RFK Jr., page 16
It’s not clear when Mary became aware that Kennedy was a serial cheater, but she clearly resented his behavior even as she was determined to be a good Kennedy wife. There was nothing she wanted more than to be part of the storied clan and spend summers at their compound in Hyannis Port, according to her friends. “She was just 200 percent invested19 in being his wife and his helpmate and living the Kennedy lifestyle,” said a source who had treated Mary for depression during her marriage to Kennedy. “She was sick about his cheating, and she felt Bobby was a real star fucker. Mary was a bit of one as well, but she looked down on that aspect of Bobby’s character, but was also jealous when she was no longer part of it.”
Another source who was close to Mary agreed. “She loved being a Kennedy, and the notion that she would stop being a Kennedy20 was scary to her,” they said.
The couple were invited to film premieres and celebrity parties, and in 1999 Kennedy’s diary included a loose ticket to the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute Benefit, an annual fundraiser organized by Vogue magazine’s legendary editor Anna Wintour. But Mary, who had spent much of her twenties hanging out at Andy Warhol’s Factory and partying with artists and celebrities at Xenon and Studio 54, was now largely stuck at home, without her architecture job, attending yoga classes in suburban Westchester and coordinating her children’s schedules and dealing with their illnesses.
In 1999, their youngest child, Finn, was diagnosed with asthma. “Finny still has bad asthma,” wrote the worried Kennedy on May 20, 1999. “Ten days on steroids. Conor used to improve instantly. Finny is sick all the time. He must be allergic to something in the house. We need to move.”
As a result of Finn’s health struggles, Mary insisted upon keeping him back from what she considered strenuous sporting outings with his older brothers and sisters. She soon became a volunteer for the Food Allergy Initiative (now known as Food Allergy Research & Education), a nonprofit that helps sponsor research and legislation for those suffering from severe allergies. Mary worked to help the group organize its annual fundraising event, the Food Allergy Ball. Despite her work for the group, it was her husband who occupied a place on the nonprofit’s board of directors.
Kennedy returned to Hawaii later that year for a series of speeches at Honolulu City Hall, this time with his sister Kerry. The entire family took advantage of the paid vacation. Kennedy took along Mary and their children, as well as Bobby and Kick. “Kerry and I did three swell speeches and a press conference at city hall,” he reported on June 21. The occasion was the inaugural Asia-Pacific Environmental Summit, which brought together four hundred environmental leaders from around the world. Kennedy and his younger sister also spoke at a gala dinner hosted by Honolulu Mayor Jeremy Harris. John Wilbur, the former football player, attended all of their events and left the dinner “with a couple of girls” to head to a hot tub, Kennedy reported.
In between snorkeling with Prince Alfred of Liechtenstein and his wife, who were in Hawaii for the conference, Kennedy spent much of that long weekend playing with his children. He took Conor, then almost five years old, diving off Makena Beach in Maui, where they came face to face with a nearly seven-foot-long shark. “Conor saw him the same time I did21 and froze,” wrote Kennedy. “The shark passed under us as Conor scrambled onto my back. It was a great experience.”
At one point, he set off with his children and Kerry’s three daughters on a lizard hunting expedition, returning with six green snakes in a pillowcase. He was thrilled about Finn’s fearlessness in the water. Five months shy of his second birthday, Finn “sinks and rises and can usually get one breath in before you have to rescue him.” He also noted that he was proud of Conor’s ability to handle a boogie board and that Bobby would soon get his diving certification. He noted that Kyra, then almost four years old, was still afraid to swim.
But the marital problems persisted. “Mary is being impossible22,” he wrote on June 25. “She refuses to do anything fun with me, like snorkeling or surfing and is resentful after I do it by myself. She . . . simmers with anger . . . using any opportunity to erupt and constantly assigning me make-work projects which is her way of venting her anger.”
