The Kennedy Heirs: John, Caroline, and the New Generation Read online

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  For my sister, Roz,

  a sister, a friend, a survivor

  whose love for life, for family

  inspires all who know her

  to shine on

  And even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

  —AESCHYLUS

  Introduction

  For our purposes with The Kennedy Heirs, I ask that you consider the first generation of Kennedys to be the one that includes those children born to Joseph Patrick Kennedy Sr. (born 1888) and his wife, Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald Kennedy (born 1890). Their first child was Joseph Patrick Jr. (born 1915). The rest followed quickly: John Fitzgerald (born 1917), Rose Marie (born 1918), Kathleen Agnes (born 1920), Eunice Mary (born 1921), Patricia Helen (born 1924), Robert Francis (born 1925), Jean Ann (born 1928), and Edward Moore (born 1932).

  The second generation are the surviving children of Joseph and Rose, and their spouses: John and Jacqueline Bouvier (born 1929), Eunice and Sargent Shriver (born 1915), Pat and Peter Lawford (born 1923), Bobby and Ethel Skakel (born 1928), Jean and Stephen Smith (born 1927), and Ted and Virginia Joan Bennett (born 1936) and, later, Victoria Reggie (born 1954).

  The third generation—the primary subject of this work—comprises the progeny of the second, and there were many, twenty-nine in all.

  John and Jackie were the parents of Caroline Bouvier (born 1957) and John Fitzgerald Jr. (born 1960).

  Eunice and Sargent were the parents of Robert Sargent III (born 1954), Maria Owings (born 1955), Timothy Perry (born 1959), Mark Kennedy (born 1964), and Anthony Paul (born 1965).

  Pat and Peter Lawford were the parents of Christopher Kennedy (born 1955), Sydney Maleia (born 1956), Victoria Francis (born 1958), and Robin Elizabeth (born 1961).

  Bobby and Ethel were the parents of Kathleen Hartington (born 1951), Joseph Patrick II (born 1952), Robert Francis Jr. (born 1954), David Anthony (born 1955), Mary Courtney (born 1956), Michael LeMoyne (born 1958), Mary Kerry (born 1959), Christopher George (born 1963), Matthew Maxwell Taylor (born 1965), Douglas Harriman (born 1967), and Rory Elizabeth (born 1968).

  Jean and Stephen were the parents of Stephen Edward Jr. (born 1957), William Kennedy (born 1960), Amanda Mary (born 1967), and Kym Maria (born 1972).

  Edward (Ted) and Joan were the parents of Kara Anne (born 1960), Edward Moore Jr. (born 1961), and Patrick Joseph (born 1967).

  The fourth generation, then, would be the many children of the third, some of whom are also considered for this work, such as Joseph Patrick III (son of Joseph II and Sheila Rauch, born 1980), John Conor (son of Robert II and Mary Richardson, born 1994), and John “Jack” Bouvier Kennedy (son of Caroline Kennedy and Edwin Arthur Schlossberg, born 1993).

  * * *

  MY MANDATE WITH this volume was not to write about every Kennedy of the third generation who ever drew breath. Admittedly, as I was doing my research, some held my fascination more than others. In the end, I sought to tell what I think are the stories that best explored the truth of who these people were in one another’s lives and that also revealed their true selves, warts and all, as well as their many contributions to our society. After all, this is a generation that was ubiquitous in our culture in the 1960s, ’70s, ’80s, into the ’90s, and beyond, and, as you will read on these pages, even today. Maybe Life once put it best when the magazine reported of them: “They were America’s children. Born at a time when the nation itself seemed reborn, the grandchildren of Joseph and Rose Kennedy became a compelling symbol of the future for people hungry for change. And we couldn’t get enough of them. Americans probably saw more of the Kennedys on television and in photographs than they saw of their own families. At a time when the American family was said to be falling apart, the Kennedy family seemed of biblical strength.”

  A myth I think worth dispelling from the outset is that these particular Kennedys did little to nothing of any great significance in our culture. In fact, they were all raised to have a strong sense of noblesse oblige. Of course, when one considers the global ramifications of what President Kennedy did with his time in office, maybe not much can compare. The same holds true of the great work of Bobby and Ted, not to mention Sargent and Eunice. “They’re all competing with icons and legends,” political consultant David Axelrod, who has advised several of them, noted of the younger Kennedys. However, as you will read, so many of them have contributed a great deal to the world, if not in elected office, then as activists. Ethel’s daughters Rory and Kerry make films about poverty and travel the world as warriors for social justice, for instance; Eunice’s son Tim Shriver runs his mother’s Special Olympics; Jackie’s daughter, Caroline Kennedy, works tirelessly to raise funds for education. “If such causes appear modest next to staring down the Russians, integrating the South or going to the moon, they are not,” Time once observed. “They are simply of their time.” Some would change the world in small ways in the private sector, others in a much bigger manner while in public office. The number of legislation, for instance, either sponsored or cosponsored by Ted’s son Patrick Kennedy during his many years in government amounts to 3,156. Put it this way: There aren’t many who do nothing with their lives. Not in that family.

