by Larry Tye
The animals were Ethel’s to oversee, along with the children and a staff consisting of a laundress, governess, wet nurse, yard man, and a pair each of maids, cooks, and secretaries. There was also a groom for the animals, whom Ethel once enlisted to rescue a starving horse from a neighbor’s yard. A jury acquitted her of horse theft, and Bobby, who was then attorney general, joked, “You’re not going to be let out again without your keeper.” She didn’t get off so easily when she was showing two journalists Bobby Jr.’s latest acquisition, a raccoonlike coatimundi. He pounced, digging his sharp claws and doglike teeth into the heavily pregnant Ethel, who shrieked, “Get him off me! He’s biting me! Oh, God, he’s biting me!” One newspaperman lifted her atop a cabinet while the other kicked the Latin American mammal across the room. After a doctor bandaged her leg, she saw Bobby off as he headed to the Senate to deliver his speech breaking with LBJ on Vietnam. “If these are all the scars the Kennedys end up with by five o’clock,” she said playfully, “it’ll be all right.”
As with Rose, Ethel’s affluence ensured that all she had to budget was her time. She ad-libbed where her mother-in-law had been methodical, but she exercised enough control over the chaos that Bobby never had to focus on it, especially when he was distracted by grief or work. She lived by the dicta she and Bobby preached to the kids—Kennedys don’t whine, they don’t give up, and they don’t abide tattletales—which helped her tune out the gossip and manage their marriage through stressful stretches. The children knew they had to arrive at meals on time, hair combed, fingernails clean, teeth brushed, vitamins taken. During summers at Hyannis Port, the older ones were required to join her at 8:00 A.M. mass; when they overslept, they stayed late for private prayers. Calling herself Old Moms, she greeted Bobby at breakfast with a royal “Hail, Caesar,” which sounded even more ironic when he was wrapped in his monogrammed blue robe and she in her habitual purple maternity dress.
There was no levity the April evening in 1967 when he returned to his Hickory Hill estate from his visit to starving children in the Mississippi Delta. “We had sat down to dinner in the dining room, with the crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling, the table set with a linen tablecloth and china,” remembered his daughter Kathleen. “He talked to us about the Delta. ‘Families there live in a shack the size of this dining room,’ he said….‘Do you know how lucky you are, do you know how lucky you are?’ ” He was asking the question as much of himself as of his offspring, the oldest of whom was fifteen. His answer was the one he gave them that warm spring evening: “Do something for our country. Give something back.’ ” And it wasn’t just his children he begged to give a damn, but wealthy friends he persuaded to ship soup and other foodstuffs to the poor people he’d met in Mississippi.
This senator worried about the world even when he was sleeping, but one way he temporarily forgot was by getting adults to act like kids when they visited Hickory Hill. He loved games, and he insisted all his guests learn to play Prisoner’s Base, Murder, and Kick the Can. His and Ethel’s favorite was Sardines, a variation of Hide-and-Seek in which just one person is concealed, the others jam like sardines into that hideaway when they find it, and the loser is the last person looking. The twists at Hickory Hill were that the hiders included luminaries such as the secretary of defense and a future Supreme Court justice, and it often ended with fifteen men tumbling out of a closet with Ethel. For Averell Harriman’s seventy-fifth birthday, the Kennedys gave a surprise costume party. Bobby dressed in the kind of overcoat and fedora Harriman wore when he was ambassador to Moscow, and on the terrace were life-sized statues of Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Josef Stalin, borrowed from a wax museum. Liz Stevens, a guest who was due to deliver in days, wore a sign saying MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR. Bobby sent her a photo of herself afterward with the inscription, “I will if you will.” Liz’s husband, George Jr., founder of the American Film Institute, says that Bobby “had that kind of sweet humor.” It was midlife nurture more than Kennedy nature that nourished that sweetness. “My father really had the weight of the world on him,” said Kerry Kennedy, “and Mummy was funny and fun and full of laughter.”
