RFK Jr., page 20
The Kennedy family’s very sick house in Bedford suddenly became a metaphor for a host of other problems, from Kennedy and Mary’s failing marriage to Kennedy’s health struggles and his growing disenchantment with the Democratic Party leaders he had once looked up to.
Kennedy’s hero Bill Clinton, who had moved him to tears in the speech he gave at Hyannis Port just a few months before, quickly fell from Kennedy’s favor after he pardoned a host of shady businessmen and drug dealers in the final hours of his second term in office without consulting the prosecutors who had worked on their cases. Among them was Clinton’s half brother, Roger Clinton Jr., who had served time in federal prison after being convicted for drug trafficking in 1985. The fugitive financier and Democratic Party donor Marc Rich and his partner, Pincus Green, were also pardoned despite having been indicted in 1983 on fifty-one counts of tax evasion and fraud as well as running illegal oil deals with Iran during the hostage crisis in 1979–1980. They had both fled to Switzerland, although Rich’s ex-wife Denise, a songwriter and herself a major Democratic donor, maintained a palatial 12,000-square-foot penthouse in New York City. Denise had made $450,000 in donations to the William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum and $1 million to the Democratic National Committee and had given Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign more than $100,000 in the years preceding the pardon.
The “Pardongate” controversy led to a criminal investigation by the FBI and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. Mary Jo White, US attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced that she was looking into whether the Rich and Green pardons had been quid pro quos, made in exchange for cash donated to the Clintons2. A bipartisan congressional House Reform Committee probe found that the pardons of Rich and Green “sent a message that individuals can go from the FBI’s most wanted list to a presidential pardon if they spend money and have the proper connections. This message undermines U.S. efforts to apprehend fugitives abroad.” Denise Rich refused to testify when she was called before the committee, citing her Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination. The criminal probe was quietly closed in 2005 without any charges being announced, although it left a black mark on President Clinton’s legacy.
“I defended the Clintons to all comers on every issue and was never shaken,” said Kennedy, referring to Rich as “that gangster” in his diary. “But now I’m disgusted. [Clinton] really is a flawed character—dramatically and for trinkets and whatever else he got for those pardons, and I think of all the good deeds he didn’t do.”
The Rich pardon was so radioactive3 that many other Democrats sought to distance themselves from the Clintons. Andrew Cuomo, Kennedy’s brother-in-law, had been scheduled to announce his bid for governor of New York at Denise Rich’s Fifth Avenue home. His campaign scrapped the idea at the last minute and held the announcement at his brother-in-law Kenneth Cole’s clothing store in Rockefeller Center, Kennedy revealed in his diary. Cole is married to Cuomo’s sister Maria Cuomo, and Kennedy had been his guest at the Super Bowl along with Macy’s CEO Terry Lundgren in Tampa just the day before. Not a die-hard football fan like many of his forebears, including his mother, Ethel, Kennedy had contemplated selling his ticket to the event outside the Raymond James Stadium when he was approached by ardent football fans offering him thousands of dollars, he wrote. “I thought of it4, but obviously it couldn’t be done.” He sat beside New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, “who I like despite his violent and forbidding character and his narrow eyes.”
Following Kennedy’s trip to the Super Bowl, he “blew off” his brother-in-law’s historic announcement to stay home with his youngest children and read Roald Dahl’s The Twits, which he was enjoying with Conor. Instead, Mary went to the event with her neighbor and best friend, Kerry Kennedy, and Cuomo himself. Except for a few select journalists, the gathering—a major news event announcing a gubernatorial run—was by invitation only for the 250 guests who attended and closed to most media. Andrea Bernstein, a reporter for the New York Observer and WNYC radio, was initially barred from entering and was escorted by black-suited security guards to the back of the store, where she was eventually allowed to listen to Andrew Cuomo’s speech.
