RFK Jr., page 4
Despite his skin problems, which made him look like a “monstro” to his fellow inmates, his early days behind bars were serene and peaceful, removed from distractions and a problem that had dogged him for years: his serial womanizing. “I’m so content here,” he wrote in his diary on July 6. “I have to say it. There’s no women. I’m happy! Everybody here seems happy. It’s not—misogyny. It’s the opposite! I love them too much.”
He took yoga classes and attended daily Mass in the prison chapel. After he was released, he told a reporter that compared to the other prisoners, who had lost much-needed jobs and couldn’t provide for their families while they were in jail, he and his celebrity activists had had it pretty easy. “Really, I escaped my cell phone6,” he told CNN. “I got a lot of time to do some reading.”
He was immersed in Alan Schom’s biography of Napoleon Bonaparte, which he found beautifully written but rather pessimistic. “His is not an inspiring life,” he wrote on July 12 of the Corsican general. According to Schom, Napoleon was worse than Adolf Hitler, who “at least had a purpose outside himself.” Napoleon had been so obsessed with his own life that he had failed to see the suffering and death that he was leaving around him, Kennedy noted. He found Karen Armstrong’s Buddha, which he also read in prison, much more inspiring. He also dipped into the works of Thomas Merton, an American Trappist monk whose 1948 autobiography and most important work, The Seven Storey Mountain, relates his spiritual journey and conversion to Catholicism.
Merton had an interesting bond with Kennedy’s maternal grandmother, Ann Skakel, and his mother, Ethel, who had befriended the monk’s mentor7, philosophy professor Daniel Walsh, who had been one of Ethel’s professors at Manhattanville College. At one point Ethel had wanted to become a nun and she was a member of the Legion of Mary, a global lay Catholic organization. Her parents, Ann and George Skakel, had befriended Merton and had been major donors to the Abbey of Gethsemani, a Trappist monastery in Kentucky. Ann, a fervent Catholic who had attended secretarial school as a young woman, volunteered to type the monk’s manuscripts. Often described as an “honorary beatnik,” Merton had embraced many of the beliefs of the beat poets, including Eastern mysticism, a rejection of materialism and questioning of authority. He had corresponded with Jack Kerouac and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who had been deeply influenced by his autobiography. Both Ethel and her mother had remained close to both Walsh and Merton, who had corresponded with them throughout John F. Kennedy’s presidency with insights about the Cold War and the dangers of the nuclear arms race. Merton died on a spiritual pilgrimage in Asia in December 1968, six months after Robert Kennedy was assassinated. In a letter to Ethel, he called the presidential candidate’s death “Bobby’s tragic immolation.”8
Kennedy copied many of Merton’s dictums to his diary as part of his attempt to use his jail time to become a better person. “Never despise anyone, never condemn anybody. Never speak evil of anyone and the Lord will give you peace,” he wrote on July 21, quoting the monk. “I like this because it’s a defect (gossip, criticism) that I need to begin addressing.”
On most days, Kennedy would head to the prison yard, where a “sinewy Dominican” prisoner often played guitar, sitting cross-legged against a backdrop of stucco walls and a canopy of concertina wire. “He played beautifully” while other prisoners stood around him in the courtyard, he wrote on July 25.
Kennedy’s only complaint about his time in prison was the food, which was mostly starch, which led to a general sense of lethargy among the inmates. “It’s like the land of the Lotus Eaters,” he wrote on July 9.
Throughout his detention, Kennedy was in regular communication with his family. Mary had told him that back at their home in Westchester, his children held a nightly vigil led by Conor, his eldest son with Mary. According to his diary, Conor sat in his father’s chair and assembled his younger siblings, Kyra and Finn, leading them in prayers for their father. “I am so lucky,” wrote Kennedy on July 9, underlining the sentence three times in his diary.
