The Kennedy of Hickory Hill
The Kennedy of Hickory Hill
SET back from a crescent-shaped driveway, the white Georgian manor sits atop a grassy knoll, its bright red door beckoning in the sunshine of an early Virginia spring. The air is vibrant with the commotion of shrieking children and barking dogs at play beneath budding oaks and hickories. A woman--joking, chiding, cajoling--bustles in and out of the house, chatting with friends who come to visit, taking on an older child at tennis (and winning), carrying a beer to a gardener on the 5 1/2-acre grounds.
It is a familiar domestic scene. A passerby would hardly give it a second glance--except for one fact. This is a Kennedy home: Hickory Hill, the domicile of Ethel Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy's widow, mother of his eleven children. And what happens in the life of a Kennedy automatically becomes the object of universal fascination.
The apotheosis of the Kennedy family has created whole new categories of national history, mythology and gossip. It started with Jack's rise to the presidency, and his death by an assassin's bullet in Dallas. It became even more tragic as Bobby reached for his brother's mantle, only to be cut down himself. It continued with the agonizing trial and conviction of Sirhan Sirhan, Bobby's assassin. It promises to grow with the senatorial prominence and presidential prospects of Ted Kennedy.
Somehow, Ethel Kennedy has remained just outside the glare of publicity. She is one member of the family whose every move is not chronicled, whose private life is not public property. According to a recent Gallup poll, Americans regard her as the country's most admired woman.* It is an assessment born of sympathy, not knowledge. The public does not know her today. Perhaps it never did. Since that grim night in Los Angeles ten months ago, she has lived almost entirely in the seclusion of Hickory Hill and Hyannisport, breaking into the news only in December, when she bore her eleventh child.
Yet those close to Ethel and to the life she has reconstructed regard her with something approaching awe. She has, they contend, emerged in many ways as the most remarkable member of her remarkable family. New York's Senator Jacob Javits describes her with absolute conviction as "the greatest of the Kennedys, male or female."
Mistress of the Menage
It is a surprising conclusion, considering the picture that Ethel presented while her husband was alive. In the giddy days of the New Frontier and after, she was known as the prankish clown of the clan, the exuberant athlete ready for any gambol, the nonstop, miniskirted supermom who exemplified all the headlong, slightly manic "vigah" of the Kennedys. Ethel was the hostess who presided gleefully when Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was pushed, fully clad, into the swimming pool at a Hickory Hill party. She was the mistress of a wacky menage that included even more animals than children--Brumus, the huge Newfoundland of nippy disposition, the wandering armadillo that broke up tea parties, the pet hawk that once landed on Mrs. Averell Harriman's wig. She was the dinner-party cutup who once, in mock jealousy at the attention a high Government official was paying another woman, tossed a candleholder at him--to the obvious distaste of Jacqueline Kennedy, the regal sister-in-law with whom she had so little in common.
There was nothing terribly wrong with anything Ethel said or did, except that she seemed to lack a certain substance. That was the impression she generally made: a little harsh and sharp-tongued, perhaps, but basically a high-spirited, possibly too rambunctious tomboy. In the ordeal of Bobby's death, even people who thought they knew her well would not have been surprised if the weight of tragedy had crushed her.
Yet beneath the surface of her character lay the qualities that were to sustain Ethel Kennedy and all those around her--an absolute dedication to the duties of wife and mother, a total devotion to her Roman Catholic faith, a steely will and discipline. The Kennedy women are the choral figures in the family's saga. Their lot has been to bear witness and to endure. Each of them has done so with a grace and resilience peculiarly colored by her own temperament. Rose, the aloof matriarch, has achieved almost mythic indomitability.
Jackie has traced an esthetic arc of grief, ending with a stylish whirl into another world. Ethel's special triumph has been to maintain normalcy. She has simply carried on, as best she could, the kind of existence that Bobby would have pursued had he lived. Countless other widows have had to do as much, most of them with less comfort from friends, family and position. Yet to acknowledge this takes nothing away from the energetic gallantry with which Ethel has managed it.
Above the fireplace in her Hickory Hill bedroom hang two framed quotations. One, a description of Aeschylus from Edith Hamilton's The Greek Way, reads: "Life for him was an adventure, perilous indeed, but men are not made for safe havens." The other, from Ralph Waldo Emerson, says:
Seek to persuade the sea wave to
break--
You will persuade me no more
easily.
