After Camelot: A Personal History of the Kennedy Family--1968 to the Present

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  As Rosemary walked along, Eunice drove very slowly behind her, the two women keeping a close eye on her the whole time. “I’m sorry I was so angry at you,” Eunice told the nun as the two sat in the car watching Rosemary. “I had no right,” she said.

  “No, Mrs. Shriver, of course you had a right,” the nun said.

  “Oh no, my dear,” Eunice said. “You see, I lost Rosie too, once. It was twenty years ago,” Eunice said, smiling at the memory.

  “We were in Chicago,” Eunice remembered. “Sarge was running for vice president at the time. Rosie and I went to church in the morning, and after the service we were in the vestibule and I was looking at some rosaries and candles and, I don’t know… I became distracted. I turned around and she was gone. And it didn’t end as quickly as this, either,” she said.

  As they drove slowly along and continued to watch Rosemary, Eunice explained that back in Chicago, Rosemary had no identification on her and no money either, yet had wandered out into the street and then become absorbed by the bustling city of Chicago. It had been the first time in twenty-four years that she was free. Eunice said that she was “absolutely terrified,” so much so that she had no choice but to call the police. She and an officer then drove all over the vicinity looking for Rosemary, trying to pick her out of crowds of swarming people. But they couldn’t find her. Finally, as Eunice recalled it, they had no choice but to issue an all-points bulletin with a description of Rosemary. “A reporter who had heard the bulletin about a missing person saw someone fitting the description,” Eunice told the nun. “She was walking down the street, looking at all of the shopping store display windows and having what seemed to be a very nice time,” Eunice said. “So the reporter approached her, asked if she was looking for me, and she said she was. The next thing I knew, we were reunited. I had never been so happy to see her. I knew then that she was a very independent woman, and I had to acknowledge that about her,” Eunice said. “Anyway… I’m very sorry I lashed out at you.”

  Of course, the nun accepted Eunice’s apology. Then the two women continued to drive at a very slow pace along the side of the road, watching Rosemary Kennedy enjoy her freedom for, likely, the first time in twenty years. “I have never seen her so relaxed,” Eunice said with a soft smile. “You know, I think I shall never forget this moment,” she said as she watched her sister. After about an hour, they got out of the car, walked down to the beach, and greeted Rosemary as if nothing were wrong, rather than scold her and ruin her lovely day.

  It’s likely that Rosemary Kennedy never forgot that day in Cape Cod either, a morning when she was able to walk on the beach alone, unsupervised. It probably had been an even richer experience for her than her Chicago getaway, simply because there were no pressing crowds to make her nervous and fearful. It had just been Rosemary and nature on the Cape, a moment for her to collect her thoughts in exactly the same manner as her many relatives by now took for granted since it had been their way for so long. In many ways, she was a good deal stronger than most people knew. After all, she’d survived a very challenging life, living it her own way and, eventually, on her own terms, which was not so surprising considering the Kennedy blood that ran through her veins.

  On January 7, 2005, Rose Marie Kennedy—Rosemary—died at the age of eighty-six of natural causes. Eunice, Pat, and Jean were at her side at Fort Atkinson Memorial Health Hospital in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, as was Ted. She had lived a long and very sad life, but one hopes she knew how much her family loved her. It was difficult for all of her siblings to say goodbye to her, but a little tougher for Eunice. After all, Rosie had inspired Eunice’s life’s work. Indeed, so much of who Eunice was as an activist and humanitarian was intrinsically tied to who her sister had been in her life and in the lives of her mother and siblings. In years to come, Eunice would often say she would never forget the sight of her older sister alone on the beach, enjoying the day with nary a concern or restriction. It would carry her through.

  Rosemary would be buried next to her parents, Rose and Joseph, at Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline.

  An Ongoing Struggle

  In March 2005, life took yet another sad turn for Joan Kennedy, who was now sixty-eight. Still battling alcoholism, Joan relapsed yet again, and this time in a very public way. She took what ABC News later described as “a drunken fall” in Boston and was found lying bleeding and alone on a Beacon Hill sidewalk. “She said she was okay, but she did not look okay,” recalled Constance Bacon, who shielded the helpless Joan from the rain as they waited for an ambulance. “She was conscious. She had just hit her head pretty hard. She knew that she had fallen and she tried to get up and she couldn’t. So I just waited until the ambulance came. I had no idea who she was.”

  Unfortunately, Joan’s fall resulted in a concussion and a broken shoulder. When the accident made the national news, it was difficult for those who loved and cared for Joan to realize that she was still waging what, at least from all outward appearances, seemed to be an unsuccessful battle against alcoholism. She had always been such a generous and caring person; it was difficult to reconcile that she was still in great turmoil and pain. From the hospital, Joan called her son Ted Jr., who then called Patrick and Kara with the upsetting news. When Patrick arrived at the hospital, he looked exhausted and extremely upset. “You want to make sure there’s someone there for her all the time,” he said, “but at the same time you don’t want to encroach on her privacy too much. When things like this happen, it makes you feel as though maybe you should have done more to make sure there’s someone with her 24/7, and perhaps that might become necessary.” Soon after, Patrick announced that he was dropping plans to run for the Senate in 2006, a move he had been contemplating for some time that would have seen him challenge Republican senator Lincoln Chaffee. “My family means too much to me,” he said, obviously referring to his mother since he was not married and had no children.

