JR.’S TELL-GALL
Skips over womanizing & wife suicide
IN his just-published memoir, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. writes about his family’s proud Irish Catholic heritage and the legacy of public service passed down to him from his father.
In “American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family,” the third of Robert F. Kennedy and wife Ethel’s 11 children also writes about his stormy relationship with his mother, his arrests for pot possession and for spitting on a cop near the Kennedys’ Hyannisport compound in Massachusetts at the time his father was the nation’s top law-enforcement officer.
But what his publisher promises as “an intimate journey” through Kennedy’s life falls far short. Even as many of the 433 pages are devoted to his battles to overcome addictions to alcohol and drugs, an important chapter is missing: Kennedy’s serial womanizing.
There is no examination of what he once called his “lust demons,” and nowhere to be found are the effects his philandering had on his second wife, Mary Richardson Kennedy, who hanged herself in an outbuilding at the couple’s Westchester estate in May 2012.
The father of six enumerated his myriad seductions in a diary discovered by The Post a year after Richardson Kennedy’s death.
In a ledger at the back of the diary, he recorded the names of women with numbers from one to 10 next to each entry. The codes corresponded to sexual acts, with 10 meaning intercourse. The Post counted 37 women in the ledger, with 16 scoring 10. They included a lawyer, doctor, environmental activist and the wife of a famous actor.
In the 398-page journal, which dated to 2001, Kennedy describes being wracked with guilt over his affairs and at one point mused that spending a month in jail in Puerto Rico was a welcome respite from temptation.
“I’m so content here,” the environmental lawyer and activist wrote during his July 2001 incarceration for his part in the protests of the Navy’s bombing exercises in Vieques. “There’s no women. I’m happy . . . It’s not misogyny. It’s the opposite. I love them too much.”
Clearly conflicted, he also wrote in the diary about his love for Richardson Kennedy, a woman he was married to for nearly 18 years.
“I finally spoke to my wonderful wife, and that was a joy,” he wrote. “She is very strong and cheerful.”
But Richardson Kennedy, the mother of four of his children — he has two other children with his first wife, Emily Black — barely warrants a mention in “American Values,” which is peppered with platitudes about his family’s devotion to public service, meetings with world leaders at the family’s Virginia estate Hickory Hill and descriptions of family Bible readings and playing sports in Hyannisport.
The reference to Richardson Kennedy appears on page 380 — a short passage detailing her involvement in a practical joke that he and his sister Kerry played on their mother in 1979 when they substituted RFK’s framed presidential letter collection with disciplinary notes from Kennedy’s teachers. Kennedy met Richardson Kennedy when she was a 14year-old boarding-school roommate of his Kerry.
Kennedy devotes more ink to extolling the virtues of his third wife, actress Cheryl Hines, calling her “my most valued editor” in his acknowledgments. Kennedy began dating Hines while he was in the process of negotiating a bitter divorce from Richardson Kennedy, who died before the divorce was finalized.
In his memoir, Kennedy writes that as he recovered from his drug and alcohol habits, he “became determined to clear up the wreckage of battered relationships that lay in the wake of my addiction.”
But while Kennedy admits to some of his failings and their fallout, he completely ignores others, tilting this personal history more toward revisionism than truth.