RFK Jr., page 5
The home boasted a stable, two swimming pools, a tennis court, and an obstacle course and zip line built by the Green Berets at his father’s request to be used during charity events at the property, although on occasion Major Francis Ruddy Jr., the head of the Army Special Forces, who was close to the Kennedy family, would bring in soldiers wearing camouflage and black greasepaint for demonstrations that delighted the Kennedy children. Later, after Jack was assassinated in 1963, Ruddy famously took off his beret and left it on his coffin at Arlington National Cemetery.
Kennedy described horseback riding with both his parents before breakfast in the fields near Hickory Hill. He rode a horse named Geronimo, while his father rode alongside on Attorney General, he wrote. On other mornings, the Kennedy children pretended to shave with their busy father while he got ready to go to work. Kennedy recalled in his diary on July 25, 2001, “the dogs and kids piled into my father’s black convertible” and rather cruelly “egging” his dog Otis to run next to their car. There were also games of Botticelli at the dining room table among the brood of ten children. His youngest sister, Rory, was born in 1968, after their father’s death.
When he was attorney general, Robert Kennedy drove himself to work every day in the family convertible, often taking one of his children and their dog and speeding down the George Washington Parkway. He drove so fast that his aides were worried that he might be arrested. In order to prevent an embarrassing situation involving the attorney general breaking the law, his aides Nicholas Katzenbach and Burke Marshall came up with a solution. “Nick said that when my dad was AG11 he drove to work by himself (especially on Saturdays) in his convertible—with the big dog in the front seat with him—very fast,” wrote Kennedy in his diary years later. “His aides were worried he’d be arrested and mentioned the problem to Stu [sic] Udall, secretary of the interior, who raised the speed limits on the parkway to avoid the issue.”
In the summer, the clan decamped to Cape Cod, to the family compound at Hyannis Port, where the Kennedy patriarch, Joe Sr., had bought a small white cottage on Marchant Street in 1928 and immediately proceeded to double its size. Other members of the family had began scooping up nearby homes, soon forming a sizable beach compound where the Kennedy children were “subjected to a daily regimen of athletic training supervised by a rotund former Olympic diver, Sandy Euler,” wrote Kennedy in one of his memoirs. “Three times a week we would have riding lessons at my grandfather’s farm in Osterville, or go on long rides through the scrub pine forest and sandy marshlands with him and his horse.” Every day, his parents would take the children sailing on their twenty-six-foot wooden boat for a picnic on a nearby island. When his uncle was president, his Marine One helicopter12 carrying him, his brother Bobby, and their aides would land at the compound to spend the weekends.
Kennedy also wrote about the entire clan getting behind his uncle’s 1960 campaign for president, helping him shore up votes in their home state of Virginia and elsewhere. Jack Kennedy ran with Lyndon B. Johnson as his vice presidential running mate, a senator and skilled politician from Texas who the campaign was counting on to bring in votes from key states in the South. Kennedy was in second grade at Our Lady of Victory School in Washington, DC, where the campaign for the first Catholic president in the country’s history was akin to a religious crusade among the priests and nuns, he said. Across the country, Jack and his wife, Jackie, symbolized glamor and hope, encapsulating the campaign’s “A time for greatness” slogan and set to the soundtrack of Frank Sinatra’s Oscar-winning song “High Hopes.” Sinatra turned the song about an ambitious ant into a rallying cry for JFK. “Everyone is voting for Jack/He’s what all the rest lack” were the opening lyrics of the tune blasted at every campaign rally. Kennedy wore a red, white, and blue “Kennedy for President” button on the lapel of his school blazer, and he and his siblings stuck stickers of Kennedy’s opponent, Richard Nixon, onto neighborhood stop signs during the campaign.
During the spring of 1960, Kennedy’s parents “disappeared” for six weeks to campaign for his uncle in West Virginia, which had the smallest Catholic population in the country. JFK ended up winning the state with 65 percent of the vote and the rest of the country by a slim margin in one of the tightest races in US history.