***
Kennedy might have been forging a career as an environmentalist, but to Democratic politicians running for office, his value lay in his last name. When Hillary Clinton took the first step toward her run for the Senate in the summer of 1999, her exploratory campaign called upon Kennedy for help. Clinton, the first first lady to run for political office, asked Kennedy and other supporters to write an opinion piece for The New York Times endorsing her campaign. Kennedy wrote it while in hospital undergoing a liver biopsy, he noted on July 9. “Demerol refused23. It was nothing.”
Like Kennedy’s father years before, Clinton was accused of being a carpetbagger—a political opportunist—when she ran for the seat left vacant after Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s retirement. The epithet was a favorite talking point of her opponent, Rick Lazio, a Republican congressman from Long Island. Clinton had moved to New York in January to establish residency for her Senate run while Bill Clinton remained in the White House to serve out the rest of his second term.
“The passions against my father were equal24 to or exceeded what I have seen,” read Kennedy’s opinion piece in the newspaper. He noted in his diary that he was proud that the editor at the Times had praised his piece, calling it “beautifully written” and much better than those by the other writers whom Clinton had called upon to back her campaign. “This is the question that was asked about my father,” continued Kennedy, who had been ten years old when Robert Kennedy had run for senator from New York in 1964. “Is somebody who is not born in this state capable of putting in or offering leadership to this state? And my answer to that is resoundingly, yes, they are. New Yorkers come from everywhere. We have the most cosmopolitan community in North America and maybe one of the most cosmopolitan in the world.” Kennedy criticized Lazio for not being tough enough on polluters. “You can’t point—and Rick Lazio can’t point—to a single instance in which he has ever demonstrated environmental leadership on any environmental issue.”
Clinton’s Senate run promised to be a Kennedy family affair. Shortly after announcing her intentions, Kennedy noted that President Clinton was with his sister Kerry and brother-in-law Andrew Cuomo in Pound Ridge, New York, and that his youngest sister, Rory, was “starting a film on Hillary which everyone envied.”
It was already turning out to be a big year for thirty-year-old Rory. Her first documentary feature film, American Hollow, had its premiere in May at Manhattan’s Film Forum and would be shown on HBO later in the year. She had taken inspiration from her father’s visit to Appalachia in February 1968, before he had announced his run for the presidency. On a visit to a one-room schoolhouse in Barwick, a hardscrabble coal town in eastern Kentucky, the children had been so traumatized by his entrance, followed by an entourage of aides and journalists, that they had hidden their heads on their desks. Instead of making a speech to the press, Kennedy had gone from child to child asking what they had eaten that day and reassuring them that everything would be fine.
Rory followed in her father’s footsteps to eastern Kentucky, where she focused on the extended Bowling family. She practically moved into their modest home in Mudlick Hollow over the course of a year to get close to them. In interviews to promote the movie, she spoke about how she had seen many similarities between the dirt-poor clan and her own family. “It’s a way to access a culture25 that otherwise feels different and feels ‘other,’” she said. “Then you identify and you think, ‘Wow, I’ve been through those—everybody I know has gone through those—exact same emotions, the exact same things. They’re just like you and me.’”
Like the Kennedys, the Bowlings go to church and organize Easter egg hunts and family picnics. The family’s matriarch is the mother of thirteen and has thirty grandchildren, and the film hints at the family’s problems with drug abuse, depression, and domestic violence. New York Times film critic Stephen Holden called it a “fine” film and said that it “does a good job of showing us26 how difficult it is for the poor to transcend their backgrounds and move up the social ladder.”
For the Kennedys, the links to the past27 and the assassinations seemed to follow them everywhere, even decades later. In May 1999, Kennedy family spokeswoman Melody Miller called Kennedy to let him know that the National Archives was poised to release documents regarding John F. Kennedy’s original casket. Following his autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland in November 1963, the four-hundred-pound bronze casket that had carried his remains from Dallas to Washington had been so bloodied that it was unusable for any public viewing of the body and had been stored in the basement at the National Archives. Vernon B. O’Neal of O’Neal’s Funeral Home in Dallas wanted it returned to him, largely because he had received offers to sell the casket for more than $100,000 (more than $1 million today). “When Daddy heard that the funeral home in Dallas wanted it back for macabre display, he asked [Nick] Katzenbach for a legal memo which determined the family ownership,” wrote Kennedy, referring to his father’s deputy attorney general in the Kennedy administration.
