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

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Patrick knew what he had to do: he had to go to Kara’s home to be with Grace, who was about to turn seventeen, and Max, fourteen. He’d spend the afternoon with them and the hours into the night, telling them heartwarming stories about their courageous mother and who she’d been in his life and in the lives of everyone she’d touched. Her bravery, her spirit … her love of family; he wanted to remind Kara’s children of all of it. He understood from his own personal experience with loss that it would be these precious memories that would sustain them during the dark days ahead. “I had this profound sense that I had to honor Kara in the way I acted during those first twelve hours,” Patrick would recall. “And I just kept thinking, I can’t do what was often done with us—talk about other things and ignore all the elephants in the room. I had to tell them the truth. Kara would have wanted me to do that for her, and for them.”

  Of course, losing Kara so suddenly was devastating to everyone. For her part, Ethel thanked God Ted wasn’t alive to have to bear it; she didn’t think he would have been able to do so. Sister Pauline Joseph recalled, “I was actually in the room with Mrs. Kennedy at Hickory Hill when she heard about Kara the day after it happened. I’m not positive, but I think it was Teddy Jr. who called with the news. I heard her chastise him and ask, ‘But why didn’t you tell me sooner?’ And from what she later told me, he said he didn’t know why, he just wanted to wait. He thought maybe it was because he envied the fact that she didn’t know about it, and he wanted that to remain the case for a little while longer. As soon as she hung up, she looked at me and said, ‘I have to call Joansie.’ I thought to myself, How terrible is it that these two women of Camelot had to come together again in the face of yet another great and sudden tragedy?”

  Just imagine the trials Ethel had watched her bear since the day Joan Bennett joined the Kennedy family more than fifty years earlier: her difficult marriage to Ted, through her alcoholism, her miscarriages (one suffered immediately after the ordeal of Chappaquiddick), her bipolar disorder, and everything else she endured, all of it winding toward this terrible time in her life that would find her burying her only daughter. “I also heard Mrs. Kennedy’s side of that conversation,” recalled the nun. “After she expressed her condolences, she told Joan, ‘We were given eight more years with Kara. How blessed we all were, Joansie. How truly blessed.’ She noted that Max was just six when Kara was diagnosed [with cancer], and Grace was eight. Now Max was fourteen and Grace sixteen. ‘Thank God Kara had those eight years to raise them,’ Mrs. Kennedy said, ‘and thank God those kids now have those precious memories with their mom.’”

  Observing Joan at Kara’s funeral at Holy Trinity Church in Washington—so small and weak in her black turtleneck sweater and pantsuit, her hair still long and golden—most people did have to wonder how she would ever survive Kara’s death. She was so shattered and numb, Patrick and Teddy had to help her as she slowly made her way into the church.

  As Kara’s best friends, Caroline Kennedy and Maria Shriver, sat with their families during the service, Teddy recalled that he and his sister had collaborated on their father’s reelection campaign back in 1988. Kara’s responsibility, he said, was public relations. He said that when poll numbers began to drop, some urged the senator to “go negative.” However, Kara strongly disagreed. “She implored Dad to emphasize instead his primary strengths, which were his compassion and his willingness to fight for what he believed in, things that even his political opponents would agree with,” Teddy said. “She reminded him why he was in political life.” Their father would end up winning that election by his largest-ever margin and, said Teddy, “our father always credited Kara for that win.”

  After the Mass, on the way out while following the casket, Max and Grace literally had to hold their grandmother up; she was too weak and overwrought to stand on her own. True to her nature, though, Joan would somehow rebound. About a half hour later, she would hold court in the parking lot while surrounded by people who just wanted to be near her, to comfort her, and to express their sorrow. Their love seemed to lift her. Soon, she was reminiscing, talking about Kara’s wedding to Michael Allen back in 1990.