“Upstairs, shoved between racks of micro-mini shorts5 and the spring camisole line, was a lovefest for Mr. Cuomo,” noted her report in the Observer. In addition to Mary, guests included Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign manager, Bill de Blasio, who would go on to be mayor of New York City, as well as Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg; Cuomo’s father, former Governor Mario Cuomo; and Martin Luther King III, who headed up the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and had come to New York City all the way from Atlanta to introduce Cuomo at his historic announcement. “My plan is, my intention is, I’m going to run for governor,” he declared as waiters weaved among the racks of clothes, bearing trays of champagne and hors d’oeuvres of lobster on toast, foie gras, and shrimp. “I’m going to have a formal announcement later on. The race is in 2002—just about two years. I wanted to be clear that that’s what I’m planning to do, and I don’t want undue speculation.’’
The announcement foreshadowed what would turn into a highly competitive Democratic Party primary including New York State Comptroller H. Carl McCall, who was seeking to become the first Black governor of the state and was scheduled to formally announce his own intention to run for governor later that week. Kennedy, who had previously confessed to his diary that his brother-in-law “lacks humanity and doesn’t love people,” had little faith that he could win the primary. Cuomo eventually withdrew from the race less than a week before the Democratic primary, when McCall’s lead was in the double digits.
While Kennedy blew off his own brother-in-law and the New York Democratic establishment, he was curious about the new Republican administration in Washington, mulling over a dinner invitation to the White House from President Bush to watch the film Thirteen Days, a dramatization of the Cuban Missile Crisis featuring Bruce Greenwood as President Kennedy and Steven Culp as Kennedy’s father. He discussed whether he should accept the invitation, which included dinner with the Bush family with the comedian Al Franken, “a truly great and smart man,” whom he saw at his local gym. Franken would later become a US senator representing Minnesota. “It’s being billed as a brilliant political move6 by Bush to show he can get along with Democrats,” Kennedy wrote, although he did not record in his diary whether or not he and Mary had accepted the White House invitation.
The year started on a somber note7 with yet another funeral—this one in Birmingham, Alabama, after the sudden death of Kennedy’s friend David Whiteside Jr., a lawyer and nephew of Judge Frank Johnson, who had died in 1999. Kennedy had kept close to the Johnson family since his time with Peter Kaplan in Alabama in the mid-1970s. During his work on Ted Kennedy’s 1980 presidential campaign in the state, he had spent six months living with Whiteside and his family. He had even been at the hospital when Whiteside’s son, David Whiteside III, had been born in 1979 and had became his godfather. David III would later follow in his godfather’s footsteps, breaking ground in the environmental movement, founding Black Warrior Riverkeeper in Birmingham several months after his father’s death. Whiteside, fifty-one, was killed in a car crash on a rain-slicked road as he returned from a deposition. He was on his cell phone with his wife, Roseanna, during the accident. She told Kennedy that she had been horrified when the phone had gone dead. She had tried calling her husband back for twenty minutes but realized he was dead when he had failed to pick up. According to Kennedy, it took her five hours to find him. After he got the call from his godson, Kennedy rushed to Birmingham and prepared to deliver a graveside eulogy for his friend. “He had the most selfless sense of justice, but he was never self-righteous and never angry or bitter or mean,” he wrote, adding that “God was with me so I spoke well. . . . I am godfather to David and I will do my best to give him the kind of . . . love that I know he needed from his father.”
In addition to Whiteside’s funeral, Kennedy also rushed to the side of his University of Virginia Law School colleague and Rhode Island attorney general, Sheldon Whitehouse, when his father died in June. Charles Whitehouse had been ambassador to Laos and Thailand in the 1970s as well as a CIA official and decorated marine dive-bomber pilot who had served in the Pacific theater during the Second World War and later during the Vietnam War. In 1966, the tall, elegant Whitehouse had been named one of the “Ten Most Attractive Men in Washington” by The Washington Post.
“Sheldon delivered a fantastic eulogy8 with cold steel and elegance,” noted Kennedy, adding that a military guard had escorted the casket and Whitehouse’s fellow members of the Orange County Hounds, a prestigious equestrian association and hunt club, had blown their horns. “The Plains church was overflowing with Old Guard Republican WASPs who are all fleeing the Republican Party. This is the noblesse oblige guard.”
