Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison For a Murder He Didn't Commit

by Robert F. Kennedy

  Despite his lack of formal education, George studied Shakespeare at night. At the breakfast table he commonly read to the children human interest or animal stories from the Herald Tribune or the columns of Thornton Burgess. My mother recollects him as “a wonderful dad, always sweet, sensitive, thoughtful, and loving toward his children,” and a competent naturalist. He took his kids for long weekend walks and countryside drives, often stopping to identify a bird or a rare tree, or to explain a bit of natural history, his mastery of which was encyclopedic.

  My mother’s siblings generally inherited their parents’ virtues, including Grandma’s zealous piety and generosity and Grandpa’s driving curiosity about history and the natural world. They espoused highly personalized brands of honor, but despite genuine efforts toward culture and charity, the Skakels never tried to pass themselves off as proper folk. They were carbon nabobs and their roughness showed itself through the generations. All the boys were genuine characters whose only aristocratic pretensions were their robust engagement in clubbing, turfing, golfing, drinking, fishing, and hunting.

  My mother lived in Chicago until she was 8 years old, at which time she, with her parents and her older siblings (Georgeann, Jimmy, George Jr., Rucky, and Patricia) moved east, following their father’s business to New York, nearer to his customers and bankers. Grandpa’s company was on its way to becoming one of the largest private family businesses in the United States. The family settled in nearby Connecticut.

  The Skakel house on Lake Avenue in Greenwich was a hybrid of The Philadelphia Story and The Beverly Hillbillies. Theirs was one of the most enormous mansions, in one of America’s wealthiest burbs, with so many bedrooms that it could easily accommodate 30 or more guests in addition to the family. Greenwich at that time was rural horse country with fewer than 6,000 residents, many working or living on large estates. The Skakel home was elegant, graceful, and roomy, with an eight-car garage, a village of outbuildings, an Olympic-sized swimming pool, and a fountain rivaling that at Buckingham Palace. The manse crowned a 10-acre lawn surrounded by 100 acres of woodland and fields. “Even though it was large, it just felt like home,” recalls my mother. “There was plenty of land for the kids to hunt and ride horses.” Swans preened while the children fished and swam in—and later skated on—a big lake.

  Grandma Ann converted their demesne into a farm, a caper that must have struck their swanky Greenwich neighbors as déclassé. She kept horses, turkeys, ducks, 25 pigs, sheep, and two cows. French goats wandered through the house, unchallenged, with 14 dogs. “We had three hundred chickens. I would collect the eggs and milk the cows, which I loathed,” my mother recalls.

  Grandma Ann’s devotion to the Catholic Church was legendary among her friends both in Chicago and in Greenwich. Silver holy water dispensers, religious icons, relics, crucifixes, and saints’ shrines with prie-dieu kneeling stations adorned most of the rooms at Lake Avenue. Religious books dominated the collection in the 60-foot-long Skakel library with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Ann attended St. Mary’s Catholic Church every morning at 7 a.m. The Skakel children grew up praying daily for their father’s conversion and Ann always carried a silver rosary and said grace before and after meals. The clan donated lavishly to Catholic charities.

  My mother recalls that her mom kept the house thick with clergy and frequently hosted salons for religious societies and assembled a whirl of church groups there for teas. She cultivated a close friendship with the influential Catholic monk, Thomas Merton. The secretive right wing Catholic society Opus Dei launched its American debut at the Skakel house, in keeping with the Society’s strategy of aligning itself with wealthy, powerful, and politically conservative Catholics. Ann worked for years on her husband’s conversion, with merciless catechizing and regular prayers imploring the Creator’s blessings on the enterprise. It was the single request from her that Grandpa resisted.

  MY MOTHER was a jock. She was a champion at both sailing and horseback riding and she loved tennis, football, golf, and skiing. My father and mother met during a winter trip to Mt. Tremblant, introduced by my father’s youngest sister, Jean Kennedy, my mother’s Manhattanville College roommate who had conspired with my mother to unite their families on a ski vacation.

  The Kennedys and Skakels dated each other rather furiously after that first encounter. My mother remembers Jimmy and George, a notorious lady killer, dating most of the Kennedy sisters at one time or another. Despite their families’ differences, my parents were well suited to one another. They were both competitive, prudish, and pious. My father loved my mother’s lively spirit and was intensely proud of her athleticism, her humor, and her peculiar blend of deep religious faith and mischievous irreverence.

