by Larry Tye
And so, hours after Bobby completed his hearings on Air Force Secretary Talbott in the summer of 1955, the young investigator ran to catch a plane to Paris, then another to Tehran, where he met Douglas. From there the two headed off by car, then ship, finally arriving in Baku, the biggest city on the Caspian Sea. Douglas had interrupted a globe-trotting trip with Mercedes, his bride of six months, for the detour with Bobby. For the next six weeks they toured factories, libraries, and any place they could talk their way into throughout Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and other outposts of Soviet rule. The unlikely duo of the fifty-six-year-old justice and his twenty-nine-year-old ward were the first westerners and one of the stranger sights most of the locals had seen.
The interlude itself said a lot about Bobby. It was the kind of break only someone with Kennedy resources and contacts could consider, since it meant taking two months off from his relatively new job, paying out of his own pocket for transportation and other expenses, and having as his only companion one of the most influential men in America. It also was just the sort of excursion Joe Kennedy had hoped for, with Bobby traveling in the rough and seeing for himself the post-Stalin Soviet state. Joe considered adventures like that better training than his boys would get in college or a job, and he foresaw dividends, as he wrote Bobby: “I think that the value of the trip, besides adding stature to your background, is the article and lectures you might give on it….As I have said a thousand times, things don’t happen, they are made to happen in the public relations field.” To make sure things did happen, Joe also wrote to the Boston public relations maven Eddie Dunn: “When [Bobby] returns from this trip through Russia’s provinces he will have a background that will need some building up….I would like you to give some consideration to it and I am enclosing my check for $1000 as a retainer. I hope this will be satisfactory.”
Joe got all that he paid for. The New York Times printed seven stories on Bobby’s travels, starting before he left and ending with a picture of him arriving home with Ethel, who met him in Moscow. The next spring Bobby wrote his own three-page version for the Times under the headline THE SOVIET BRAND OF COLONIALISM. In a fourteen-page interview in U.S. News and World Report, he talked about what he saw: Russian soldiers doing manual labor, “which is something you don’t see in this country”; a museum in Leningrad “devoted completely to ridiculing God”; and, across Central Asia, “the average local person lives in a mud hut, with a mud floor.” A month after his return he gave a lecture at Georgetown University. The Russian government had electronic listening devices in his hotel rooms, Bobby said, and the state selected all the books in the libraries. “All I ask,” he concluded, “is that before we take any more drastic steps [toward détente] that we receive something from the Soviet Union other than a smile and a promise—a smile that could be as crooked and a promise that could be as empty as they have been in the past.”
Justice Douglas, not surprisingly, had a different take on the Soviets and found his mate wearying. “At almost every stop and at every introduction, Bobby would insist on debating with some Russian the merits of Communism,” Douglas recalled. “The discussions were long, sometimes heated, but as I told Bobby, they were utterly fruitless because he could no more convince them than they could convince him.” Worse still for Douglas, Bobby “carried ostentatiously a copy of the Bible in his left hand. And he spent his time on the planes not going over Russian agricultural or industrial statistics, but reading the Bible.” Having refused to eat or drink most of what was offered along the way—even the caviar—Bobby became deathly ill near the end of the trip, with a temperature Douglas estimated at 105. Kennedy wouldn’t let any Russian doctors examine him, but by then he was becoming delirious and Douglas summoned one anyway. It took three hours for the physician to get there, and when she did she administered massive doses of penicillin and streptomycin. “That dear lady never left Bobby’s room for thirty-six hours,” Douglas reported. “When she emerged, her eyes were bright and she said, ‘Now he’ll be all right.’ ”
The KGB kept tabs on Bobby in Russia the way Hoover’s FBI increasingly was doing back home, and it was equally unimpressed with this young son of a family both organizations would come to know intimately. “Kennedy was rude and unduly familiar with the Soviet people that he met,” the Russian spy agency reported to the Kremlin—an observation that reflected cultural differences as much as Bobby’s idiosyncrasies. He took pictures of crumbling factories, shabbily dressed children, inebriated officers, and other scenes intended “to expose only the negative facts in the USSR.” In meetings with government officials he “posed tendentious questions and attempted to discover secret information.” Lastly, the KGB report said, “he has a weakness for women” and asked his Intourist handler to dispatch to his hotel room a “woman of loose morals” (the report didn’t say whether the handler obliged).