Amid widespread cries of nepotism, Jack appointed Bobby as his attorney general. He was already his older brother’s most important confidant, a skillful tactician who had managed his political campaigns. “Call Bobby, get together with him13 and come back with an idea on this” was the familiar command that Jack would give to his advisers. Now, at just thirty-five, Bobby Kennedy, an intense strategist who fixed “the steely blues” on anyone he needed to convince to his way of thinking, became “assistant president,” said George Stevens Jr., a Hollywood filmmaker who later worked on propaganda films for Bobby’s campaign for New York senator, which tried to soften his “ruthless” demeanor and dispel his opponents’ charges that he was a carpetbagger candidate who had never really lived in the state.
Walter Lippmann, an influential newspaperman, had his doubts. “Bobby is a very attractive human being14, but his greatest weakness, the thing I worried about before he was appointed is that when he’s bent on what he thinks is the right course, he’s rather ruthless in action,” he said.
One of those ruthless acts involved allowing the FBI to wiretap the phone of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. Authorities also bugged his hotel rooms when he was on the road leading marches. The agency was collecting information about his numerous extramarital affairs and his connections to the Communist Party in order to discredit his entire movement. The surveillance began soon after King’s March on Washington in August 1963. More than half a million people descended on the National Mall for King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. “The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges,” said King, sending shock waves to authorities, who convinced themselves that the Baptist leader was promising some kind of Communist revolution.
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From the beginning of the Kennedy administration, Hickory Hill doubled as an extension of the White House.
During the University of Mississippi crisis, when the first African American student registered for university at Ole Miss, many of the planning meetings to prepare for the riots that were expected to take place at the school took place at Hickory Hill, with legal advisers who included Deputy Attorney General Katzenbach and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Byron White, among others. Kennedy, who was eight years old at the time, eavesdropped on the meetings from behind a sofa. “History was happening all around us,” he wrote in his memoir American Values. “During the years that Uncle Jack was president, our home at Hickory Hill was a satellite White House. Many of the most momentous governmental decisions were made there by men in swimming trunks on the pool-house patio.”
James Meredith, a twenty-nine-year-old civil rights activist and air force veteran, decided he wanted to test the federal government’s commitment to desegregate schools after the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education, which had declared that segregation was illegal, by registering at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. He was twice denied admission to the public university in 1961. That year, he wrote an extraordinary letter to the Department of Justice, outlining his segregated education in Attala County, where he had grown up, and the nine years he had spent in the air force serving his country. He was seeking federal intervention to allow him and other African Americans to enroll at the school. “I have no great desire15 to protect my hyde [sic], but I do hope to see the day when the million Negroes who live in the state of Mississippi will have cause not to fear as they fear today,” he wrote on February 7, 1961.
With the help of Medgar Evers, an army veteran and civil rights activist who was the head of the Mississippi chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Meredith sued the school in Mississippi federal court. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in Meredith’s favor. On September 13, 1962, Meredith tried to enroll in classes, much to the anger of Mississippi’s Democratic governor, Ross Barnett, who tried all manner of ways to prevent him from attending the university, including charging him on a trumped-up voter fraud violation. On September 25, Meredith attempted to register again but was blocked from entering the university’s admissions office. Three days later, the Court of Appeals found Barnett in civil contempt and ordered his arrest and a fine of $10,000 per day if he continued to refuse to admit Meredith to the school. Following a flurry of phone calls among Barnett, Bobby Kennedy, and the president, Barnett finally relented, although he made a fiery speech at a football game in which he encouraged people to continue to block Meredith’s entry. On September 30, riots broke out when three thousand white protestors, including members of the Ku Klux Klan, clashed with federal marshals at the school. A phalanx of five hundred federal marshals escorted Meredith to his dorm room. Two people died in the violent melee. The next day, President Kennedy dispatched more than thirty thousand federal troops to quell the riot and protect Meredith, who graduated a year later.