These are the principles by which Ethel believes Bobby lived. They are the principles she intends to carry forward. "Sometimes a seed has to die before it takes," she says. "I will bring up the children the way he would have wanted. He has already established the pattern. They all understand that they have a special obligation. They've been given so much; they must try to give that again. Bobby's life, for example: how much more meaning it had because of what he was able to do in Bedford-Stuyvesant. The people who can't be bothered about those situations--well, there's a whole dimension of life that they're completely missing."
The children are still too young, of course, to be deeply involved in such things. Ethel herself is still observing her year of mourning. She rarely goes out socially, hardly ever appears at public functions. Basically her life is at Hickory Hill. The vast affairs that once characterized the place are no more. But her home is still constantly filled with guests of every rank and background, and they find the quality of life there surprisingly unchanged.
Brumus is still in residence. Visitors are welcomed by the same assault wave of small Kennedys tumbling happily down the red-carpeted stairway virtually into their arms. There is always an extra bed in one of the 19 rooms for an unexpected guest, just as there is always another chair--or two or three--at the table. When someone turns up, a few positions are shifted, and the visitor finds himself sitting next to Ted Kennedy, onetime Football Great Roosevelt Grier, Supreme Court Justice Byron ("Whizzer") White, Actress Lauren Bacall--or perhaps a trio of civil rights workers from the South. It all seems so natural, says Dave Hackett, Bobby's prep-school roommate and longtime friend, that "you have the feeling he himself will come walking in."
Sprint Around the Lawn
Ethel is no longer the prankster she was in days past, when she would string up a dummy parachutist in a tree by way of greeting General Maxwell Taylor, who parachuted into Normandy on Dday. But evenings at Hickory Hill are hardly occasions for quiet conversation. "After dinner, you never just sit around and talk, because she's not comfortable in that type of situation," says a friend. There is always an activity of some sort--charades, games of "who said that?" based on the day's news--or a movie in the playroom by the pool. A recent guest remembers pushing back from the table after a particularly mountainous meal, only to hear Ethel announce "O.K., everybody, let's have a race," and then lead the way at a full sprint around the lawn.
More than any other Kennedy, Ethel has always been obsessed with athletics. Even today, a simple game becomes a do-or-die competition. Last summer, nearly six months into her pregnancy, she was bounding around the tennis court at Hyannisport, playing doubles with Mountaineer Jim Whittaker against Columnist Art Buchwald and Singer Andy Williams. Ethel's team lost. Furious with frustration, she knelt on the court and banged her head on the surface. Next morning, in a rematch, she blasted a forehand across the net at Buchwald so hard that it hit him on the cheek before he could even lift his racket. After that, Ethel's side ran away with the set, 6-0.
Even in the last few months before the baby came, when Ethel was confined to bed by a complication in the pregnancy (it was to be her fifth caesarean), she remained active. She continued to see visitors, oversee the children's activities, keep up with her responsibilities as a member of the board of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Corporation, and make plans for "the foundation," the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial. She also supervised the publication details of Bobby's book Thirteen Days, right down to selecting the kind of paper to be used and vetoing some of the advertising because it stressed Bobby's role in the Cuban missile crisis at the expense of Jack Kennedy's.
All memorial projects have top priority. Two months ago, she made a rare public appearance to attend the unveiling of a commemorative bust of Bobby at the Justice Department. Last month she traveled to New Hampshire's Waterville Valley ski resort for the World Cup competition, which was dedicated to Bobby. She has worked diligently at home on a nationwide series of fund-raising dinners organized to pay off the $3,500,000 debt remaining from Bobby's presidential campaign.
So far, the fund-raising activities have paid off $2,000,000 (including a settlement on an $85,000 bill from the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, where Bobby was killed); Democratic Party resources will take care of most of the rest. Though Ethel will never be less than a wealthy woman, the burdens of being sole head of a large family have nicked into her personal fortune as well. "Ethel spends pretty freely," says a friend, "but now she's going to have to watch it." Accordingly, she has quietly disposed of some family stock, sold a few paintings and trimmed the payroll at Hickory Hill.
Nevertheless, she still has a household staff, counting volunteers and part-time workers, that numbers around nine. While she does not exactly take this cushion for granted, she occasionally presumes on it. Her tendency to be unaware of how other people live makes her seem demanding at times. She can ask her women friends to help with mail or join in welcoming somebody home from Zambia and fail to understand why they cannot run right over. Yet, as those friends are quick to point out, she is never as demanding of others as she is of herself.
