RFK Jr., page 21
In addition to the David couple, Kennedy hosted Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, who had a home on the cape nearby. Other boldface names sought his counsel. Alec Baldwin called Kennedy to talk about his impending divorce from Kim Basinger and his concerns about their daughter, Ireland, who was then five years old. “He is directing his first movie when she presented him with divorce papers . . . and moved to LA, a town he hates,” Kennedy wrote of Baldwin.
At his aunt Eunice Kennedy Shriver’s eightieth birthday celebration on July 10, he gave an impromptu toast, and spent most of his time speaking to his cousin Maria Shriver and her husband, Arnold Schwarzenegger, about marriage and divorce as well as health and wealth, he noted in his diary. The family had much to celebrate after Eunice’s near-death experience at Johns Hopkins Hospital the previous year. Following the party, Kennedy seemed to gain a new appreciation of his mother, noting in his diary that “it occurred to me that I’ve never heard my mother use a curse or say a bad word. That’s something!”
There were also meetings with his uncle Ted Kennedy in Hyannis Port over their fight against the Bush administration’s plans to drill for oil in the Arctic. “Met with Teddy after church and meeting on ANWR,” he wrote, referring to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a 19.6-million-acre protected area in Alaska. “Been trying to hold together the labor/enviro coalition. John Podesta [former chief of staff to President Clinton] told me the Teamsters endorsed ANWR drilling in exchange for White House calling off the investigation. Bush fired Mary Jo White a day after the ANWR vote.”
In August, Congress backed the drilling plan, which had been a central issue in Bush’s 2000 election campaign. Teamsters president James P. Hoffa, the son of the legendary former labor leader who had disappeared in 1975, backed the drilling plan, saying it would create tens of thousands of jobs for union members. At the time, Hoffa was lobbying to end the union’s federal monitor. The union had been under federal oversight by the Southern District of New York since 1989 in order to eliminate mob influence. At the same time, US Attorney White had been investigating a fundraising scandal related to the union’s former president Ron Carey’s 1996 reelection campaign. Carey was indicted in January 2001 for perjury and providing false statements to a grand jury investigating his reelection campaign. The monitor invalidated his narrow victory, ordering a new election, which Hoffa won. Following the vote, Hoffa intensified the union’s campaign to end the monitoring, saying that the union had gone a long way toward cleaning up corruption and ending mob influence. After their support for drilling in Alaska, Bush suddenly came out in public support of Hoffa. “He’s running a good union18,” he said in a Labor Day 2001 speech at a Teamsters picnic in Detroit. “And in an aboveboard manner, in an aboveboard way. And make no mistake about it, people are beginning to notice, particularly in Washington, D.C.”
While Bush may not have entirely called off White’s investigation of the Teamsters, as Kennedy described in his diary, he was seemingly open to supporting an end to the federal oversight of the union after it backed him on the Alaska drilling initiative. In the end, the Senate did not vote to approve the ANWR drilling.
While Kennedy spent the rest of that summer working on environmental issues at Pace University and Riverkeeper, he drove back and forth to Hyannis Port to be with his extended family and his friends, among them the actor Glenn Close. He was relieved to be home after his time in prison and gushed in the pages of his diary about how wonderful his family was. “I’ve got the best family ever19! They love each other and love their lives and love the adventure. God bless us!” The pages of his diary are crammed with descriptions of clamming and fishing for bluefish as well as waterskiing and boating with the children, as well as fossil-hunting excursions in the Catskills and numerous games of capture the flag. “Kyra insisted that she be in Kick’s film20,” he wrote on Saturday, August 11, describing a video that his eldest daughter, Kick, was making. “‘You must put me in it,’” she said. “‘I’m a drama queen. Dad said so.’”
Kyra, who was six years old21 at the time, was “inseparable” from her great-uncle Teddy. “He is charmed by any pretty face and she is absolutely in love with him and she’s with him on his boat every day,” wrote Kennedy. Earlier, while still in prison22, he had written after the birth of his youngest child, Aidan, that he “couldn’t be happier with the life and wife God has given me.”