“I think it belongs to the family [and] we can get rid of it any way we want to,” Robert Kennedy told Lawson Knott Jr., the director of the General Services Administration, according to one of the memos released by the National Archives of their telephone conversation in 1966. “What I would like to have done is take it to sea. I don’t think anybody will be upset about the fact that we disposed of it.”
Robert Kennedy sought the advice of the Department of Defense over the best way to drop the casket at sea. The heavy casket was filled with 240 pounds of sandbags and drilled with holes before it was dropped by a military airplane near the Outer Banks off the coast of North Carolina. In his diary, Kennedy made a note not to forget to mention the imminent declassification of the documents to his mother. The documents were made public a couple of weeks later.
***
“This has been a difficult year for our family28 and everyone is feeling so stressed and angry,” wrote Kennedy on Thursday, July 15, the day he drove to Hyannis Port for Rory’s wedding. He took along thirty cases of his new water, Keeper Springs, for taste testing during the wedding. Little did he know that within a matter of hours, the year was about to get even more difficult.
Among those feeling particularly stressed were John F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife of three years, Carolyn Bessette. Although John Jr.’s mother, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, had died in May 1994, he and his sister, Caroline, were still fighting about her estate, specifically the furniture at Red Gate Farm. John Jr. had purchased his sister’s half of the Martha’s Vineyard estate, which took up 340 acres and had more than a mile of beachfront. Jackie had left all her assets, including her New York City apartment and two homes in Martha’s Vineyard, to her children. “John confided in me how hurt he was by Caroline’s actions,” wrote Kennedy in his diary. “It’s like a divorce.”
John Jr., who had been dubbed the “sexiest man alive” by People magazine in 1988, was also stung by criticisms leveled against him by his uncle Ted Kennedy, who hammered him for seating Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt at his table during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. “John was hurt by that because his family is important,” wrote Kennedy. The staff of George, the glossy magazine he had founded with a partner in 1995, had reserved six tables, according to Kennedy. At the May dinner, Flynt had sat in his trademark gold wheelchair, wearing a green satin dinner jacket. John Jr. had invited the actors Sean Penn and Claire Danes to the dinner as his guests. “This event, and the culture29 of our magazine, is about melding extremes,” said John Jr. at the event.
Caroline Kennedy’s husband, Edwin Schlossberg, was horrified and wrote his brother-in-law “a long disappointed letter,” wrote Kennedy, who noted that John Jr. was also dealing with the news that “his best friend” and cousin Anthony Radziwill was dying of cancer. In September 1996, Radziwill, the son of Jackie’s sister, Caroline Lee Bouvier Radziwill, had been best man at John Jr.’s wedding on Cumberland Island in Georgia.
On top of the infighting with his closest family, John Jr. was having serious financial troubles at George, billed as a “fun” read about the intersection of politics and popular culture. The inaugural issue had been unveiled in the fall of 1995 with great fanfare at Manhattan’s Federal Hall, where George Washington had taken his presidential oath of office. The first issue’s cover had featured a photo of supermodel Cindy Crawford as a sexy powdered-wigged George Washington, with exposed midriff and pancake makeup. Another cover had featured Barbra Streisand as Betsy Ross. Unlike other start-ups, the magazine had seemed to do well with its first two issues and was later backed by David Pecker, then the CEO of Hachette Filipacchi Media. But by the time Pecker had left the company in 1998, George had been pretty much in free fall. The new Hachette CEO, Jack Kliger, had told John Jr. in June 1999 that the company was going to pull the plug on the magazine. A month before Rory’s wedding, John Jr. had been prepared to put his own money behind the failing magazine and take the whole venture digital. “He has trouble refinancing30 and whenever he asks for money it gets in the press with predictions he’s failing and advertisers all get jumpy,” wrote Kennedy, noting that the circulation was 400,000—half that of Newsweek—and was widely circulated at every airport and newsstand in America. “But they still predict his demise.”
