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

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  One of the great trials of Joe’s life unfolded in 1973.

  On Saturday, August 11 of that year, Ethel and Ted sat down with Joe to have a serious talk. He had to stop being so irresponsible, Ted told him. His many siblings were looking to him as an example. “You’ve got to start making good decisions,” he told him. “Remember that character is easier kept than recovered,” he added. The family was counting on him, Ted told his nephew. He could be valuable in government one day and it would be a shame for him to squander the opportunity to serve.

  At this time, the country was in the midst of the Watergate scandal, which would culminate with President Richard Nixon’s resignation within a year. Ted and Ethel both thought the administration was full of liars and that the country was in dire need of a reset. It motivated them both to want to make sure the new generation of Kennedys was at least trying to better themselves in hopes that maybe one day they might be of real service. Ted said he would do anything he could for his nephew Joe, as always, and that if he felt he was about to make a wrong choice to please just call him and ask for help. He would drop everything, he said, and race over to him so that they could talk it out. Ethel agreed. “Be responsible. You’re about to turn twenty-one. It’s time to grow up,” she said. “You are Joseph P. Kennedy the Second. Act like it.”

  In his defense, Joe said he was trying his best but never got credit for anything he ever did right, only grief for what he’d supposedly done wrong. He was sick of it, he said. When would the two of them ever give him a break? After all, his uncle Teddy had done any number of terrible things, and “he turned out okay, didn’t he?” Bringing up Ted’s indiscretions right in front of him was going too far. “Spoken like a true failure,” Ethel exclaimed. “You never disappoint, do you?” Then, according to this account, she walked up to Joe and, in one swift motion, hauled off and slapped him hard right across the face. “You’d better stop talking right now,” she said angrily, “or I swear to God, I will beat the Kennedy right out of you.”

  A couple of days later, Joe and David, then eighteen years old, along with David’s girlfriend, Pamela Kelley, attended a barbecue on Nantucket with some other friends. Kelley’s family members were permanent residents of Hyannis Port; her sister Kim had dated Bobby. Somehow Joe ended up behind the wheel of a Jeep, with David, Pamela, and four other girls crammed into it. He was joyriding. “It was typical Kennedy horseplay,” Pamela Kelley would recall. “We were all laughing as Joe spun the Jeep ’round and ’round and ’round until it started flipping over. I remember David and I holding on to the roll bar to keep from flying out, and I can still in my mind’s eye see David’s face as we were forced to let go of the Jeep. That’s the last thing I remember.” As a result of the accident, Pamela would be permanently paralyzed and forced to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. David would suffer injuries to his back, the treatment of which would factor into his deadly drug addiction.

  The next day, a solemn Ethel sat in her kitchen at her home on the Cape, nervously drumming on the table with her fingernails while perusing the damning police report. Ena and her daughter, Fina, were also present. Fina sat down next to Ethel and put a comforting hand on her shoulder. To make her smile, she remembered that when Joe was about five, Fina—who was nineteen at that time—would say, “I heard from a little birdie that you were a bad boy. Is that true?” The wide-eyed tot would look all around him and ask, “Really? A little birdie? Was it yellow?” Then, pointing to a bird on the fence, he would ask, “Was it that yellow birdie right over there? I’ll bet it was. Was it?” The memory worked; Ethel’s face lit up if only for a second. “He was such a sweet boy,” she said.

  Noelle Bombardier, also present, recalled, “As Ethel tried to concentrate on the police report, Ena said, ‘Don’t worry, Mrs. Kennedy. Whatever Joe did, I know he’s sorry. You’re right. You’ve raised him to be a sweet boy.’ Ethel shook her head. ‘Maybe. But he could be such a powerful force for good.”

  After she left the room, Noelle urged Ena and Fina to sit down with her at the table. “But we’re not allowed to sit in here,” Ena said. “Oh, just for a second,” Noelle told her. “I promise we won’t get arrested.” The three women sat down, Ena very reluctantly. They were then joined by Leah Mason.