In addition to his mother, Mary was firmly behind him, and regaled him with messages from his supporters in New York, including Mario Cuomo, who complained to Mary about his wayward client, describing Kennedy as “troublesome and hard-headed,” he noted in a July entry in his diary. Cuomo was upset that he had lost his case in Puerto Rico and blamed Kennedy for the defeat, Mary said. After all, Cuomo had “mesmerized the courtroom audience with his characteristic eloquence,” noted a reporter for the New York Times during the presentencing trial. He spoke about Independence Day and praised the history of civil disobedience in the United States in order to cast Rivera and Kennedy in a noble light. “We ask the court to recall9 that our nation was conceived in the civil disobedience that preceded the Revolutionary War,” Cuomo said. “And that the acts of civil disobedience involved in the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, the famous sit-down strikes of 1936 and 1937, the valiant struggle for civil rights in the 1960s and the movement against the Vietnam War were always treated by the courts—not like crimes committed for personal gain or out of pure malice—but as technical violations designed to achieve a good purpose.”
Judge Laffitte was unmoved, although Cuomo still gave himself credit for getting Kennedy a relatively short sentence. Kennedy had confided in Mary that it was really due to Norma Burgos’s outburst in court right before his own sentencing, which had distracted the judge and resulted in his monthlong sentence. Burgos continued her defiance in prison and ended up in “the hole,” or solitary confinement, for three days—which both Kennedy and Rivera were quick to protest to the prison spokesman. They threatened that their entire unit would volunteer to go to “the hole” if they didn’t let Burgos out immediately.
Mario Cuomo had told Mary, “‘I’m so happy to be rid of those guys (me and Dennis). It was like a bad love affair. Have you ever had that experience—where you know that the relationship is not good for you, but can’t extract yourself?’” Kennedy noted in his diary on July 9.
In addition to Cuomo’s conversations with Mary, Kerry sent Kennedy inspiring quotes by Evelyn Waugh and Henry David Thoreau, which he committed to his journal. “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in prison,” he wrote on July 18, quoting Thoreau in his diary.
On July 13, Mary had their fourth child. “He came around 6pm,” wrote the ecstatic Kennedy in his diary on the same day. “I was calling all day with special permission from the warden (We are only allowed 10 minutes a day).” In fact, he was able to spend10 between two and three hours on the phone with his wife while she was in labor. “I felt at least in some sense, like I was there with her when she was having the baby,” he told a reporter following his release, referring to Mary as the real hero, who had “shouldered the burden of my imprisonment,” taking care of their children on her own while he was away.
Kerry and Mary’s sister Nan Richardson were both in the delivery room during the birth of Aidan Caomhán Kennedy, who weighed seven pounds, ten ounces and was named for two Irish saints. “I am so proud of my Mary,” he wrote on July 13. “She has become the woman I fell in love with through hard work. She has overcome her fear, enshrined her faith, abandoned self pity and blame and immersed herself in gratitude and God gave her a baby commensurate with her victory and her struggles—a beautiful, serene and happy soul. I am so happy. I couldn’t be happier or more grateful for the life and the wife God has given me.”
The couple had married in 1994, shortly after Kennedy had divorced his first wife and while Mary was pregnant with their son Conor. By 1999, the marriage was in trouble, with Kennedy frequently complaining in his diary entries about Mary’s mood swings and her stints at rehab facilities to treat her addiction to alcohol.
Two days after the happy news, Kennedy and Rivera welcomed a steady stream of visitors that included Hillary Clinton as well as the archbishop of Puerto Rico, who spoke to all the Vieques inmates. Benicio del Toro, the Puerto Rican actor, also visited with his father, a prominent criminal lawyer. Clinton met with both Kennedy and Rivera for more than an hour, and they were allowed to use the warden’s office for their conversation, he said.
Ethel Kennedy visited a few days later, on July 19. “Mommy came at noon,” he wrote. “She was kind of stressed by my face but said that I should tell future visitors that the guards here were fierce and had roughed me up.” After he sneaked a look at himself in a mirror just before his mother’s visit, he admitted to looking like “Robert the Bruce’s leprosy-ridden father in Braveheart.”
During her visit, one of the guards apologized for her son’s imprisonment. “He came to help us and our children and our children’s children,” said the guard. Kennedy told a reporter that the guard had tears in his eyes11 when he spoke to his mother.