Kennedy and Mary planned to seek out the young couple during the weekend festivities in Hyannis Port. “Mary and I resolved31 we will go see them this weekend and spend a lot of time with them,” wrote Kennedy. Mary had visited them in Manhattan a week earlier and reported that Carolyn had told her that her husband was “so depressed.”
The couple stopped by John Jr.’s house in Hyannis Port shortly before Rory’s rehearsal dinner at 6:00 p.m. the following day, but the couple had not shown up yet. John Jr., Carolyn, and Carolyn’s sister Lauren Bessette were scheduled to arrive on the small plane piloted by John Jr.
“We had the most wonderful rehearsal dinner,” Kennedy wrote on July 16. “Everyone made loving toasts. Kerry recited a clever, clever poem.” Family members sang an ode to Rory and her fiancé to the tune of “Angel from Montgomery.” “Mark and Rory were so happy and I’ve never met two people who inspire so much love and good will. Everyone is crazy about them,” he wrote.
After dinner, the couple returned to John Jr.’s home, but they still hadn’t arrived. John Jr. was flying his Piper PA-32R-301 Saratoga II HP, a small plane he’d bought just three months before. Although he had been taking flying lessons since the early 1980s, he lacked experience flying at night, using only the plane’s instruments to guide him. He had started training for his private pilot’s license in 1997 and passed the exam in April 1998 but had logged only a handful of hours of nighttime flying. Nevertheless, he took off with his wife and her sister, Lauren, from Essex County Airport in Caldwell, New Jersey, at 8:38 p.m. for Martha’s Vineyard Airport. There was little cloud cover that night, but a summer haze reduced visibility over Long Island Sound, according to reports. “Other pilots flying similar routes32 on the night of the accident reported no visual horizon while flying over the water because of haze,” according to the National Transportation Safety Board.
Kennedy and his wife returned to John’s house at 10:00 and 11:30 that night, Kennedy wrote. John Jr.’s friend Pinky and the housekeeper were at the house, and they were expecting to eat dinner when John and Carolyn arrived. “I wasn’t worried at all because anything can happen with John,” wrote Kennedy. But Pinky was worried enough to call Carole Radziwill, Anthony’s wife, who called the Coast Guard. Kennedy had wanted to send someone over to John’s apartment in Manhattan to check if he was still there.
But at 3:00 a.m., Kennedy was awakened by his sister Kerry, who said that their cousin’s plane was missing. “I knew then that John was dead,” he wrote. “I looked out the window of Carolyn’s house from which I could see the lights on in John’s front porch and I felt empty, sad.” Then he wrote a half-remembered quote from King Lear: “We are to the Gods as flies to wanton boys,” he wrote, mangling the line spoken by Gloucester. “They kill us for their sport.”
In the morning, Ted Kennedy assembled his public relations team and announced to the Associated Press that Rory’s wedding had been postponed. The large white tent that had been erected for the festivities had just been completed and the caterers were standing around in shock, Kennedy wrote. Hundreds of reporters began to pull up outside the gates of the compound, and satellite trucks began to set up for live broadcasts. Kennedy noted that the water was 68 degrees F., and some of the family members had hope that they might still be alive. “But I had none,” he wrote.
That afternoon, emergency teams found the nose of John’s plane near Gay Head. The priests who had been set to preside at Rory’s wedding instead said a Mass for the plane’s tragic passengers in the morning and again at 6:00 p.m. In the evening, the cousins gathered for dinner at Ethel’s house to eat Rory’s wedding dinner. Kennedy spent most of his time in a nearby carriage house watching the news, which “was all about John.” He was also on the phone with Carole and Anthony Radziwill as well as John Jr.’s secretary, RoseMarie Terenzio, who was at the couple’s home in Manhattan.
