her colorful muumuu. “About last night,” she began, standing before Cuomo and looking down at him critically. Surprised by her presence, Andrew jumped to his feet in respect. She nodded and told him to sit back down. “You’re from an Italian family, Andrew,” she then said. “I thought for sure that Italians were fun. But you. You’re such a wet blanket. Has anyone ever told you that?” she asked. He looked at her with a stunned expression. “Close your mouth, Andrew,” she told him. “You’ll catch flies.” Was she being insulting? Her beguiling charm and easy naturalness often made it hard to figure her out. It was her laughter as she sat down next to him, though, that answered the question.

  Though Hickory Hill was an expansive estate and Andrew and Kerry certainly had their privacy, he was not accustomed to the place’s rabble-rousing culture. On this sunny afternoon, Ethel was referencing what had happened the previous night when a Kennedy tried to push Andrew into one of the estate’s two swimming pools. The two men almost came to blows over it. “We are fun,” Andrew protested. “But within reason. Why is it so wrong that I don’t want to be shoved into a pool when I’m wearing a suit and tie?”

  Ethel nodded. “Okay. Fair enough,” she agreed, though secretly she no doubt disagreed.

  The two then had an animated discussion about public housing and the devious methods of slumlords in this country, a topic that had obviously become a priority of Andrew’s because of his work with HUD. He explained that Mario had started as a lawyer for the underdog, and that he had now proudly taken up the fight himself, a battle Ethel admired and one that sounded a lot to her like something her late husband might have waged. Andrew was also invested in the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity (FHEO), which had been started under the LBJ administration. Ethel had had mixed feelings about LBJ back in the day but believed deeply in FHEO and its work in fighting discrimination in public housing. Andrew had recently beefed up its staff, wanting to make sure that each and every complaint ever lodged would be dealt with quickly and handled fairly. It wasn’t just lip service for him, either. He had deeply held convictions and was passionate, which was clear whenever he talked about his work as an advocate.

  In the year that they lived together at Hickory Hill, Ethel began to understand what Kerry saw in Andrew; she became a staunch advocate not only for him and his undertakings but also for the marriage. She began to think that maybe one of the reasons hers sons didn’t like Andrew was because they were jealous of him. He was a good man, she said, who kept his head down and did his work without distraction. He had a strong work ethic, which she felt some of her more undisciplined sons might consider worth emulating rather than criticizing.

  Andrew soon became a fan of Ethel’s as well. “My mother-in-law was a firsthand witness to pretty much everything I ever learned about the Kennedys in school,” he said at the end of his year at Hickory Hill. “I admire her, probably more than she knows. I now understand that she’s been Kerry’s greatest influencer.”

  After that first year at Hickory Hill, the Cuomos settled in a large six-bedroom home in an upscale neighborhood in Queens. They had three children, twins Cara and Mariah in 1995 and Michaela in 1997. Andrew and his mother-in-law continued their close relationship, speaking on the phone several times a week.

  While he was well-meaning in his work, it was also true that Andrew Cuomo was a tough boss; most of his aides were intimidated by and even afraid of him. Even those who admired him had to admit that they thought he was a bit of a tyrant. “Every day was blood-sport battle for Andrew,” said one assistant of his, “and he eagerly put on his armor to engage in it. It was difficult for him to turn it off when he got home, and from what I understood, he could be less than warm to Kerry, particularly on days when tensions ran high at the office.”

  Also, because of his heavy workload and his commitment to it, Andrew had become an absentee father. By the end of 1997, Kerry was frustrated. She told her sister-in-law Mary that Andrew was always gone, traveling for work. She’d actually fallen into a pretty good routine with the kids in his absence. When he was finally around, however, his presence threw things into chaos. “To be honest, I’m starting to think it’s better when he’s not here,” she said. “First of all, my expectations are lowered, and secondly, things just run more smoothly.” Even when he was home, Kerry complained, Andrew seemed checked out. He was preoccupied, and maybe with good reason. After all, he was contemplating a run for governor. She started to feel selfish wanting more from her husband, and then that didn’t feel good, either.

  Even given her present dissatisfaction with him, Kerry felt Andrew had good ideas for the state of New York and that he could make a real difference. “What if this is his moment?” she asked her brother Joe. His response was, “Pretty much alway
s in politics, it comes down to one of two things: ‘I hate that guy’ or ‘I don’t hate that guy.’ With your husband, I’m pretty sure it will be ‘I hate that guy.’”