But that was not the full story of Bobby’s travels. His detailed journal entries did focus on Russian vulnerabilities, but he also included a section marked “good things” that described the proliferation of libraries and schools and an amnesty for criminals. His simplistic Cold War take on U.S.-Soviet tensions became more nuanced. Rather than making a scattershot attack on Soviet crimes, he zeroed in on a question few were asking then: Where were the million Kazakhs and other Central Asians who had vanished during the drive to replace individual land and labor with collective farms? (Answer: Some had been killed, others were in gulags.) He also pointed a finger at the West, saying it could not credibly attack Soviet colonization of areas like Central Asia while it had its own colonies in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere. “We are still too often doing too little too late,” he said, “to recognize and assist the irresistible movements for independence that are sweeping one dependent territory after another.”
This was how Bobby Kennedy learned—by seeing things with his own eyes. Experience enriched and informed his better instincts. He ventured into the most remote of the Soviet republics at the very moment the Warsaw Pact was forming and most Americans were staying as far away as they could. Once there, he filled his journals with engrossing, if not always eloquent, observations. In Iran, he was disturbed by the shah’s proliferation of palaces, calling them “a tremendous waste of land and money.” In the Soviet republics he agonized that “a defendant in a criminal trial can refuse to answer questions but there is an assumption by the judge of guilt. No jury—the judge sits by himself.” His questions drilled deep in a way that could put people off, but they were neither casual nor abstract. He did fight back when new ideas conflicted with ones he had long held, which frustrated Douglas and others who mistook it for bull-headedness. It was, instead, the very way he grew and evolved.
By the end of their adventure, the Supreme Court justice had started to revise his opinion of his young companion. “I began to see a transformation in Bobby,” Douglas wrote later. “In spite of his violent religious drive against Communism, he began to see, I think, the basic, important forces in Russia—the people, their daily aspirations, their humanistic traits, and their desire to live at peace with the world.” Mercedes Douglas, who along with Ethel had been waiting for the men in Moscow, was even more impressed with Bobby’s growth. Experience flushed a lot of ideas out of his system—she likened it to an enema—and his trip to Russia represented the “undoing of McCarthyism.”
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ETHEL WAS LESS worried about how the trip had transformed Bobby’s politics than about how it had sapped his health. “What have you done to my husband?” she demanded of Douglas when he delivered a frail and flushed Bobby to her in Moscow in September 1955. A classic Kennedy welcoming party—Ethel accompanied by two of Bobby’s sisters—greeted him like a returning warrior, yet they were eager to get on with a gamesome itinerary that included dinner at the American ambassador’s, a performance of the ballet Swan Lake, and an excursion to Leningrad. For Ethel, fretting interspersed with fun was becoming the yin and yang of life with Bobby Kennedy.
Ethel had dis
played plenty of wifely aptitudes during their five years of marriage, but she conceded from the start that cooking was not among them. She regularly burned the bacon and once had to call her sister for instructions on fixing a collapsed soufflé. On another occasion she managed to whip up four dishes of vegetables for guests, then realized she had not remembered to cook the meat. After one too many nights of dining out, or getting by on Cheese Dreams,*1 she broke down and hired a cook—an indulgence that became a standard for these Kennedys. Laundry was a challenge, too, which she solved by sending it out for washing and ironing. It helped that Bobby’s wardrobe consisted mainly of tattered khaki pants and that his favorite food was chocolate ice cream drenched in chocolate sauce. Ethel did take care of the English bulldog, Toby Belch, that they got back when Bobby was in law school. What she also did was complete her husband and make him blossom.