Neither his time in the self-important Senate nor his expanding family responsibilities tempered Bobby’s daring. The Canadian government had named in honor of President Kennedy its highest unscaled peak, where the Yukon Territory meets the Alaska panhandle, and Bobby and Ted were determined to be the first to reach its top. With Ted’s back still healing, Bobby barreled ahead in March 1965 with expert mountaineers. No matter that he hated heights, that he had no experience with rope or snowshoes, or that his only preparation, as he said, was “running up and down stairs and practicing hollering Help!” Over the course of two days he climbed out of crevasses chest-deep in snow, trudged up a sixty-five-degree ridge, and counted his steps to make himself relax. This adventure, like others in which he pushed the edge, brought him alive. Four and a half hours after leaving high camp, he reached the 13,900-foot summit. Head bowed, he made the sign of the cross, then planted in the snow a black-bordered flag with the Kennedy crest. He came back down so fast that Jim Whittaker, the first American to summit Mount Everest and Bobby’s guide, had to egg on his fellow professionals: “For God’s sake, this guy is a Senator from New York. You’re going to let him run you into the ground?” What Bobby never said about the climb, but his friends did, is that he spent the last of his disabling grief on Mount Kennedy.
He hoped his children would develop that same fearlessness, which is why on family vacations they rafted on Idaho’s “river of no return” or skied the steepest slopes at Stowe or Sun Valley. It wasn’t just his brood of ten but seventeen nieces and nephews who often came along, with most adoring Uncle Bobby and internalizing his vision of what it meant to be a Kennedy. Always do what you are afraid to do. Only mama’s boys collect wildflowers. Don’t expect special treatment when the game is on the line. “Bobby and I were the pitchers on our teams” during one such game in Hyannis Port, recalls Fred Harris, an Oklahoma Democrat who started in the Senate two months before Bobby. “Right up until the last inning, each of us slack-pitched slow balls to the little kids like Kerry. But in the last half of the ninth, with the score tied, two people on base, and two out, Kerry Kennedy stepped up to bat for our team, and Robert pitched her three sizzling fast balls in rapid succession—and struck her out!…That night we had dinner over at his house and his mother was there and so was Jackie Kennedy. I said, ‘Gee, isn’t it an awful thing that your son just ruthlessly struck out his daughter?’ He said, before Rose could answer, ‘Can I help it if she’s a sucker for a high inside fastball?’ ”
On every trip to Hyannis Port, Bobby visited Joe in his room just before dinner and engaged in a spirited monologue that often lasted thirty minutes. He was convinced his father could hear, but he would have talked to him regardless. Bob and Ted also took their father to the opening game of the 1967 World Series at Fenway Park between the Red Sox and the St. Louis Cardinals. Joe didn’t last long, collapsing in his seat and needing oxygen before his sons took him home. There also were new tragedies in Ethel’s family, with a plane crash killing her brother George Jr. on his way to a hunting trip in Idaho in the fall of 1966. That was eleven years after her parents died in a similar accident and a year before George Jr.’s wife would choke to death when a piece of meat went down the wrong way during a family dinner. Nobody could and did offer more credible consolation than a practiced mourner like Bobby.
Jackie, meanwhile, continued to absorb a disproportionate share of Bobby’s time and energy. Just as she was adjusting to Jack’s being gone, William Manchester was finishing his meticulous examination of the assassination, The Death of a President. The Kennedys had recruited the journalist to the project, and Manchester agreed to let them review the book before publication. The manuscript ended up treating JFK adoringly, but both Bobby and Jackie—neither of whom had read it, asking friends to undertake that painful process and report back—voiced major concerns. J
ackie’s were personal, having to do with the author’s gruesome details about her husband’s murder, which was too raw for her to relive. Bobby’s were political, fearing that Manchester’s depiction of LBJ made him look so brutish and unassimilated that it would come across as a Kennedy hatchet job. Bobby first tried to work out the changes amicably, then he got tough. Finally, at Jackie’s insistence, the Kennedy lawyers sued in December 1966 even as Manchester, who had devoted two years to the project and done more than a thousand interviews, was threatening to kill himself.