  What I have also learned over the years as a Kennedy historian is that, despite the complexities of their lives, personal and political, it’s really not that difficult to understand them. Of course, some of their experiences have been amplified tenfold because of money, power, and prestige. Also, fame does tend to twist everything. However, at the heart of their stories are the kinds of choices and decisions similar, at least I think, to those we may have made in our own lives as we’ve attempted to navigate the sometimes rocky terrain of getting along with parents, siblings, and children. I believe we can relate to the Kennedys on a deep, visceral level that has to do with a thing so basic and so uncomplicated: our shared humanity. To my mind, this is why the Kennedys’ story continues to resonate. Plus, of course, the many tragedies of their lives have reached out to us over the years, causing our hearts to ache unbearably for them.

  At a symposium on the legacy of the Kennedy women at the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Kerry Kennedy told me, “It’s difficult when your most private moments are also your most public moments, but it’s interesting, too, because we have never really felt alone in any of it. We have always felt at one with the American public, and I think they have felt the same dynamic with us. There’s this special, symbiotic relationship Americans have with my family going all the way back to my grandparents, to President Kennedy and my aunt Jackie, to my father, my mom … Uncle Teddy, Aunt Joan … my late brother David … and while I think a lot of it h
as to do with basic empathy, I also think it has to do with a collective human experience. All people have troubles in their lives. If understanding how we have dealt with our own problems can in some way help people cope with their own, well, then I think that’s good. In fact, I think that’s very good, and I know my family members would agree.”

  Senator Ted Kennedy put it this way in addressing the question of how the Kennedys dealt with tragedy. “Yes, we have had some hard knocks,” he told me. “But we have survived because we have heart. And heart matters.”

  Here’s a hard truth, though: The name “Kennedy” can inflame as much as inspire; there are people for whom the very name stirs up anger and resentment. Their critics believe the Kennedys, especially those of the third and fourth generations, to be an entitled and spoiled lot used to getting away with bad behavior and never suffering true consequences because of it. Maybe Newsweek put it best in 1998 when describing what it called “the duality of the Kennedy experience in the popular imagination—sin and service.” There have certainly been times of great disgrace—many of which have to do with self-inflicted tragedies—that remain an integral part of family history and, as such, are closely examined in these pages. However, I hope you’ll agree that even those parents, sons, or daughters of this American dynasty who’ve at times been perhaps not so deserving of our admiration still have certain traits instantly recognizable not only in people we know and love, but maybe in ourselves, too.

  “Family is family,” John Kennedy Jr. told me when I had a chance to interview him after the press conference for the unveiling of his George magazine in September 1995. “You can pick the Kennedys apart, and I’m sure you will,” he said with a nod at what he knew I did for a living, “but at the end of the day, we’re just people trying to understand each other as we share this incredible life we’ve all been blessed with. It’s nothing more than just that, if you really want to know the truth.”

  I have come to believe it’s a lot more than just that, if you really want to know the truth. It is my hope that as you read The Kennedy Heirs you will agree.

  BOOK I

  PART I

  Son of Camelot

  Prologue

  The Tide of Events

  JULY 1999

  John Kennedy didn’t want to have this fight again, but he also knew there was no way around it. He and his wife, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, had been invited to his cousin Rory’s wedding at the family’s private compound in Hyannis Port. “And … here we go again,” he told his personal assistant, RoseMarie Terenzio. He cursed under his breath, dreading the argument he knew was in the offing with his wife over it.

  The problem John faced was that from the first time Carolyn ever set foot on the family’s property some four years earlier, she didn’t feel that she fit in with his family. While he and his relatives always felt insulated against the world at the compound, cocooned within its familiar, pleasant surroundings, she just felt exposed, as if her deepest insecurities were on display. On some level, he understood that only a person who’d actually been raised a Kennedy could truly fathom the complex machinations of the family’s culture—the competitive nature of their sportsmanship, the constant and not-so-gentle ribbing of one another, their unique camaraderie and secret language, not to mention their constant obsession over the family business: politics, of course. The Kennedys had always existed in an exclusive world, and even John had to admit that sometimes they weren’t welcoming to outsiders.

  In truth, Carolyn wasn’t really that close to Rory, the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy’s daughter. Was she really expected to be friends with every one of John’s twenty-seven cousins and their spouses and other partners, as well as all his aunts and uncles? That wasn’t the primary reason for Carolyn’s trepidation, however. Nor did it have to do with the feelings of inadequacy that somehow always washed over her whenever she was around the Kennedys. She’d dealt with it all in the past and had managed to get through many uncomfortable visits. The truth about this upcoming wedding was that she had a sinking intuition, maybe even a premonition about it. Whatever it was, it was telling her not to go.