  After my father and mother fell in love, my mother adopted his family as her own. Historian Arthur Schlesinger described theirs as “one of the great love stories of all time.” They married at St. Mary’s Church in Greenwich and had a reception at the Skakel mansion on Lake Avenue in June 1950, a year after my mother got her bachelor’s degree. It was a lavish affair with 1,200 guests. My father’s 27 ushers included his two surviving brothers, John and Edward; the three Skakel boys, George, Jimmy, and Rucky; and several teammates from his Harvard football squad.

  With her skepticism toward authority, her self-confidence, humor, and her recklessly competitive spirit, my mother fit right in with her new Kennedy in-laws. And my grandfather Joseph Kennedy and all his children accepted her as one of their own. According to my Uncle John’s closest friend, LeMoyne Billings, “She soon forgot she was a Skakel. She became the consummate Kennedy.” Lem described her as “more Kennedy than the Kennedys.”

  When I finally got to know Rucky Skakel’s children, in my mid-twenties, I was struck by the tumultuous blend of piety and deviltry. Like all orthodoxies, Rucky’s zealotry was authoritarian and occasionally cruel. I later learned that he beat Michael silly for bringing Playboy home from a trove of porn magazines the neighborhood boys found in a covey at Belle Haven Club. Michael laughs, “He told me that masturbation was the equivalent of murdering 10 million potential Christians and that sex was dirty, filthy, and disgusting and I should save it for the girl I loved.”

  The families seemed ideally matched, with their Catholic piety and love of sports and outdoor adventure. But fault lines soon emerged between the Skakels and Kennedys. At least part of the schism was stylistic. When my Grandpa Joe sent his sons to Europe to work as war journalists or to study under the socialist economist Harold Laski, my mother’s brothers George and Jim were working as roughnecks on oil rigs in Utah and in Brownsville, Texas. While the Kennedys were surprisingly chary with their dough, the Skakels practiced a nearly destructive generosity that delighted Catholic charities. Grandpa Joe discouraged his children from riding first class on planes or trains, taking ski trips to Europe, playing polo, or gambling. The Skakel boys, in contrast, were the founders and outstanding players of the Metropolitan Blind Brook and Bethpage Polo Clubs and retreated with the swanks to bet the races at Saratoga every August.

  The prevailing narrative of the Moxley murder trial was rooted in the canard pedaled by press and prosecutors that Michael Skakel is a “monstrous, spoiled Kennedy cousin.” Putting the “monstrous” part aside, the caricature of Michael Skakel as a Kennedy cousin always seemed strange to me. Our Kennedy parents raised the 29 grandchildren of Joe and Rose Kennedy communally. We spent our summers together in Hyannis Port sailing, swimming, fishing, and playing baseball, football, and tennis. We worked on political campaigns and at Special Olympics. We attended daily mass as a group, took our meals together, and spent every waking moment in each other’s company. I am as close to my Kennedy cousins as to my 10 brothers and sisters.

  Nevertheless, as I’ve said, I never knew any Skakels growing up. My mother had turned Kennedy and was estranged from her family. To this day, I have Skakel cousins whom I’ve barely met and would not recognize.

  As Michael had recalled, “the Skakels and the Kennedys were like oi
l and water.” The Skakels were Republican but so little interested in politics that my mother’s nuptials into a prominent Democratic family did not set off alarm bells. “When I married Daddy, it wasn’t a big deal,” she recalls. “They thought I was a little communist, but they all had good humor about it. It wasn’t taken seriously.” But when she started actively campaigning, she crossed a line. The Skakels were oil and coal Republicans, and like most people in the extractive industries, they were conservative. “Well, my parents weren’t bedrock Democrats,” my mother says dryly. “Grandpa was neither pro-government nor pro-Democrat.” While Grandpa Joe was FDR’s top donor in 1932, Grandpa Skakel piped his carbon lucre to the GOP and only rejected an offer to become the Republican Party’s national treasurer due to his antipathy for the spotlight.

