The House of Kennedy Read online

  Lingering resentments are expected to blow over, however, and be largely forgotten. “A year from now, Michael and the Baby Sitter and Joe and the Annulment will have joined Amy and Joey and Donald and Marla in the landfill of tabloid dreck,” predicts Time magazine.

  But unfortunately, it would only be a few months before Michael Kennedy is back in the headlines.

  Chapter 52

  The past year, 1997, has been a challenging one for the Kennedy clan, and for Bobby and Ethel’s sons in particular. Even so, former JFK speechwriter and family intimate Ted Sorensen tells the LA Times, “It’s a family that is accustomed to both controversy and criticism. Sometimes withstanding it is all you can do—just accept it and go on.”

  Holding their heads high and soldiering on is something the family has long been taught to do. As Lem Billings—for whom Michael LeMoyne Kennedy is named—used to remind the younger generation after the deaths of Jack and Bobby, “Remember what Grandma Rose used to say: ‘Never forget that you are a Kennedy. A lot of work went into building that name. Don’t disparage it.’”

  “The Kennedys all take care of each other,” Beth Dozoretz, a Washington Democratic activist, remarks. “They have an overwhelming sense of a continuing commitment to public service, through all the trials and tribulations of their lives,” says Thaelia Tsongas Schlesinger, a Massachusetts Democrat.

  Despite his setbacks, Michael’s family encourage him, “You’re a Kennedy. You have to pull it together.” Pulling oneself together and moving on is “just Kennedy 101,” his cousin Patrick insists.

  As 1997 comes to a close, Michael Kennedy is among extended family and friends congregating for the holidays in Aspen, Colorado, as they do nearly every Christmas season. Even though their divorce is imminent, Michael’s estranged wife, Vicki, is also staying in nearby Vail with her father and stepmother, Frank and Kathie Lee Gifford. “Probably the central thing in Michael’s life was his wife and his children,” Michael’s friend Larry Spagnola remarks. “It was his intention to reconcile.”

  On New Year’s Eve, Michael and about twenty friends and relatives—a group that includes his younger brother Max and sister Rory, plus his three children—gather near the 11,212-foot-high summit, awaiting their last run down Aspen Mountain. They’re about to play a favorite Kennedy game, known as “ski football.” “They hang at the top of the mountain till everybody is off the hill, so they don’t endanger anybody else,” a family friend says of the game, which involves skiing downhill while tossing a small foam football back and forth. “It is Kennedyesque. There is a lot of laughing, vigor, excitement and a big rush.”

  There are conflicting reports as to whether the family has been warned earlier that week against playing the made-up sport, but the daredevil game is certainly rife with potential danger.

  The possibility of disaster doesn’t bother Michael, whom longtime friend James Hillard notes “really had a tremendous drive for living on the edge. Whether it was kayaking or skiing, he just did it.” It’s not a new attitude, or even exclusive to Michael. The Kennedy cousins are known to goad each other to jump from extreme heights, and Bobby Jr. notes of their childhood, “If we went more than two weeks without a visit to the emergency room, it was unusual.”

  And in a family known for daring athleticism, Michael is touted as the best of them all. His brother Max calls him “an unbelievably good athlete,” and Joe agrees, remarking on Michael’s “amazing physical gifts” and deeming him “fearless—on the slopes, on water skis, wherever he could test himself at the edge.”

  Bobby Jr. claims Michael’s “the greatest athlete of our generation,” and notes, “In all my life I’ve never seen anyone ski as beautifully as Michael.” Even Bob Beattie, a former US Olympic ski coach, has praised Michael’s talent for skiing. “Michael is the best skier, a tremendously gifted athlete who could ski downhill backwards and blindfolded,” another friend notes. He’s confident enough to not only forgo his ski poles but often to videotape the action as the group tosses and receives the brightly colored foam ball, though on this occasion the New York Times notes that it’s his ten-year-old daughter who is “videotaping their antics.”

  They’ve played this game many times before, including earlier that week. The columnist R. Couri Hay, who was present on New Year’s Eve, says, “Michael is the ringleader, without question,” and recalls that the previous game had ended in a tie. “Then they said, ‘We’ll play tomorrow—death to the loser.’”

