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

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Of additional interest: I interviewed Eunice Kennedy Shriver in the spring of 2002 for an article I was writing at the time on the Special Olympics for Redbook, a women’s magazine. I drew from that interview for this part and other sections of this book.

  Incidentally, the story never ran because when I submitted it the editors were displeased that it did not contain personal details about her relationships with other Kennedy family members. Looking back on it now, I think I simply didn’t have the courage to ask Mrs. Kennedy Shriver the kinds of personal questions the editors felt deserved answers in my story. In my defense, prior to the interview she specifically told me via fax that “no personal questions will be answered.” Somehow, I thought that sitting with her face-to-face might give me the courage to tread on terrain she’d deemed off-limits, but, alas, if anything her sheer presence in the room was so overwhelming, I have to admit I was a little intimidated. So I toed the line. As a result, the story was rejected by the magazine.

  Six months after I did the interview, I received a telephone call from Mrs. Kennedy Shriver asking for a copy of my story about the Special Olympics. “I somehow seemed to have missed it,” she told me. It was then that I had no choice but to tell her that the feature did not run, which was something I have to confess I truly did not want to do. “Well, why is that?” she demanded to know in a clipped tone. Reluctantly, I explained the reason as honestly as I could. “Well, good for you, then!” she said suddenly seeming happy. “I applaud you for your discretion!” She concluded, “Fine, then. Now, goodbye and I hope we meet again one day.” And with that, she hung up. She really was quite remarkable.

  I also met Sargent Shriver at that time and drew from my conversation with him in this section of the book, as well as in others. It would overstate it to say that I formally interviewed Mr. Shriver. I did not. However, Shriver was such a gregarious person, it was unlikely that one could have a conversation with him and not be left with a wealth of anecdotes—such as the story told here about his conversation with Eunice relating to starting Timberlawn in their own backyard—or as he told me, “I have a story about pretty much everything, don’t I?” And that he did!

  Also, as part of my research for Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot, I attended the Oprah Winfrey taping of “The Young Kennedys” in November 1997 in Chicago, where I had the opportunity to meet Christopher Lawford, Bobby Kennedy Jr., and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. Some of their quotes in this book are from that show, and also that backstage meeting.

  Additionally, in the hope of meeting Rosemary Kennedy, I visited St. Coletta’s and the Alverno Nursing Home in 1998 as part of my research for Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot. While I was able to have a brief meeting with her, I was not permitted to interview her. However, the staff there were very gracious and provided many of the details found in this section of the book.

  PART THREE. SARGE

  Interviews referred to: Leah Mason, Frank Mankiewicz, and Pierre Salinger, as well as Cathy Griffin’s interviews with Noelle Bombardier. I also referred to my interview with Joan Braden relating to the dinner at Timberlawn during which Jackie discussed Sargent Shriver’s appointment by LBJ. I also relied on Cathy Griffin’s interview with Donald Dell (June 1998) to re-create the conversation he had with Sargent and Eunice (“The decision is made”) relating to Sarge’s possibly assisting RFK. Comments by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. are culled from my interviews with him on March 1, 1997, March 28, 2003, and April 18, 2006. I also interviewed Ted Sorensen in May 2008 in conjunction with the publication of his book Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History.

  Only one serious biography has ever been written about Sargent Shriver, and what a comprehensive and fascinating book it is, and that is Sarge by John Stossel. I relied on it for parts of this section of After Camelot, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in knowing more about Ambassador Shriver.

  My researchers were also able to access the Sargent Shriver Collection at the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, and we utilized that collection as well.

  The late Hugh Sidey was also very helpful in aiding me to understand the complex dynamic between Shriver and the Kennedys, as were Jack Valenti and Senator George Smathers.

  I interviewed Frank Mankiewicz, Bobby Kennedy’s press secretary, on August 25, 1998, and utilized that interview in the chapter “Bobby Kennedy,” as well as in other parts of the book.

  I utilized the Arthur Krock Papers (1909–1974) in this section of the book.

  I relied on a transcript of a PBS interview with Ted Sorensen, August 29, 1996. I also referred to “Passing the Torch: Kennedy’s Touch on Obama’s Words,” by Susan Donaldson James for ABC News. Moreover, I interviewed Mr. Sorensen in April 1998 for my book Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot, and some of his comments from that interview can be found in After Camelot. I also referred to the transcript of Mr. Sorensen’s speech at the Charleston School of Law on February 23, 2010.