At the end of her visit, Ethel gave an interview to Puerto Rican reporters. Kennedy watched on a prison TV as his mother, clearly proud of her son’s civil disobedience and incarceration, said she hoped that Kennedy would name his new son “Vieques Libre Kennedy.” Kennedy and his wife would end up taking Ethel’s advice, giving Aidan “Vieques” as one of his middle names12, although they left out “libre” on the birth certificate. “It would give him a context of his birth, and that he would know that his father was in jail doing a term for a choice of conscience,” Kennedy told an interviewer after his release. “And it would give him something good to think about.”
While he waited for Mary to arrive with their newborn—she was due in with his other children, his friend Peter Kaplan, and his sister Kerry—Kennedy admitted that he wasn’t achieving the serenity that he had hoped for. “I’m not getting the kind of spiritual respite and growth that I had hoped for,” he wrote on July 17. “I need to come out strong and resolved and I don’t feel that anymore.”
In a poignant admission toward the end of his incarceration, he confessed that he had failed to live up to the Kennedy family legacy, crippled by his addictions to sex and drugs. “After daddy died I struggled to be a grown-up,” he wrote on July 25. “I felt he was watching me from heaven. Every time I was afflicted with sexual thoughts, I felt a failure. I hated myself. I began to lie—to make up a character who was the hero and leader that I wished I was.”
The longer he remained in detention, the more frequently he returned to the distant past and the defining moments of his life. In his diary, he recalled the “smell of mint growing near a creek” during the time he had spent in Alabama with Kaplan working on the Harvard senior thesis that would turn into his first book. He recalled his restlessness and emptiness then and worried that he was disappointing his father with his lack of discipline and restraint.
With his face “as grey as a hornet’s nest,” he vowed to execute a “three-point plan” for “fixing his lust demons” and becoming a better father and husband. But he never wrote down the plan, and he left the subsequent days of his diary—the remainder of his time in prison—blank.
Chapter 2
“History Was Happening All Around Us”
As a child, growing up with a swarm of siblings and a menagerie of unusual pets, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dreamed of becoming a veterinarian. It wasn’t until his father was assassinated that he began to change his mind. He began thinking about a career in public service1 and following in his vaunted footsteps, he told TV executive and longtime friend Roger Ailes decades later.
Bobby, the third child and second son of RFK and Ethel Skakel, was born at Georgetown University Hospital on January 17, 1954. As the namesake of his crusading father, he was expected to rise to greatness.
At the time of his birth, his twenty-nine-year-old father was poised to become chief counsel for the Democratic minority on the Senate committee investigating the conduct of Wisconsin’s Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy, a family friend who, like the Kennedys, was a fervent Irish Catholic—a rarity among US lawmakers at the time and often seen as a liability in political circles dominated by moneyed Protestants.
McCarthy had given Robert Kennedy, or Bob, as he was known to his friends, a job in December 1952 on his Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations at the behest of his father, Joseph Kennedy, a businessman and former ambassador to the United Kingdom during the early years of the Second World War. After managing the successful Senate campaign of his older brother John earlier in the year, Bob was casting about for a government position when he became one of fifteen staffers on the subcommittee that aggressively investigated Communist infiltration in the US at the height of the Cold War. According to some accounts, he couldn’t stomach much of the Cold War hysteria and brutal investigation tactics that characterized the committee’s work.
Or at least that was the myth that he and his family later spun to suit his crusading image. The reality was that Robert Kennedy was at times more doctrinaire and reckless than McCarthy himself. RFK spent less than seven months working for McCarthy and resigned largely over friction with McCarthy’s chief counsel, Roy Cohn. The ruthless former prosecutor was on the legal team that prosecuted Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in Manhattan federal court. In 1952, the electrical engineer and his secretary wife were convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and executed a year later. The tough Bronx-born attorney, who would go on to be a mentor to the young Donald Trump, had little time for the imperious and entitled Harvard grad. “He walked in, sat down, and he looked me over very carefully2 as though, you know, sizing up a piece of merchandise,” said Cohn, describing his first meeting with Bobby Kennedy in an interview for the John F. Kennedy Library in 1971.