***
But as the summer wound down, so, too, did the twentieth century, at least in Kennedy’s telling of the events on September 11, 2001. He was at a meeting with John Sweeney, the director of the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations in Washington, DC, when terrorists flew two planes into the World Trade Center and attacked the Pentagon. “Armageddon!!” he wrote. “Today, the 20th century ended.”
The meeting, which also included John Podesta and John Adams, a cofounder and the founding director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, ended abruptly when Sweeney said the World Trade Center had been attacked. Looking out of the window of the AFL-CIO headquarters, “I saw crews bringing stinger missiles to the roof of the White House and then there was an explosion as another plane hit the Pentagon,” Kennedy wrote. “We watched the smoke billow out.”
Kennedy and Adams walked across a “paralyzed” DC as all buildings were being evacuated. They managed to share a rental car with a Department of Justice attorney who happened to be one of their opponents in a legal case and drove to New York through the Delaware Water Gap because every other route was closed. The drive took nine hours, enough time for Kennedy to reflect on how much the world had changed since the previous day, when he had gone to Manhattan to make a speech and “do TV stuff” before attending the Marc Jacobs show at Pier 54. The Fashion Week event was also a promotion for Riverkeeper, and Kennedy had taken his friend Peter Kaplan to the party in order to personally thank the rock star Deborah Harry for pledging $10,000 to his nonprofit. Kennedy had been shocked by the excesses of the Fashion Week party with “thousands of beautiful . . . bodies” crowding the venue at Pier 54. He described the party scene as “the excess of the age and the flesh and the money,” like something out of Sodom and Gomorrah, the biblical cites that were centers of sin and depravity. The events also reminded him of the chaotic Russian roulette scene in The Deer Hunter in which American prisoners of war, surrounded by their Vietnamese captors, are forced to play the deadly game of pointing a loaded pistol at their head and pulling the trigger. As he turned to leave, “Donald Trump leapt up to hug me,” he wrote, adding that Kaplan had introduced him to Tina Brown, then the editor in chief of Talk magazine, who had once commissioned a hit piece on him. Kennedy said that he had greeted the editor politely. “Peter was delighted,” he wrote. “She is scared of him because her advertisers read his paper and he keeps saying she is failing.” The magazine, which was bankrolled by producer Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax as well as the Hearst Corporation, ceased publication just a few months later, in February 2002.
Kennedy continued to chronicle the effects of the 9/11 attacks in his diary. “Today the city is covered in ashes,” he wrote, describing how his younger brother Max had driven all night from Boston to deliver film cameras that could spot bodies through rubble. “He spent the day at the World Trade Center with the police and fire squads.” He added that another brother, Douglas, had moved into his and Mary’s Bedford home after his Lower Manhattan apartment building had been evacuated.
The World Trade Center deaths hit close to home for Kennedy and his family. George Morell, a bond broker with Cantor Fitzgerald, had died in the attacks. The father of four had been on the 105th floor of the World Trade Center when one of the planes had hit. He had been on the phone with his wife at the time. He had told her he loved her and yelled at someone not to open a window. Then the phone went dead, Kennedy wrote. A few days later, he went to Morrell’s memorial service. “The church was overflowing,” he wrote. “Like Christmas.” He took one of Morell’s children to hunt for fossils near his home in Westchester County with his own kids and their Kennedy and Cuomo cousins.
If Kennedy had had any respect for President Bush, it disappeared on 9/11. He was disappointed that Bush had been evacuated to Nebraska, leaving Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in the White House. “Our president fled to Nebraska23 and mumbled embarrassing platitudes read from cue cards about war,” he wrote. “Our president is an idiot and a puppet and it’s painful watching him on TV.” Later, when Bush announced plans to attack Afghanistan, Kennedy wrote that he was promising revenge and a crusade against Osama bin Laden. “He will get Bin Laden ‘dead or alive.’ He will drop million dollar bombs on $10 homes in Kabul and bomb back to the dirt age a nation that has already been bombed back to the stone age. He is such an utter simpleton. It’s agonizing having him as our leader and I know the forces of darkness in his administration will turn this national tragedy to their advantage, using it to enrich their friends in the military production industries, jump start the Cold War, drill in the Arctic and blame the economic woes covered by their tax cuts for the rich on the Taliban.”