The NBC anchor David Brinkley called the dust-up “the biggest publishing story since the New Testament,” and gossip columnists couldn’t get enough. If the assassination and its aftermath showed the Kennedys at their noblest, this was the family at their smallest-minded. Each new revelation of the behind-the-scenes machinations made Jackie seem more imperious, with one in three Americans saying they thought less of her now. Bobby suffered worse. Liberals called him a book burner. Intellectuals denounced him for rewriting history. Democrats said he was threatening party unity. The old charges of ruthlessness were dredged up, as Bobby knew they would be, but he could neither abandon his sister-in-law nor look as if he was backing down.*9 In the end the lawsuit was resolved, the serializations were published in Look magazine, and the book was released, but none of that helped the junior senator from New York. A poll by Louis Harris revealed that among those who had followed the controversy—an impressive seven in ten Americans—59 percent preferred LBJ for president in 1968 compared to 41 percent for Bobby. With those who had not been paying attention, Bobby led 54 to 46 percent. Ironically, while the public was blaming him for his bad behavior, Manchester was forgiving him. “Amicable relations with Bob Kennedy were quickly restored,” wrote the author, who wanted the Kennedys to like him and understood Bobby’s zeal in protecting his brother’s reputation and widow. “And in the spring of 1968, after he had announced for the Presidency, I was campaigning for him.”
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NEVER HAD THERE been a Senate office quite like Bobby’s. He had one of the biggest staffs ever, starting with about forty in 1965 and building three years later to more than seventy, which was more than double Ted’s and four times as many as Majority Leader Mike Mansfield’s. Others worked part time and without pay while the salaries of some official staff came at least partly from his own purse; he was kicking in a hundred thousand dollars a year by 1968. He received seven hundred fifty letters on an average day and twelve hundred when an issue was hot, both surely high-water marks for a freshman lawmaker. So were his daily calls from seventy-five journalists and fifty invitations to speak. The traffic to his office was so heavy that a doorway threshold that normally lasts a decade had to be replaced after six months. All of which was extraordinary for a senator who chaired no committees or subcommittees, led no geographic or ideological blocs, and sat with three other junior members in a newly created back row that he joked was closer to the men’s room than the dais.
The explanation was axiomatic: Never had there been a senator quite like Bobby Kennedy. It wasn’t just his money, fame, and power, although each elevated him beyond any other freshman in memory. So did his apparently permanent title as attorney general and the knowledge that he’d been the martyred president’s most trusted lieutenant. Twenty-two books had been or were being written about him (he never read them, but did look at the picture books), and he wrote five of his own (with help, and with the hope of making them bestsellers). His mail bore postmarks from Burbank and Missoula along with Poughkeepsie and Schenectady, with other senators’ constituents seeking assistance with everything from missing Social Security checks to how to extricate us from Vietnam (or make sure we stayed). It was as if Bobby belonged to all fifty states and 195 million Americans. The same way reporters had dubbed him assistant president when JFK was alive, they now dreamed up new epithets, from “probable president” and “exiled prince” to “a happening.” The most apt was “heir apparent.” When a Senate colleague complained to a committee chairman that “you’re giving Kennedy preferential treatment,” the chairman quipped, “I treat him the same way I’d treat any future president.”
Bobby knew that those expectations created an opportunity beyond the reach of a normal senator, and he had set up his office in a way meant to capitalize on that. The plotting and politics were delegated to old New Frontiersmen like Richard Goodwin and Ted Sorensen and family faithful like Steve Smith and Ted Kennedy. His mission in the Senate was to change the country and the planet, for which a quartet of staffers was key. Adam Walinsky, who internalized his boss’s mettle and cadence as he drafted speeches on everything from Bed-Stuy to Vietnam, was the irascible bomb thrower Bobby fantasized becoming. Peter Edelman shared that passion but with the gentler edges needed for ferreting out novel solutions to problems like poverty. Both were Jewish intellectuals who rose from the lower levels of Bobby’s Justice Department, elbowed their way onto their hero’s Senate campaign, and had the Ivy League pedigrees that made the Kennedys comfortable, Adam having graduated from Yale Law School and Peter from Harvard Law. Both also understood that Bobby would follow them out onto ledges, but he counted on them to pick ones with footing solid enough to justify the risk.
“If you’re making speeches about, you know, redevelopment on the Upper West Side or something like that, then who cares what you say? But if you’re messing around with the lives of people in Vietnam or something of that magnitude, then you better have it right, not wrong,” explains Walinsky, who grew so frustrated with Bobby’s indecision on the war that “I told him he had a month to find a replacement for me….I loved him, actually, but I just felt that was necessary.” It was one of a dozen pressures on the senator to finally make a break, and knowing that he would, he advised his fiery aide, “When you go home and tell your wife, don’t get her real upset.”