  Joan recalled that as she and Kara planned the big day, Kara told her she wanted a black gospel choir to sing during the ceremony. This was dismaying, she said, because she’d always imagined a lovely string quartet playing Mozart at her daughter’s wedding. However, Kara’s mind was made up about it; she wanted gospel music. “I was so determined that she have the wedding of her dreams, I spent months going to black churches all over the city trying to understand gospel,” Joan recalled in an animated way; she seemed to be relishing the telling of the story. “Finally, I found just the right choir at the Twelfth Baptist Church in Roxbury, one of the oldest Baptist churches in the country,” she said. “They were thirteen of the best gospel singers ever and, believe you me, when Kara got married nothing like this had ever been heard at Our Lady of Victory. Are you kidding me? This was something for the ages.”

  As Joan Kennedy smiled, she concluded, “Kara was so proud of me that day. She really was. And I was proud of her, too.”

  PART IX

  Demons

  Gasoline to a Fire

  Back in the spring of 2008, Mary Richardson Kennedy was lying on a couch in Ethel’s home on the Cape. Sister Pauline Joseph was kneeling at her side, holding her hand and praying with her. Ethel walked into the room and gently placed a cool folded towel over her daughter-in-law’s head. Mary had a hangover, a usual occurrence these days. “I think I need a lot more than just prayers right now,” she said, looking up at the nun.

  “What is it you need, dear?” the nun asked her.

  “A new life,” she answered.

  Ethel knelt down next to the nun and looked at Mary with steely determination. “No, Mary,” she said. “I’ll tell you what you need. You need to look in the mirror and you need to figure out just who you are, and it’s not this.” She reminded Mary that she’d warned her not to marry Bobby but that she’d decided to do it anyway. Now she needed to make the marriage work. She said that whatever he did in his private life shouldn’t have such a debilitating effect on her. “That’s what men do, Mary,” she exclaimed. “You always wanted to be a Kennedy? Fine,” Ethel said. “You got your wish. Now figure it out.”

  After she got all that off her chest, Ethel looked up at the nun and noticed her subtly shaking her head. Ethel’s face then softened. After all, she’d known Mary for almost thirty-five years, since 1974, when she and Kerry were roommates at Putney.

  Taking a gentler tone, Ethel reminded her daughter-in-law that when she was a freshman, an art history teacher had accused her of cheating on a term paper and gave her an F. It was the first time she’d ever received a failing grade. “And you wouldn’t stand for it, would you?” Ethel asked. “You fought back!” When Mary defiantly confronted the teacher, he defended himself by saying he’d been teaching at Putney for thirty years and that he’d never read a freshman term paper quite like Mary’s. Obviously, he said, she’d copied it from someone else. “I told him he was full of shit,” Mary said, “and asked him to name any work of art, and I’d sit down and write him a paper about it.” When he named the Sistine Chapel, Mary wrote in longhand an excellent analysis of Michelangelo’s work off the top of her head in thirty minutes. “He was amazed,” Mary remembered, “and he said, ‘I’m so sorry, I stand corrected.’ Then he gave me an A-plus.” Ethel nodded with satisfaction. “‘See! That’s who you are, Mary,’ she said. ‘You’re a fighter. Right now, you’re being tested. That’s what this is—a test.’” Then, according to Sister Pauline Joseph, who witnessed the conversation, Ethel said she worried about Mary all the time. “I think of you as a daughter,” she told her. “We’re not a family without you, kiddo.” Before she took her leave, she added, “Come find me later and we can talk.”

  As Mary sat up, the nun handed her an Alka-Seltzer. She stared hard at it as it fizzled in the glass and said that Ethel was right. She
needed to pull it together. She just didn’t know how to do it. “You have to pray,” the nun told her. Mary nodded; she was still deeply Catholic. “I know I have to keep fighting,” she said as she tried to clear her head. “I can do it.”

  “You can do it,” said the nun.

  “She would go into a kind of altered state, which we came to call her ‘episodes,’” Bobby remembered of Mary. “Her features would change with her jaw set forward, her face paled, her eyes notably darkened, her voice alternatively breathy or hard. Mary’s mood vacillated between rage and self-pity. Her behavior often became violent and destructive.”

  One night, Mary attacked Bobby in the bathtub with a pair of scissors. During another evening, Bobby woke up to find her standing at his bedside, staring down at him with menacing eyes. Without warning, she pounced. She began to pummel him with her fists, beating him hard. His nose and mouth bleeding, he struggled to get her off him. Finally, after a few minutes, he was able to get away. He opened a window—they were on the second floor of their home—and jumped to safety.

