In considering her journey, it’s easy to recognize the slow burn of Sheila’s life as she found her own power and went from being a wife her husband thought was only smart enough for the newspaper funnies to one who undertook the mammoth amount of research necessary to challenge him over a Catholic annulment. He really didn’t think she had it in her, and his underestimation of her would be to his great detriment, especially when Sheila sought to take their battle before the court of public opinion. She decided to write a book about the entire story.
Sheila’s proposed book was the subject of a conference at Ted Kennedy’s home in March 1996 with the family patriarch, Ted, his nephew Joe, and two of their political operatives, both attorneys. According to one of them, Ted told Joe that he needed to stop the book from being published. When Joe asked how, Ted said Joe should just call Sheila and tell her the whole family is against it. Joe said he’d already tried Ted’s suggestion, but that he’d gotten nowhere with it. “Jesus. What the hell did you do to that woman, anyway?” Ted asked, frustrated. “Nothing,” Joe said. “I gave her everything,” he added. “I gave her our name, for Christ’s sake.”
“That’s when Ted became annoyed,” recalled one of the observers to the conversation. “‘Back in my day,’ he said, ‘women knew how to act. Now, Joan? She knew how to toe the line. She was a Kennedy wife and knew how to act like one,’ he said, riled up. ‘She did what I told her to do, like a good girl.’ Joe then made the observation that it was the 1990s, not the sixties, and that women were now different. At that, Ted threw up his hands. ‘Your ex-wife needs to play by the rules,’ he said angrily, ‘and the first rule is: we make the rules. An attack against one of us is an attack against all of us,’ he bellowed as only the Senator could bellow.”
In March 1997, Sheila’s memoir, Shattered Faith: A Woman’s Struggle to Stop the Catholic Church from Annulling Her Marriage, was published. It turned out to be a well-measured, thoughtful account of her investigation into the process of annulment, the hypocrisy she found within the Catholic Church, and stories of other women who’d been faced with similar circumstances. It was with her assessment of Joe’s character, though, that she did the most damage. She portrayed him as being argumentative, temperamental, and emotionally abusive. She said he had no time for her or the kids once he got into office. He berated her, she alleged. He browbeat her and called her a “nobody.” What’s worth noting, though, is that not a lot of the book is devoted to her analysis of Joe, and what’s there is in prose that appears to be carefully written with an eye toward avoiding offense.
In April 1997, Massachusetts governor Weld finally made it clear that he would not be running for reelection. This was good news for Joe, who was still considering the position. There was a big party at Hickory Hill after Weld’s announcement, a celebration of just what might be in store for the family. “This was really the realization of a generation of dreams,” said Christopher Lawford. “Look, we all had been groomed for the presidency since the time we were little kids. Now Joe was on his way there. The governorship was clearly just a stepping stone to the presidency, and we all knew it. Everyone was excited, Aunt Ethel and Uncle Teddy especially. The stakes had suddenly gotten a whole lot greater. Even Joe was sort of over the moon, and believe me, he wasn’t a man necessarily given to false hope or to unrealistic expectations. ‘I can do this,’ he told me. ‘You will do this,’ I said to him. ‘You’ve been bred to do this, cousin.’ He looked at me, flashed that great Kennedy smile, and said, ‘Yeah, Chris. You know it.’”
Prior to the publication of Sheila’s book, most people—not just the family but much of Massachusetts—seemed to agree that Joe had a good chance at winning an election. After the book, and most especially after Sheila’s television appearances promoting it, things took a sudden turn; Joe’s popularity took a real hit. Sheila did a lot of damage quickly. One Boston Globe poll showed that only 17 percent of voters were now likely to vote for him after the book’s publication. “It was a real boomerang effect,” said Christopher Lawford. “So fast. Like within weeks. One minute we were all sitting on top of the world. The next, we were sliding off it, and it was slippery, all right.”
During a subsequent meeting at Hickory Hill with staff members and family, the Kennedys tried to determine a plan going forward. Joe said that after everything he had done for his state, and considering all his great plans for the future, he refused to believe that an ex-wife’s little book could ruin everything. It was incomprehensible to him. It was also wrong, he said, and he added while slamming his fist onto a desk, “I’m just not going to accept it.”