Since childhood, Bobby had obsessed about whether he could be the equal of his lionized father and big brothers. Ethel made him feel he could be their better. She managed the home front, letting him forget household and child-rearing responsibilities that he knew she’d remember. Her lightness relieved his heaviness. Her love was the kind he had craved—without conditions. She so relished having his children that she would stay pregnant for nearly half of their eighteen years of marriage. She even stood by Bobby’s defense of Senator Joseph McCarthy, defying anyone who complained to “name one person [McCarthy] has hurt.” Seldom did she show jealousy—not of his men friends, of his endless hours at work, or even of rumors of his romantic liaisons. It was not that Ethel was a martyr, but she felt secure that their partnership would remain as solid as steel as long as they lived. He reinforced that message by taking her with him on work trips that wives seldom made; she reciprocated by dazzling diplomats as well as journalists. When she couldn’t go, he sent love missives, one a day, in the language of whatever land he was visiting. Bobby, his sober-minded sister Eunice said, “would never have been the man that he became without his wife. I wouldn’t say that about my other brothers.” When an interviewer asked Bobby his major achievement in a life brimming with them, he shot back: “Marrying Ethel.”
Their married life had begun in 1950 in a modest house on leafy Cameron Lane in Charlottesville near the University of Virginia School of Law. After graduation there were months-long stints in Greenwich, Hyannis Port, New York, Washington, and, during Jack’s first Senate campaign, Boston. By the time they moved back to Washington in 1953 their family had grown to four, with Kathleen an eighteen-month-old toddler and Joe’s namesake, Joseph Patrick II, an infant of four months. Ethel searched street by street in Georgetown until she found a four-bedroom rental that met Bobby’s spending cap of $400 a month. They could have afforded more, with his million-dollar trust fund and the cash the Skakels were willing to kick in. But Bobby wanted to make a point: His family would not be overly extravagant. It was the kind of tight-fistedness that Joe Sr. encouraged yet seldom achieved among his offspring, and it was the first and only time that Ethel would live within a budget or that Bobby would insist on it.
Georgetown had just been converted into a historic district, with stately brick townhouses offering a sanctuary in the fast-moving capital to executives, diplomats, lawmakers, and a privileged few congressional staffers. Bobby delighted in the setting but still relaxed in daredevil fashion. The full-speed sledding down Montrose Park slopes brought yelps of joy from Thunder and Lightning, his two German shepherds. He took the children for rides in the black Cadillac convertible with the top—and the gas pedal—all the way down. Pickup games of football seemed never to end, even when his head collided with the metal fence of the adjacent tennis court. Eleanor McPeck, a fifteen-year-old neighbor, was there for much of it, and it was her mother who found a pile of towels to soak up the blood from his head gash. “It was terrible,” she said, “and Mommy was not a Kennedy lover.” Bobby and Ethel even rode a rented pony cart in the woods at a breakneck pace. “I don’t know how to express it, but it is a quality I definitely identify with Bobby…an image of speed, which I’m calling recklessness,” says McPeck. “I thought, ‘If they challenge me to do it, okay, I’ll do it.’ But I remember being scared.” She also remembers her father, the agent for the Kennedys’ rental, having to deal with the stack of broken china left in the basement when they moved out. “It’s like [they thought] somebody else would pick it up.”
If their life was defined partly by privilege, it also would be etched in tragedies and gutsy responses. Before he turned nineteen, Bobby had lost his brother Joe in the wartime explosion over the English Channel. A second plane crash, this one over France on a trip meant for pleasure, took his twenty-eight-year-old sister Kathleen. In the fall of 1955, Ethel’s parents, George and Ann Skakel, set off for a work trip to California aboard his company plane, a military surplus World War II bomber. The flight exploded midair over Oklahoma. Ethel, who was just twenty-seven, absorbed her losses the way the Kennedys had theirs, grieving in private and donning not just a brave face but a smile at the funeral. Yet she would never again fly when she could drive or take a train, and when she did get on an airplane it was with butterflies in her stomach and her hand reaching for reassurance from whoever was in the next seat.
