What about Bobby Jr.? The twisted upbringing of RFK son
Inside Kennedy widow’s cruel neglect of her troubled brood
SINCE Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination on June 6, 1968, his widow, Ethel, has been his torchbearer. Unlike her late sisterinlaw, Jackie, she never remarried, never sought a path or identity that was hers alone. She held herself up as the martyr, the good Catholic widow left to raise 11 children alone, the empress of Hickory Hill.
She was content to be the other Kennedy widow, the domesticated antidote to the glamorous, globetrotting Jackie.
Today, Ethel Kennedy is 87, the clan’s de facto matriarch — a dubious position given the neglect shown toward her own children.
In his new book, “RFK Jr: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Dark Side of the Dream,” author Jerry Oppenheimer delves into Bobby’s upbringing — or lack thereof — to understand why the scion of our greatest political family has never accomplished much. Oppenheimer contrasts Bobby’s upbringing to that of John F. Kennedy Jr.
“John, after his father’s death, was brought up by a controlling and domineering mother, but one who obsessively looked out for his care and wellbeing,” he writes. “Bobby, after his father’s death, was essentially given up by his angry, widowed mother.” PROBLEM CHILD
ETHEL Kennedy met her future husband in December 1945 on a ski trip with her col
lege pal Jean Ann Kennedy, Bobby’s little sister. Ethel was 17 and smitten.
“Her only interest was the Kennedy family,” Oppenheimer told People magazine in 1991. “The Kennedy name, what Bobby could do in the future, what the other Kennedys were doing, what Jack’s future was. She just gave her life over to them.”
They married in June 1950, and by July 1951, their first child, Kathleen, was born. Ethel spent much of the decade pregnant, but that didn’t stop her from traveling extensively with Bobby in pursuit of his political future.
The children, Oppenheimer writes, were afterthoughts. Bobby, the third eldest, was a sensitive boy who turned to animals for company. There was little adult supervision.
“It was incredible,” a former nanny told Oppenheimer. “There wasn’t anybody to say, ‘Don’t do that.’ It was hard to control them.”
Ethel was 40 and three months’ pregnant with her last child, daughter Rory, when her husband was assassinated. Bobby Jr. was 14, and one week after his father’s funeral, the family celebrated his brother’s 13th birthday. Bobby slipped laxatives into everyone’s drinks.
“Just leave home!” Ethel yelled at him. “Get out of my life!”
She often used such language with him. “Her moods could swing drastically,” Oppenheimer writes, and soon after, she “literally beat Bobby with a hairbrush.”
Unable to cope with her grief — let alone her children’s — Ethel shipped Bobby off to a series of boarding schools, each less prestigious than the next, each forced to expel the namesake son of a martyred political icon. Bobby wasn’t even 15 and already using drugs heavily. He insisted each school allow his pet falcon to stay in his room. He formed a gang, The Hyannis Port Terrors, and one of his favorite practical jokes was bumping the fender of a passing car, having a pal collapse in the road, then yelling, “You’ve killed a Kennedy!” He once spat in a cop’s face.
Ethel did nothing. She was sealed off in her McLean, Va., estate. Only her dead husband, his legacy and her privilege as a Kennedy widow existed. Nothing Bobby did got her atten tion for long, and that attention was usually negative.
“I never witnessed a civil conversation between Bobby and Ethel,” one of RFK Jr.’s exgirlfriends told People in 1984.
When Bobby was arrested for buying pot in 1970, Ethel threw him in the bushes. “You’ve dragged your family’s name through the mud!” she yelled.
“Almost anything could trigger a fight between them,” another family friend said. “She would scream at him for 10 or 15 minutes without letting up and tell him to leave, which he did. Later, it would be like it never happened.”
‘HORROR HILL’
IN his 1994 biography of Ethel, “The Other Mrs. Kennedy,” Oppenheimer writes of her “uncontrolled rage” and the abuse that extended to her household staff. Her brotherinlaw Peter Lawford was shocked when Ethel berated a new maid for going to throw out some old scraps of paper.
“You stupid n r,” Ethel yelled. “Don’t you know what you’re doing? You’re destroying history. Get out of my sight! You’re fired.”
One of Ethel’s secretaries, Noelle Fell, told Oppenheimer she was surprised by such outbursts.
“She would say things like, ‘Those black people are stupid,’ ” Fell recalled. “I really don’t think she liked blacks or Hispanics. She couldn’t stand it if they didn’t speak English.”
One such maid, who brought sanitary pads when Ethel asked for face cream, got a hard slap in the face. She quit on the spot.
