The House of Kennedy Read online

“I tell you, doctor,” Monroe said in one session. “I’m glad he [Jack] has Bobby. It’s like the Navy—the president is the captain and Bobby is the executive officer. Bobby would do absolutely anything for his brother and so would I. I will never embarrass him. As long as I have memory, I have John Fitzgerald Kennedy.”

  According to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “Robert Kennedy came to inhabit the fantasies of her [Monroe’s] last summer,” although in another session, Monroe asserts, “As you see, there is no room in my life for him [Bobby]. I guess I don’t have the courage to face up to it and hurt him. I want someone else to tell him it’s over,” she says. “I tried to get the president to do it, but I couldn’t reach him.”

  Life magazine gets one of Monroe’s final interviews, published weeks after her August 1962 death. When asked whether many of her friends had rallied around her when she was fired by Fox, “There was silence,” Life reports, “and sitting very straight, eyes wide and hurt, she had answered with a tiny, ‘No.’”

  In those final summer days, would Marilyn Monroe have counted the Kennedy brothers as “friends”?

  In 1964, Frank A. Capell, an anti-Communist author, self-publishes a pamphlet titled “The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe” (later expanding it in 1969), alleging that Bobby’s affair with the actress had ended in a death sentence carried out by Communist agents hell-bent on keeping Monroe from exposing Bobby’s dealings with Castro.

  Numerous other conspiracy theories regarding whether Marilyn Monroe was murdered—and if so, by whom—engage public imagination to the point that twenty years later, in 1982, the LA district attorney’s office agrees to review the ongoing controversy. Ultimately, however, they conclude that had the actress indeed been murdered, it “would have required a massive, in-place conspiracy covering all the principals at the death scene on August 4 and 5, 1962,” and concluded, “Our inquiries and document examination uncovered no credible evidence supporting a murder theory.”

  Marilyn Monroe’s original cause of death—a barbiturate overdose marked on her death certificate as “probable suicide”—stands.

  * * *

  In May 1964, the recently widowed Jackie Kennedy is playing tennis with Reverend Richard T. McSorley in McLean, Virginia, at Bobby and Ethel’s six-acre Hickory Hill estate (which was briefly Jackie’s—she and Jack bought the place in 1955 and lived there for a year before selling it to Bobby and Ethel). The game allows Jackie unexpected freedom and cover to talk with the priest openly about her struggles—with grief, depression, her obsessive mental replaying of Jack’s violent death, and thoughts of taking her own life, an act forbidden by her Catholic faith, but one she’s grown sympathetic to.

  “I was glad that Marilyn Monroe got out of her misery,” she says of the actress. “If God is going to make such a to-do about judging people because they take their own lives,” Jackie says, to Father McSorley’s alarm, “then someone ought to punish Him.”

  Chapter 26

  On a sheet of ruled notebook paper, Bobby writes the word Courage.

  It’s Christmas Eve, 1963. Bobby’s two younger siblings, Ted and Jean, are representing the family among eight hundred notables gathered for the rededication of New York’s Idlewild International Airport as John F. Kennedy International Airport. Mayor Robert Wagner extolls the late president as “a brilliant practitioner of intercommunication.”

  Bobby sits alone with his notebook. He’s been asked to write the foreword to the memorial edition of JFK’s Profiles in Courage. In a few words, he must distill the bravery that marked his late brother’s character. The assignment also contains a painful and private challenge for Bobby—incorporating courage into the next phase of his own life, a life without his brother.

  Bobby describes the technique Jack used to successfully mask a lifetime of physical pain: “Those who knew him well would know he was suffering only because his face was a little whiter, the lines around his eyes were a little deeper, his words a little sharper. Those who did not know him well detected nothing. He didn’t complain about his problem so why should I complain about mine—that is how one always felt.”

  By contrast, Bobby always wears his intentions on the surface. A trait, he explains, born of determination. “I was the seventh of nine children. When you come from that far down, you have to struggle to survive.”

  “The Kennedys moved fast,” the New York Times columnist George Vecsey observes, humorously describing two separate occurrences when Bobby “almost knocked down” Vecsey’s wife and “almost mowed down” Vecsey himself.