  “We have to try to help Mrs. Kennedy through this tough time,” Noelle told her coworkers. “If you see one of the kids misbehaving, come to me with it, not her. She has enough on her mind.” Ena, feisty as ever, snapped back, “Well, if you ask me, she needs to love ’em more and holler at ’em less.” Then she got up. “I have work to do,” she muttered as she walked away. “She sure speaks her mind, your mom,” Noelle told Fina. Fina chuckled and said, “Yes. I’m just glad Mrs. Kennedy didn’t hear it.”

  At just that moment, Ethel entered the kitchen. As she passed by, she took notice of the women sitting around the kitchen table. “My, my, my,” she said as she breezed through. “Must be so nice having nothing to do. Maybe I should take a vacation, too.” Once she was gone, Leah said under her breath, “Good idea, Mrs. Kennedy, and maybe we can help you pack.” Her remark caused the ladies to break into gales of stifled laughter.

  After the accident, Ethel, Ted, and a few of the Kennedy lawyers tried to figure out a fair way to compensate Pamela for her life-altering injury—not much, as it turned out: a total of about seven hundred thousand dollars, which would be doled out in increments over the years. It wouldn’t even dent the Kennedys’ family fortune. “But how long will she be getting that money?” Joe asked in the company of a family attorney. Ethel slammed his chest hard with the palm of her head. “For the rest of her life, Joe,” she exclaimed. “For the rest of her life.”

  In 1976, Joe graduated with a degree from the University of Massachusetts Boston. That same year, he founded Citizens Energy, the successful nonprofit designed to provide heating oil to low-income families, which he would later turn over to his brother Michael. He also managed his uncle Ted’s reelection campaign. He was twenty-four at the time and much like his father; he had the same earnestness about being of service to the underprivileged. He was also interested in politics, unlike his father’s namesake, his brother Bobby. “He had it in him at an early age,” Bobby Jr. would say of Joe. “He was well-read, even if others didn’t know it at first. He had ideas. When we all gathered ’round the dinner table, some of what we said didn’t make a lot of sense. We were allowed to have varied opinions, though. Joe always made sense. You’d hear him reason something out and think, yes, that’s a leader in the making. He had a sense of things that eluded most of us.”

  In 1979, Joe married Sheila Brewster Rauch, a young woman three years his senior for whom he fell hard. Sheila hailed from a good, upwardly mobile background, daughter of Rudolph Stewart “Stew” Rauch Jr., chairman of the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society, the first savings bank to organize and do business with the United States (back in 1816). She was pretty and dark-haired, with an outgoing personality. She got along well with Ethel, too, which was important. “My Joe will give you a beautiful life,” Ethel told Sheila on her wedding day, “and I promise you, kiddo, you will love every second of it.” Though he’d had an irresponsible youth, Ethel hoped it was now over and that Joe was ready to be serious as a husband and father.

  The Kennedys went on to have twins in 1980—Matthew Rauch and Joseph Patrick III.

  In 1986, when Phillip “Tip” O’Neill announced his retirement, Joe decided to run for his seat in Congress, which Tip had held since 1953. It seemed somehow to be his destiny in that his uncle JFK had held that same seat from 1947 to 1953. Of course, everyone in the family was excited by the idea, especially Ethel, even if she did have some reservations. Her husband’s were big shoes to fill, and she had never been quite sure that Joe was the one to fill them. Still, now that he had stepped up to the plate, she wanted to give him a chance to hit a home run.

  For his part, Bobby Jr. was relieved that the pressure finally was off him.

  Joe won the electio
n in 1986 and then again in 1988, 1990, 1992, 1994, and 1996. His victories weren’t small ones, either. He was incredibly popular with voters in Massachusetts. He had good ideas, was devoted to serving and doing whatever he could, especially for the underprivileged. Whereas his cousin Patrick had mental health as primary concern as a legislator, Joe was invested in helping the lower and middle classes sustain themselves with affordable housing, whether it was by passing legislation to make credit available to working Americans having trouble purchasing homes or by creating hundreds of thousands of affordable housing units by virtue of tax credits that would stimulate growth.

