After Camelot: A Personal History of the Kennedy Family--1968 to the Present

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Intervention for David

  Perhaps no one in the Kennedy family understood that better than his long-suffering aunt, Joan Kennedy. Because she had been battling an addiction to alcohol and prescription pills for so many years, she could obviously relate to David’s complex emotional issues, and she also understood what it was like to feel like a complete outcast in the close-knit family. She certainly never felt that she belonged either. When she saw David at a family function, the two had a chance to really talk, and David confided in her. He said that he felt everyone in the family was staring at him during the ceremony “because they know I’m a junkie. I’m sorry I’m so weak,” he told Joan. “I just don’t want you or anyone else I love to lose faith in me.” He also told his aunt that he felt he “wasn’t good enough to be a Kennedy,” and that all he had done in recent years was “bring shame upon my family.” Joan somehow got David to admit to her that he was using everything from pot to coke to heroin to Demerol to methadone, and that he was also drinking heavily. He also claimed that his uncle Ted had been so tremendously upset with him recently that “he threatened to lock me away like his sister Rosemary, for the rest of my life in some psychiatric facility.” Joan was understandably upset by everything her nephew had revealed to her. Had Ted actually said that to David? “Of course not, Joansie,” he said when she confronted him. “I would never say such a thing to him. Why would he tell you that?”

  “I think we should have an intervention,” Joan suggested to Ted in a meeting with him, Richard Burke, Stephen Smith, Eunice and Sarge Shriver, and several other people, including key Kennedy family PR people and attorneys. A strong proponent of therapy for some time now, Joan firmly believed in the value of carefully executed interventions—a therapeutic process during which the addict’s friends and family members confront him to remind him of the consequences of his actions and also to tell him how those actions have affected them and, most important, to make it clear that if he doesn’t get help they will cut him out of their lives. “I have done a lot of research into this,” Joan said, extracting a stack of brochures from her large purse. “I’ve talked to a number of doctors and psychiatrists and here’s what they have told me.” She spent about thirty minutes detailing the possible benefits of an intervention. Everyone was quite impressed.

  “Well, I think that’s just a marvelous idea,” Eunice decided. She said that she too had talked to several psychiatrists about the very subject, and as she put it, “I am totally convinced of its viability as a solution.”

  Sargent Shriver wasn’t so sure. He was concerned that it would appear to David as if everyone was piling on him. “That will just piss him off,” Sarge offered. “Then what?”

  “It has to be Ethie’s decision, then,” Ted said, according to a recollection of the meeting. “Let’s run it by her and see what she thinks. I agree with Joansie, though, we have to do something. And I like this idea. Good one, Joansie,” he said, smiling at her. She beamed back at him. It must have been a good feeling for her to know that she had contributed something important.

  When the drastic idea of an intervention was later presented to Ethel Kennedy at a follow-up meeting, she, like Sarge, expressed some ambivalence. She agreed that David might feel that everyone was ganging up on him, and she wasn’t sure what good that would do him. In the end, though, she had to admit that she was at the end of her rope, so she agreed to it. She decided, though, not to be a part of it. “God knows, he knows how I feel,” she explained, “and we’re at such odds right now, he’ll just start lashing out at me and, to tell you the truth, I can’t take it.” Everyone understood.

  “So David’s brother Joe and I planned the intervention at a nearby hotel,” Richard Burke later recalled. “To my memory, all of his brothers and sisters were present. We had a psychiatrist there who acted as a mediator. We had a facility lined up and the plan was to take David right over there from the hotel. They all told David how much they loved him and how disappointed in him they all were, and that if he didn’t straighten up his act they were going to stop communicating with him. It was standard intervention material. Very tough. Very upsetting. Lots of tears. I recall that when someone brought up that his uncle Teddy was disappointed in him, David really lashed out. ‘The way he drinks,’ David said, ‘and the way he has lived his life and treated Aunt Joan? How does he get off being disappointed in me?’