“What a shame,” Ted said. “Massachusetts is being been robbed of such a strong leader.” There was so much work to do, and his nephew was the man to do it, Ted said; the people of the state deserved him, and he couldn’t believe that it was all because of a woman that everything was blowing up around them. He asked if what Sheila had written was true. Could they challenge it? It was all true, Joe admitted. “The truth is whatever it looks like, though,” he added, spoken like a true politician.
“Oh, who cares?” Ethel snapped, annoyed. “The truth is overrated, anyway.” Ethel’s was an interesting observation, especially given that the truth had often been a flexible proposition in Kennedy history. For instance, back in the 1950s, when JFK was seeking the nomination of his Democratic Party for President, his opponent, Lyndon Baines Johnson, played a dirty trick on him the day before the vote. He had his people slip under the hotel doors of every delegate a yellow sheet of paper informing them that Kennedy suffered from Addison’s disease—which was true. Bobby Kennedy responded by getting doctors to lie and say his brother was completely healthy—which was untrue. However, Ethel definitely approved.
Bobby had been famously quoted as saying he believed people to be divided into two groups, white hats and black hats: the Kennedys being the white hats and everyone else the black. (Incidentally, from that time on, Johnson was viewed as a black hat; at Bobby’s funeral when he tried to kiss Ethel on the cheek, she turned her head to make sure it didn’t happen.) Ethel wholeheartedly agreed with Bobby’s classification of friends and enemies. It was easier to make this distinction, though, when the traitor was outside the family. When the enemy was within, it was tougher for Ethel to be as definitive. That’s why she was torn about Sheila. While she wanted the women in the family to be strong-minded and independent, she also wanted them to be loyal. “Not only should the wives know where the line is,” she said in speaking about Sheila, “but also,” she added, raising her voice, “the cost of crossing it.” As far as she was concerned, Sheila had definitely crossed that line. If not for the fact that Ethel loved her grandsons by Sheila—Joe and Matt—she would never have had anything more to do with her. “I’m not one to say ‘I told you so,’” she said at the meeting, “but doggone it, Joe. Didn’t I?” What could he say? Mummy was right again; it was impossible to diminish her prescience. So now what?
“We should just say everything in the book is a lie and leave it at that,” Ethel concluded. “A nice blanket statement without being specific.” No, Joe said. He felt that this position would open them up to scrutiny as Sheila and her defenders would then go through the book point by point to prove its accuracy. He was right. This wasn’t the fifties. It was the nineties. Because of the family’s checkered history, the public was a lot less inclined to just believe them these days without question.
“What do women want, anyway?” a frustrated Ted asked, according to this account. “That’s what I don’t get. What the hell do women want?”
“Everything, I guess,” Joe answered, shaking his head in dismay.
According to the witness, five minutes later, the phone rang. Ethel picked it up. “What?” she demanded in her own inimitable way. There was a pause. Then, without saying another word, she slammed down the phone. “Who was that?” Ted asked.
“Speak of the devil,” Ethel exclaimed. “It was Sheila.”
Joe was surprised.
“I should talk to her,” he said.
“What for?” Ethel asked. “I think we’ve all seen how effective that can be.” After a beat, she then asked, “Are we done here?” to which Joe responded, “Actually, Mummy, I was thinking—” Ethel cut him off. “We’re done here,” she concluded in a voice that forbade argument. She then rose and left the room.
* * *
AS HE HAD demonstrated throughout his life, Joe Kennedy always leaned toward sexist behavior. It was decided, however, that in his response to Shattered Faith, he should do whatever necessary to hide that particular inclination. Wisely, he didn’t try to argue with Sheila’s depiction of him. He fell on his sword without obfuscation or even the kind of self-righteous detachment many politicians do so well. “There are certainly things I wish I never said and I presume Sheila feels the same way,” he allowed. “I am terribly sorry for any of the mistakes I made in our relationship. I have deep regrets about my relationship with Sheila. [It had] in so many ways deteriorated … you say things you wish you never said.”
