Within just a very short time after Bobby’s death in 1968, Ethel Kennedy’s oldest sons, Joe, Bobby, and David, became very hard to control, especially during their annual summers in Hyannis Port. It was easy to understand that the older children were traumatized by the death of their father, and the youngest would always feel a sense of longing for the dad they barely remembered. “There was a lot of sadness,” recalled one of Ethel’s employees at that time. “But it was mixed with natural teenage rebellion and also a sense of entitlement. From an early age, the kids were raised to believe they were special. They got a lot of press coverage and attention and it went to their heads. And of course, there were so many of them. Ethel was at a loss. She called it ‘my cross to bear.’ She relied on the senator [Ted] a lot, and he did his best, but it was hard. He too was grieving.”
Bobby and Ethel’s oldest son, and also the oldest of the third generation of Kennedys, was Joseph Kennedy II, Joe. From the beginning, there seemed to be a lot of pressure on him. For instance, just two days after JFK’s assassination, on November 24, 1963, his father wrote him a letter that suggests extremely high expectations of an eleven-year-old. “You are the oldest of the male grandchildren,” Bobby wrote. “You have a special and particular responsibility now which I know you will fulfill. Remember all the things that Jack started—be kind to others that are less fortunate than we—and love our country.”
Of course, Bobby Kennedy’s death hit Joe, now sixteen, very hard. He not only loved his father but also admired him greatly, and therefore the despair he felt at losing him so suddenly was almost overwhelming. It had actually been his gut-wrenching duty to inform his siblings of their father’s death. As it happened, Joe had been at boarding school when his dad was shot, and was flown across the country to be at his deathbed with some of his siblings who were already on that coast. When Bobby finally died, Ethel shut down completely and was unable to tell her children about it. So it was left to Joe, who was just fifteen at that time, to try to make sense of it all with his siblings. Because Bobby had been such a hero to him, Joe felt on a very deep level that there was no way he would ever be able to measure up to his father’s standards of greatness, no matter how hard he tried. The fact that he sat in his father’s chair at the dinner table after Bobby was gone likely didn’t help matters either.
Barbara Gibson, who knew Joe very well when he was a boy, recalled, “I think he felt as if he wasn’t smart enough, wasn’t good-looking enough—‘wasn’t Kennedy enough,’ is how he would put it to me—to take his father’s place in the family. He was a muscular guy who started to use brawn to get his way; in other words, he became a bit of a bully. It was a defensive mechanism. We all knew it.” It also didn’t help that there was a sense of Joe as not being very smart. “It’s a shame,” Rose Kennedy told Gibson during one of their daily walks on the beach, “that Joe isn’t very smart, especially with him being the oldest boy.” In fact, while Joe was having a very difficult time in school, it was because he was dyslexic, not dumb—or at least that’s how he sees it today. He was never tested for dyslexia, and back in 1968 no one really understood the disability. However, he was sure he had it then, and believes he still does today, and that he would have benefited greatly by some sort of treatment for it. Meanwhile, when Joe asked his mother if he could go to Spain in the summer of 1968 with a friend named Chuck McDermott, she decided to let him go. “She talked it over with Ted and they decided it would do Joe some good,” said one of Ethel’s relatives, “but, to be honest, I always felt that it did Ethel more good to not have to worry about the kids that summer. I think that’s how Ted saw it, too.”
Indeed, that same summer, 1968, Ethel sent another of her sons, David, to Mayrhofen, Austria, to attend a ski and tennis camp with his cousin Chris Lawford, Pat’s son. Because both boys were just thirteen, most people on the outside of the family felt they were too young to be in Austria, even if there was adult supervision. As it happened, David lost his virginity on that trip to a seventeen-year-old girl in Austria who, while they were being intimate, told him how sorry she was that his father had been murdered. It seemed to make no sense to outsiders. However, Ethel’s daughter Kathleen was seventeen in 1968 and she was sent off to teach at an Indian reservation. In fact, the family customarily sent their offspring to other countries either for vacations so they could see the world, or for work so they could be of service to others.