No Time to Pause
Ethel, three secretaries and three volunteers spend hours every day answering the mail that cascades into Hickory Hill at the rate of up to 100 letters a day. Most replies are typed on Ethel's black-bordered stationery, and she scrawls personal messages on many of them. Never, though, does she sign with the whimsical drawing of a pregnant woman that her acquaintances saw so often in the past. Nor does she send many more of her humorous telegrams and letters, even if her friends do. Her favorite valentine this year was Robert McNamara's--a picture of himself encircled with the motto: "You'll find me under 'Lovers' in the Yellow Pages."
Ethel is up every morning at 7 for breakfast with the children. Before attending Mass, she shuttles youngsters back and forth to school in one of the several car pools her large brood involves her in. Eight children are at Hickory Hill with her now. She sits down to every meal with them, says the rosary and reads the Bible with them every night. She comforts, counsels and disciplines--quite strictly sometimes. "Once in a while she gets sore as hell at them," says a family intimate. "Bobby never struck any of the kids. Ethel, I think, has."
Ted Kennedy and a few close friends do what they can to fill a small part of Bobby's role as father. Art Buchwald holds irregular meetings of the "Blue Meanies," and entertains them with picnics, fanciful discussions and mock-secret projects. LeMoyne Billings, a prep school roommate of Jack's, recently took Bobby Jr. on a trip to Colombia. And Dave Hackett makes a point of attending each and every Father's Day at all the schools.
Of course, friends can only do so much. As Rose Kennedy points out, the advice that a father could give will be missed over the next 20 years. "Bobby spent so much time," recalls Ethel. "If one of the boys was having trouble just catching a football, Bobby would go out and work with him on it, tell him what he was doing wrong and practice with him until he got it."
Last Christmas, as a surprise for Ethel, the older children composed letters about their father. Wrote David, 13: "Daddy was very funny in church because he would embaress all of us by singing very loud. Daddy did not have a very good voice. There will be no more football with Daddy, no more swimming with him, no more riding and no more camping with him. But he was the best father their ever was and I would rather have him for a father the length of time I did than any other father for a million years."
Outsiders may consider it bathetic, but this feeling is genuine at Hickory Hill and it runs close beneath the surface. Ethel's constant motion provides her own defense against misery. It is painful for her to sit still for any length of time, her hands idle, her thoughts closing in on her. Then her pert features droop, reflecting the ravages of sorrow.
Such moments are rare, and probably always will be. Ethel Skakel Kennedy has been idle for hardly a minute in her life. Even as a child, says her brother Jim, her emotional makeup was "total reaction. The only time she rested, she rested from exhaustion." She was born in Chicago, the sixth of seven children (three boys, four girls). After her father moved his business, the multimillion-dollar Great Lakes Carbon Corp., to New York, the family lived briefly in suburban Larchmont and then on a 16-acre estate in Greenwich, Conn.
Mama at Work
George Skakel was a self-made former railway clerk who never forgot his humble origins, and used to caution the family, "We could all be thrown out on the street tomorrow." He usually appeared on the estate in old clothes, and got a great kick out of being mistaken for the gardener. Mother was Ann Brannack, a huge (200 Ibs. plus), cheery, moonfaced Irishwoman who relished a joke even more than her husband did--except perhaps when Joey the ram, the family's pet goat, butted her through a glass door. Mrs. Skakel was in dead earnest about only one thing --her religion--and her earnestness there was more than a match for George Skakel's casual Protestantism. She saw to it that all the children were enrolled in parochial schools and, from the age of four onward, went to Mass daily.
Otherwise, a raffish, indulgent and hyperactive atmosphere prevailed in the Skakel household. There were servants, a swimming pool, riding horses, a 35-ft. yawl and another smaller sailboat (significantly named, by Ethel, Sink or Swim). The house was always crammed with the children's schoolmates and other visitors, and it was not unusual for 25 people to gather at the Skakels' dinner table.
Though never scholarly, Ethel always got on well at school. "She had enough drawbacks," says Brother Jim, "not to be envied, and she excelled enough to be honored." Athletics were her particular forte. Swimming, skiing, horsemanship--Ethel won competitions in them all, though she doesn't much like to talk about it now. "They were all country-club teams," she says, "and that sounds so trivial in this day and age."
There was nothing trivial--then or now--about Ethel's devotion to her religion. At one point, she thought seriously of becoming a nun (to which Bobby quipped: "I'll compete with anyone, but how can I compete with God?"). Her sisters recall her sitting on a horse backstage at Madison Square Garden, waiting to go on, frowning intently at a book. In accordance with her sodality pledges, she was finishing up her half-hour's spiritual reading for the day.