  It’s mild weather, a little after four o’clock in the evening, and the group is about halfway down the run when Michael calls out to his buddy Blake “Harvey” Fleetwood, “Pass me the ball, Harve!” Michael catches it. He’s looking uphill and considering where to throw the ball again, not realizing he’s about to collide with a three-foot-wide spruce tree.

  “Stop! Stop!” Rory tries to warn her brother.

  But it’s too late.

  Michael crashes headfirst into the tree and is knocked unconscious.

  “There was blood all over the snow,” says R. Couri Hay.

  Michael’s sister Rory is the first to reach him. She races over and begins administering CPR. “Michael,” she tells him, while others move to shield the two from the children’s view, “now is the time to fight. Don’t leave us!”

  Paramedics from the ski patrol arrive within minutes and take over CPR as the children yell, “It’s my father! Please help my daddy!” R. Couri Hay recalls, “Several of the Kennedys were on their knees saying the Lord’s Prayer.”

  The paramedics work feverishly to stabilize Michael’s neck with a cervical collar, loading him onto a toboggan for emergency transport to Aspen Valley Hospital. “On-mountain treatment included intensive cardiac care, spinal immobilization, and respiratory support,” a prepared statement from the resort reads.

  Despite best efforts, Michael Kennedy is pronounced dead at Aspen Valley Hospital at 5:50 p.m. The Pitkin County coroner’s office notes cause of death is multiple injuries from blunt-force trauma to the head and neck, and is deemed accidental. No trace of drugs or alcohol are found in his body.

  Aspen Club Lodge bellman and driver Matthew Malone recalls picking up a female passenger at 6:00 p.m. that evening, with instructions to bring her to the hospital. “Should I drop you off at Admissions or Emergency?” he inquires, to which she responds in a “tone sharp with anger and sorrow.

  ‘He’s dead. Wherever you go for that.’”

  CNN reports that Michael’s body is flown home to Hyannis Port on actor Kevin Costner’s jet, and shortly after he is buried next to his brother David, near their grandparents, Joe and Rose.

  It’s a sadly familiar scene, stoic Kennedys in mourning.

  “We don’t know what to make of another Kennedy death,” Kevin Sowyrda, a Massachusetts Republican political analyst, tells the Washington Post. “We almost expect it now.”

  “The Kennedys play too hard and live too hard,” one former White House correspondent observes. “They push the envelope, and sometimes it blows up.”

  Others are more compassionate.

  Boston’s Mayor Thomas Menino says, “I don’t know anyone who can match the sort of continuum of sadness this family has had,” adding, “Maybe that’s the price you pay for great glories.”

  To a packed church of mourners and hundreds of spectators, Michael’s brothers Bobby Jr. and Joe eulogize him, focusing on his achievements in business and human rights. “He was not made for comfort or ease,” Joe remarks. “He was the athlete dying young of A. E. Housman’s verse: ‘Like the wind through the woods, through him the gale of life blew high.’”

  “He died, three years sober, on a forty-degree day under a blue sky in the company of his children, his family, and friends he loved,” Bobby Jr. says. “He caught the ball, turned to a friend, and said his final words: ‘This is really great!’ The last thing he saw was his children. The next thing he saw was God.”

  * * *

  Even in a year as difficult as 1997, the Ke
nnedys still celebrate “a nugget of happy news,” as the New York Times proclaims when announcing the birth of Ethel and Bobby’s twenty-first grandchild on May 22.

  Both Courtney Kennedy (the fifth of Ethel and Bobby’s brood, between brothers David and Michael) and her husband of four years, Paul Hill, are in their forties when their first and only child, Saoirse (pronounced “Searsha”) Roisin Hill, is born.

  “I couldn’t understand a word he said,” Courtney recalls of first hearing Paul’s thick Belfast accent, “but I thought: ‘He’s gorgeous.’” They meet in 1990, when Courtney is recovering from a broken neck sustained in a skiing accident, and Paul—an Irishman known as one of “the Guildford Four”—is recently released from fifteen years in prison for an IRA bombing he didn’t commit, as dramatized in the Oscar-nominated 1993 movie In the Name of the Father. (Ironically, Courtney’s cousin Caroline Kennedy had once nearly been the victim of an IRA bombing herself. In October 1975, when she was seventeen and living in London, a bomb under the car Caroline was scheduled to take exploded prematurely, tragically killing a neighbor, a renowned cancer researcher.)

