The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (48 page)

Joe was haunted by the image of his gay, ebullient daughter whom he would never see again. He knew that some people thought that the death of one child did not make him terribly depressed, for he had so many children. How little they knew. He thought to himself that no one had any idea that he was depressed, not even Rose, who had faith as her solace.

W
hen Kathleen died, Bobby had been at the Grand Hotel in Rome in the midst of a six-month-long European and Middle Eastern tour. He was suffering
from a bout of jaundice, and when Jack called to tell him of the accident, his companion, George Terrien, recalled that he “broke down like a little kid.” Despite his illness, he could have traveled to the crash site to accompany his sister’s body back to England, or he could at least have flown to the funeral. He did not, however, and that said much about how his father saw the world, and the obligations he had put on his sons to be forestalled not even by the death of a sister.

Bobby’s journey replicated the youthful journeys that Jack and Joe Jr. had made. Like his older brothers, Bobby was accompanied by a friend, George Terrien. He stayed in the best hotels, but that was the least of his privileges. Joe had seen to it that his twenty-two-year-old son would meet with ranking diplomats and leaders. Despite Bobby’s total lack of either experience or apparent interest in journalism, he carried reporter’s credentials from the
Boston Post.

What saved Bobby from being simply a spoiled son of wealth were two qualities he could claim as his own: courage and physical daring. His brothers were brave too, but they did not extend courage as the defining virtue not only of men but also of nations. Jack perceived the postwar political world as a massive conflict of ideological systems in which too much of what was once called courage might destroy the world in a nuclear holocaust. Jack, moreover, astutely perceived why democratic man in the mass was often less than brave.

Bobby, however, saw the world through a prism of courage. He had at times a simpleminded belief in the absolute virtue of courage, not recognizing that physical and moral courage were not the same, and that a man could be physically brave and a moral coward.

When Bobby arrived in Palestine, he saw the Arabs and the Jews as admirable peoples of courage and the British as a corrupt, cowardly regime attempting to keep them from killing each other. The streets were full of dangers. Twice authorities picked Bobby up. Once he was blindfolded and when finally released warned to stay inside. That would have kept all but the most intrepid reporters from venturing no farther than the hotel bar. But Bobby headed out again to meet with prominent Jews and Arabs.

Bobby did not struggle over the transcendent question of ends and means that bedeviled the majority of Zionists, who, as much as they wanted a Jewish state, disapproved of the terrorism of some of their brethren. “Met officers in the Irgun who were responsible for blowing up the train and killing 50 British soldiers as well as the blasting of King David Hotel,” he wrote in his diary, disclosing not an iota of disapproval. “They’ll fight any soldiers no matter what uniform they are wearing if they attempt to administer their homeland.”

In the series that Bobby wrote for the
Boston Post,
he portrayed the conflict as a tragic struggle between two peoples fighting for what they believed was right. They were voting with their own blood. He had a far lower opinion of American Jewish leaders who spoke from a sanctuary of safety.

“Many of the leading Jewish spokesmen for the Zionist cause in the U.S. are doing immeasurable harm for that cause because they have not spent any or sufficient time with their people to absorb their spirit,” he wrote in a passage cut from the published article. Bobby might admire the intrepid spirit of Israeli Jews, but he still shared some of his father’s stereotypical views toward American Jews.

Bobby concluded his series with a call to arms for the rest of the world. “I do not think the freedom-loving nations of the world can stand by and see ‘the sweet water of the River Jordan stained red with the blood of Jews and Arabs.’ The United States through the United Nations must take the lead in bringing about peace in the Holy Land.”

Bobby was not deeply versed in the terrible ironies of history. He looked at the world not to understand it as much as to change it, and as a young man at times he did not see that understanding is the beginning of change. He took dangerous and simple pleasure in the profession of rhetoric.

In the struggle against communism, he considered dispassion a pallid and dishonorable excuse, a pathetic sheathing of swords. He called for the protection of Cardinal Mindszenty, the imprisoned Hungarian priest, for “all eyes will now be turned our way to see if he will be betrayed, or if resistance to evil can expect support…. For if we fail, the fault as with Julius Caesar’s Romans will be ‘not in our stars but in ourselves.’ LET US NOT FAIL!”