The Skakel and Kennedy families first came together around 1940, when the children met at schools. Thereafter, their lives progressively intertwined, as they dated one another, visited back and forth, and went on outings together. Seventeen-year-old Ethel and 20-year-old Bobby met in 1945, at Mont Tremblant, a Canadian ski resort near Montreal. They liked each other ("He was so handsome!" Ethel recalls) and began to date, until Bobby turned his attentions to Ethel's quiet, bookish sister Pat. This lasted a few months by most accounts, but to Ethel it seemed "two years at least." Finally Pat developed other romantic interests. "Then Mama," says Ethel, referring to herself, "went right to work."
Keeping in Touch
Not only was Ethel the right girl to draw the shy Bobby out of his shell, but also she had the proper temperament and family background to suit the tightly knit, boisterous and opinionated Kennedy circle. At Bobby's behest, Ethel threw herself with abandon into older brother Jack's 1946 campaign for a House seat from Massachusetts. The year after her graduation from Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart in 1949, Ethel and Bobby--then a law student at the University of Virginia--were married in Greenwich, with Representative John F. Kennedy (D., Mass.) as best man.
From the beginning, theirs was "an extraordinary relationship," says Ted Kennedy. "With Ethel and Bobby, everything just clicked all the way." In a forthcoming memorial volume, Bobby's sister Eunice Shriver writes: "I hear him on the beach, in his home, on his boat, on the front lawn playing football, at the tennis court--always with the same question: 'Where is Ethel?' He grew out slowly. He was a lonely, very sensitive and unfulfilled youngster. He met Ethel, and all the love and appreciation for which she seemed to have an infinite capacity came pouring down on him. How he blossomed."
They moved through a succession of homes--first in Charlottesville, then in the Georgetown section of Washington, and finally Hickory Hill in 1956--Bobby rising through the capital hierarchy, Ethel raising his children and presenting him with a new one almost every year. No matter how busy either of them became, they were never out of touch during the day. If Bobby was conducting hearings as a congressional committee counsel, Ethel would arrive in the morning, attend the hearings, drive home for lunch with the children, return for the afternoon hearings, then go back home and call her friends to say how brilliantly Bobby had performed. Later, when Bobby was Attorney General, she and a clutch of children often showed up on working evenings at the Justice Department with trays of hamburgers, milk and ice cream.
No Neutrality
For Ethel, says Eunice Shriver, "Bobby was everything: the best sailor, the best skier--a hero who could easily climb Mount Everest if he wanted to." To keep up with him Ethel went to some pretty heroic lengths herself. Art Buchwald recalls a camping trip on which Ethel hiked seven miles out of the Grand Canyon in 119DEG heat: "I didn't think any woman could do that. Maybe no woman but Ethel could."
In one respect, Ethel went Bobby one better--or worse, as the case may be. The word "neutral" had no meaning for her, as applied to the Kennedys. If people were not for her, then they were against her and she against them. Senator Joseph McCarthy, for whom Bobby once worked as a committee counsel, won her favor as a "pal," and she blindly defended him long after he fell into disgrace. But it did not pay even pals to incur her wrath --as another McCarthy, Senator Eugene, learned when he and Bobby became rivals for the Democratic nomination. Encountering Ethel at one point during the campaign, McCarthy leaned down as usual to kiss her cheek. He should have known better. "Hello, Gene," said Ethel icily, extending her hand.
Others on the receiving end of her spite might have been happy with a handshake. When Bobby was Attorney General, Ethel seethed at FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's ill-concealed disdain for his young boss. So she jabbed away at Hoover's sorest point, his running feud with Los Angeles Police Chief William Parker. Into Hoover's personal suggestion box one day she popped a note, signed by her, saying "Parker for FBI Director."
What convictions Ethel held, she held with a fierce tenacity that drove her into any verbal fray, often oblivious of the consequences. Veteran New Frontiersmen remember with mixed amusement and embarrassment that she was the champion asker of gauche questions at the Hickory Hill seminars where Bobby brought his people together with leading intellectuals. Once, seated next to Chief Justice Earl Warren on a plane trip, Ethel launched into a long harangue about the school-prayer issue that was then before the Supreme Court, forgetting that Justices never discuss their current cases. While Warren sat in discomfited silence, Ethel bore down relentlessly with remarks like, "There is no way to ban God from public schools; God is everywhere." The court's ruling against public school prayer was announced the next day.