Days after the Mississippi crisis, on October 16, 1962, the Kennedy brothers confronted arguably the most consequential moment of Jack’s presidency and the most dangerous episode of the Cold War when intelligence operatives discovered the presence of Soviet missile bases in Cuba. The nuclear missiles there were capable of traveling more than three thousand miles and were aimed directly at the United States.
More than a year before the Cuban Missile Crisis, Jack had already relied on his brother for foreign policy advice when he had consulted Bobby on the failed Bay of Pigs operation in April 1961—an incident that ultimately led to the missile crisis. Beginning in the Eisenhower administration, the CIA had trained a group of Cuban exiles in Guatemala to invade the island and topple Communist leader Fidel Castro, who had come to power in 1959 and begun expropriations of everything from major industries to the homes of ordinary Cubans the following year. Brigade 2506 was made up of 1,334 exiles, and they counted on US airpower to take over the island in a daring invasion. The mission was a disaster, largely because the Kennedy administration failed to provide air cover, resulting in 114 exiles being killed and more than 1,100 captured by Castro’s forces.
Following the debacle, Robert Kennedy defended the actions of the exiles in legalistic terms, citing the United States’ neutrality laws in a press release, even though he was fully aware that the exiles had been trained and funded by the US government—a violation of those very laws. “There is nothing in the neutrality laws16 which prevents refugees from Cuba from returning to that country to engage in the fight for freedom,” he said. “Nor is an individual prohibited from the United States, with others of like belief, to join still others in a second country for an expedition against a third country.” Later, Jack put his brother in charge of Operation Mongoose, a series of undercover operations to undermine Castro’s government through support for exile groups, sabotage, and assassination.
After the Bay of Pigs invasion, Castro had reached a secret deal with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to place Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba to prevent another US incursion onto the island. But they were not defensive missiles; they were squarely aimed at the United States. At first, Bobby was determined to bomb Cuba, but after much consideration he helped his brother achieve a last-ditch diplomatic solution that saw the Kennedy administration order a naval “quarantine” of the island and demand that Khrushchev remove the missiles. In the tense days when the world found itself on the brink of nuclear war, it was Bobby who met secretly with the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin, to defuse the crisis. He told Dobrynin that the United States was planning to remove its intermediate-range ballistic Jupiter missiles from Turkey—one of Khrushchev’s key demands—but it could not be made public and seen to be part of the deal to avert the nuclear showdown. The Soviets backed down and agreed to remove their IL-28 bombers from Cuba on November 20. Five months later, in April 1963, the United States removed its Jupiter missiles from Turkey.
“We didn’t see my dad17 during most of the Cuban Missile Crisis,” wrote Kennedy in his family memoir. “For thirteen days and twelve nights he stayed at the White House. At the height of the crisis, the government made plans to evacuate public officials and their families. We all knew that the capital would be vaporized in the first minutes of a nuclear exchange.” When US marshals arrived at Hickory Hill to transport the family to a bombproof bunker, Bobby refused to allow them to leave, even though Kennedy and his older brother, Joe, were eager to visit the underground caverns. “My dad told us we needed to be ‘brave soldiers’ and show up at Our Lady of Victory School, that our absence would be noticed and might cause panic in the capital.”
Just as the Cuban Missile Crisis was being defused, another segregation drama was unfolding at the University of Alabama, where the state’s governor, George Wallace, seemed to aim his fiery inaugural speech at the Kennedy brothers when he promised “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” in January 1963. Months later, when three Black students applied to the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, Bobby Kennedy called the governor in an effort to avoid an armed confrontation like the one at Ole Miss a year earlier. After numerous phone calls from the president, which Wallace refused to answer, Bobby traveled to the state capital in Montgomery for a face-to-face meeting. The Confederate flag was flying at the state capitol on April 25 when Bobby arrived for his meeting with Wallace, making his way past a menacing phalanx of state troopers in steel helmets emblazoned with the Confederate flag.