Bobby’s rhetoric may have sounded strangely overwrought, but as a deeply religious, conservative Catholic, his sentiments were honest. These were largely Catholic countries, and American Catholics felt deeply about their religious brethren being unable to worship God as they chose. At mass on Sunday, priests conveyed an image of Eastern Europe as a gigantic Communist prison in which millions of people lived on their knees but could not pray on their knees.

For Bobby, as for most Catholics, Mindszenty was a symbol and martyr, a fearless, saintly priest who would not kneel down before the alien Marxist faith. That he was so tortured and debased that, emaciated and broken, he finally confessed to crimes against the Hungarian state did not diminish his martyrdom in the slightest, but only enhanced it. For Bobby, as for millions of his co-religionists, issues of faith and politics came together in their unyielding anticommunism, to them the transcendent issue of their time.

T
hose who stood stalwartly against evil deserved at least the wreaths of memory and Bobby traveled to Heppen, Belgium, where Kathleen’s husband, Billy Hartington, had fallen. Like Bobby, Billy had been a man who felt that he had to prove himself worthy of his heritage, yet however much he did was not quite enough. On the day he died he had led his troops and tanks wearing a white mackintosh and bright pants and he fell with a bullet through the heart.

Bobby went to Billy’s grave and what struck him was how routine the death was to the villagers. “They went through all the motions of how Billy was killed and how he fell, etc., which was a little much for me,” he noted in his diary. “The farmhouse he was killed attacking and into which he threw his grenade now houses a couple of little children and parents with the man having difficulty keeping his pants up. The people all tell their stories of the war as if they just came out of a wild western movie.”

When Bobby reached London, he stayed in Kathleen’s townhouse. One evening he went to see
The Chiltern Hundreds,
a play by William Douglas-Home. The playwright, who had been in love with Kathleen before the war, had re-created her on stage as a central character of the play. Bobby’s beloved sister was resurrected as an exquisite, ethereal character walking across the stage of the Vaudeville Theater. The actress playing Kathleen had soft, vaguely aristocratic features and was beautiful in the way that Kathleen was only in the memory of her friends.

Bobby met Joan Winmill, the twenty-one-year-old actress playing his sister, and fell in love. His father and brothers had all had flings with actresses; to them, the very word “actress” had a vaguely erotic connotation and was the preferred category for casual dalliances. Joan belied all that. She took the moral mandates of the Church of England as seriously as Bobby took those of the Church of Rome. Her mother had died in childbirth, and she had been brought up largely by relatives. She had a trusting innocence and was a woman of the strongest character. She was as taken with this idealistic young American as he was with her.

For the next weeks, Bobby met Joan every evening after the play for dinner, finishing the evening in his late sister’s house. Joan did not see Bobby as a shy, socially inept young man, but as a dashing American with a “freckled face and white, toothy grin.” For Bobby, this romance was as great an adventure as any of his escapades in Palestine or Berlin, and as healthy a tonic to his sense of well-being. No woman had ever had such an exalted conception of him. No woman had ever listened to his dreams, not as unlikely reveries, but as the road map of his tomorrows. “He talked about wanting to do good
things for his country,” Joan Winmill recalled. “He wasn’t more specific about that, but that’s what he wanted to do.”

As soon as Joe heard about the romance, he sent up every distress signal. He had lost one daughter to England; he was not about to lose a son. When Bobby’s father heard the word “actress,” he thought of Gloria Swanson and the romantic misery of that misbegotten affair. Beyond that, Bobby was unlike Jack, who moved from woman to woman so rapidly that Joe rarely had time to worry about whether one momentary alliance was appropriate or not. Bobby was serious about this woman and Bobby was a young man who used language as a tool of his truth. Bobby dismissed his father’s concern with a chuckle to Joan, but he could hardly remove Joe’s grasp on his life. “He was so controlled by his father,” Winmill reflected. “He was clearly in the shadows of his brothers, and his father dominated much of his life.”

Bobby’s other problem was more immediate, and that was his relationship with Ethel Skakel. His sister Jean had introduced him to Ethel during the winter of 1945/46 on a ski trip to Canada, but he had been less impressed with the skittery, intense Ethel than with Pat Skakel, her earnest, serious, older sister.