  Still, from the start, Joe Kennedy was controversial. He was often argumentative with colleagues, too often showing his temperamental side. He was sometimes absent from important committee hearings. A female lawmaker told Time that when Joe noticed her adjusting her bra strap during a caucus meeting, he leaned in and whispered to her, “Need any help with that?” Beneath the surface, people who got to know Joe well felt, was a vast insecurity, and maybe it had to do with Ethel. “There was this huge fear of failure,” one staff member reported, again to Time, “which his mother continued to promote.”

  Ethel remained a discouraging factor in Joe’s life even after he was in office. No one could really get a handle on why. Obviously, she should have been proud of him, and probably on some level she was. However, she constantly reinforced that he would never be in government what his father had been, as if she felt Joe was in some sort of competition with RFK. It seemed irrational—and it hurt. “When he would get off the phone with her,” the former aide recalled, “he would literally look deflated, as if he could never hope to live up to who his father had been, not only in his life but in his mother’s.” As much as it hurt, maybe Ethel’s critical nature also motivated him to be bigger and better, because Joe Kennedy was quite successful in Congress. Even his mother couldn’t take that away from him.

  In 1993, a Boston Globe poll showed that Joe was a likely successor to the popular incumbent governor, William Weld. However, Joe decided to stay in Congress, feeling that a governorship was slightly premature for him. “That was the biggest mistake he’d ever made in politics,” Ethel would later say. She was probably right. With timing being almost everything in politics, that had been Joe’s time and he missed it. If he had run, he almost certainly would have won, his future as a politician assured.

  By 1996, Joe had been a Massachusetts congressman for almost nine years. He was still young—he’d just turned forty-four—was tall and good-looking, about as handsome as his cousin John. With tousled dirty-blond hair, penetrating blue eyes, tall and muscular and well-dressed, when Joe stood on a stage behind a lectern he was a commanding presence. “He was extremely well-spoken,” Senator John Tunney observed in 1998. “He didn’t need a script and was always better without one. I remember Ted once saying, ‘There has to be a lot in a politician’s head that isn’t written down.’ His own son Patrick paled by comparison to Joe. Pat was vulnerable; he appeared to want to please. That worked for him, though. People liked his sense of empathy. Joe was more commanding and powerful, anything but vulnerable. He was a type-A personality, a real fighter … and he’d been one ever since he was a kid. The challenge for him was to find a way to move out from behind his father’s shadow. I felt he was doing so. I think a lot of people felt that way. He was a good politician in his own right, and he proved that.”

  By this time, Joseph P. Kennedy II had his eye on being governor. He felt he was ready, and everyone in the family, even his usually disapproving mother, had to agree. Part of his platform had to do with pushing for legislation requiring banks to let consumers pay off debt at the rate they incurred it at as long as they agreed to cut their credit cards in half and not use them. In one speech at this time, he said: “We are at a point where people have to make the difficult choice between paying off their debt and heating their homes. It’s not right. It’s not fair. It’s a choice no one should have to make. This is a crisis we face in this country, in this state, and it’s really not that complex. Part of it has to do with the way banks blanket consumers with credit card applications, people who are already in trouble. There has to be some regulation in place. It’s one thing to induce people to save and quite another to induce them to go into debt.”

  “He understands that politics is about people,” said his uncle Ted of Joe to The Wall Street Journal, “all the people, not just the so-called elite. He gets it. Of the next generation, he will go far, and we Kennedys will always stand behind him.” Off the record, Ted was even more effusive. In the company of that same reporter for The Wall Street Journal, he turned to Vicki and observed, “You want to know who the next President is in this family? Well,” he added while smiling broadly at his nephew, “you’re lookin’ at him.”

  What Women Want

  Everyone knew that if Michael Kennedy’s relationship with Marisa Verrochi were to ever be made public, it would have a terrible impact on the political career of his eldest brother, Joseph P. Kennedy II. Therefore, when Joe’s office began receiving phone calls from reporters at The Boston Globe inquiring about Michael and a “family employee,” he and his family became alarmed. Joe’s staff tried to discourage writers from digging too deeply. However, it was clear that someone was cooperating with the Globe—and the Kennedys feared it was either the Verrochis themselves or, worse yet, maybe even Michael Skakel. “There was a lot of paranoia going on” is how Bobby Kennedy put it. As Joe tried to get a handle on what was happening, another story was about to make headlines, this one directly involving his marriage to Sheila.