  After that very troubling incident, Joan’s children intervened in her affairs, obtaining a court-ordered guardianship that put Ted Jr. in charge of his mother’s care and her $9 million estate. The details found in papers filed in Barnstable Probate and Family Court on Cape Cod were disturbing. It was alleged by her children that Joan had stopped attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and had been surreptitiously drinking vanilla extract and mouthwash in an attempt to become inebriated, so much in fact that she had done damage to her kidneys. If she continued at the rate she’d been going, doctors feared she could end up on dialysis within a year. They also stated that Joan had been suffering from bipolar disease and depression as well as alcoholism. In the end, Barnstable judge Robert Terry ruled that Joan was “incapable of taking care of herself by reason of mental illness.”

  It was at this same time that Joan’s children found out that she had transferred title of the Squaw Island home—the house she and Ted had owned for many years, and which she got as part of her divorce settlement from him—to a trust that was to be controlled by Webster Janssen, a man Ted Jr., Patrick, and Kara claimed to not even know! Understandably, they became suspicious and feared that someone was taking advantage of their mother in her emotionally weakened state. The result was an awful family feud that left Joan feeling bullied by her children and as if she had no power over her own life and affairs. She retaliated by putting the Squaw Island house on the market. As far as her children were concerned, this was the proverbial last straw. They loved that house, had grown up there, felt it was theirs as well as their mother’s, and weren’t going to allow it to be sold. “Basically, my mother is taking it out on us by trying to sell the house,” Ted Jr. stated at the time.

  So how did all of this happen?

  It started a couple years earlier, in the spring of 2003, when Joan’s second cousin Webster Janssen picked her up from her home in Boston to drive her to Maine to visit relatives there. On the trip, Joan seemed particularly anxious. She had just been released from a treatment facility in Blairstown, New Jersey, after a seven-month stay and, as
she explained to Janssen, “It cost me a fortune. I’m very worried about my future,” Joan said. “I’m getting older. I feel I need to be saving money, not spending it.”

  “What about Ted and the kids?” Janssen asked. “Surely they can help you out?”

  Joan shook her head and didn’t respond. Her relationship with Ted was fine, mostly because she kept him out of her business and he didn’t ask questions about it. They had been divorced for more than twenty years and, of course, he was now married to Vicki. He’d just barely been available to Joan during their marriage, so she certainly didn’t expect much from him now, other than simple kindness—which he did offer. However, Joan’s now grown children were a different story. Joan was adamant that she didn’t want them telling her what to do, yet she was always in such emotional distress that it was difficult for them to stay out of her affairs. The more they pushed to help her, the more she felt her freedom being chipped away. As much as they all loved one another, there was a great deal of anger and disappointment bubbling just under the surface. It was a family dynamic that had been many years in the making, going all the way back to when Joan left home to move into her own apartment in the early 1980s. By 2005, she had been in and out of rehabilitation centers for the better part of thirty years. It had not been easy on anybody.

  “Maybe I can help you,” Webster Janssen offered as he drove Joan to Maine. As it happened, Janssen had grown up with Joan in Bronxville. His mother, Belle Bennett, and Joan’s, Ginny Bennett, were cousins. He had been a frequent date at school functions, an usher at her wedding to Ted (and, he recalls, danced with Jackie at the reception), and had maintained a relationship with her over the years. He was one of the first to call her after the Chappaquiddick incident in 1969. Because he’d worked on Wall Street as a trust investment officer at Citibank and Morgan Guaranty Trust, he felt qualified to help Joan. “I’ll take a look at your portfolio and we’ll see what we can do.”

  “When I looked at her portfolio and saw how her investments had been managed, I realized she really could benefit from my experience,” Janssen recalled. “I thought I could help her. That I would give her the best advice.”

  Joan and Webster came to an arrangement whereby she would pay him by the hour to advise her on her assets, which he found in looking at the books came to about $9 million. However, since her money was hopelessly entangled in mortgages and other long-term investments, Joan had good reason to be worried. She was cash poor.

  For the next eighteen months or so, Joan and Jannsen continued to work on her finances and straighten out myriad problems. “I would come to Boston once a month and we would sit down and try to figure it all out,” he recalled. “Without getting into detail, a lot of people had taken advantage of her. She is a very nice person, and somewhat naive. I found that she wasn’t knowledgeable about her investments or finances, and she was really in over her head.”

  “What about the house on Squaw Island?” Webster asked Joan during one of their meetings. “How often do you actually go there?” Joan said she stayed at the home about two months of the year every summer. “It’s not worth it, then,” Webster advised her. “I think you should sell it. You could probably get about $7 million for it. That would put money in your pocket and you wouldn’t have to worry for the rest of your life.”