It doesn’t seem that, today, Ethel’s offspring have a very critical view of what Ethel was trying to achieve by exposing her children to the world around them at such an early age. “One of the most important things our mother did was teach us the lesson, You are what you do,” says Christopher Kennedy. “She surrounded us with people who had done great things. When we went hiking it was with guys like Jim Whittaker [the first American to reach the summit of Everest]. When we played sports, it was with Rosey Grier and Rafer Johnson. What they had in common was a great sense of success and of service, and that was the example by which we were raised. We traveled a lot. We were always traveling, actually. People thought she was trying to get rid of us. That makes me laugh, really.”
Still, it seems that sometimes the trips Ethel planned backfired. Chris Lawford says that the trip he took with David that summer of 1968 was a defining one in their lives, and not in a positive way. “It was a change in how we thought about being Kennedys,” he recalled. “We felt differently. Or maybe a better way of putting it is that we didn’t feel anything at all. Nothing mattered after JFK and Bobby died. When we left for Austria with the tennis team we were traveling with, I remember we had baggies of pot stuffed down our underwear. We were scared shitless that the Germans would figure out what was up, that we weren’t the innocent thirteen-year-olds they thought we were. When we somehow got separated at customs, I was terrified that David would be scared enough to give up the drugs he had on him. I went to the camp counselor and said, ‘Man, we lost David. We gotta find him!’ Then, from out of nowhere, out popped a disheveled David, looking as if he’d just been in a fight. ‘Thanks a lot for leaving me alone with the Nazis,’ he told me. I had no idea what he was talking about, what had happened. We skied and played tennis and screwed girls the entire time we were in Austria, maybe not what our moms had in mind when they sent us there.”
Also that same summer, Ethel sent Bobby Jr. off to Africa in the company of JFK’s prep school roommate Lem Billings, who had become a close family friend and who would be very influential in the lives of all of the boys. Billings thought the world of Bobby and wanted to do what he could to help his friend’s sons through what he knew would be a difficult adolescence. “The stories he told and the examples he set gave us all a link to our dead fathers and to the generations before us,” Bobby Jr. said. “In many ways, Lem was a father to me, and he was the best friend I will ever have.”
When Bobby Jr. returned from his trip, he ended up being suspended from Millbrook School, the Dutchess County prep school he had attended for two years. Then came the episode of having sex in the compound, and his subsequent forced exile from Ethel’s home. The problem was that while he was banished and sleeping in a tent, he and his brothers formed a little gang—and today, all of these years later, some people who live in Hyannis Port still talk about the Hyannis Port Terrors.
Hyannis Port Terrors
The HPTs—the Hyannis Port Terrors—was the name Joe, seventeen, Bobby Jr., fifteen, and David, fourteen, came up with for the little gang they had formed, along with several other youngsters in the Cape Cod neighborhood. The three boys would sneak out of Ethel’s home in the middle of the night, race down to the Shrivers’ home nearby, and meet with Eunice and Sargent’s boy, Bobby, and Pat’s son, Christopher, who was often visiting. They’d then don dark clothing and smear black grease on their faces to hide their identities and take off for a night of misbehavior, often high on marijuana, and on occasion even LSD. “Usually they’d meet three or four other kids in Hyannis and spend the nights causing all sorts of trou
ble,” recalled Thomas Langford, who knew the Kennedy boys at that time. He was seventeen then and, as he put it, “a charter member of the HPTs. Sometimes I played along, when I had the nerve. We’d shoot off firecrackers, deflate people’s tires, stick potatoes in the exhaust pipes of cars, turn over trash cans, mess around with girls… all sorts of mischief.
“After we did our bit, Ethel would get calls from everyone in town complaining about it. At first she used to say, ‘My kids were home asleep last night, I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ But one night she waited up, and, sure enough, she caught me, Bobby, and David jumping out one of the second-floor windows of her home. She chased us all over the compound in the middle of the night in her nightgown and bare feet, finally losing us somewhere on the stretch of beach. The next morning, the brothers told me they snuck back in the house while she was still asleep. But then she got up before they did and locked them both in their bedroom. When she finally let them out at about eight that night, they took off with one of her sheets. Apparently, during their time alone all day, they’d made a makeshift flag out of it, which had emblazoned on it the words ‘HPT’s Rule.’ That night, they rigged it so that they could get it up on the steeple of a local church, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian. I happened to be at Ethel’s sitting in the living room the next day watching TV with Bobby [Shriver] when the doorbell rang.”