“If this country means anything18, if our society’s going to hang together at all, it’s going to hang together because of the law, and observance of the law,” said Bobby. “And that’s what we are interested in. This transcends the question of segregation or integration or desegregation. This is a question of law and order in the United States.”
A few minutes before Bobby’s arrival, police arrested eighteen white demonstrators in front of the capitol building carrying signs saying “Mississippi Murderer” and “No Kennedy Congo Here.” “Inside the executive office, Wallace placed a tape recorder on the table between them and endeavored to goad my dad into threatening to send troops into the state, a provocation Wallace could use to political advantage,” Kennedy wrote in his family memoir.
Wallace remained firm that he would not allow the federal government to interfere with Alabama, and Bobby returned to Washington.
The confrontation at the university ended nearly two months later, when Katzenbach, accompanied by two federal marshals and a contingent of National Guard, confronted Wallace on the steps of the school in front of the national press. Katzenbach presented Wallace, who was standing at a lectern with a microphone, backed by state troopers, with a proclamation from the US president threatening to charge him with obstruction of justice if he did not allow African American students Vivian Malone and James Hood to enter Foster Auditorium to register for their classes. Wallace gave a prepared speech, refusing to step aside. “Governor, I’m not interested in a show19,” said Katzenbach. Wallace eventually backed down, declaring “I can’t fight bayonets with my bare hands,” and allowed Malone and Hood to pass.
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The Kennedy family’s proximity to power informed Kennedy’s childhood. For one thing, the Kennedy children kept largely to themselves. “When I was growing20 up, my brothers and sisters were my friends,” he told an interviewer in 2007. And they made friends with some powerful adults. William O. Douglas, an associate justice of the Supreme Court, taught Kennedy how to fly fish. “In 1962, Justice Douglas took us kids21, many of my cousins, aunts and uncles and my father on a ten-day pack trip to Whiskey Bend in the San Juan range on Washington’s Olympic peninsula,” he wrote. “We lived on trout that we caught with salmon eggs and drank from the streams. Afterward, we fished for salmon in Puget Sound and caught more fish than I’d ever seen.”
In addition, everyone from the actor and activist Harry Belafonte to Lauren Bacall and the football player Roosevelt Grier were guests at soirées at Hickory Hill. “One winter a contingent of Alaskan Inuit22 arrived for lunch during an unusual Washington snowstorm and spent the afternoon with my father in the backyard building a great igloo,” wrote Kennedy in his memoir.
His powerful family nurtured his fascination with animals and nature, with his uncle inviting him to the Oval Office for a private meeting about the environment. A black-and-white photo in the archives of the John F. Kennedy Library & Museum shows the nine-year-old Kennedy in a blazer, matching shorts, and a tie presenting a salamander to his uncle23. Other pictures show the lifeless amphibian floating in a vase as Kennedy and his uncle examine it closely. After that meeting in March 1961, Jack Kennedy arranged for his nephew to meet with Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall to present his concerns about extinction. The encounter of the young Kennedy scion and the country’s leading environmentalist resulted in news stories in both Time magazine and The Saturday Evening Post.
By the time he was eleven and immersed in T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, Kennedy became obsessed with falconry, hunting wild game with a trained bird of prey, such as a hawk or a falcon. He eventually trained with a local falconer and acquired his own hawk. The hawk, named Morgan after King Arthur’s half sister, joined a menagerie of animals at Hickory Hill that at one point included a sea lion named Sandy, who lived in one of the pools and was fed a diet of fresh mackerel. Although she devoured the fish, she had issues with their eyeballs, which were “scattered like marbles across the pool, patio and lawn.” Eventually, things got so out of hand with Sandy prowling through the neighborhood with a pack of dogs and, at one point, causing a traffic jam that the family donated her to the Washington National Zoo, where Kennedy had summer jobs cleaning cages and feeding rats to the raptors.