  Joan seemed relieved. It sounded like a very good idea. Therefore, she and Janssen established a trust, transferred title of the Squaw Island house to it, and prepared to sell it.

  When Joan told Ted that she was working with Webster Janssen, he said he was happy about it. He said he was relieved that she had found someone she could trust and he was happy not to have to worry about her. Apparently, Joan decided not to tell her children she was working with Janssen, and Ted didn’t give them that information either. In fact, the children didn’t know a thing about Janssen until Joan had her street accident in Boston and they began delving into her affairs. “Who the hell is this guy?” Ted Jr. asked his mother. “It’s none of your business,” Joan told him. “These are my affairs, not yours.”

  It was when Joan Kennedy put the Squaw Island house on the market that her children—Ted Jr., Patrick, and Kara—decided to take her to court over the sale of the property, with a trial being set for June 2005. They also wanted the interloper Janssen out of the picture. It was all very unfortunate—“extremely disrespectful to Joan,” is how Janssen put it—and couldn’t have done much to ease Joan’s unhappiness at this time. However, in their defense, Joan’s children were genuinely worried. They didn’t understand why she felt it necessary to keep her relationship with Webster Janssen a secret, and they were very concerned. It got ugly.

  In the end, Joan didn’t have the strength or energy to fight her children. A court case was avoided when she settled the matter by dissolving the trust established by Janssen and taking the Squaw Island house off the market. She also reluctantly agreed to strict court-ordered supervision with a guardian to make sure she did not drink. Meanwhile, her finances were to be handled by two court-appointed trustees. Tired and feeling overwhelmed, Joan then went into rehab again. This time, she was required to stay sober, otherwise her children would be granted permanent custody of her.

  Webster Janssen says, “My reputation took a beating. Let’s just say the Kennedys were not kind to me in the press. It never even occurred to me when I started helping her there would be any opposition since I was a family member and had the qualifications. There were things that showed up in local newspapers impugning my professionalism and integrity, statements I could have sued them for, but I didn’t want to go up against the Kennedy machine. It would have cost an arm and a leg and taken years in litigation, and quite frankly, I didn’t want to drag Joan through it. It cost me more than you will ever know in time and personal anguish.”

  Within six months of the settlement, Joan was much stronger emotionally and decided to put her foot down. She was selling the house, and that was the end of it. So she put the property back on the market for $6.5 million, just as she and Webster Janssen had intended. Ted had the right of first refusal, but apparently he didn’t have the cash or the credit since he was heavily leveraged on other properties, including the Big House on the compound. Joan’s children said they didn’t have the money either. In the end, the house was sold to a stranger. “If it had been sold under the trust that Joan and I had established, there would have been a provision that the new owner would have to allow Joan to lease it every summer for two months, as she had for years,” said Webster Janssen. “But under the new arrangement, that was not possible. So it was all very sad.”

  As of this writing, Joan Kennedy is committed to her sobriety and attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings seven days a week in Boston, where she lives. She remains sober. Her relationship with her children is still somewhat strained, but they continue to try to make it work. “At the end of the day, we’re family,” Patrick Kennedy said, “and, as we’ve well learned over the years, it’s family that matters most.”

  Pat Kennedy Lawford Dies

  On September 17, 2006, Pat Kennedy Lawford passed away at the age of eighty-two from cancer and complications of pneumonia.

  In the later years of her life, Pat had devoted her time to organizations that served the mentally disabled and those helping people with substance abuse problems. She may not have had the kind of high-profile life of her sister Eunice, the activist, or Jean, the ambassador, but as she got older she was very happy with the life she had made for herself. “She distinguished herself in one important way,” Ted Kennedy once said of her. “She was a very good friend. In fact, you could never have a more loyal, kinder friend than my sister Pat.”

  When Pat learned that she had throat cancer in 2003, she made a decision not to fight it. She was against the idea of chemotherapy and felt strongly that it never worked and that anyone who believed it did was fooling himself. “That was always Pat’s way,” said her friend Patricia Brennan. “She was very definitive and pragmatic. It was the way
she felt about marriages never working out. Anyone who said she was in a happy marriage was lying about it, at least as far as Pat was concerned. The family was very worried about her and sort of ganged up on her and made her go on chemotherapy. In the end, though, Pat was right—it didn’t work and it made her life a living hell. If it had been up to her, she would have died in 2003, not 2006. The last three years were brutal. It was a shame. ‘If everyone had just let me do it my way, this would be all over by now,’ she told me in 2004. She wasn’t afraid of death, not at all. She was more afraid of living a life of great pain than she was of dying. When it was her time to go, she was happy to do it, I must say.

  “The last time I talked to her was in 2005. She could no longer make the trips to the West Coast, so our lunches were a thing of the past. On the phone with me, I could barely hear her because her voice was just a whisper now. She said, ‘No tears for me, Patty. I have had a very good and very rich life. So, not one tear should be shed for Pat Kennedy Lawford,’ she concluded, ‘and if you cry for me, I swear to God I will come back and haunt you.’ And then we laughed. My goodness, how we laughed!”