Still, for Kennedy, some positive things came out of the attacks. “The raw number of dead here alone are [sic] not impressive,” he wrote on September 23 after attending the funeral of the New York real estate developer Lewis Rudin along with Bill and Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, and others. “The effect comes from the fact that they were our friends; the towers were an important symbol. Perhaps this will give us some empathy for the suffering of others around the globe. It has brought us together as a nation and as a community in ways unimaginable a month ago, and God has blessed us with an enemy who is truly evil. Here is a gift, an opportunity to do better with someone truly bad and to solve a problem for this generation that affects the entire world. My original fears that we would bomb civilians in Kabul and make ourselves as bad as them seem to have been averted by Bush’s speech last night. Our response will be more measured and probably appropriate, I pray.”
The next day, after his class at Pace and a surprise birthday party for Riverkeeper board member Ann Colley, he headed to Ground Zero to pass out McDonald’s hamburgers and Chicken McNuggets to the firemen who were digging through rubble, with one of his colleagues quipping, “Haven’t they suffered enough?”
With many planes still grounded throughout the country, Kennedy drove with his assistant Mary Beth Postman to North Carolina for a Riverkeeper event several days after the terrorist strikes. “People talk of nothing but the bombing,” he wrote on September 20. They drove back by way of Hickory Hill. The next day at the gym in nearby Tysons Corner, “my heart went into palpitations.” But rather than seeking treatment in Washington, where he feared media exposure, he drove back to New York City, where he was scheduled to make a speech at an event in Central Park. It was only after the speech that he drove to Westchester and checked himself into a hospital, where his doctor was waiting for him. “Got EKG’d,” he wrote, adding that he had also been given a shot of blood thinner and another drug that, he noted, had a chance of sending him into heart failure. Doctors, he noted, don’t normally prescribe the treatment, but his doctor “knows I won’t tell on him.” He reported that he had returned home at 4:00 a.m.
***
Kennedy’s personal life continued to be chaotic. By the end of 2001, he had recorded trysts with thirty-seven women, sixteen of whom had received a 10 next to their names in the ledger at the back of his diary, which Mary believed was his code for intercourse.
In June 2003, his younger sister Kerry and her husband, Andrew Cuomo, announced that they were separating. The breakup occurred after Kerry’s alleged affair with the playboy businessman Bruce Colley, who often played polo with members of the British24 royal family. Cuomo, who lost his bid to win the Democratic primary in the 2002 gubernatorial election, had allegedly caught the pair together. Kennedy and Cuomo’s father, Mario, tried to intervene to keep Kerry and Andrew together, to no avail. The couple, who had three young daughters, also tried counseling, but could not work out their differences, reports said. At the same time, Colley’s wife, Ann, was allegedly involved with Kennedy25 (which Ann Colley has vehemently denied), according to Mary, who was said to be heartbroken over her husband’s infidelities, especially after the birth of their fourth child, Aidan, born while Kennedy was serving time in prison in Puerto Rico and writing odes to his “beautiful wife” on the yellow legal pads that doubled as his diary. The situation was particularly fraught because the alleged affair had begun while Kennedy had been trying to play peacemaker to bring Kerry and Andrew back together.
Mary was so distraught about her husband’s alleged affair with Ann Colley that she tried to get her thrown off the board of her husband’s charity. But Ann, who was in charge of the philanthropic arm of the hedge fund billionaire Louis Bacon’s Moore Capital Management, was not going anywhere. The hedge fund had donated more than $1 million to Riverkeeper over the past several years, and the nonprofit, which had gone through the upheaval and bad publicity of losing its founder, Bob Boyle, in the past year, needed to keep its donors happy at all costs. Both couples—the Colleys and the Cuomo-Kennedys—eventually divorced.
That summer, while he vacationed with his family in Hyannis Port, Kennedy suddenly found himself embroiled in another cause: linking common childhood vaccines to autism in young children. The new cause would cost him his relationships with fellow environmentalists as well as most of his friends and family, who would practically disown him as he dived deep into what became an all-encompassing obsession to challenge common vaccines and the entire medical establishment.