  Courtney has a particular affinity for the Kennedys’ ancestral land, recalling the feeling of her first visit to Ireland as a teenager, “I felt like I was at home.” Her aunt Jean Kennedy Smith begins a five-year ambassadorship to Ireland in 1993, the year of Paul and Courtney’s marriage.

  Reclusive Courtney, according to Vanity Fair, is “the most sensitive and emotionally vulnerable of the [RFK] bunch.” She also grapples with lifelong depression, though she doesn’t blame it on the circumstances of her upbringing. “My difficulty was being able to say ‘I’m a Kennedy and I’m suffering from depression.’”

  That she and Paul name their daughter Saoirse—which means “Freedom” in Gaelic—is profound, but Courtney wavers on passing along the Kennedy. “I just thought it would be one name too many,” she explains. Though at first the sole Kennedy grandchild not to use the name, in later years Courtney’s daughter seems happy to claim it, signing her name “Saoirse Kennedy-Hill.”

  In 2002, Courtney and Paul decide to move their family to Ireland, where they can bring their daughter up in a “less manic” environment. “Being here,” Courtney notes, “is the best medication I can think of,” for her lingering depression. And Saoirse, both her parents say, is “very Irish.” The marriage doesn’t last, however, and when the couple separates in 2006, Courtney and Saoirse, then eight years old, move back to the United States.

  Courtney’s cousin Timothy Shriver calls his niece “an only child with a hundred brothers and sisters,” and her uncle Bobby Jr. agrees, saying, “She became a sister or daughter to a hundred Kennedys, Shrivers, and Lawfords. We all considered her our own.”

  Bobby Jr. affectionately calls her “an outgoing imp with a rebellious nature, an irreverence towards authority and deep commitment to mischief,” attributes he says are likely inherited from her parents—Courtney and Paul.

  Nevertheless, like her mother, Saoirse suffers from depression. At age eighteen, she bravely writes a personal essay in Deerfield Academy’s paper, the Deerfield Scroll. “Although I was mostly a happy child, I suffered bouts of deep sadness that felt like a heavy boulder on my chest,” Saoirse explains, urging her high school classmates and community to be more compassionate. “We are all either struggling or know someone who is battling an illness; let’s come together to make our community more inclusive and comfortable.”

  Saoirse also helps found Deerfield Students Against Sexual Assault, motivated by her own experience. “I did the worst thing a victim can do,” she reveals, “and I pretended it hadn’t happened. This all became too much, and I attempted to take my own life.”

  She graduates in 2016, moving on to Boston College as a communications major and vice president of the College Democrats. Bill Stone, a fellow BC student, describes Saoirse as “very kind, funny, bright, smart,” but adds, “I knew she had her demons.”

  She also possesses great empathy. In 2014, on the thirtieth anniversary of her uncle David’s death more than a decade before she was born, she addresses David online: “You were a kind, gentle spirit that went through unimaginable struggles in your life,” she writes. “It saddens me to know that we will never meet in this world, but I know I will see you up in heaven with my grandfather, Uncle Michael, and other family members.”

  Her words come true far sooner than anyone could have expected.

  Twenty-two-year-old Saoirse spends the night of July 31, 2019, in Hyannis Port—finishing up some schoolwork and watching the Democratic presidential debates with her ninety-one-year-old Grandma Ethel. Later, although “she wasn’t a partier or anything,” a family source notes, she heads out with a friend for a night of karaoke and dancing, ending with a sunrise swim.

  And then, as her uncle Bobby put it, “Saoirse woke up with God.”

  Emergency workers respond to a call at the Kennedy compound for a suspected overdose at 2:30 p.m. on August 1, 2019, but it’s already too late. Though unresponsive, Saoirse is rushed to the hospital, where she is declared dead. Three months later, on November 1, 2019, toxicology results reveal “methadone and ethanol toxicity as well as other prescription medications were found in Hill’s system,” though her death is ruled accidental.

  “If anyone ever wondered whether God loves the Kennedys,” Bobby Jr. says during his eulogy for Saoirse in Our Lady of Victory Church on August 5, 2019, “the proof is that he gave us Saoirse, this brilliant beam of light and laughter.”