Joe Dolan was like his boss in different ways. A pragmatic Irishman, Dolan hired and nurtured the staff, filtered unrealistic demands from the pathologically impatient senator, and communicated with Bobby in the same private language of gestures, pauses, and monosyllables that assistant attorneys general like Burke Marshall had mastered. Angie Novello was a blend of mother hen and Mother Superior. She’d been with Bobby since the Rackets Committee. The scores of advisers, lobbyists, and even family members who wanted to reach him had to get by her. They also had to satisfy her standards. The senator could be late, but not anyone hoping to meet with him. What one fellow staffer called “pretty young things” perpetually circled, but Angie wouldn’t let them in without a serious reason, and without hems and necklines she considered appropriate. She also didn’t let in anyone who looked menacing, and she wasn’t shy about pressing the security buzzer by her knee. She was the only one able to read the senator’s pinched script and the only one who dared to call him “boss” or “Bob”; to everybody else he was “Senator.”
Angie was unique in one more respect. Nearly all the women in his office were smart enough that they knew their jobs without being told, were as determined to make a difference as Walinsky or Edelman, and went on to impressive careers as lawyers, literary agents, or professors of, among other things, feminist theology. But Angie was the only one with real power. The remainder of the mainly female staff answered phones and mail and responded to visitors’ questions, requests for tea, or, for the luckiest, complaints from constituents. That was partly a reflection of that Mad Men era, with barely a dozen female legislative aides on all of Capitol Hill. It was also a Kennedy thing. Joe held his wife and daughters to standards of propriety he and his sons never tried to meet, while in the Kennedy White House, there was a saying that “women belonged in the parlor, in the kitchen, in the bedroom, and behind the typewriter.” Bobby was able to imagine a black in the White House but not a female. Ethel helped her husband in most everything he did but saw herself in a subsidiary role. “I would never use the word ‘partner,’ ” she says. “That refers to equality.” Anne Hudson Shields worked for and ad
mired Bobby when he was a senator but says, “One can only answer so many legislative mail letters before you begin to go nuts.” Shields, who later became a lawyer, then chief of staff to the secretary of the interior, quit her job with Bobby because “there was obviously a glass ceiling. You were not going anywhere, and so what was the point?”
The rest of the staff, female and male, swallowed what reporters joked were loyalty pills.*10 Most were young and unscarred by cynicism or battle fatigue. They volunteered to work six long days a week and felt privileged to be part of Kennedy World. No big deal when he asked them to fetch his favorite chicken and rice soup and Hershey bars with nuts, or requested that they get the china coffee cup from his office so he didn’t have to drink from the thick ones in the cafeteria. No complaints, either, working shoulder to shoulder in offices too small for that big a staff, spread across two buildings, with few windows, none of which opened. It felt like a campaign and paid as poorly. When you were drooled on by Brumus—or one of the boss’s toddlers—you wiped it off and went on. Bobby still borrowed cash that he meant to but didn’t pay back. Same for pocket combs, and everyone knew he preferred long ones. He loved that haircuts from the Senate barber were free, although nobody could tell the difference after he’d had one, and he seldom had coins to tip the shoeshine boy or barber. It was the millionaire’s casualness about money that he’d had from the start.
So why did they put up with it? Why not move on, as Shields did? They loved Bobby’s resolve to be a Jeremiah, afflicting the comfortable, at a time when most congressmen preferred the reassuring role of Pollyanna. He had an acrobat’s ability to juggle twenty issues at once and a motivational magic that convinced the aide assigned to each issue that it was the senator’s number one priority. His office was the same kind of intellectual open shop that it had been at Justice. He accepted his assistants’ mistakes so long as they confessed and didn’t make them all the time. Like Bobby, most staffers preferred field visits to folders of statistics, especially when they were punctuated by his familiar entreaty: “Tell me what I can do.” The forgotten legions in the mail and copy rooms appreciated that he trooped through regularly, trying to make small talk and succeeding in letting them know that he cared. Such things, his longtime advance man Jerry Bruno said, are what “made me really want to knock myself out for him; I hated to see him unhappy.”