  Regarding the Peace Corps, I relied on the Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Collection at the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston.

  We pulled all of the Sargent Shriver files from the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, and referred to many of them for this and other sections of this book. I also referred to numerous audiotapes of conversations LBJ had with Sargent Shriver, which can be found in the National Archives.

  Regarding Bobby Kennedy’s history, I relied on Death of a President, by William Manchester. I also relied on the following articles: “The No. 2 Man in Washington,” by Paul O’Neil, Life, January 26, 1962; “The Death of Robert Kennedy,” by Theodore H. White, Life, June 14, 1968.

  I referred to Richard B. Stolley’s article “Eunice on Sarge and ‘the Kennedy People’ ” in the August 18, 1972, issue of Life.

  I also reviewed Jackie Kennedy’s oral history for the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, which she gave on January 11, 1974, from her apartment in Manhattan. She was interviewed by Joe B. Frantz. It’s interesting that when asked about the contentious relationship between LBJ and Bobby, Jackie seemed not to know a lot about it. She said that she “was never alone with the two men.”

  I referred to “LBJ and the Kennedys,” by Kenneth O’Donnell, Life, August 7, 1970.

  For the section “Ted Disappoints,” I drew from a confidential source who worked closely with the Shrivers in Paris.

  For background on the Special Olympics, I referred to The Kennedy Family and the Story of Mental Retardation, by Edward Shorter.

  I referred to the following volumes: The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, by Doris Kearns Goodwin; A Woman Named Jackie, by C. David Heymann; American Legacy: The Story of John and Caroline Kennedy, by C. David Heymann; The Uncommon Wisdom of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, edited by Bill Adler; Point of the Lance, by Sargent Shriver; Just Who Will You Be?, by Maria Shriver; The Death of the President, by William Manchester; The Shadow President, by Burton Hersh; The Dark Side of Camelot, by Seymour Hersh; The Dark Side of Camelot, by Nelson Thompson; The Kennedys: America’s Emerald Kings, by Thomas Maier; Kennedy and Nixon, by Christopher Matthews; Taking Charge: The Johnson White House, by Michael R. Beschloss; A White House Diary, by Lady Bird Johnson; Changing Habits: A Memoir of the Society of the Sacred Heart, by V. V. Harrison; The Society of the Sacred Heart in North America, by Louise Callan; Ethel, by David Lester; All Too Human, by Edward Klein; Living with the Kennedys, by Marcia Chellis; Kennedy Wives, Kennedy Women, by Nancy Gager; The Kennedys: An American Drama, by Peter Collier and David Horowitz; America’s First Ladies, by Christine Sandler; Jackie, by Hedda Lyons Watney; Torn Lace Curtain, by Frank Saunders; JFK: The Man and the Myth, by Victor Lasky; My Story, by Judith Exner, as told to Ovid Demaris; Bitch, by Buddy Galon; The Censorship Papers, by Gerald Gardner; The Whole Truth and Nothing But, by Hedda Hopper and James Brough; Uncommon Grace, by J. C. Suares and J. Spencer Beck; Remembering Jackie, by Life editors; The Woman in the White House, by Winzola McLendon; Ethel Kennedy and Life at Hickory Hill, by L
eah Mason (unpublished manuscript); Presidential Wives, by Paul E. Baker.

  Of additional interest: I spent considerable time at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library reviewing their catalog of books, articles, and other materials relating to President Johnson. I also reviewed many taped telephone conversations between LBJ and others, including Jacqueline Kennedy (such as the one cited in the text regarding Johnson’s interest in naming her ambassador to Mexico), Ethel Kennedy, Joan Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Rose Kennedy, Lady Bird Johnson, and many dozens of others. These tapes are also available in the National Archives.

  Some who have listened to these tapes feel that Johnson was inappropriately flirtatious where Jackie was concerned, especially in the weeks after the assassination. “You just come over and put your arm around me. That’s all you do,” he told Jackie when trying to encourage her to visit him at the White House on December 2, 1963. “And when you haven’t got anything else to do, let’s take a walk. Let’s walk around the backyard and just let me tell you how much you mean to all of us… you got the president relying on you,” he said. “And this is not the first one you had. They’re not many women running around with a good many presidents. So you got the biggest job of your life,” he concluded. Jackie laughed. “She ran around with two presidents,” she responded. “That’s what they’ll say about me. Okay. Anytime.”

  “Give Carolyn and John-John a hug for me,” LBJ said to her on December 7, 1963. “Tell them I’d like to be their daddy.” Jackie said, “I will.”