  It could be argued that Mary’s emotional problems didn’t have a lot to do with being a Kennedy. Certainly, she was ill before she married Bobby. The fact that he had his own issues made things much worse for her, though. Bobby’s challenges were connected to his sense of Kennedy entitlement and predilection for misogyny and sexism. In that regard, he’d always known that something wasn’t quite right about his pathological need for sexual gratification. When he was diagnosed as being a sex addict sometime in the early 2000s, it made sense. His brother Michael had once been given that same diagnosis, though at that time some people wondered if it was really just a good excuse for him to be with Marisa Verrochi. However, with the passing of time, more became understood about this addiction, though there are still psychiatrists today who don’t believe in it.

  Bobby kept incredibly detailed journals about not only his sexual conquests but about those times when he was able to resist. If one peruses these diaries, it’s evident that he lived a life of guilt and shame throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s as he was intimate with as many as fifty different women a year and found the strength to avoid doing so with about another fifty. He called it his “greatest defect, my lust demons. It’s not misogyny,” he explained. “It’s the opposite. I love them [women] too much.” He also reflected in one entry that after his father’s murder, “I felt he was watching me from heaven. Every time I was afflicted with sexual thoughts, I felt like a failure. I hated myself.”

  “The havoc his addiction played on his life and on the lives of everyone in his midst was as real as real gets,” said one of his relatives. “It required years of serious treatment. I remember he once told me, ‘I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.’ The fact that infidelity was also a trigger for Mary’s illness was like adding gasoline to an already raging fire.”

  “The Men Are Dogs. The Women, Fools.”

  Since marrying Bobby, Mary Richardson Kennedy had borne four children—John Conor in 1994, Kyra LeMoyne in 1995, William “Fin” Finbar in 1997, and Aidan Caohman Vieques in 2001. She loved being a mother, and she was a good one, too; she’d even taken courses in parenting and then started teaching classes herself. However, in her role as a mother, Mary began to feel stagnant, especially as compared to Bobby, whose life as an activist was so fulfilling.

  At this time, Bobby became dedicated to educating people about the dangers of children’s vaccines and childhood autism. He was also still involved in the protection of New York’s drinking water. Moreover, he and his associates had formed a bottled water company, Keeper Springs Natural Spring Water.

  For her part, Mary seemed to be not invested in much other than obsessing over her fear that Bobby might leave her. Certainly, there was a lot she could have devoted herself to as a woman married to a Kennedy, any number of charities to which she could have lent her name. Years earlier, when she was working with Kerry at the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, she was tasked with putting together food, clothes, and medical supplies for a mission to El Salvador. The goal was to fill just one truck. Within about six weeks, she had accumulated ten tractor trailers full of supplies worth tens of millions of dollars. Now, though, she couldn’t seem to focus on anything other than her marriage.

  “How’s it going with Bobby in the boudoir?” her friend Alyssa Chapman asked Mary, according to her memory of “just girl talk between friends.”

  “It’s okay,” Mary said glumly, “but Bobby gets mad because I want the lights out.”

  “Why would you want that?” Alyssa asked.

  “Why do you think?” Mary shot back.

  “It took me a second to get it,” recalled Alyssa Chapman, “but I suddenly understood that Mary didn’t feel attractive anymore and she didn’t want Bobby to see her clearly when they were making love. She started making sad statements, such as ‘You know, a lot of people find me interesting. Why doesn’t he?’ She hadn’t been raised to accept this kind of treatment from a man, she told me. ‘I was raised to be admired,’ she said. ‘You’ve heard about this Kennedy curse?’ she asked me. ‘I finally figured out what it is: The men are dogs. The women, fools.’”

  Lately, Mary had also begun threatening suicide, and Bobby believed she’d actually do it. After his brother David died of an overdose, everyone in the family felt tremendous guilt about it, but none more than Bobby. He now felt a real responsibility to Mary and said he’d never be able to live with himself if she ended her life. He wrote to her brother, Thomas Richardson, to express his deep concern and ask for help. “I know you think Mary’s going to kill herself,” Richardson responded in an email of his own, “but I guarantee she won’t. I may regret those words one day, but that’s how I feel.”