  Bobby loves to tackle, but his real skill is tenacity. “I can’t think of anyone who had less right to make varsity than Bobby,” his 1947 Harvard teammate and friend Kenny O’Donnell tells biographer Chris Matthews. “If you were blocking him, you’d knock him down, but he’d be up again going after the play. He never let up. He just made himself better.”

  Not everyone views Bobby’s forceful manner positively. When Jack begins his first Senate term in 1952, Ted Sorensen (an attorney hired as JFK’s researcher, who would go on to become a speechwriter and trusted political adviser) gets a jarring introduction to Bobby’s style of play.

  “In a photo opportunity for a magazine article,” he recalls, “JFK, RFK, and I went across the street to the Capitol lawn to simulate a touch football game in which JFK threw me a pass with RFK defending. As I reached up for the ball, I felt a powerful and unsportsmanlike shove and went down onto the muddy grass in my one good ‘Senate suit.’” Sorensen developed an early impression of Bobby as “militant, aggressive, intolerant, opinionated, somewhat hollow in his convictions.”

  Like Sorensen, in 1952 Bobby is also a Senate staffer, working for first-term Republican senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin. While Sorensen’s position is merit-based, Bobby secures his through Kennedy connections—McCarthy’s a pal of Joe Sr. and has not only vacationed with the family, but dated two of Bobby’s sisters, Pat and Jean. Bobby, a 1951 graduate of University of Virginia Law School, works for just six months on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee for Investigations, but the stint tarnishes his reputation for over a decade. “In those days,” Sorensen recalls, “[Bobby] was a conservative, very close to his father in both ideas and manners, sharing his father’s dislike of liberals.”

  On January 31, 1957, Bobby becomes chief counsel for the newly formed Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field, popularly known as the Rackets Committee. Though Bobby has inside knowledge of his brother Jack’s presidential ambitions—and according to his sister Jean, their father is “really mad” about a “politically dangerous” investigation into organized labor—Bobby sets his target on James Riddle “Jimmy” Hoffa, head of the 1.3 million-member transportation-based Teamster union.

  On February 19, 1957, Eddie Cheyfitz, a lawyer for the Teamsters, invites the two men to dinner at his home. It’s their first meeting, and after sizing one another up—Hoffa finds Kennedy’s handshake weak; five-nine Kennedy looks down on Hoffa’s five-five stature—tension builds over dinner conversation that amounts to what Bobby calls “a complete fabrication” of information about the union. He demands a physical contest: “Hoffa, I’ll just bet I can beat you at Indian hand wrestling.”

  In both of his two memoirs, Hoffa relates the encounter. The RFK biographer Larry Tye quotes from the second: “I leaned back in my chair and looked at him as if he was crazy. I couldn’t believe he was serious but he stood up, loosened his necktie, took off his jacket, and rolled up his sleeve…Like taking candy from a baby. I flipped his arm over and cracked his knuckles on to the top of the table. It was strictly no contest and he knew it. But he had to try again. Same results…I’m damn certain in my heart that Robert F. Kennedy became my mortal enemy that night.”

  For three years, Bobby tries and fails to prove the improper financial dealings he’s alleged of Hoffa. “I used to love to bug the little bastard,” Hoffa says of a series of 1957 Rackets Committee hearings televised by NBC, which rev
eal an entrenched rivalry between the two men.

  “During the worst of the hearings,” Ethel recalls, “the big semis would get off the main roads and come by Hickory Hill with the horns just blaring.” In 1959, the New York Times reports that Bobby “received anonymous threats from a telephone caller that someone would throw acid in the eyes of his six children,” who consequently, according to Bobby Jr., had “to wait after school in the principal’s office” for Ethel to pick them up.

  Still, staffers admire his total dedication. The assistant attorney Nicholas Katzenbach recalls working lunches at Hickory Hill. “Bobby would call up at the last minute, and say uh, ‘Ethel, I’m bringing out uh, 10 of us, 12 of us, 20 of us, uh, can you fix us some lunch?’ And we’d spend the afternoon discussing problems.”

  The feud with Hoffa escalates when Jack is elected president in 1960 and Bobby rises to the head of the Justice Department as attorney general for the Kennedy administration. Joe Scarborough writes that Bobby “ultimately succeeded in convicting Hoffa but along the way he did the unthinkable: He made him a sympathetic figure.”