Members of Kennedy’s more immediate family also needed his attention. His cousin Michael Skakel visited him in Bedford while he was preparing for his upcoming murder trial in Connecticut. “I told him I’d never done9 anything except my best to help him—which is true,” wrote Kennedy, who had insisted on doing the “perp walk” with his cousin when Skakel had been arraigned on the murder charges the previous year. “I loved him and forgave him, but that I would have a hard time trusting him. He walked away from a 16-year friendship without explanation and spread lies about me and my family.”
Nevertheless, Kennedy forgave Skakel during their meeting, and they hugged when he left, Kennedy wrote. After Skakel was convicted of the murder of Martha Moxley in 2002, Kennedy launched a campaign to prove his innocence, beginning with a long article that appeared in The Atlantic a year later, which began “The tragedy of Martha Moxley’s death10, twenty-seven years ago, has been compounded by the conviction of an innocent man.”
Kennedy went on to relate how his cousin had helped him get sober in 1983 and, largely because of what he believed to be his good character, couldn’t possibly have killed Moxley when he was a teenager. Skakel was being targeted only because he was a member of the Kennedy clan, he later said in a book he wrote about his cousin. “We attended hundreds of alcoholism-recovery meetings together,” he wrote. “In that context and others we have shared our deepest feelings. For fifteen years we skied, fished, hiked, and traveled together, often with my wife and children. During that time I sometimes spent as many as two or three weekends a month in his company. Like nearly everyone else who knows him well, I love Michael. If he were guilty, I would have testified against him. He is not.”
***
Like the creeping mold, Kennedy’s health problems, some of them diagnosed when he was in college, set off alarm bells while he was traveling the country at his usual frenetic pace, giving speeches and meeting donors in 2001. Just before a speech in Seattle in May, his heart went into atrial fibrillation and began to beat furiously. He was so worried about the onset of the heartbeat abnormality, which could lead to a stroke or heart failure, that he asked a woman who had attended the lecture to take him to the nearest hospital. It turned out to be a false alarm, but he spent the night under medical observation. Two days later, he reported waking up with hallucinations from a migraine and “wondered if my life is a little too stressed!”
He had begun having difficulties11 with his heart in his early twenties. “It came up in college,” he said in a deposition. “It feels like there’s a bag of worms in my chest. I can feel immediately when it goes out.” He added that he had to avoid caffeine and stress and that the condition had resulted in the loss of his short-term memory.
He had also been diagnosed12 with hemochromatosis, a genetic disorder that causes excessive iron absorption in the body and can lead to damage of organs such as the liver and heart. “It may account for my heart problems; my heart feels like a gerbil cage several hours a day these days, and the Captain Winky problems that began five years ago when my Hepatitis C was first discovered due to blood tests in which I took for the Captain, in which high iron levels were also noted,” he wrote in his diary. “Anyway, the doctor urged immediate treatment which is blood removal—the old religious medieval practice of bleeding. Mary says I’ve entered the ranks of rock stars.”
Then his voice started to falter. “My voice is gone13,” he wrote in his diary on May 20, 2001. “I can speak five minutes and it disappears completely.” He was diagnosed with spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological disorder that causes involuntary spasms in the muscles of the larynx. Later, he would claim that the disorder had resulted from a flu vaccine, but his sister Kerry also suffers from the same malady, for which there is no known cure. When he was first diagnosed with the condition, a doctor treated him with botox shots in his vocal chords. But the injections made his voice sound “like I’d sucked down a helium balloon. I am breathless—I can’t swallow,” he wrote. “I choke and I can’t talk. So far, the care is worse than the disease.” The doctor had told him that the condition would last another ten days but could stretch out for four months. In the end, he would be plagued with the condition for years to come. “I’m embracing my fate,” he wrote, adding that perhaps God didn’t want him to speak and instead spend more time with his children and doing more productive things, such as learning management techniques.