  The only time my mother heard her parents discuss politics was on the subject of “what a bad person President Roosevelt was” and how organized labor was destroying America. She recalls, “The Skakels were very critical of all Democrats, but particularly Roosevelt. They thought he’d be a dictator and they were extremely anti-union.” The Skakels were comfortable with people of every station. They often reached out to individuals in need. Grandpa George opened his wallet to children with disabilities and to people suffering deprivation. My Uncle Steve Smith, husband of Jean Kennedy, was unrestrained in his admiration for Grandpa Skakel. “George Skakel was the last great industrialist who really cared about his workers. He made sure all his employees had a safe, dignified workplace and wages that would put them into the middle class. He just seemed to want to share his good fortune with all the people who worked for him.”

  Personal generosity aside, the principles of representative democracy, or the role of government in protecting the rights of the downtrodden or in fostering an equal playing field, were notions with which the Skakels were not particularly sympathetic. “None of that was ever discussed,” recalls my mother. “So it was pretty amazing to come to the Cape and listen to people who cared about the little guy. It was a big change having lunches or dinners with the [Kennedy] family. Well it was just so funny to hear Democrats lauded and admired and what a nice guy FDR was. This was different.”

  According to Skakel family legend, in September 1955, two years after my birth, Grandpa George reportedly made the momentous announcement to Father Abbott of Thomas Merton’s abbey at Gethsemani in Kentucky that he wanted to convert. It was the answer to years of beseeching, imploring, and unctuous supplications by every member of the Skakel clan, and fervent benedictions by their posse of clergy. Grandpa told Father Abbott he wanted to begin the process when he returned from a business trip to the West Coast. He and Grandma took off in a converted Air Force B26 bomber on October 3, 1955. They spent a day in Tulsa and left at 9:45 p.m. the following evening for Los Angeles. Thirty minutes into the flight, both aircraft engines exploded in mid-air. The bomber lit up the sky like a comet and plunged to the ground near Union City, Oklahoma. They were both 63 years old. Police identified Grandma’s body by the rosary wrapped around her charred hand.

  Uncle George Skakel Jr. had joined his father’s business in 1947 and two years before Grandpa’s death, he became president of Great Lakes Carbon. By then, the company had 3,000 employees and was manufacturing and selling petroleum coke; carbon and graphite products, including electrodes and fiber; charcoal briquettes; crude petroleum and natural gas filters; and building materials. Its headquarters were at 18 East 48th Street, New York.

  In the glow that followed my parents’ marriage, Uncle George, an experienced sailboat racer, once agreed to crew for Uncle Jack Kennedy, then a US senator skippering a 28-foot Wianno Senior, in a Cape Cod Regatta. George promptly discovered his discomfort at taking orders from his in-law. He abandoned the enterprise mid-race by jumping into the ocean and swimming to the distant island of Nantucket. It was a signal that George and the Skakel brothers had soured on the Kennedys. There were no more trips to the Cape.

  The Skakels supported Nixon in 1960, which stung my mother, but she bore the wound in silence and continued to love her family from a distance. During Uncle Jack’s presidential inauguration ceremonies in 1961, George Skakel, for the sake of fun and to show his contempt for the new Democratic president, distributed a pile of coveted, top-shelf family tickets that my mother had acquired for the Skakel family, to some hard-boiled hoboes from Washington’s skid row. Uncle Jack’s close friend and fellow PT boat skipper, Red Fay, found himself sitting among a dozen pickled winos in the reviewing stand. That, of course, was very funny, but the Skakel brothers became increasingly vocal about opposing my father in his political endeavors, contributing heavily to his opponents. My mother recalls that Rucky was annoyed at my father, then US Attorney General, for bringing an anti-trust suit against Rucky and his business partners when they tried to move their baseball team, the Milwaukee Braves, to Atlanta. The Skakel group eventually prevailed. My father’s unwillingness to pull strings felt like treachery to the Skakel brothers, who, in turn, contributed to my father’s opponent, Kenneth Keating, during his 1964 New York Senate race. After my father’s death, my Uncle Steve Smith, who managed my mother’s financial affairs, challenged the management of Great Lakes Carbon by the surviving Skakel brothers. Steve felt that Jimmy and Rucky weren’t sharing GLC company revenues among the non-management siblings, including my mother. For years, my mother and her sisters stood on the sidelines and watched Jimmy and Rucky deploy GLC’s fleet of company planes all over the world on golf, hunting, fishing, and ski trips that the girls suspected were only tangentially related to business. Uncle Steve hoped he could restore some financial discipline to the company that my mother’s father had built. When Uncle Steve’s efforts failed, chilly relations between the families turned frigid.