Such high turnover contributed to the deplorable conditions at
Hickory Hill, which staff dubbed “Horror Hill.” Bobby had left behind a huge turtle, which defecated everywhere, as did the family dogs. A soiled rug, a gift from the shah of Iran, ended up stashed in the basement. The dogs pooped under the table during dinner parties.
“No one would dare say anything to Mrs. Kennedy, who tried to cover up the mess with her foot,” Fell told Oppenheimer. “But everyone could smell it.”
Yet Ethel could be abusive when it came to her kids’ messiness, according the 1984 People article. “If your room wasn’t clean,” said a friend of her son Joe, “Ethel would have you walk up and down the stairs carrying whatever you’d left on the floor 50 or 100 times.”
By now, Bobby was rarely home. Kicked out of two boarding schools, he was accepted by a day school in Massachusetts. Ethel farmed Bobby out to friends of a Kennedy hangeron. She never called, not even on his birthday.
“I never knew Ethel,” Joanne Brode told Oppenheimer. When Brode first met Bobby, he seemed like “a bird with a broken wing. He was trembling and skinny and looked really like a sad, lonely kid who’d been through hell.”
Bobby rarely spoke of Ethel, but one night, while Brode was talking of her own mother’s instability, he opened up, she recalled.
“I can identify with that,” he said. “My mother’s totally irrational and totally controlling.”
THE ‘CESSPOOL’
IN 1979, while studying law at the University of Virginia, Bobby met Emily Black. He was seeing other women, too, but it was Em ily he proposed to one year later.
According to Oppenheimer, her family, Midwestern and middle class, was starstruck by the Kennedys. Then Black’s parents were informed that they’d be paying for the wedding.
Ethel offered to host the rehearsal dinner at the fanciest local restaurant her assistant could find. The bill came to $8,939.80.
Short by nearly $6,000, Ethel promised to pay the rest. Two years passed without payment. On April 20, 1982, the restaurant’s owner, Rudy Fisher, sent a letter to Hickory Hill. “In these trying times . . . we need the cash flow to pay our suppliers,” it read. No response. He threatened to go on TV and “tell the world what a bunch of cheapskates the Kennedys were.”
By September, Fisher was paid in full. He later said a Kennedy family member told him “it should have been a privilege to serve the Kennedys, and you shouldn’t be charging for the dinner at all.”
Though Ethel’s wealth was vast, the bulk of it was tied up in trusts, so she just billed the Kennedys.
In “The Other Mrs. Kennedy,” Oppenheimer wrote that dinners were often thrown out, with Ethel changing her mind at the last minute. Each month, she spent thousands of dollars on clothes.
The Kennedy accountants begged her to scale back and would call and visit. After every visit, Fell recalled, Ethel would “go on a rampage and start pacing the whole house, going, ‘Look at this waste!’ . . . But that very night she would have caviar and lobster.”
The Kennedys finally limited their financial contributions, and Ethel resorted to selling off the children’s horses. Posey Dent, a friend, arranged to buy them and drove to Hickory Hill. She couldn’t believe what she found.
“Two of the children’s favorite ponies, Geronimo and Atlas, were in terrible physical condition,” Dent told Oppenheimer. “Either they were fed too much, or they were not exercised . . . They were both lame.”
Ethel would borrow pieces from antiques dealers, then return them after parties. She’d buy fine things in bulk — china, clothes, towels — use them, then return most everything damaged and unwashed.
That entitlement extended to her children. In 1992, after running over a neighbor’s foot, Bobby refused to settle for damages. “The guy’s a real f k,” the plaintiff ’s attorney said. “He just had this attitude of ‘Shove it up your ass.’ ”
Ethel said nothing, just as she did in 1973, when her son Joe left his brother David’s teen girlfriend paralyzed after flipping his Jeep. In 2005, Joe said it was time for him to stop making payments to her.
David died of an overdose in 1984. Another son, Michael, made headlines in 1997 for having an affair with his teen baby sitter. Months later, he died playing football on skis, hitting a tree. In 2012, Ethel’s son Doug was caught on camera kicking a nurse in a hospital elevator. (He was acquitted.)
In 1994, Bobby divorced Emily. His new girlfriend, Mary Richardson, was six months’ pregnant. His marriage to Richardson was tumultuous, and in 2012, she committed suicide. That year, his sister Kerry stood trial for driving while drugged on a Westchester highway. (She was acquitted.)
Through it all, Ethel has rarely spoken publicly, although she often shows up in court to support her troubled brood. After all, her response to scandal, Oppenheimer writes, is “circling the wagons to protect the cesspool.”