As to whether or not Michael’s death was the result of carelessness, maybe that was a different story. But even there, one would find some debate. One witness to the accident, experienced skier Ted Widen, recalled, “I felt they were asking for trouble. I like having a distance of about twenty-five to fifty feet around me when I ski,” he said, “and these people, some of them were skiing at an arm’s distance from each other. It was way too close. They were cutting each other off and barely missing each other on their way down. I remember thinking they were playing a very dangerous game. I didn’t know they were Kennedys, by the way. I just knew they were a rowdy group of people playing a crazy game—and by the way, never in my life had I ever heard of playing football on skis. I told the friends I was with, ‘Look, let’s stay as far away from those people as possible.’ Just as my group was getting ready to move to the side, down the hill comes one of the guys from that group, full steam ahead and just barely missing one of my friends. And he sailed right by us without a care in the world. I waved my fist at him and screamed out, ‘Hey! Come on! Slow down!’ ”
Some of Michael’s friends rose to his defense when magazines quoted witnesses as saying they thought the Kennedys had been out of control. One friend, Blake Fleetwood, wrote a letter to Time in response to its reporting of the accident, saying, in part, “Michael was the best all-terrain skier I have ever seen. He was skiing at a moderate speed on a well-lit and well-groomed intermediate slope, playing a game with his children, something many of us have done without incident for nearly 20 years. Like all sports, including ski racing and ski jumping, ski football has an inherent risk, but Michael’s death was far from reckless; it was a tragic accident.”
Michael’s older brother Bobby Kennedy Jr. was particularly upset with R. Couri Hay, who contacted the New York Daily News and the National Enquirer immediately after the accident—before Michael even had arrived at the hospital—to file a firsthand witness report.
“Look, I want you to stop giving interviews about what happened to my brother,” Bobby Kennedy told Hay in a very heated telephone call about a week after the accident. “You’re betraying your friendship with Michael, with me, with all of us,” he said. “What the hell is wrong with you, Couri?”
“I’m just telling the truth, Bobby,” Hay explained.
“But you quote Michael as having said, ‘We’ll play tomorrow. Death to the loser.’ ”
“Well, he did say that.”
“I don’t give a shit,” Bobby countered, according to Hay’s recollection of the conversation. “Michael said a lot of things. No one would even know about it if you hadn’t blabbed it.”
“I’m a reporter,” Hay said in his defense. “This is my job. You guys can’t control the news.”
“Jesus Christ, don’t give me that bullshit!” Bobby said, exasperated. “You contacted the press before Michael was even at the hospital! That’s terrible, man. Bottom line,” Bobby concluded, “is that my mother wants you to knock it off.”
“But your mother is quoted in Time as having had a conversation with an official at Aspen Ski Corporation asking her to stop the game.”
“What!” Bobby exclaimed. “That’s a lie! My mother never talked to anybody,” Bobby said. “All of these stories are ridiculous. Stop talking to the press, dude. I’m serious.”
“I can’t promise that,” R. Couri Hay said, holding his ground. “If I can save one life, one limb, one child from being hurt by calling attention to ski safety, I think it’s my responsibility to do that.”
“Fine, then,” Bobby Kennedy said, sounding defeated as he ended the phone call.
Grace Under Pressure
It was Friday morning, January 3, 1998.
“Bagels! We need bagels,” Ethel Kennedy exclaimed. “And coffee. There will be a lot of people here. Do we have enough coffee?” As she ran about the house giving orders to servants like a general on campaign, it was obvious that Ethel was quite upset and just trying her best to hold it together. After all, friends and family would be arriving at the Kennedy compound in a couple of hours to pay their final respects to Michael, whose closed coffin sat in the parlor of her home facing a window overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. It was here that Michael had spent so much of his life with his loved ones, and it was here that they had all come back the previous night to say goodbye to him.
“The wake continued until almost midnight,” recalled Brian O’Conner, a press aide to Joe Kennedy, “and Mrs. Kennedy was there the whole time, consoling, trying to make everyone else feel better.”
Another close friend of the Kennedys, Philip Johnson, added, “It was very much an Irish affair. Being Irish Catholic myself, I had seen it before. Yes, laughter and the funny anecdotes of Michael’s life, laughter about moments on the campaign trail and, yes, tears. A lot of tears. At times there were occasions when Mrs. Kennedy prayed and led some of us in prayer. Would that we all had her strength.”
At Ethel’s request, the Reverend Michael Kennedy, who is a distant cousin of the family, flew to Massachusetts from Ireland, where he is a parish priest, to assist with the wake. “She is a woman who relies on her faith to get her through these times,” he said. “She believes in God’s promise of a hereafter, and it sustains her.”
“I’m so sorry this has happened, my love,” Andy Williams told Ethel after the service, according to his memory. “I don’t know what to say.” He recalled that the evening had been so emotional, he was “near tears the whole time, just trying to hold them back because, you know… that’s what we’d been doing for decades, ever since I sang at Bobby’s funeral. Grace under pressure. I guess that’s the best way to describe how we’ve handled these things.”