  Although a May 1963 Gallup poll shows Bobby’s favorability rating at 72 percent, he’s already worrying about the effects his controversial stint as attorney general may have on Jack’s chances for reelection in 1964.

  Aides are surprised when on November 20, 1963, his thirty-eighth birthday, their hard-working leader (according to Joe Sr., “Jack works as hard as any mortal man can. Bobby goes a little further”) gives a dispirited toast at the office party. They whisper about an impending resignation, speculating, “I guess Bob won’t be here by Christmas.” That night at Hickory Hill, in the midst of another bustling party for friends and family, Ethel picks up on Bobby’s grave mood. In her own toast, she never mentions her husband, insisting only that guests “drink to the President of the United States.”

  Two days later, on November 22, 1963, it is warm enough to eat lunch on the patio at Hickory Hill. Bobby’s guests are Robert Morgenthau, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, and the chief of his criminal division, Silvio Mollo. The menu of clam chowder and tuna fish sandwiches honors the Catholic tradition of forgoing meat on Fridays.

  At 1:45, there is a commotion by the pool. A workman with a transistor radio begins shouting, and a phone extension rings. Ethel tells Bobby that J. Edgar Hoover’s on the line, which immediately alarms him, as he and Hoover are bitter rivals. (At a meeting of senior FBI agents in 1968, Hoover deputy Clyde Tolan remarks of Bobby, “I hope someone shoots and kills the son of a bitch.”) Bobby later tells Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “I thought something was wrong because he wouldn’t be…calling me here.”

  Hoover delivers his dire news: “The President’s been shot.” When JFK biographer William Manchester asks Bobby whether Hoover “sounded excited,” Bobby replies, “No, not a bit. No, nor upset.” On reflection, Bobby later says, “It wasn’t the way that, under the circumstances, I would have thought an individual would talk.”

  Morgenthau, with whom Bobby had served in the navy, can immediately see the “shock and horror” on his face. After about a minute, Bobby repeats Hoover’s message to his guests. Bobby has calls to make upstairs, but, Morgenthau says, “We didn’t want to leave him.”

  Bobby remembers talking to Secret Service agent Clint Hill: “I asked if they’d gotten a priest, and they said they had.” He waits by the phone in his home office. “Clint Hill called me back, and I think it was about thirty minutes after I talked to Hoover…and he said, ‘The President’s dead.’”

  Bobby rejoins his guests in the television room. “Jack is dead,” he tells Morgenthau. “We were just in shock,” the US attorney recalls. “We just couldn’t believe what we were hearing. Then he got up and walked out and left us.”

  Bobby’s aides pour into Hickory Hill, where US marshals set up security detail. With his black Newfoundland dog, Brumus, trailing behind, Bobby walks the grounds with Edwin Guthman, the public information director for the Justice Department, confiding his fears that his relentless crusades against crime or Communism could have brought this violence on Jack. “There’s so much bitterness,” Bobby says to Guthman. “I thought they would get one of us, but Jack, after all he’s been through, never worried about it…I thought it would be me.”

  “Did the CIA kill my brother?” Bobby demands of the agency’s director, John McCone, not long after the assassination. He is never satisfied with McCone’s answer of no.

  “He had the most wonderful life,” Bobby assures his children of their uncle. But his composure is cracking. Ethel hands her husband a pair of dark glasses. Soon he must prepare to meet Air Force One at Andrews Field.

  Once the plane lands, newly sworn in President Lyndon Johnson will take possession of the Oval Office—and all the secrets of the Kennedy administration contained within. Bobby orders national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy to change the combinations to Jack’s locked file cabinets and to remove the recording equipment installed there and in the Cabinet Room.

  After he dispatches Ted and Eunice to Hyannis Port to tell Joe and Rose the news, settles Jean and Jackie in the White House residence, and consults with Sargent Shriver on the funeral arrangements, Bobby tries to rest. Chuck Spalding walks him to the Lincoln Bedroom, offering a sleeping pill, which Bobby accepts. “God, it’s so awful. Everything was really beginning to run so well,” Bobby tells Spalding, keeping control of his emotions until his friend closes the door.