  While there have been a few other sad losses (Ted’s daughter, Kara Kennedy, age fifty-one, and Patricia’s son Christopher Lawford, age sixty-three, both die unexpectedly from heart failure in 2011 and 2018, respectively), Saoirse’s tragic death reignites public curiosity about the family, whose younger generation is more often known for who they’re dating than for what political roles they may be taking.

  The juiciest gossip stories involve Bobby Jr.’s son Conor, who dates singer Taylor Swift in 2012 while he’s still a high school student at Deerfield Academy; his cousin Patrick Schwarzenegger (son of Eunice’s daughter Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the movie-star-turned-politician), who has a relationship with pop star Miley Cyrus in 2015—while his sister Christina Schwarzenegger simultaneously dates Miley’s brother Braison Cyrus; and their older sister, Katherine Schwarzenegger, is best known for marrying actor Chris Pratt in the summer of 2019.

  John F. Kennedy biographer Robert Dallek remarks that the Kennedys are “a case of triumph and tragedy, great success and terrible suffering, and in many ways it’s the American story” especially poignant in today’s more jaded era. People are “reverting back to the Kennedys,” he opines, “to hold on to something that they admire.”

  Although there is a brief blip in 2012 when Ted’s son Patrick chose not to seek reelection to the Rhode Island House of Representatives, W Magazine points out that, “Every year between 1947 and 2011, and then from 2013 onwards, at least one Kennedy family member has held federal elective office.” It’s Bobby Jr.’s son Joe Kennedy III who steps in to continue the legacy; in 2013, at age thirty-two, he takes over retiring Barney Frank’s seat in Congress, and is reelected in 2014 and 2016. “All eyes have been on Joe to continue to carry the torch for the family,” biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli points out.

  But a 2010 opinion piece in Brookings notes, “One-quarter of the Kennedy cousins have been treated for drug or alcohol abuse, which is well above the national average. For all the glamour associated with the family, it seems that it is not easy, psychologically or emotionally, being a Kennedy.”

  As Ethel Kennedy herself says, “Being a Kennedy isn’t for the faint of heart.”

  PART EIGHT

  The Prince

  John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr.

  Chapter 53

  John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. has been famous since before he was born—on Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1960, just weeks after his father is elected the thirty-fifth United Stat
es president.

  The president-elect is riding in the Kennedys’ private plane (the Caroline, named for John Jr.’s older sister, who will turn three two days later), when he is briefed that “Jackie has been rushed to the hospital” and is undergoing an emergency cesarean section. “I’m never there when she needs me,” Jack is overheard to worry. Jackie’s pregnancies have been difficult before—although Caroline was born healthy, Jackie previously suffered a miscarriage along with the devastating stillbirth of their first child, Arabella (and will later endure the heartbreaking loss of yet another child, Patrick, in 1963). Though this baby is not due for another month, given her history of complications, a cesarean had already been planned for December 12. As soon as they land at Palm Beach International Airport, Jack immediately charters an American Airlines D-6 for a return flight to Washington. Shortly after 1:00 a.m., while still en route, the announcement of the baby boy’s birth is made over loudspeaker to applause from those on board. Captain Dick Cramer passes his headset to JFK so he can hear for himself that mother and child are “doing well.”

  “It was really something, wasn’t it?” Jack says of his son’s unexpected arrival. Reporters standing outside the Kennedys’ home at 4:35 a.m. that morning note, “He was particularly pleased when asked the name of his son. ‘Why, it’s John F. Kennedy Jr.,’ he said, almost reverentially: ‘I think she decided—it has been decided—yes—John F. Kennedy Jr.’” Though it delights him, in years to come, Jackie tells several people that she regrets giving their son Jack’s name. “We would never have named him John after his father if we had known what was going to happen,” she says. According to biographer Steven M. Gillon, “The irony is that in the effort to honor her husband, she inadvertently made her son’s life more challenging.”

  At thirteen days old, John Jr. is baptized at Georgetown University Hospital’s chapel. Jackie chooses her sister Lee’s husband, Prince Stanislas Radziwill, as godfather and Martha Bartlett—who first introduced Jackie to Jack—as his godmother. While posing for press photos, Jackie holds her son, saying, “Isn’t he sweet, Jack? Look at those pretty eyes.” John’s “pretty eyes” are brown like Jackie’s, not blue like Jack’s.