Still, he continued to work in his legal clinic at Pace and entertain new and old celebrity friends. On the evening of May 21, he and Mary hosted the economist Jeffrey Sachs and Leonardo DiCaprio for dinner at their home. DiCaprio played with the children and Kennedy’s pet raven and was a good sport when Finn, fascinated by the actor’s ponytail, asked him if he was a girl. “Leo was very sweet and cautiously explained,” he wrote. Later, DiCaprio asked him for advice on environmental issues while Kennedy drove him back to Manhattan. “He wants to spend his life and resources on a clean environment,” Kennedy wrote. “I told him to . . . pick one area where he could develop an expertise and speak with authority.” DiCaprio had already established an eponymous foundation in 1998 to give out grants to environmental causes for everything from preserving oceans and wetlands to raising awareness of climate change.
After he dropped off DiCaprio in the city, Kennedy was off to a late meeting with a law firm at the Trump Hotel to discuss upcoming litigation. “Got mugged on the way home,” he wrote, using his code word for seduction. “I’ve got to do better,” underlining the verb for emphasis.
***
Kennedy’s disenchantment with high-ranking Democrats continued before and during his incarceration in Puerto Rico over the Vieques trespassing charges as he tried to mobilize lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to help end the bombings on the island. When he failed to secure assistance14 from outgoing members of the Clinton administration, Hillary Clinton helped set up a call with Donald Rumsfeld, the newly installed secretary of defense. “I got a returned phone call from Donald Rumsfeld,” he wrote on January 16, 2001. “Hillary [Clinton] told me to call him. He was very jolly and told me a lot about his mother and how much he loves her, and how ‘tickled’ she was over his appointment. I gave my rap on Vieques.”
Perhaps the call to Rumsfeld did some good. The timing may have been right, for in conjunction with the protests on the island, some Republican lawmakers were also getting in on the act and beginning to lobby the federal government to end the navy’s bombing on Vieques, which, analysts said, was costing President George W. Bush critical support among Hispanic voters, many of whom were against the bombings. In the spring of 2001, New York Republican Governor George Pataki demanded an end to the bombings during a visit to Puerto Rico. He followed up with a visit to the Bush White House in June. “My goal is not to have it stopped15 two years from now,” he told reporters at a news conference in New York. “My goal is to have it stopped now.” Pataki, who planned to seek another term in 2002, knew that he needed the support of Hispanic New Yorkers, most of whom opposed the Vieques bombings.
Bush’s plan, which was announced ahead of a referendum on the bombings in Puerto Rico, called for ending all military exercises on Vieques by May 2003. Like Pataki, supporters of ending the bombings wanted an immediate halt to the military exercises, while opponents in the military felt the plan was wrongheaded and would jeopardize US military preparedness. In the end, the military had a partial victory as the terrorist attacks on September 11 pushed the United States onto a war footing and postponed the end of the Vieques bombings yet again. The US Navy finally ended the bombing runs on the island in May 2003 and later turned the practice range into a nature reserve.
After his release from prison in Puerto Rico, Kennedy dived into the last month of summer on Cape Cod, packing in boat races, games of capture the flag, fishing, and waterskiing at the family compound in Hyannis Port with his children and most of the Kennedy clan. Despite the skin condition that had erupted while he was in prison, he was thrilled to be home. “My face looks like a teenager’s16 with a very bad acne case now,” he wrote. “I’m invisible to women, which is a good thing.”
In August, he went on a lavish excursion with his Hollywood pals Larry and Laurie David on the billionaire philanthropist Theodore Forstmann’s 140-foot yacht. Kennedy noted in his diary that the Hollywood power couple was nervous about being on “any kind of boat” and that Larry David’s parents would never have boarded any kind of yacht. David’s father’s family were Jewish immigrants who had settled in the United States in the nineteenth century, while his mother’s family were Polish Jews from what is now Ukraine.
“Our family is exactly the opposite of yours17,” Larry David told Kennedy on the lunchtime cruise, which also included Arianna Huffington and other celebrities. “The Davids are antithetical to the Kennedys. With the exception of politics, we have nothing in common. We are appalled by the things you do, the way you people live your lives.” He wrote in Forstmann’s guest book, “People and boats, what a terrible combination.” Kennedy recorded David’s comments on August 10, 2001.