  In fact, Jackie never felt that LBJ was being inappropriate and just chalked his manner up to good ol’ Southern charm. As she explained to LBJ in an impassioned letter from the West Indies during the height of her very public disagreement with William Manchester over his book Death of the President, “I read in a magazine… that I had objected to your calling me ‘honey.’ All the rage that I have been trying to suppress and forget down here boiled up again. It is a trivial thing, but so typical of the way that man has twisted everything. The only thing that is nice about it is that it makes you look as kind and solicitous as you always were and are to me…. I hope you will call me that [‘honey’] again and that you will not become embittered by all this and by all life, really.” She continued, “Please forgive me, Mr. President. I know I shall wish I had torn this letter up as soon as I have sent it off, but in some blind way I wished to express to you the fondness I will always feel for you—no matter what happens and no matter how your feelings might change for me.”

  Also, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library has in its collection forty years of personal correspondence between Jackie Kennedy and Lady Bird Johnson, which I relied heavily on for many parts of this book. The correspondence is interesting in that some of it reveals a different side of Jackie. At times, she could be incredibly childlike. “After I had done the tree on Christmas eve and everything was so nice and peaceful,” she wrote to Lady Bird on December 30, 1965, “I just looked under that tree and thought I would like to open one or two interesting little bundles for myself. Dear Lady Bird, I could not believe my eyes. Those Chinese plates are beyond belief! You think Christmas is for children once you are grown up, but I don’t think that’s true. Carolyn and John didn’t love any present as much as I loved mine! How could you know what I would love more than anything?”

  It’s also worth noting that even though there was certainly no love lost between Bobby Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, Lady Bird was hard to resist. Apparently, she managed to sweep Ethel and Eunice off their feet when the two visited the Johnsons in Texas. In an undated letter, Ethel wrote to Lady Bird that she and “Eun” were still “recuperating” from their trip. “I guess we never will get completely over being treated like Kings for five days,” she wrote. “It’s hard to get back to plain old cabbages. We loved every minute with you and you have my very big thank you for being so friendly and thoughtful and generous. We had a very happy time, and whatever the political consequences, it was great fun.” She signed the letter, “much, much love and so many thanks, affectionately, Ethel.”

  After Bobby was killed in June 1968, Ethel wrote to President Johnson to thank him for all he did for her during her darkest days. “We shall always be grateful to you, Mr. President, for honoring Bobby by attending his funeral,” she wrote, “by meeting the train in Washington and by accompanying us to Arlington.” She signed the letter, “Love, Ethel.”

  Also, Max Kennedy’s comments (relating to George Wallace) were culled from “A Left Coast Kennedy,” by Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Magazine, March 14, 1999.

  I met Max Kennedy a year earlier at a book party to celebrate the release of his work Make Gentle the Life of This World: The Vision of Robert F. Kennedy, a book of quotes his father had loved and an examination of the way RFK had been influenced by the powerful thinkers he so admired. (The title is a quote from the Greek poet Aeschylus, which Bobby Kennedy recited when he broke the news of Martin Luther King Jr.’s death to a crowd in an Indianapolis ghetto.) “I think there’s a perception that we Kennedys are opposed to the public having a fuller understanding of who we are, of what makes us tick,” Max—who was three and a half when his father was killed—told me. “But it’s just not true. Yes, we have been opposed to much of what has been written about us, mostly because of the inaccuracies of the reports and sometimes—such as my aunt Jackie’s battle with William Manchester—because it just digs too deep into private thoughts. But we Kennedys understand history and the importance of history. In fact, my mother has been my greatest encourager. She’s the one who urged me to read my father’s journals, to go through his notes and all of the index cards he had assembled during his life with quotes and other thoughts that had meant so much to him. My uncle Teddy had written a book about his brother called Words Jack Loved, and it was always my idea to do sort of the same thing for my father. But it was my mother who pushed the idea along, who felt it was important.”

  PART FOUR. TED

  I would first like to thank author James Spada for providing me with a wealth of material on Ted and Joan Kennedy that he compiled during the process of developing a book about the senator. His in-depth research into the lives and times of Ted and Joan and their family—including his interviews with many of their intimates—proved invaluable to this book, just as it did to Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot, and I would like to gratefully acknowledge him.

  For this section, I relied heavily on my interview with Leo Damore (June 1994), conducted for my proposal for Jackie, Ethel, Joan, then called The Kennedy Wives. Damore, who committed suicide a year later, was the author of Senatorial Privilege, considered the most reliable book about the Chappaquiddick incident.