  “Let me tell you something,” says Julie Skakel. “My father drilled into our heads that we were never to mention the Kennedy name. We weren’t even allowed to call Kennedy Airport Kennedy Airport. We had to call it Idlewild.” Michael says, “As a kid, it seemed my dad was angry at your family. Remember he and all the Skakel brothers were right-wing Republicans. Dad was furious that Martin Luther King slept around and included all Democrats in his condemnation, particularly your family. He thought King was dragging the nation into an immoral pit of sexual depravity and perdition and that you guys were encouraging him.”

  Every year my mother’s brother Rucky rode in the Rancheros Visitadores, an exclusive, male-only club, on a 60-mile pack trip through the Santa Ynez Valley near Santa Barbara. Ranchero’s 600 members were California’s oil, gas, and real estate tycoons, the exclusive right-wing aristocracy of the Republican Party. It was one of the macho seasonal musters of the Bohemian Grove’s business elite. Members would bond by riding, drinking, dressing in drag or in cowboy costumes, and performing skits. Stephen Skakel showed me a framed picture from the 1967 ride. Then-Governor Ronald Reagan is handing a guffawing Uncle Rucky a mocking cartoon caricature of his brother-in-law—Robert Kennedy—with great Bugs Bunny teeth, protruding ears, and a mop of unruly hair. The Skakels were Kennedy doppelgangers: iconoclastic, irreverant, and unimpressed by the references to American royalty that sometimes attended their in-laws.

  The Skakel boys knew that all their devilments came at a price they’d sooner or later have to pay—and they did. Uncle George Skakel Jr. died in an Idaho air crash on September 24, 1966, flying into a remote wilderness airstrip near the Shepp cattle ranch in the Salmon River Valley near Riggins, Idaho. My father’s close friend Dean Markham, CIA agent Lou Werner, and two other friends died with him. They were beginning a 10-day pack trip to hunt elk in the Idaho wilderness. The plane, a single-engine Cessna 185 owned by Great Lakes Carbon, became trapped by the nearly vertical walls of Crooked Creek’s box canyon and crashed while the pilot was making a desperate, last-ditch attempt to turn. George’s friend, Francesco Galesi, who witnessed the crash, recounted to me that, as the plane headed for the wall, George waved goodbye from the co-pilot’s seat to his family and fri
ends who had arrived on earlier flights. According to Galesi, George was wearing the broad grin he reserved for moments of extreme peril. The plane nicked some pine trees, hit the palisade wall, and tumbled into the river. George was 44 years old. The crash scene was only a few miles from where my father, my siblings, and I had camped on a Salmon River whitewater trip the previous summer.

  In a New York Times obituary, conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. bemoaned his buddy George Skakel’s death, which was reported across the nation’s front pages. Buckley echoed the Skakels’ disdain for the Kennedys, explaining that George was a force in his own right and should not be memorialized for his relationship to the Kennedys. Buckley recalled Uncle George “as a young tycoon and sportsman” of “enormous competence, curiosity, charm” who was “impulsive in mischievous and irresistible ways … in the tradition of the total American man,” but with the genius for life comparable to that of Leonardo da Vinci.

  Following George’s death, his brothers Jimmy and Rucky took over management of Great Lakes Carbon. Neither of them had George’s interest in the business or his management skills. By 1985, the company was on life support and the family sold it for pennies on the dollar. With competent management, the company quickly regained its value. Ironically for me, a professional environmental advocate, Great Lakes is today one of the shining stars in the Koch Brother’s constellation of carbon companies. Bill Koch told my mother that her father’s company may be the Kochs’ most profitable acquisition.

  Funerals were about the only thing that would get my mother back to Greenwich. Eight months after George’s death, his widow, Pat Skakel, choked to death on a piece of shish kebab during a dinner party at her home in Greenwich. Their parents’ deaths left my four cousins orphaned. Pat’s New York Times obituary contained a line about my cousins that synthesized the Skakel family gestalt: “Mark, 13, is still in Greenwich Hospital, recovering from cuts and burns he suffered while experimenting with explosives.”