According to Thomas Langford, Ethel went to the door to find a man standing there with a bedsheet in his hand. He turned out to be the minister of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church. “Mrs. Kennedy, I think this belongs to you,” he said. Ethel looked perplexed. “But what is it, Reverend?” He said, “It’s a sheet that I think your boys hung from the steeple of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian.” Ethel protested. “My boys are Catholic,” she said. “They would never do such a thing.” The reverend then turned over a corner of the sheet and showed it to her. On it were the initials “RFK”—obviously for Robert Francis Kennedy. For a moment, Ethel had no words. “The next time your boys want to fly a flag, ask them to do so from the steeple of the Catholic church, not from mine.” With that, he handed Ethel the sheet and took his leave. Ethel closed the door. Then, at the top of her lungs, she looked to the heavens and screamed out, “Give me strength!”
It was all just mischief, but troubling just the same when the stories would get back to Ethel or the other adults in the family. For instance, one prank had the boys playing in busy Hyannis Port tourist traffic, only to have one kid fall to the ground while another smacked the back of a car, making a loud noise. Then they would all gather around their fallen chum and shout hysterical sentiments at the driver, such as, “You’ve just killed another Kennedy!” When panicked people came to the aid of the young Kennedy sprawled in the middle of the road, the boys would milk it for all it was worth by trying to get the boy to move his legs and then saying it looked as if he’d been paralyzed. But then the fallen Kennedy would suddenly stand up and walk away. At that, the other boys would proclaim, “Look, it’s a Kennedy miracle!” and then race off, leaving a crowd of very upset Hyannis Port tourists in their wake.
The stories are legendary in Cape Cod, even today. One could write an entire book on the mayhem the HPTs caused in Hyannis in the late 1960s and into the 1970s. One could also fill a tome with the many times Ted Kennedy sat down with his nephews to try to reason with them. “We’re probably talking on a weekly basis,” is how Thomas Langford put it. “Ethel would call in tears and Ted would come running, saying, ‘Don’t worry, Ethie. I’ll take care of it.’ That was just their dynamic. He’d put the boys in a room and give them a good talking to, telling them that their father wouldn’t approve… that sort of thing. It didn’t much matter, though. After each time, he and Ethel would reconvene and she would say, ‘Well? What do you think?’ and he would say, ‘I did my best. Let’s see if it sticks.’ ”
Unbeknownst to most people at the Kennedy compound during the summer week in 1969 when everyone was dealing with Ted’s accident at Chappaquiddick, Ethel was handling another matter with one of her sons, minor in comparison to what was going on with Ted, but upsetting just the same. On the same night as Ted’s accident, Joe got into some trouble just a few miles away. At the time, Joe was seventeen and enrolled in the private Milton Academy, living there and not at home.
On the day of Ted’s accident, Joe had arrived on Martha’s Vineyard to watch the Edgartown Regatta and cheer his uncle Ted, who was sailing in the race. With Martha’s Vineyard being such a popular summer resort and the regatta a big event, accommodations in Edgartown were hard to come by. Eventually, Joe and a friend managed to find a double room at a quaint hotel called the Daggett House. Once checked in, they unpacked their bags and then went off to the races. They returned several hours later, but now with five friends, all of whom had been invited to stay in the room. After the owner of the establishment, Frederick Chirgwin, learned of this new arrangement, he told Kennedy he would not permit it; the five friends would have to find other accommodations. In response, Joe took off his sailing hat and furiously flung it at Chirgwin. “You can’t do this to me,” he shouted at him. “I’m a Kennedy. If a Kennedy rents a room, he can do what he likes with it.” That outburst resulted in Joe being kicked out of the hotel altogether. He then went back to the Kennedy compound and to the small apartment Ethel had given him above one of the garages. By the time he got there, though, Chirgwin had already called Ethel. Naturally, she was quite upset.