Unfortunately, Joe’s subsequent speaking appearances about Sheila and her book did little to assist him in the court of public opinion. Ethel became angrier every time she saw him on television. The official line was enough to satisfy the public, she felt, and every time her son tried to elaborate he got himself into trouble, especially when his words were taken out of context upon later publication in newspapers. “Oh my God, Joe. Stop talking,” she told him. “Remember one thing: people can’t quote silence.”
Many people now took a dim view of Joseph P. Kennedy II, and there wasn’t much he could do about it. Even to this day, what remains surprising is how one book by one author could do so much damage. Maybe it wasn’t so surprising, though. Its narrative fed right into the popular notion that not only could a Kennedy male get away with pretty much anything, but also that his toxic masculinity knew no bounds. In Sheila’s case, the takeaway was also that he would even try to find ways to twist to his advantage the tenets of Catholic law. Not since Mary Jo Kopechne had the story of one woman done so much harm to the family’s public image. Maybe one of Joe’s brothers put it best when he concluded: “Karma’s a bitch, all right. And her name is Sheila.”
Sheila Rauch Kennedy continued to appeal the church’s decision to annul her marriage to Joe, fighting it long after most people forgot about her book and long after many other women might have abandoned the battle. In 2007, her efforts finally paid off when the annulment was overturned. As of this writing in 2018, Sheila has remained successful in seeing to it that her marriage to Joseph Kennedy remains intact in the eyes of the Catholic Church.
“Surrender the Me to the We”
On April 25, 1997, just days after Joe made his statement about Sheila’s book, the proverbial “other shoe” dropped: The Boston Globe finally broke the story of Michael’s relationship with Marisa Verrochi. The headline on the front page was a stunner: “Controversy Surrounds a Kennedy’s Alleged Affair with Baby-Sitter.” While the paper didn’t identify Marisa, it did note the names of her parents. The report also clearly stated that the relationship with Michael started when Marisa was fourteen. (Maybe that was true, but Vicki discovered Michael and Marisa in bed on January 21, 1995, when Marisa was sixteen—the legal age of consent. She would turn seventeen a week later, on January 29.)
The news sent shock waves throughout the media, with the New York Post using the headline that Ethel Kennedy hated the most: “They’re at It Again! RFK Son ‘Slept with Schoolgirl, 14!’ Could Even Face Statutory Rape Rap.” One of Ethel’s assistants recalled, “That was the one, even more than The Boston Globe, which really upset her. I watched her tear that front page up into little pieces. Back in her day, she told me, she had an enemies list of reporters who spoke out of turn. Pretty much nothing was ever revealed about her kids in the 1960s unless she approved it. Reporters knew better than to cross her. Those days were long gone, though. ‘The damn seventies changed everything,’ she told me.”
Almost everything that had occurred between Michael and Marisa was now out for the world to weigh in on, and it was unlikely that the verdict in the court of public opinion would be sympathetic to the Kennedys. Some people in the family—like John, a magazine editor in his own right—were surprised it took so long for the story to be revealed. He understood the way media worked and, like most of the Kennedys, he was almost certain that Michael Skakel was a source for the original story in the Globe. “Finally, I agree with Joe about something,” he said. No one quite knew what to do about Skakel yet, but they were definitely suspicious of him.
The day the news broke, John telephoned some of his older relatives to see how they were handling it. When he called Eunice, he first spoke to her household chef, Randy Beatty. Beatty catered the food service for five sitting presidents, including inaugural dinners for Carter, Ford, Bush, and Clinton. He had been the executive sous chef at the Smithsonian Institute just prior to working for the Shrivers. Now he was working in the Shrivers’ enormous (ten bedrooms, eleven bathrooms) stately Colonial Revival–style mansion on Harrington Drive in Potomac, Maryland. “Very nicely, John asked me how I enjoyed working for his aunt and uncle,” Beatty recalled, “and he tolerated my answer good enough, though I could tell he was anxious to talk to Mrs. Shriver. They got on the phone, and she lowered her voice to an urgent whisper as she spoke to him.”