  By the end of the 1980s, Joe’s marriage was in trouble and he wanted a divorce. When that divorce was granted in 1991, he left behind a hurt and disillusioned Kennedy wife. Amy Thompson-Huttel, a friend of Sheila’s who had worked at Citizens Energy, recalled, “Sheila told me, ‘He could be so much nicer as a person. When I see him in public and he’s in politician mode while smiling, shaking hands, kissing babies, and being that guy, all I can think to myself is, Oh my God, he’s so fake. That is not who he is at all. He once accused me of only being concerned about our family, not our country. Who says things like that to his wife? I had to accept that family would always come second to his political career.’”

  It was telling that Sheila had even become afraid to go into Joe’s study at home for fear of disturbing him. She would stand outside the door as she tried to make up her mind whether to knock, or just walk away. Usually, she would choose the latter rather than dare to disturb him and risk taking his mind off politics.

  One story that says a lot about Joe’s opinion of Sheila was one she told Amy Thompson-Huttel. It was a Sunday morning, Sheila recalled, just a normal day at home. The couple was having breakfast, the kids playing in the background. Joe was reading a newspaper. Sheila asked, “Can I have some of that to read?” Without looking at her, Joe said, “Sure.” He then peeled off the comics section and, without even looking at her, handed it over.

  Around the time of his divorce from Sheila, Joe became serious about a former staff member, Anne Elizabeth Kelly—known as Beth—and wanted to marry her. She was sweet and supportive and not as formidable as Sheila, which was good news to Joe. Sheila suspected that Joe had been with Beth long before she’d known about her, and that he’d been dishonest about it. She felt she had to take it in stride, though. “I married a politician and then I’m surprised when he lies to me?” she asked someone in her circle.

  Since divorce is not recognized in the Catholic Church, Joe would be unable to marry Beth in a religious ceremony. If he did so in a civil ceremony, he then wouldn’t be able to partake in the Church’s sacraments, such as Holy Communion and Penance (Confession)—and neither would Beth, who was also Catholic. This situation was untenable for Joe. Still, on October 23, 1993, Joe married Beth anyway in a non-Catholic ceremony. Afterward, he applied to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston for an annulment of his marriage to Sheila. He explained that he hop
ed to rectify his standing with the Church and then remarry Beth in a religious ceremony. However, Sheila wouldn’t allow it. She and Joe had been married for twelve years, she said, and had two children; she felt that if she agreed to an annulment it would be “lying before God.” She wanted to “defend my marriage.” Joe was furious at her for taking such a position; more than anything, he hated being defied, especially by females. At one point, he even had the temerity to tell her, “I will not allow a woman to stand up to me like this.” Her hurt response: “Why don’t you try talking to me as though I was someone that you actually loved?”

  The contention between Joe and Sheila over the annulment would rage on for three more years. In the end, Joe would win the battle; the annulment was granted in October 1996 without Sheila’s consent. Everyone in the family was surprised that he’d been able to pull it off. “That was definitely Kennedy money at work” is how one intimate of the family’s described it. Sheila was distraught. It had meant everything to her to not have her marriage annulled, yet Joe didn’t seem to care. It was as if he wanted what he wanted, and that was the end of it for him. Even Ethel wasn’t comfortable with the annulment. She said she wasn’t sure how Joe had managed it and didn’t want the details. In her gut, she felt there was something not right about it and that he would live to regret it. “Just remember this moment,” she told him, according to one family source. “That’s all I have to say, Joe. Remember this moment.”

  There had actually been some precedent, with Ted having had his marriage to Joan annulled so he could do the same thing—marry Vicki in the Catholic Church. However, Joan had reluctantly given him her blessing; she didn’t fight it like Sheila. Ethel couldn’t help but fear that there would now be trouble. She always had an intuition about people, especially other women, and she knew that even though Sheila had been a retiring personality in her marriage, she was smart, well-read, and educated. “She’s not going to let him get away with it,” she said. “Do you think she’s just going to go away? She’s not.” Ethel was right. Sheila did not accept the ruling. She appealed it.