  “Then I just heard him break down…I heard him say, “Why, God?”

  Chapter 27

  Bobby grapples with his grief by means of a striking physicality.

  In Hobe Sound, Florida, not long after the funeral, Kennedy aides take up a brutal game of touch football. “People were smashing into each other to try and forget that John Kennedy was dead,” Pierre Salinger observes, “and Bobby was one of the toughest guys in the game.”

  Even so, Bobby tells Washington friends, “I don’t think there is much left for me in this town.” The friends are alarmed at the sight of his gaunt figure dressed in his brother’s clothes—Jack’s leather bomber jacket with the presidential seal, or his tweed overcoat, or his navy sea coat. Bobby, a nonsmoker, holds the silver cigarette case that commemorates Jack’s defeat of Nixon. The inscription reads: “When I’m through, how about you?”

  Adults attempt to comfort Bobby, but one child dares to confront him with the truth. “Your brother’s dead! Your brother’s dead!” journalist Peter Maas recalls a boy of around seven shouting at Bobby during a Christmas party for orphans. The event is Bobby’s first public outing since the funeral, and everyone in the room is aghast. “The little boy knew he had done something wrong, but he didn’t know what; so he started to cry,” Maas reports. “Bobby stepped forward and picked him up, in kind of one motion, and held him very close for a moment, and he said, ‘That’s all right. I have another brother.’”

  And he has eight children. The day before Jack’s funeral, he writes each of them a letter and instructs his siblings to do the same with their children. “It was natural for Bobby to take charge,” Ted recalls. “He’s been sort of a second father to us.” To Joe, Jack’s godson and Bobby’s oldest son, Bobby writes, “Remember all the things that Jack started—be kind to others that are less fortunate than we—and love our country.”

  Of his work at the Justice Department, Bobby says, “I don’t have the heart for it right now,” and through the end of 1963 he remains at Hickory Hill.

  The naturally bright atmosphere at Hickory Hill turns somber. “At this breakfast, not long after my uncle’s death,” Bobby’s son Michael remembers, “my father had the discipline to tell the older children to write down the significance of Jack’s death to the United States.” Although Michael was only five years old at the time, he says, “I remember that incident very, very well. I remember thinking, Oh, I’m glad I don’t have to do that yet.”

  Kathleen Kennedy Townsend (the eldest of Bobby and Ethel’s children)
remembers the typical ambiance of Hickory Hill as a “wild, informal mixture of a children’s playground, upbeat discotheque, and a humming political headquarters.” Her childhood home bustled with “lots of kids. There were plenty of horses, many dogs, chickens, geese, goats. It was a menagerie…my brother Bobby collected reptiles. And actually the turtle was in the laundry room. The sea lion was in the swimming pool.”

  In late January 1964, a Pacific trip to Japan and Indonesia “restores him [Bobby] to activity,” according to Arthur Schlesinger. He begins to act on the pronouncement Jack made to a reporter during his Senate service: “Just as I went into politics because Joe died, if anything happened to me tomorrow, my brother Bobby would run for my seat in the Senate. And if Bobby died, Teddy would take over for him.”

  Politics has changed, become more personal. One driving factor is the revelation of a long-held Kennedy secret. After her botched lobotomy in 1941, Rosemary Kennedy—now the oldest living Kennedy sibling—was shuttled around to various facilities, leaving Eunice, her closest sibling, with no idea of her sister’s whereabouts “for a decade after the surgery.” Since 1949, however, Rosemary has been under the care of the nuns at the St. Coletta facility in Wisconsin. Her biographer Kate Larson believes that Jack may have visited Rosemary while campaigning in 1958, though he made no mention of his sister during the national presidential contest. Only in 1960, when Jack is president-elect, is Rosemary mentioned as his “mentally retarded sister who is in an institution in Wisconsin,” in a publication for the National Association for Retarded Children.

  Outspoken Eunice, who, as executive vice president of the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation since 1957, has already spent years advocating for the intellectually disabled, pushes further. “Don’t bother to sit with them; they can’t learn, so forget them; give them a lollypop to suck and a bench to sit on,” she mocks. “That’s what we’ve been fighting.”