“Now, now. You mustn’t be sad,” Ethel told him as she took her old friend’s hand. “Michael is with David now. And with Bobby. They’ll take care of him, Andy. He’ll be just fine.”
“But what about you, Ethel?” Andy asked. “How are you doing?”
Ethel gazed at Andy and, for just a moment, her eyes seemed to mist over and it appeared that she might begin to crumble. However, she quickly shook it off. “Andy, why don’t you go find Bobby Jr. and tell him you’re here,” she said, changing the subject. “He would love to see you. Now, go. We’ll talk later.”
Of course, Ethel Kennedy was obviously a very strong, resilient woman, but one had to wonder just how much more she could take. Given a life checkered with so much tragedy, it seemed a wonder that she could muster the strength to be available to others during yet another crisis. It was clear to most observers, though, that an integral facet of Ethel’s coping mechanism at this time involved helping others deal with what had happened to Michael, almost as if to distract and protect herself from the full impact of the tragedy. However, she appeared exhausted, as if she might buckle at any moment.
“Ethie, come and take a little walk with me,” Teddy finally said as he took her by the arm.
“No, Teddy,” Ethel protested. “No!”
“Just a little walk, Ethie,” he insisted, his tone gentle but firm. “We’ll be right back, don’t worry.”
She exhaled deeply. “Okay,” she said, giving in to him. “Just a little walk.”
Ethel and Teddy walked through the parlor, past Michael’s casket, and out the door into the cool ocean air. Hand in hand, they slowly continued across the expansive green yard and then down to the beach, the same stretch of sand and sea upon which Ethel had spent many a day and night with her beloved Bobby and their children so many years earlier. A few moments later, Ted Kennedy could be seen holding his “Ethie” in his arms under a gray New England sky.
“Okay, Lord. The Kennedys Have Had Enough.”
The funeral Mass for Michael Kennedy was held at Our Lady of Victory Church in Centerville, a Cape Cod community near Hyannis Port. It was the same church in which Caroline Kennedy, Sydney Lawford, and Kara Kennedy had married. Referring indirectly to the way Michael died, Joe Kennedy, in his moving eulogy, framed his brother’s athletic pro
wess as “one of the glories of his life and it should not be diminished by his loss.” Always so eloquent, he added, “He was not made for comfort or ease. He was the athlete dying young of A. E. Housman’s verse: ‘Like the wind through the woods, through him the gale of life blew high.’ ” The service also included the reading of letters from President Clinton, Coretta Scott King (the widow of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.), and Nelson Mandela, the president of South Africa.
Andy Williams, who began the funeral by singing “Ave Maria,” recalled, “I don’t know what it was about this Mass, but this one was so hard. Maybe it was because some of us old-timers were just getting older and this kind of thing involving the younger generation was just so hard. In fact, I think that was it. You get to a point where it just becomes too much, and I think that’s how we were all feeling that day. I barely got through the song, I have to say. I was standing up there looking at Ethel, and it was… it was incredibly difficult.”
Certainly no sight could have been more heartbreaking than that of fourteen-year-old Michael Kennedy Jr. struggling to hold up the front of his father’s coffin after the Mass, and then breaking down into racking sobs after the casket was loaded back onto the hearse. “I just remember John Kennedy Jr. holding Michael Jr. in his arms with all of his might,” said Gary Andover, another family friend who was also at the funeral. “I saw Sargent Shriver break down and his daughter, Maria, go over to him to hold him and support him because, for a moment, it looked like he might collapse. Michael’s estranged wife, Victoria, also looked devastated. She was with her dad Frank Gifford and his wife Kathie Lee Gifford, who were holding the hands of Michael’s little girls, Rory and Kyle. And of course, there was Ethel, her face so sorrowful. She seemed older, more fragile, and just so very sad. Eunice was at her side, holding her hand.”
Michael’s siblings, especially the brothers who were all so close, did what they could to hold it together during the Mass, but afterward they began to take comfort in what Michael had been to them, and how important he’d been in their lives. “On the hour-and-a-half drive carrying Michael’s body from the funeral home in Hyannis Port to the cemetery in Brookline, we were told there was room for only one of us in the hearse,” recalled Joe Kennedy. “But all of us [brothers] ended up going. Bobby and I squeezed into the front seat with the driver; in the back, Max, Douglas, and Chris scrunched in next to Michael’s coffin. The Mass had been tearful. Bobby and I had both eulogized Michael. But now, in the car, the conversation was full of the great fun Michael was to us. We all laughed heartily, unfettered. A windowed partition between the front and the back muffled some of the conversation, and each of us kept pushing it back and forth in order to hear the stories better.”