That night, the Shrivers hosted a dinner for Ted Kennedy and his wife, Vicki, as well as Tim and Mark Shriver and their wives, Linda and Jeanne. They ate in the enormous, white-walled dining room with its cathedral ceiling and huge ornate hanging chandelier. This was truly a magnificent space, with its own fireplace, which was always in use, even in summer; its magnificent oil paintings from the Shrivers’ time in France; and its expensive antique furniture with chairs that weren’t exactly comfortable because of their straight wooden backs and firm custom-made cushions, but that Eunice liked because of the way they forced guests to sit up straight. Each of the four corners of the banquet-sized room featured built-in shelves in which family photos taken over the years were proudly displayed in silver and gold frames. At the far end of the room was an enormous floor-to-ceiling window that showcased the lush grounds of the estate, all beautifully illuminated as the sun went down.
The Shrivers and their six guests were gathered in one corner of an enormous antique dining room table that could easily seat thirty. “They were open, not hiding their conversation whenever I walked into the room to serve them,” Beatty recalled.
“I feel just terrible,” Ted said at the dinner table as Beatty served heaping helpings of his special, red flannel hash. The Senator wondered if he’d somehow failed Michael and what he might have done to prevent him from making such bad choices. He recalled once being in a car with him and noticing that the way the sun hit him and the shadows fell on him made Michael looked almost exactly like his father. “The resemblance was so striking, I had to just sit there and stare at him for a moment,” Ted said wondrously. On the other hand, he was also angry at him. He felt that Michael had been selfish by indulging in an affair with someone so wildly inappropriate. “In this family, you have to surrender the me to the we,” he observed.
Eunice noted that Michael had never really been the same after Bobby’s death. Sarge agreed that he became a different kid. The problem, Sarge noted, was that he was a grown man with children of his own. If he didn’t know better by this time than to make such bad decisions, what could any of them do about it? He wasn’t a youngster anymore, Sarge said, and they couldn’t coddle him or treat him like one. He also said it was time for Ethel to stop infantilizing her children, hollering at them and putting them in their places “like they’re ten, when they’re what? Forty?” Eunice had to agree with him. She said she believed that Ethel, in her heart, felt she’d done a poor job with her children when they were young and that she was now trying to make up for it. This was why, said Eunice, Ethel often treated them as if they were still just teenagers. She re
mained optimistic, though. “We will survive this,” she said, “because that’s what we do. We survive.”
Later the atmosphere cheered up over crème brûlée desserts when Ted, always the raconteur, began telling jokes and stories. For instance, he told everyone a humorous anecdote about having recently sailed with First Lady Hillary Clinton. “So we’re coming onto shore from a very pleasant outing when she looks around and suddenly seems insulted. ‘Why isn’t the presidential flag flying?’ she asks me. ‘After all, I am the First Lady, you know?’ I stare right at her and say, ‘I don’t know why, Hillary. Maybe it’s because I’m not the President?’” Eunice shrieked with delight, “No,” she exclaimed, “that can’t be true. That’s hilarious, Teddy.’”
After dinner while in the parlor having coffee, Ted, Vicki, and the Shrivers tried to craft some sort of response to the Globe’s story. They realized that they couldn’t completely deny the report; it was all true.
The next day, despite the Kennedys’ attempt to explain things in a vague statement of support for Michael, the Globe feature would start an avalanche of bad publicity for them. By the middle of the summer there were probably few people in the United States unaware of the story of “Michael Kennedy and the babysitter.” What was maybe most ironic about what was happening was that Michael was actually doing a lot better. He’d just gotten out of an Arizona rehab, where he’d been in treatment for substance abuse and sex addiction. He was also on new medication to treat depression, which doctors determined had probably been a problem for him since he was a child, and which had clearly not been addressed. The new treatment made a big difference, and people noticed it straightaway. He felt good for the first time in a long while, maybe the first time ever. Also, he was said to have passed a lie detector test relating to Marisa and her age when he first started having sex with her. What was not revealed, however, was that the test was administered by someone working for one of his own lawyers, arguably not the best-case scenario if on a search for the truth.
The Kennedy Heirs: John, Caroline, and the New Generation Page 26