  “To be honest, I don’t think it did any good,” Richard Burke continued. “I’m not sure we understood the depth of his shame, that the guilt he felt about the relapses was partly responsible for his wanting to continue to medicate himself, if you will. He was so ashamed, and he kept saying as much. Even with the shrink there, I just had a feeling we were in over our heads with this thing. He absolutely refused to go to the facility, and short of dragging him over there, what could we do? The next day, I reported back to the senator that I didn’t think the intervention had been successful. He was crestfallen. ‘Goddamn!’ he told me. ‘I don’t know why, but I just thought it would work. I really did.’ ”

  The next couple of years would amount only to more of the same for David Kennedy—unsuccessful treatments at rehabilitation centers followed by relapses, unhappiness, shame, and despair. He would lose track of the many meetings he would take with his uncle Ted about possible strategies to help him with his addictions. “I am always being chewed out by my uncle,” he would say at the time, “and I feel really bad about it. The whole thing is messed up.”

  In the spring of 1983, events took an even more dramatic turn when author David Horowitz contacted David Kennedy, now twenty-seven, to interview him for a book he was writing about the Kennedys. Horowitz had been around the family for a couple of years, brought into the fold by Bobby when he asked Bobby to help him network into the third generation. The relationship with Bobby started off peacefully enough, with Horowitz promising not to write about the young Kennedys’ drug issues unless any of them became news and thus public information. Still, the more Horowitz hung around Bobby Kennedy and Chris Lawford, the more exposed he was to their private worlds and became privy to some of their more private moments with women and, yes, drugs—much of which would end up being detailed in his book, cowritten with Peter Collier.

  Horowitz said that he believed David Kennedy had been the scapegoat for many of the family’s problems, and that he wanted to give the young and troubled Kennedy a voice. Perhaps at the risk of exploiting David’s vulnerability and certainly appealing to his sense of having been so misunderstood, the writer guaranteed that if David agreed to further interviews for the book, it would set the record straight once and for all. David, who wasn’t very untrusting of the media as a rule, thought it over and ultimately agreed to be interviewed. He then spent four days being questioned by Horowitz—four days that he would soon regret. “I feel they should have done something earlier,” David told the author in speaking about how the family had handled his addictions. “My mother, although in a sense she wasn’t really competent. But even more, Ted, Steve Smith and the rest of the group who were always figuring out ways to keep Joe, Bobby and Chris from having to pay the piper, just let me go. When they finally did do something, it seemed like it was more to keep me from OD’ing in the street and causing a problem for Ted’s campaigning, than anything else.”

  On September 10, 1983, David entered yet another rehabilitation program in Spofford, New Hampshire. His ex-girlfriend Pam Kelley—who had been paralyzed in the auto accident years earlier—spoke to David after he finished the program at Spofford, which was just six days. “He seemed somewhat better,” she would recall. “He said he was hopeful. He was tired of being looked at as the Kennedy screwup. He wanted more for himself and his family. ‘I get it now that I’m totally responsible for my own problems,’ he told me. ‘I want to be better. I don’t want to be this guy who is always so ashamed of himself and of what he is doing to his family. I will be better. I have to get better.’ ”

  Bobby Jr.’s Surprising Drug Bust />
  Just one day after David Kennedy checked into the program in Spofford, Ethel Kennedy got a troubling telephone call from a family friend in Rapid City, South Dakota, an attorney named John Fitzgerald. He had bad news—as if she needed more bad news! Her son Bobby was being questioned by police there after apparently overdosing on a Republic Airlines jet from Watertown to Rapid City. He had also been found in possession of heroin, a small amount in his carry-on bag. (The authorities would decide to keep the luggage for further inspection, and two days later they would find even more evidence of the drug.) After about three hours of questioning, Bobby was released.

  Many years later, in 2000, John Fitzgerald recalled, “Unfortunately, yes, I was the one who had to call Ethel Kennedy and give her this news. As it happened, Bobby called Ted to tell him what had happened, and Ted called me and asked me to handle it. He suggested I call Ethel, telling me that he couldn’t bear to do it himself.