  To John, Carolyn’s reasoning seemed pretty weak. “You just don’t want to?” After four years of tolerating his relatives, he didn’t understand why she couldn’t just endure one more party. So John went ahead and sent back the RSVP for two. It was a family obligation, he decided, and Carolyn would just have to sort through her emotions about it and attend. She was a Kennedy by marriage, and sometimes Kennedys had to do what they didn’t want to do for the sake of the greater good. The storm would pass.

  John was wrong; Carolyn wouldn’t let the storm blow over. In fact, it just grew in intensity. “They had a pretty big argument about it,” said a very good friend of Carolyn’s. “What was at stake for her was more than just getting her way. It had to do with respect, with being visible in her marriage, with being recognized … acknowledged. In a family full of loud voices, one thing Carolyn had learned about being around the Kennedys was that she had to speak up if she ever wanted to be heard.”

  The irony of this marital dispute would not have eluded anyone aware of John’s personal history. He and Carolyn were actually of the same mind, at least in some important respects. Especially in recent years, John had been battling preconceived notions of how he was supposed to act as the namesake and only son of America’s thirty-fifth President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and First Lady Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. Like Carolyn, he didn’t like being told what to do either, and he roundly rejected the cookie-cutter version of how a Kennedy of his generation was supposed to act. If he squinted at the equation hard enough, he probably would have been able to identify with Carolyn’s side of it. However, as often happens when a person is in the middle of a big fight, he could only see his side. “Carolyn’s not going,” he glumly told RoseMarie Terenzio a few days before the Saturday wedding. “I just have to accept that I’m going alone.”

  “But John, that’s only asking for trouble,” RoseMarie said.

  “Well, I’m not going to fight her on it anymore,” John said, seeming fed up with it all.

  “It’s just not good, John,” she said. Not only did RoseMarie feel Carolyn should be present as John’s spouse, she worried that her absence would send a message to the world about the state of their union. It would definitely spark a firestorm of rumors, she felt, which, as usual, she would then be responsible for containing. After all, John was a special case in the Kennedy family. Any of them could show up without their partners and it wouldn’t have mattered much to the press. It’s not as if Ethel’s son Bobby Jr. or Ted’s son Teddy Jr. would have caused a media sensation by going stag to a cousin’s wedding. However, as the most popular member of the new generation, all eyes were always on John—and even more so in recent years since taking Carolyn as his wife. His being alone would be noticed, and the following week would find RoseMarie inundated with queries—all of which could be avoided if Carolyn just went to the doggone wedding. Therefore, without being asked to do so by John, she slipped into his office and called Carolyn herself.

  RoseMarie, a New York Italian American, was known to be a straight shooter, forthright and blunt. “Carolyn, are you fucking kidding me?” she asked, getting right to the point. “What are you doing? You’re smarter than this. You don’t want to put John in a position where he has to explain where you are, and you don’t want to put yourself in a position of being judged. You get enough of that.” Somehow RoseMarie was able to convince Carolyn that her judgment was being crippled by emotion. Eventually, Carolyn agreed to accompany John to the wedding.

  Of course, when Carolyn told John she’d changed her mind, he was elated. He promised that this would be the last time he’d ever insist that she go with him to this kind of family event at the Kennedy compound. “I’ll owe you one” is how he put it. He would fly them both up to Hyannis Port in his Piper Saratoga, he said. They’d attend the wedding, spend the night, and leave the very next day. She
wouldn’t regret it. “Just wait and see,” he assured her. “Things are going to be great.” Then he flashed his dazzling smile, usually her cue to melt into his arms. What she didn’t do, though, was tell him how she really felt. That deep sadness she’d been trying to shake for longer than she cared to admit somehow now felt even more acute.

  “She told me she felt manipulated and compromised,” said Carolyn’s trusted friend, “as if she had no authority over her own life. She said she was putting John on probation. ‘I’m going to give it three more months and see how I feel,’ she said. ‘Are you sure you’re not just pissed off because you don’t like being told what to do?’ I asked her. She admitted that this might be the case. She felt she needed a cooling-off period and that in a few months she’d have more clarity. They’d been having a lot of marital problems lately, she said, and she was worn down by them.”

  Was she thinking divorce? “Who divorces John Kennedy Jr.?” she asked. “You’d have to be insane, or at least that’s what people will think.” However, she said that if she decided on it she would steel herself for a serious fight and get through it as best she could. Even though she was thrown by events from time to time, Carolyn had demonstrated a new kind of focus and determination ever since she married John. Maybe in that respect she was becoming a little more “Kennedy” than even she knew. Whatever the case, Carolyn said she actually felt better about things because at least now she had a plan. She just needed more time.

  As for John, there wasn’t as much joy in his victory as Carolyn believed. He knew she felt bullied. “This same fight you keep having with her about being with your relatives, it has to stop,” his good friend John Perry Barlow told him. “It’s not good, John. Not for you. Not for her. Definitely not for your marriage.”