When Bobby returned to McCarthy’s committee as counsel for the Democratic minority in February 1954, he was determined to go after Cohn in front of millions of Americans who were watching the thirty-six-day Army-McCarthy hearings on television. Before the beginning of the hearings, RFK told McCarthy’s secretary, Mary Driscoll, to assure the senator that he would do everything to protect him. “I’m really going to get3 that son-of-a-bitch Cohn,” he said, according to an interview with Cohn years later. At one point, things got so out of hand that Cohn threw a punch at RFK in the hearing room lobby during a break in the hearings.
In Cohn’s recollection of events4, RFK was more militant than his boss and known to hold a grudge. After conducting an investigation for the committee on the transshipment of goods by Greek ship owners to Communist countries, RFK insisted that the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration crack down with an iron fist on the Greek ship owners, which would have resulted in the United States’ breaking diplomatic ties with Greece. Even McCarthy refused to back the plan. “In later years when he had become a ‘liberal5,’ he tried to indicate that he had resigned . . . from the committee because he disapproved of McCarthy’s methods,” said Cohn. “Well, this is total nonsense. The exchange of letters between him and Senator McCarthy at the time of his resignation make it crystal clear they were on the most cordial friendly terms.”
Still, Cohn’s reckless pursuit of Communists in the US Army was heavily criticized and ultimately led to his resignation and McCarthy’s censure in the Senate in December 1954.
But for Kennedy, there was little room for nuance in his early memories of his father. RFK was the valiant hero lawyer. Although he had never practiced law, Robert Kennedy had fearlessly taken on Cohn, McCarthy, and a string of mobsters and corrupt union leaders, including Jimmy Hoffa, when he had later headed up investigations on the labor racketeering committee led by Democratic Senator John McClellan of Arkansas, beginning in 1956.
“My dad believed6 the ‘enemy within’—a dark force infiltrating American politics and business, unseen by the public and out of reach of democracy and the justice system—posed a greater threat to our country than any foreign enemy,” wrote Kennedy, describing how his mother would take him—a toddler at the time—and his older siblings, Kathleen and Joe, to the Senate hearings to support her husband. Kennedy’s younger brother David was born a year before the hearings began. During the nearly three years of the Mob and labor union investigations and hearings, Ethel would give birth to three more children: Courtney in 1956, Michael in 1958, and Kerry in 1959. “Pointing at Teamster bosses7 Jimmy Hoffa and Dave Beck, and their shady mob associates, my mother declared, ‘Those are the bad guys,’” wrote Kennedy. “She didn’t need to tell us that my father, Uncle Jack, and dour old Senator John McClellan were the good guys.” Later in his diary, in a section he called “memories from childhood,” he remembered “Teamsters backfiring in front of our house8” as a warning to his father that they would come after him and his family unless he backed down.
From the time they could read and write, the Kennedy children were expected to be immersed in current affairs. According to Kennedy, they had to read for an hour each day, record three current events from the newspapers in their daybooks, and be prepared to speak about them at the dinner table. On Sundays, they read poetry, he said. If Bobby caught any of his children reading a comic book, he was quick to admonish them and tell them to do something useful instead.9 “America has been very good to the Kennedys,” he was fond of saying. “We all owe the country a debt of gratitude and public service.”
In his family memoir, American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family, Kennedy described an idyllic childhood at Hickory Hill, the family’s thirteen-bedroom estate on twelve acres in McLean, Virginia. The sprawling mansion where his family moved when he was three years old had been owned by Robert E. Lee’s father, Henry, a former governor of Virginia. His parents had purchased the five-story home in 1956 from his uncle Jack and his wife, Jackie, who had moved to a smaller residence in Georgetown.
The home was decorated with shrines10 to Saint Francis, for whom Kennedy and his father were named. “Franciscan iconography decorated our home, and the garden bristled with shrines and statuary celebrating Francis and his friars,” wrote Kennedy.