Bobby’s own calamities made him empathic with other people’s, no matter the shape they took. “We were driving back from the airport at night to go to Bobby’s house, and we ran into a dog and killed the dog….The dog raced in front of the car and there was no way of stopping,” recalled Charles Spalding, a friend of Jack’s and later of Bobby’s. “We went into every single house for ten miles, I suppose, until we finally found the person who was the owner. And Bobby explained what had happened and said how terribly sorry he was and asked about the dog—could he replace it or was there anything possible that could be done. It was so typical of him.”
By early 1957, the time came for the Kennedys, now a family of seven, to escape the skinny row houses and streets of Georgetown and find a more sprawling setting like those Bobby and Ethel had cherished as kids. They didn’t have far to look. Jack and his wife, Jackie, were anxious to move back into the city from their Georgian manor house in McLean, a barely populated Virginia suburb thirty minutes west of Washington. Jack charged Bobby the same $125,000 he had paid for the five-and-a-half-acre estate, which had been the home of the former attorney general and Supreme Court justice Robert H. Jackson.*2 The compound took its name—Hickory Hill—from the centuries-old trees that dotted the rolling pastures. The house itself was luxurious but comfortable, with high ceilings, gold draperies, marble fireplaces, crystal chandeliers, and a candlelit dining room. Its fourteen rooms gave Bobby and Ethel space to expand should they keep making babies, as they knew they would. The kids couldn’t contain themselves when they pulled into the arched driveway for the first time. Kathleen, the eldest, tumbled out of the car first, followed by four-year-old Joey, three-year-old Bobby Jr., two-year-old David, and, in the arms of her parents, the baby, Mary Courtney.
In this perfect setting, Bobby could re-create those parts of his youth he cherished and reshape ones he didn’t. Bobby and Ethel mimicked Rose and Joe’s practice of using mealtimes for current events quizzes, testing the children with questions such as “What did John Paul Jones say and where did he say it?” Family had come first in the homes where Bobby and Ethel grew up, and the same ethic held at Hickory Hill. When Kathleen skinned her knee, or Joey wouldn’t share with Bobby Jr., Bobby offered the same stern lesson he had heard at their age: “Kennedys don’t cry.” This batch of Kennedys, too, refused to come in second if they could help it. Ethel kept a card catalog modeled after Rose’s to track each child’s shoe size, vaccinations received and tonsils removed, and other statistics vital to raising them and telling them apart. She also helped them remember their lineage by displaying everywhere pictures of the Kennedy family, and she gave them a taste of their nation’s prized history by hanging on a wall across from the front door a rare copy of the Emancipation Proclam
ation signed by President Abraham Lincoln.*3
But the children at Hickory Hill were less bound by the strict discipline that governed Bobby’s boyhood homes. There were no Saturday night weigh-ins and no dress code mandating sports jackets at the dinner table. The kids paid less of a price for being late to meals. They could and did interrupt, whether Bobby was conferring with staff or Ethel was being interviewed by a reporter. “Grandma had a great intellect and she’d say, ‘Dear, I think it would be much better if when the children came home from school you gave them an apple and not ice cream with hot fudge and whipped cream,’ ” Ethel recalls of Rose’s visits. “I must have more than fifty letters from her in that vein. She was so thoughtful and she wanted the children brought up correctly. But she was made of sterner stuff and I just wanted them to have a little fun.”
That spirit extended to Bobby’s workplace. The children’s watercolor drawings adorned the walls of every office he inhabited, and from the time they toddled, Ethel brought them to the Senate hearing rooms to watch Daddy at work. As much as he held his brood to high standards, his love was never conditional. And while travel was as much a part of his work as his father’s, he never lived away for long intervals the way Joe had. He made a point of getting home to his family for dinner at least three nights a week, and, whenever he could, he brought work and workmates home for lunch.