  “It was not an easy call to make. I thought for some reason she would be more stoic, but that was not the case. She was upset. ‘I already have my hands full with David,’ she told me. ‘I can’t go through this with Bobby, too.’ ”

  A series of intense telephone calls between the Kennedys took place over the course of the next two days while Bobby was holed up in a hotel in South Dakota. He was in trouble and needed help, that much was clear. But the idea of sending another young Kennedy to rehab wasn’t easy to accept. “David was the Kennedy screwup, not Bobby,” said Christopher Lawford. “So this was a real wake-up call.”

  Even though he had obviously been in some trouble in the past—such as when he and his cousin Bobby Shriver were arrested for pot possession back in 1970—Bobby, the third of the eleven RFK children, was thought of as the one most likely to follow in his father’s footsteps. He had cut a striking figure as a teenager—back in the days when Ethel would ban him from the house and he would sleep in a tent on the beach—very tall and lanky with shoulder-length black hair and always with his pet falcon on his shoulder. A Harvard and University of Virginia Law School graduate who now worked as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, he was viewed as sensible and focused. Though he failed his bar exam on the first try, he did pass it on the second try. “I don’t want the pressure of doing great Kennedy-like things in my life,” he had said, “but I see that there’s no escaping it.” One classmate at Harvard recalled a speech Bobby delivered in jurisprudence class. “He talked about the eighties and how self-indulgent they were and how, in the sixties, people cared. He made this incredible comment about the loss of ideals since the sixties. At that point, I think we realized—hey, this kid really is Bobby Kennedy’s son.”

  Bobby married Emily Ruth Black (a classmate from the University of Virginia Law School), in March 1982, but the union was troubled from the start; she complained that he had “a lot of suppressed and not-so-suppressed anger.” After the two moved into an apartment that had been bequeathed him by close family friend Lem Billings, Bobby used drugs to cope with his troubles. At first, it had been alcohol and marijuana as a teenager with his cousins, and then cocaine and, eventually, heroin, which, like his younger brother David, he would score in the streets of Harlem. Everyone knew it. It wasn’t a secret. After all, he’d been using for fourteen years. It was just that so much focus had been on David’s troubles, Bobby’s weren’t viewed as being that serious.

  “I was part of a generational revolution that looked at drugs almost as a political statement—a rebellion against the preceding generation which had opposed the civil rights movement and promoted Vietnam,” Kennedy would observe many years later. “At the time, I don’t think any of us were aware of how damaging drugs could be. I’d always had iron willpower and the ability to control my appetites. At nine I gave up candy for Lent and didn’t eat it again until I was in college. After I started taking drugs, I earnestly tried to stop. I couldn’t. That’s the most demoralizing part of addiction. I couldn’t keep contracts with myself.”

  It was eventually decided to send Bobby to Fair Oaks Hospital, a treatment center in Summit, New Jersey. Once there, he issued a statement through Ted Kennedy’s office saying, “I am determined to beat this thing.” Later he would plead guilty to drug possession and would be sentenced to community service.

  Ironically, this unfortunate incident would turn out to be the best thing ever to happen to young Bobby Kennedy, because afterward he would never again use drugs. To his credit, this former member of the HPTs—the Hyannis Port Terrors—really turned his life around. He has been sober for twenty-eight years. “I’m one of the lucky ones: I’ve never had a single urge since,” he says. “Once I completed a twelve-step program, the obsession I lived with for fourteen years just lifted. I would describe it as miraculous.”

  Like his mother and many of his family members, Bobby Kennedy is today extremely religious. He carries a rosary in his pocket wherever he goes, and he says the prayers of the rosary every day of his life.

  “I Love You, Mom. That’s All I Got.”

  It was January 1984, the beginning of a new year. “I keep praying that each year will be a better one for us,” Sargent Shriver said in his New Year’s toast while surrounded by many of the Kennedys’ third generation of sons and daughters. Much of the family had convened at Sargent and Eunice Shriver’s home for a New Year’s get-together, and even David was present. “I hope this will be that year,” Sarge said.