Only one thing disconcerts Ethel, and that is flying. Airplanes have brought nothing but tragedy into her life. In 1955, her father asked her mother to fly with him on a business trip to Los Angeles in his company-owned plane. Mrs. Skakel usually preferred to take the train, but this time she made an exception. Near Tulsa, Okla., the plane exploded in midair, killing all aboard. Ethel's sister Ann phoned her the news. Ethel was silent for a few seconds, then said: "It's all right. It's all right." Softly, she added: "Goodbye." Ann was momentarily appalled. "Then I realized --this was Ethel's great strength."
Ethel was to display the same stoic fiber eleven years later, when her brother, George Skakel Jr., was killed in the crash of a light plane in Idaho--a crash that also claimed Bobby's close friend and onetime Kennedy aide Dean Markham.
During the bleak period after Jack Kennedy's assassination in 1963, it was Ethel whom Bobby relied on and talked to as he sorted out what to do with his life. "It was so difficult seeing Bobby so miserable," she says. "But we never really talked about pulling out of political life altogether. Bobby used to quote Lord Tweedsmuir on polities' being a very noble calling. It's a way of working directly to achieve the things you believe have to be or ought to be done." Eventually, Bobby returned to politics, first in a successful race for New York Senator, later in his belated campaign for the presidency. "No one else cared as much," says Ethel, and she strongly urged him to run despite the objections of some of his advisers, who thought he should wait until 1972.
Giving Comfort
Then her own moment came in Los Angeles. No one who was there will ever forget that it was Ethel, in the first panicky moments after Bobby was shot, who calmly pushed back the surging crowd in the hotel serving kitchen to give him air. Later, as he lay dying, she led a small group of friends and family out onto the roof of Good Samaritan Hospital for a break. Everybody was numb with shock, but Ethel was dry-eyed, her voice was firm, she even managed to laugh.
On the plane that carried Bobby's body back East, Ethel moved down the aisle, placing pillows under the heads of friends, squeezing their arms, kissing them, urging them not to feel bad. In New York, it was Ethel who made most of the funeral arrangements, planning the seating, working out the prayer card, suggesting roles for Leonard Bernstein and Andy Williams, even finding places for the children to stay. She told Archbishop (now Cardinal-designate) Terence Cooke that she accepted Bobby's death as God's will, and therefore she wanted the ceremony to be as affirmative and optimistic as possible.
On the funeral train that carried the casket from New York to Washington, she refused to remain closeted in the family car. Ignoring a friend's urging to go back, she stepped into a car full of Washington friends and officials. After kissing or shaking hands with everyone there, she learned that all the staffers and newsmen who had traveled on Bobby's campaign plane were aboard the train. "I want to see them," she said. A reporter friend told her that they were scattered throughout the train, perhaps 20 cars in all. She insisted, "I'll go see them." And so she did, teasing some and comforting others. After going through the entire train, she returned to the casket, and wept.
An Unchanging Way of Life
In the weeks after the funeral, there were rumors that Ethel and her children would leave Hickory Hill. Nothing could have seemed more plausible. Why not cast off painful associations and turn away from Washington politics? Why not, in fact, spend some time in international travel and socializing? Ethel would not have it. "No one ever gave a thought to leaving Hickory Hill," she says. "This is where we'll stay."
Clearly, that decision means more than simply remaining in a familiar house. It means sticking with a way of life. In Ethel's mind, her stewardship of that clamorous household symbolizes her stewardship of a legacy from Bobby. Thus she is the driving force behind the Kennedy Foundation, which she is determined will be a "living" memorial, appropriate to Bobby's ideals. She is the staunchest backer of the foundation's plan to raise money for fellowships that will enable promising but underprivileged youths to work alongside leaders of their own causes (a young farm laborer, for example, might work alongside Cesar Chavez, the evangelistic leader of migratory workers in the Southwest). "Ethel's the kind," says one associate, "who wouldn't shrink from getting involved with such groups as the Black Panther organization in Chicago." Ethel agrees: "You could always play it safe; take on projects that couldn't fail and no one could criticize. But that isn't the way Bobby lived."
That is why Ethel vehemently supported Ted Kennedy's resolve to forge ahead in politics after Bobby's death. "There never was a thought of his leaving the Senate," says Ethel. "There was never a thought of his retiring from public life. I wouldn't have it any other way." For Ethel, too, remaining at Hickory Hill means resolving, after all the pain and horror that have gone before, to encourage her own sons to go into politics if they are so inclined. "For anyone to achieve something, he will have to show a little courage," she says. "You're only on this earth once. You must give it all you've got."
* The runners-up: Rose Kennedy, Mamie Eisenhower, Lady Bird Johnson.
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