  I also referred to my interviews with Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Ted Sorensen, Barbara Gibson, Leah Mason, Senator George Smathers, Webster Janssen, Sancy Newman, Roswell Gilpatrick, Dun Gifford, David Burke, and Helen Thomas.

  I interviewed Ted Kennedy’s assistant Richard Burke on August 23, 1999, and relied on some of his memories for this and other sections of this book.

  Cathy Griffin interviewed Joe Gargan for Jackie, Ethel, Joan on March 17, 1999, and I followed up with a faxed Q&A that same month, and his memories of the night of the Chappaquiddick accident are culled from those interviews.

  I referred to two of Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s letters to Joan that, based on their contents, appear to have been written in the summer of 1979. These letters went on auction from Alexander Autographs in February 2007.

  Cathy Griffin had several conversations with Helga Wagner and one interview with her on February 20, 2011.

  The conversation between Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Roswell Gilpatrick was recreated as per Gilpatrick’s memory of it in my interview with him.

  I referred to The Kennedy Case, by Rita Dallas, for details of Joseph Kennedy’s final hours.

  I also referred to the transcript of the television broadcast “Chappaquiddick: What Really Happened?” on Geraldo, November 9, 1988, with Leo Damo
re and Leslie Leyland (grand jury foreman).

  I interviewed Robert McNamara in June 2008 and utilized some of his memories in this and other sections of the book. Cathy Griffin did a follow-up interview with Mr. McNamara in August 2008.

  Articles referred to: “He Now Stands Alone,” by Robert E. Thompson, Sunday Advertiser, June 9, 1968; “Joan and Ted Kennedy: Their Love Story,” by James Bowser, TV and Radio Mirror, October 1968; “An Intimate Portrait of Joan Kennedy,” by Barbara Kevles, Good Housekeeping, September 1969; “All Quiet on the Kennedy Front in Edgartown,” by Homer Bigart, New York Times, January 11, 1970; “Joan Kennedy’s Story,” by Betty Hannah Hoffman, Ladies’ Home Journal, July 1970; “Paper Claims Ted Danced All Night,” UPI, London, November 30, 1970; “Joan and Ted’s Tardy Ways Irked Their Herman Hosts,” by David Binder, Stars and Stripes, April 23, 1971; “Sisters” (Joan and Candy Bennett),” by Mary Fiore, Ladies’ Home Journal, March 1973; “Joan Had to Learn to Live with Heartache,” by Eleanor Roberts, Herald American, December 7, 1982; “Prime Time with Joan Kennedy,” by Sally Jacobs, Boston Globe Magazine, July 9, 2000; “Joan Kennedy Treated for Alcoholism,” Associated Press, October 9, 2001.

  Volumes referred to: Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died, by Edward Klein; Edward Kennedy: An Intimate Biography, by Burton Hersh; Sons and Brothers, by Richard D. Mahoney; A Common Good, by Helen O’Donnell; Jacqueline Onassis, by Lester David; Iron Rose, by Cindy Adams and Susan Crimp; JFK: Reckless Youth, by Nigel Hamilton; The Bouviers, by John H. Davis; Taking Charge: The Johnson White House, by Michael R. Beschloss; A White House Diary, by Lady Bird Johnson; The Joy of Classical Music: A Guide for You and Your Family, by Joan Kennedy; Gloria and Joe: The Star-Crossed Love Affair of Gloria Swanson and Joe Kennedy, by Axel Madsen; Swanson on Swanson, by Gloria Swanson; JFK: The Presidency of John F. Kennedy, by Herbert Parmet; John Kennedy: A Political Profile, by James MacGregor; Honey Fitz, by John Henry Cutler; John F. Kennedy and American Catholicism, by Lawrence H. Fuchs; Rose Kennedy: A Life of Faith, Family, and Tragedy, by Barbara Gibson and Ted Schwartz; The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga, by Doris Kearns Goodwin; The Kennedy Women, by Laurence Leamer; Times to Remember, by Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy; Marilyn: The Last Take, by Peter Harry Brown and Patte B. Barham; The Decline and Fall of the Love Goddess, by Patrick Agan; The Masters Way to Beauty, by George Masters; Marilyn Monroe: An Uncensored Biography, by Maurice Zolotow; Marilyn Monroe: Confidential, by Lena Pepitone; Robert Kennedy and His Times, by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.; Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, by Lester David.