  Kerry wasn’t offended by her sibling’s observation. She knew how her brothers felt about Andrew. By this time, he knew it as well. “They can’t stand it,” he said of them, according to one account. “They just want us to be as miserable as they are.”

  Andrew didn’t see the problems he had with Kerry as being insurmountable. He was still completely devoted to her and the children and felt he was giving to them as much as he had to give. Meanwhile, Kerry didn’t want to sabotage his chances of being governor with a high-profile separation and possibly even a messy divorce. She wanted to support him; she felt it was her duty, and she wasn’t going to let him down. Still, she wanted to honor her own concerns, too. Rather than cause any sort public sensation at the wrong time in her husband’s career, she instead asked him if he would attend couple’s counseling with her. He readily agreed.

  A Culture of Caring

  By the beginning of 1998, John Kennedy Jr. and his new wife, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, found themselves locked in a routine so familiar to anyone who has ever found himself on constant alert due to the illness of a loved one. The phone would ring in the middle of the night, jarring them from a restless sleep. John would answer it, panic rising in him. He’d then sit up in bed and listen as Anthony’s wife, Carole, told him that his cousin was again in the hospital. “I’ll be right there,” John would whisper into the phone, not wanting to disturb Carolyn. He’d then leap out of bed, tell Carolyn to stay put (she never would, of course), throw some clothes on, race down to the street, and then hop into a taxicab headed to the hospital. Once there, he and Carolyn would find a weeping Carole pacing back and forth while doctors worked on her husband. As they awaited word, Anthony would suddenly stabilize. The next morning would inevitably find the best friends joking about it always having to be “about” Anthony, and why it was that he refused to ever let anyone in his life have a decent night’s sleep. A couple of days later, Anthony would be released. John and Carolyn would be relieved. With the passing of a few days, they might actually fall into a habit of sleeping well … that is, until the cycle would repeat.

  The rest of the year and into the first six months of 1999 would involve more emergency hospital visits and more close calls. Of course, there were always Kennedys, Shrivers, Lawfords, and Smiths coming and going from the hospital, all of whom cared deeply about Anthony. There were also many strangers who kept showing up—friends of friends who wanted the best for him, not to mention the families of other patients who became familiar faces simply because they were also in the hallways every day, pacing the floors, worried about their own loved ones.

  “You meet so many people in these circumstances—so many strangers—and you bond with them in the hallways of hospitals and in coffee shops there, and you hear their stories,” Gustavo Paredes recalled. “John called it ‘a culture of caring’ and said that somehow in the midst of all the pain and suffering he started to recognize something so wonderful, so heartwarming—an inherent goodness in people. ‘It makes such an impression on you, how wonderful people are at their core,’ he told me one day at the hospital. ‘It’s so powerful, you never want to forget it. You want to hold on to it forever.’”

  PART IX

  Running Out of Time

  The Wealth of the New Generation

  At the same time that John Kennedy was trying to cope with Anthony Radziwill’s devastating illness, he was also taking meetings with other members of his generation in the offices of Park Agency, Inc., the family’s team of business managers in New York. The Kennedys were in the process of attempting to restructure and redistribute their tremendous wealth. Of course, because of their mother’s marriage to Aristotle Onassis, John and Carolyn were more than set financially for life, with each being worth as much as maybe $50 million by 1998. “It was hard to imagine how much money they had,” said one of their cousins, laughing. “We would think, wow … John’s that rich but yet doesn’t spring for dinner?” Still, despite his tremendous wealth, John attended all the meetings at Park Agency, Inc.—and there were many of them—feeling that even though he didn’t need the additional money, he was entitled to it, as was his sister; he wanted to be a part of the proceedings. Caroline, though, didn’t attend a single one. When it came to discussing money with her cousins, she drew a line in the sand. She sent her husband to one of the meetings, and he then reported back to her that John had it covered. The Schlossbergs could safely stay out of it.