Kennedy’s initial interest in mercury in childhood vaccines arose after an encounter with Sarah Bridges, a pretty blond mother with a doctorate in neuropsychology who showed up on Kennedy’s doorstop in Hyannis Port with a Bankers Box of documents in high summer 2003. She was hoping that the environmental attorney would lend his famous name to her campaign against the vaccines that she believed had caused her son’s brain damage. “It wasn’t totally random26,” she said. “I went to college with one of his brother’s wives, and she said that Bobby worked on environmental mercury and that planted the seed in my head. I said I was just going to show up to see him in Cape Cod.” Bridges had attended Brown University with Victoria Anne Strauss, who has been married to Max Kennedy since 1991.
Bridges, who said she is not against all vaccines, nevertheless believes that mercury in a vaccine given to her son was the cause of his severe health problems. Bridges’s son Porter Bridges had developed normally until he had turned four months old. Then he had been given vaccines for diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis (whooping cough). The night of the last shot, he had woken up with a fever, which had developed into a two-hour grand mal seizure. He had never been the same afterward, his mother said. By the end of his second year, he had been hospitalized fourteen times to stop recurring seizures, some of which had gone on for hours at a time. He had later been diagnosed with brain damage and severe autism—“A bad reaction,” doctors concluded, to the pertussis vaccine. He was hyperactive and unmanageable, according to Bridges, adding that her son had ended up needing specialized care. In 1994, she filed a lawsuit in the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, often called “vaccine court.” Americans cannot sue vaccine makers directly because Congress, worried that pharmaceutical companies would stop developing vaccines if they had to defend costly lawsuits, made a law forbidding it in 1986. That same year, Congress established the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program to handle claims against vaccine makers.
When Bridges sought out Kennedy, her son was eight years old, and she had been waiting for compensation for most of his life. With severe autism, he wore a helmet most of the time, and caring for him had proved to be untenable. Bridges’s marriage had fallen apart as a result, and her other two children were having a hard time. But Kennedy had no time for Bridges. He had summer houseguests, he told her, and needed to go sailing. “So he left and I stayed on the porch,” Bridges said. When he came back three hours later, she was still there. The annoyed Kennedy promised to read the documents. “He said, ‘If I read it will you leave?’” said Bridges. “I left it with him. That night he read a huge portion, and he said that ‘Something is wrong here. I’m going to look into it and make a few phone calls.’ Three to four weeks later, he told me he was getting involved.”
Although Kennedy had vaccinated all of his six children, he soon saw in Porter’s case a new crusade that he could trumpet and perhaps make millions of dollars from along the way. After the “armageddon board meeting” that had resulted in the ouster of Boyle and his supporters from the board of directors of Riverkeeper two years earlier, Kennedy was still having trouble pushing his commercial plans to bottle Riverkeeper-branded water to raise money for the nonprofit. Perhaps he needed an entirely new campaign, especially now, three years after he had started an environmental legal practice with a fellow attorney, Kevin Madonna, a graduate of Pace Law School and former executive director of the Waterkeeper Alliance. Madonna had also worked with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation and the United Nations Environment Programme. The partnership meant that Kennedy could now move beyond the nonprofit work that he had been involved with in the environmental clinic at Pace Law School and move into more profitable environmental litigation, not only against big polluters but also against pharmaceutical giants.
Among Kennedy and Madonna’s first major cases was a class action lawsuit against DuPont on behalf of a group of West Virginia residents living near one of the company’s zinc smelters, which had spewed dangerous chemicals into their homes and nearby sources of water. The firm joined other lawyers in the landmark lawsuit, which argued that the chemical company had been negligent when setting up its 112-acre toxic waste site. For more than ninety years, the smelter had produced more than 400 million pounds of zinc dust, exposing local residents in the town of Spelter to dangerous levels of arsenic, lead, and cadmium. A jury in the Circuit Court of Harrison County, West Virginia, awarded the plaintiffs more than $396 million in damages and ordered DuPont to conduct medical testing on eight thousand residents for forty years.