  As it happened, David Kennedy had spent much of the last two years in Sacramento, isolated from the family as he attempted to build a new life there, all the while continuing to do drugs and remaining as unhappy and disillusioned as ever. Ted and Ethel didn’t want him to go, but his mind was made up. He wanted to be away from Hickory Hill. In some ways, Bobby’s drug bust had just made things worse for him. It had been Bobby’s first bust and first time at rehab, and the family was solidly behind him in a way that David envied. Bobby had been using drugs as long as David and, in David’s eyes, had only been better at hiding it. So why should he now have so much familial support? David really was blind to any support the family had given him—it was as if he was just too far gone to recognize it.

  After Bobby’s return from rehab, Ethel seemed even closer to him than before—and this probably made no sense to David either. Why was she always so angry at him, yet not mad at Bobby? Also, Bobby’s recovery somehow seemed easy for him—which made David feel all the more inadequate. All of it seemed unfair, and in David’s eyes the family’s typical dynamic was always to see the odds stacked against him.

  “I’m just trying to hold this family together,” Ethel had earlier told Jackie during the reception after the September wedding of Sydney, Pat’s daughter, at the Kennedy compound. In truth, Ethel wasn’t really doing such a bad job. If anything, David’s ongoing turmoil stood in stark contrast to what was going on in the lives of his siblings by 1984.

  For instance, by this time, David’s oldest sister, Kathleen, thirty-four—the first of Rose and Joseph’s grandchildren—had spent almost the last ten years raising two children by attorney David Townsend. She’d gotten her law degree in 1978 and was working as a property program analyst at the Massachusetts State House in Governor Mike Dukakis’s Office of Human Resources. David was a stay-at-home dad, writing a novel. “He represents the new kind of father,” Eunice said at the time. “He really enjoys taking care of the kids.” The couple soon moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is where two of their children, Meaghan and Maeve, were born—at home, via Lamaze. “There is a tradition in New Mexico that after a home birth you bury the placenta and plant a tree over it,” Kathleen explained years later. “My mother arrived the day after and looked in the icebox. ‘What is this?’ she asked. I said, ‘A placenta.’ She said, ‘What’s it doing there behind the milk?’ I said, ‘Well, there’s this tradition…’ She went out and bought a piñon tree and buried the placenta herself. She’s open to all new experiences.” David, with nothing but the knowledge of a police manual, delivered Maeve h
imself, since no local doctor could be found who would attend a home birth. “She was born in the amniotic sac, as Meaghan had been—a sign of great grace, according to an old midwife legend,” he said. “I had to chew through the sac or she would have drowned.” They were then—and are still—an unconventional couple, and very happy together.

  David’s older brother, Joe, thirty-two, had married Sheila Rauch in 1979 and had twin boys in early 1983. To his credit, after the accident that had paralyzed Pam Kelley, Joe really did turn his life around and stayed out of trouble. He was presently running the Citizens Energy Corporation, a nonprofit energy company started by Richard Goodwin, who had been a speechwriter for JFK and had also worked as an adviser to Bobby. Joe was toying with the idea of running for office. In two years, he would be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from the Massachusetts 8th Congressional District, and it would certainly seem as if he would have perhaps the brightest political career of any of the Kennedys’ third generation.

  As earlier stated, Bobby, twenty-nine, had done very well in his drug rehabilitation in New Jersey after his recent surprising drug bust. He and his wife, Emily, would go on to have a boy together in 1984 and in another four years a girl. The following year, Bobby would join the Riverkeeper organization to satisfy his fifteen hundred hours of community service. He worked with the group to sue alleged polluters of the Hudson River, and after his community service was completed he would end up taking a job with the organization as its chief attorney. Bobby would also found (and is the current chairman of) the umbrella organization Waterkeeper Alliance. In 1994, Bobby and Emily would divorce and he would marry an architect named Mary Richardson, with whom he would have four children. In 2010, he would file for divorce from Mary after sixteen years of marriage, just three days before she would be charged with drunken driving.