On this particular day, the stress was already building for Ethel Kennedy. Ted’s evasiveness over Mary Jo’s death and the desperation it had caused in the compound—and the seeming hopelessness of it all—was more than she could handle. Enraged by the hotel owner’s call, Ethel burst in on Joe and was horrified to find that he had a teenage girl in his apartment with him. “You!” Ethel said angrily, pointing at the startled young lady. “You get out of here right now, or so help me God, I’ll…” Appearing frightened out of her wits, Joe’s paramour gathered her delicates and made a mad dash for it. Then Ethel let her son have it. Her shrill voice could be heard all over the compound. “You think you can do anything you want just because you’re a Kennedy?” she demanded to know. “Do you think your grandfather would be proud of your behavior?” She then told her son to go to his room and write a five-thousand-word essay about “Why I think Grandpa would be very disappointed in me.” “I want to read it by morning.”
Afterward, Rose came over to Ethel’s to see what all the fuss had been about. As Ethel relayed parts of the story—carefully leaving out the details involving Joe and the girl in his apartment—she sat on the sofa with her legs crossed at the knees, her arms and hands animated as she went on about her frustration with her children and their behavior. Rose took it all in patiently. Finally, she said, “May I offer you some advice?” Ethel said she would most certainly welcome any advice from her mother-in-law, a woman who had raised so many children. “Well, dear,” Rose Kennedy began, “you know, it’s much more ladylike to cross one’s legs at the ankle, not at the knee.” In that particular moment, it’s likely that Ethel didn’t find Rose’s counsel very helpful.
Pot Bust
Generally, accounts of her life over the years have had it that Ethel Kennedy raised a truly unruly bunch. It’s not entirely true. The fact is, she had eleven children, and of them only three presented real problems, the eldest boys: Joe, Bobby, and David. The rest were generally well-behaved, though some of her other sons would find themselves in trouble from time to time. By the summer of 1970, Kathleen Hartington was eighteen; Joseph Patrick II, seventeen; Robert Francis Jr., sixteen; David Anthony, fifteen; Mary Courtney, thirteen; Michael LeMoyne, eleven; Mary Kerry, ten; Christopher George, six; Matthew Maxwell, five; Douglas Harriman, three; and Rory Elizabeth, two.
Of course, each of Ethel’s older boys had his own distinct personality and character, but one challenge they all faced was that they had no choice because of their lineage but to do something truly significant with their lives.
“We felt a real pressure to be worthy of the name Kennedy,” is how Joe once put it. “There was always so much emphasis on being of service. ‘Make your life count’ was something we heard a lot. Even if someone wasn’t preaching it to us in the moment, all you had to do was think about the family’s history and how important Jack and Bobby and even Ted had been to America to feel sort of overwhelmed by it. So, as a kid, yes, I think the best way to put it is that we were overwhelmed by it all and it could be said we acted out because of it.”
A running theme throughout Joe’s life and the lives of all of the third generation was the sense that they had some vitally important obligation to fulfill as members of the socially conscious Kennedy family. However, as teenagers, the youngsters couldn’t wrap their minds around what it was they were supposed to do with such a unique station in life. Though their aunt Eunice would often talk to them about “being of service,” they couldn’t quite connect with the idea. It was so amorphous a notion that it meant little to them.
“We were often reminded that this country has been very good to the Kennedys and that we owed it some kind of reciprocal debt in return,” Bobby Kennedy said. “That the money was just not all ours and the privilege and the power was not just ours to do what we wanted with, that we had to use it in some way to serve others, otherwise we would be wasting what we’d been given. I remember one time when my father returned from Appalachia where he found three families living in a one-room shack and the kids were going to bed hungry. And he came back home just in time for dinner and over the meal he said to us, ‘You know, you’re lucky to be eating all of this food in this wonderful house where you have your own rooms to sleep in, and I hope and pray that when you guys grow up you’ll be able to do something to help people.’ We clearly heard Saint Luke’s admonition that from those who have been given much, much shall be expected. Was it pressure? Did we see it as pressure? Yes.”
After Camelot: A Personal History of the Kennedy Family--1968 to the Present Page 16