  Worn out from all the drama, Bobby tried to end it with Mary on Father’s Day in June 2006. He moved out of the house. “But Mary told me she would never allow a divorce,” said her friend Victoria Michaelis; the two had been close since attending Brown University together. “She loved her husband and wanted to save her family,” said Victoria. “Also, she was very Catholic. Divorce was against her faith, a worst-case scenario not just for herself but for any woman. ‘I just will not allow it,’ she told me. ‘I have to find a way to make my marriage work. It’s the only way.’”

  Giving Sickness a Name

  At the end of the summer of 2008, Mary’s illness was, at long last, diagnosed. “You’re married to a woman who has borderline personality disorder,” her psychotherapist told Bobby. Like most people, he knew little about BPD. Of Bobby’s research into it, the writer Laurence Leamer would later note for Newsweek, “When he opened “I Hate You, Don’t Leave Me by Jerold J. Kreisman and Hal Straus, he finally felt he had an understanding of what was happening with his wife. Bobby read that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association lists nine criteria for BPD, five of which must be present for a diagnosis. Mary seemed to have every one of the nine, including a perceived sense of abandonment, a lack of identity, recklessness, suicidal threats, intense feelings of emptiness, and inappropriate displays of anger.”

  Finally, there was an explanation for Mary’s behavior, and one that actually made sense. “We’d all been trying for so long to understand,” said Alyssa Chapman. “There was a great sense of relief. My God, we thought, this is it. Even though it sounded daunting—borderline personality disorder—we were so happy to have this … thing be named.”

  Despite the diagnosis, Mary’s family to this day doesn’t believe that she suffered from BPD. They have called the diagnosis “a vindictive lie” and “an insult to those who do struggle with this very serious illness.” They would always maintain that Mary’s problems were a direct response to continued psychological abuse by an unfeeling, insensitive husband. Kerry just tried to keep the peace with them and act as a buffer between them and her brother while everyone tried to find new ways to help Mary.

  By this time, Kerry Kennedy had made
a good and productive life for herself, built around activism and philanthropy. She and Andrew Cuomo divorced in 2005. A year later, he went on to a stunning comeback after his 2002 political embarrassment by being elected New York State attorney general in a race against Republican nominee Jeanine Pirro (who is presently a noted Fox News commentator). In 2010, Andrew would be elected the fifty-sixth governor of New York. Meanwhile, Kerry would continue to raise their children, co-parenting with her former spouse, with whom she remained close, as well as continuing her work as a social activist.

  Despite how busy she was, Mary’s problems were always foremost on Kerry’s mind. While she sometimes felt torn in her allegiances to her brother and her best friend, she still believed she knew what was best for Mary, and that was to not be with Bobby. The fact that he wanted out of the marriage gave Kerry even more confidence that her advice to Mary to let him go was good for both of them. Then Bobby suddenly changed course.

  For Bobby, Mary’s BPD diagnosis answered a lot of questions. At least now he knew what he was dealing with. In the fall of 2008, he decided to recommit himself to the marriage.

  One friend of his recalled that being at the Kennedys’ home for dinner in October 2008, he found Mary in a good mood. As she prepared a salad in the kitchen with the chef, she spoke of a vacation she and Bobby planned to take now that things seemed a bit calmer. They were thinking of a cruise, she said. The way she glanced over at Bobby and caught his eye made it clear that the two still had something strong. As Mary spoke in an animated manner, Bobby stared at her with a small, loving smile. Despite everything they’d been through, she remained beautiful in his eyes. “You could see the adoration he had for her,” said the witness to the scene. “As I watched, I thought, My God, he loves her so much. I had no doubt that he could make it work. I later said to him, ‘You’re doing a good job with her, Bobby. Whatever you’re doing, keep it up.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Can I let you in on a secret?’ I said sure. He said, ‘I actually don’t know what the hell I’m doing.’”