  Prior to these meetings in 1998, most of the Kennedys of the third generation had their inheritances completely tied up in trusts and other entities that had been created with tax strategies in mind; it all made it difficult for them to access any funds, even for emergencies. In a sense, it wasn’t exactly what the patriarch had had in mind. Back in 1940s, Joseph P. Kennedy used to tell his wife, Rose, “I’m making all this money so that my children don’t have to, so they can go into public service.” In other words, he wanted at least his own children to be able to access their cash, and probably, if he had been asked, he would have liked his grandchildren to have the same access. However, after RFK died in 1968, Rose Kennedy began to clamp down on the way the family’s fortune was being spent.

  By 1970, each of the families—Kennedys (Jackie’s, Ted’s, and Ethel’s), Shrivers, Smiths, and Lawfords—were allocated about $150,000 a year, a sizable amount for the times with the average per capita income being $9,350. However, Ethel’s Hickory Hill was an expensive enterprise. Unlike, for instance, Sargent and Eunice, who had their own thriving philanthropy to finance Timberlawn (their estate from which much of their youth charity was run), Ethel was entirely dependent on the Kennedys’ largesse. She was also having trouble accessing her own family’s wealth, which had been put into complex Skakel investments that would frustrate and exasperate her throughout the seventies and all the way into the nineties. The third generation—her children and their cousins—also had trouble accessing trust funds and annuities as they got older, which is why some of them ended up finding their own ways of making money. Joe Kennedy II started Citizens Energy, for instance, and when his brother Michael took over the company (when Joe became a congressman), it continued to turn a huge profit and provide many millions of dollars for both of them. Others weren’t as lucky. For instance, Newsweek reported that Bobby Jr. and his wife, Mary, might be forced to sell their house in Bedford because it was no longer sustainable. “Compared with his wealthier relatives, Bobby and his siblings were paupers,” Newsweek noted. “His father had spent much of his inheritance on his 1968 presidential run. What was left went largely to his widow, the remaining amount divided among the eleven children.” It wasn’t true that RFK had used his inheritance to finance his presidential run, but the essence of what Newsweek reported of Bobby’s siblings having to figure out their finances was true. “Of course, it overstates it to say that any of the Kennedys were ever paupers as Newsweek suggested,” said the family’s attorney Benedict F. Fitzgerald Jr. in an interview in 2012. “But prior to 1998, many of them did have to find ways to make a living in order to augment trust funds that were not easily accessible to them.”

  Things changed dramatically for the next generation in 1998 when the Kennedys decided to sell off the Merchandise Mart in Chicago—a family enterprise bought by the senior Joe in 1945 for $12.5 million—as well as other massive holdings. This financial reworking was the purpose of all those meetings in 1998 of Kennedy heirs at Park Agency, Inc. The properties that were to be sold consisted of 5.3 million square feet of office, retail, and showroom space—including the Apparel Center in Chicago, the Washington Design Center, and the Washington Office Center, both in Washington, D.C. All of it was sold for $625 million, and the sale was made for one reason: to once and for all seed the lives of the next generation, or as the Chicago Tribune put it, “The transaction fulfills a plan by the Kenn
edy family to sell real estate to satisfy the goals and financial needs of a growing number of family members.” A small percentage of the wealth—which would still be managed by Park Agency, Inc.—would be split among all the members of the next generation, the children of Jack, Bobby, Teddy, Eunice, Pat, and Jean. They, in turn, would be free to distribute it to their offspring as they saw fit. Suffice it to say, this 1998 business maneuver would serve to finance a whole generation of Kennedy heirs, and the one after that one, too … and likely many more to come.

  Pretty much every member of the next generation of Kennedys—and that’s twenty-seven cousins, Kennedys, Lawfords, Smiths, and Shrivers—immediately received about $10 million each from the Chicago sale to do with what they liked, and many more millions—don’t forget, the sale was for $625 million—which would be invested for them. Today, some of the Kennedys, such as Ted’s children, Teddy and Patrick, are said to be worth about $20 million each, most of it from the sale, but also from inheritances. Bobby and Joe Kennedy are today worth $50 million—about $10 million liquid of which came from the Chicago sale and the rest from their own lucrative work: Joe’s with Citizens Energy and Bobby’s as an environmental attorney. While the wealth of the new generation is complicated in that they all have their own accountants and have invested in their own ways, one thing is certain: if not for the 1998 sale, the Lawfords and Smiths, for instance, and some of the Shrivers, too, would have been in trouble. (Maria Shriver would never have to worry, though; her marriage to Arnold Schwarzenegger set her up nicely.)