Both young women were students at exclusive Manhattanville College in upper Manhattan. There they were taught by the nuns of the Sacred Heart that educated Catholic women should not only be good wives and good mothers but also do good work in the world. Both women were deeply religious, Ethel so much so that she at one time contemplated becoming a nun. Pat became president of the student body and after graduation worked for the Christophers, a Catholic activist organization whose slogan, “It is better to light one little candle than to curse the darkness,” could have been penned by Bobby’s father. Pat could sit at the Kennedys’ dinner table and discuss current affairs with as much confidence and vigor as anyone in the family.

While her older sister was downtown helping to integrate Schrafft’s Restaurant, Ethel stayed uptown, a prankster full of mischief to enliven the tedious regimen of learning at Manhattanville. Ethel had an endless number of friends and was blessed by a bounty of energy and impish delight in the world. Ethel might have been plain, but her sheer joy in life gave her a radiance not seen in many far prettier women.

Ethel flung open each of life’s doors that stood before her and rushed forward, fearing nothing and no one. She had the Skakel sense of humor—rude, raucous, and daring. When a handsome young rider on the Irish national team spurned her affection, she sneaked into the stable and painted his horse green. One evening she sat in her dorm room momentarily remorseful at the fact that she had so many marks in the nuns’ demerit book that she would
not be able to leave campus. Suddenly she came upon the solution: steal the confounded book and throw it down the incinerator.

Ethel’s endless pranks all had an edge to them that left their victims outside the circle of gaiety and at times rendered almost as much hurt as laughter. At Manhattanville, she did not come forward and own up to her not-so-practical jokes but preferred to stand with the other students and have them punished along with her. She treated the school library like her own bookstore, not bothering with the tedious business of returning books.

Ethel might have seemed like a frivolous young woman, but she was deadly serious in her pursuit of Bobby, who was two and a half years her senior. She was a fierce competitor on the tennis court or in a horse show, and she was a doubly fierce competitor when the opponent was her own sister. That said, she still might have lost the game had she not had Jean, her closest friend and Bobby’s sister, as her co-conspirator. Ethel had no interest in politics, but she went to Boston to work alongside Bobby in Jack’s primary campaign. So had Pat, and soon afterward it was Ethel’s sister who went with Bobby to the Manhattanville senior prom.

That Christmas Bobby invited Pat to come down to Palm Beach and spend the holidays. Bobby did not invite a young woman to the Kennedy family home without the highest and most honorable of intentions. Jean and Ethel understood this full well, and they showed up together at the Palm Beach estate.

Whatever the sport, Ethel played with fierce competitiveness and a casual disregard for the more onerous rules. By the time the family left Florida, Ethel and Bobby were the couple, not Pat and Bobby. The fact that Pat did not marry Bobby probably had less to do with Ethel’s relentless maneuvering than with her own desires. Soon afterward, she married an Irishman and moved to a modest house in Dublin, a world away from the Skakel estate in Greenwich, Connecticut.

When he wasn’t playing football at Harvard, Bobby spent as many weekends as he could with Ethel, often staying at the family estate. Coming up the circular driveway on Lake Avenue the first time, Bobby was instantly confronted with the immensity of Ethel’s home. The Kennedys lived well, but nothing like this. The entrance hall had twenty-five-foot ceilings, and there were eleven bedrooms in the main house alone. The floors were of polished teak. There were enormous black marble fireplaces. The decor announced its refinement authoritatively enough to tone down even the earthiest and most vulgar of visitors, but it quieted the Skakels not at all.

George Skakel, Ethel’s father, was a self-made multimillionaire who made his fortune with what became the Great Lakes Carbon Corporation. Ann Brannack Skakel, his Irish-Catholic wife, had given him seven children,
four daughters and three sons. “Big Ann,” as she was known, was oversized in everything, from her enormous frame, the intensity of her faith, and the decibels of her voice to the rudeness that she inflicted on underlings and shopgirls. The Skakels did not live country club lives of sedate games and gatherings but partied and played with wild, frenetic energy.