Though Michael’s brothers were feeling somewhat better by the time everyone got to Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline, there was no avoiding the overwhelming sadness of seeing the mahogany coffin that held Michael’s body ready to be lowered into the cold ground. Michael was to be buried with his favorite football and a medallion that marked three years of sobriety for him. “Everyone was in such absolute shock and feeling such tremendous grief, you couldn’t even speak,” said football star Brian Holloway, a friend of the family’s who attended the services, of the cemetery service. With him was his daughter Kerry, named after Kerry Kennedy, who is also her godmother. “We just put our arms around each other because there weren’t any words,” he said. “I was standing right next to John Jr. at the family plot where David Kennedy 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, and we just stood there in disbelief that this terrible thing had happened to someone so young and so athletic and as full of life as Michael.”
“I went over to John, who was standing with Carolyn,” Gary Andover recalled. “Carolyn had her hair pulled severely back from her face into a little bun with just light makeup on. Her eyes were very, very red. She looked bereft and incredibly thin, though my memory of her was also that she moved with such facile grace she somehow reminded me of Jackie. Both she and John were dressed in black. They seemed so devastated. Two weeks later, I saw photographs of them from this awful day in some ridiculous tabloid being used to illustrate how unhappy they were in their marriage, which was most certainly not what was going on that day.
“I’m so very sorry your family has to go through this again,” Andover told John as the three of them walked away from the cemetery, Carolyn at John’s side.
“I know,” John said. “It sure seems unfair, doesn’t it? I’m really worried about my aunt Ethel, I gotta tell you. She doesn’t look good to me right now.”
Gary agreed and put his arm around John’s shoulder as they continued walking.
“You know,” John said, his voice sounding very weary, “they say the Lord doesn’t give you any more than what you can handle.”
“Yeah, that’s what they say, all right,” Gary agreed.
John stopped walking. Then, with a small, weak smile, he gazed up at a gray winter’s Cape Cod sky and said, “Okay, Lord. The Kennedys have had enough now, thank you.”
PART TWENTY-ONE
A Peaceful Time
Ethel’s Change for the Better
On April 11, 1998, Ethel Kennedy turned seventy years old. In the months before her birthday, she had been understandably overwhelmed with grief at Michael’s sudden death. In fact, for days afterward she simply couldn’t stop crying. She was grief-stricken and inconsolable for so long, her children stayed close by her side. But then something seemed to change in her. With the passing of just a few months, she went through what appeared to be some sort of emotional transformation, the result of which was that she seemed to become more accepting of Michael’s death and less angry about it than she had been about other deaths in the family.
As everyone who knew her well realized, there’d always been an undercurrent of suppressed rage in Ethel’s personality, and it could be argued that it was with good reason. Ever since Bobby was murdered thirty years earlier, she’d suffered one heartache after another with her children. But maybe because of wisdom that comes with age, she had begun to realize that there was nothing she could have done about the unpredictable and often tragic ways life had unfolded for her and her family, so why bother wasting time being so incredibly angry about it? Or maybe she had begun to rely more on her Catholic faith than ever before, and she was finally finding a comfort in it that perhaps had previously eluded her. “She goes to Mass every day of her life,” her daughter Kerry said at this time. “She prays on her knees before church, prays before every meal, and prays on her knees before going to bed.”
With Ethel, it was always her actions that spoke volumes, not necessarily her words. She had always proclaimed in press interviews and at public events that she was just fine, even when she wasn’t. However, by the time she turned seventy, she somehow did seem better. From all accounts, there was a certain tranquility and ease about her. She was more nurturing as well. “She’s become the greatest source of strength to all of us,” her oldest child, Kathleen, said right after Michael died. “She’s filled with love. She makes people feel special. She listens. She validates us. She acknowledges us. She has created a safe harbor for all of us and, yes, we go there often.” These days Ethel was more—to use a word she had chosen in trying to describe Jackie at the end of her life—“serene.” Except that Ethel Kennedy was nowhere near the end of her life. She still had many years to live, so much more to give her family, and now, as she embarked on her eighth decade, she was truly living once again and not just going through the motions.
“What I think is that after the kids were grown and on their own, Ethel started to mellow,” said one of her longtime friends. “So in a sense it started before her seventieth birthday. Gradually, she just became more relaxed. Let’s face it, the biggest problem she faced was that the older boys were always in trouble. As adults, that trend seemed to continue, but she was much le
ss invested in the outcome.”*
“I remember that after Jackie died in 1994, that’s when Ethel seemed to start down a better road,” said her former assistant, Leah Mason. “ ‘Jackie was so young and taken like that,’ she [Ethel] said. ‘How dare we not enjoy this life God has given us, while we still can?’ She also said, ‘I’m just going to try to be happier, you know?’ She’d had a lot of misfortune in her life and I think she began to recognize that she’d let it get to her, though she never said as much. Playing tennis, going golfing, sailing… all the things that she had always done she was now really and truly enjoying, instead of just acting like it. ‘Maybe the point of death is to teach us about life,’ she told me.”
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