Skakels and Kennedys
The first words he ever said to me was, “I’m going to get away with murder. I’m a Kennedy.”
—Greg Coleman, resident of the Élan School with Michael, heroin addict, and prosecution witness, to a Rochester, New York, television station in 2001
Michael Skakel likely never would have gone to prison had the press, police, and prosecutors not been able to portray him as a “Kennedy cousin.” It was a false characterization from the moment Dominick Dunne and Mark Fuhrman first deployed it in 1997. (Nor did Michael write or approve a draft in 1998 for a book proposal by Richard Hoffman employing the term “Kennedy cousin” in its title.) Building on the Dunne–Fuhrman narrative, prosecutor Jonathan Benedict portrayed Michael as a monstrous fiend using the Kennedy name and connections to get away with murder. However, Michael never identified himself as a “Kennedy cousin” or rode on his relationship with the Kennedys—and for good reason.
The gulf between the Skakel and Kennedy families was always wide and deep; there was so little contact between our families that neither I nor any of my Kennedy siblings or cousins knew Michael Skakel in 1975. I wouldn’t even have recognized any of my Skakel cousins at that time. The Skakels never saw themselves as satellites within the Kennedy orbit; they didn’t need to. They had a distinctive family history with their own iconoclastic gestalt and greater wealth than the Kennedys. My mother’s generation of Skakels prided themselves on being the anti-Kennedys. They were rough and ready carbon Republicans with seasoned contempt for the nanny-state, regulating, soak-the-rich sort of government they imagined the Kennedys promoting. Among their crowd, any association with the Kennedys was a kind of social demotion. “The Skakels and Kennedys were like the Hatfields and the McCoys,” recalls Michael.
George Skakel, my maternal grandfather, the second of four children, was born in 1892 and grew up on a homestead near the South Dakota prairie town of Tyndall. George’s pedigree was Scotch-Irish and his persuasion was a particularly severe version of Dutch Reform Protestantism. He remained embarrassed by profanity and off-color stories until his death. By all accounts, alcoholism ran through the Skakel clan back to the Neanderthal era. Angry at his father’s excessive drinking, Grandpa George ran away from home at age 14, riding the rails to Chicago to seek his fortune.
With his father’s example as an admonition, Grandpa remained a teetotaler for most of his life, giving testimony to the old saw that “God invented whiskey to prevent the Irish from conquering the world.” Grandpa had ambition, determination, and an entrepreneurial spirit. These qualities, along with a gift for numbers, a photographic memory, and a near-reckless appetite for risk, would make him one of the wealthiest men of his generation. My mother, Ethel Skakel Kennedy, remembers him being grounded emotionally and spiritually, saying he “had a quiet, gentle disposition. His personal humility reflected humble origins. His most striking quality was his generosity. He couldn’t bear to see suffering and he always had a hand out for people in need.”
After a short stint working for the railroad, he quickly found a job with the William Howe Coal Company, a coal distributor. In 1917 he married Ann Brannack, a tall Irish Catholic from Wabash Avenue on Chicago’s tough South Side. Her grandparents on both sides had sailed from Ireland in 1848, at the height of “the starvation” that killed 750,000 Irish and made refugees of millions more. Grandma Ann was loud, brash, and half a foot taller than her husband. She blasted up prayers to the Almighty for hours each day and cheerfully catechized everyone within earshot. She attended daily mass with a fervor that my mother and her brothers would inherit.
My mother described Grandma Ann—using more flattering words—as a striver, who was forever laboring long hours without complaint to better herself and her circumstances. She was an entrepreneur whose many business ventures in later life included the St. Paul’s bookstore on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and a consignment store under the elevated railroad on the Lower West Side called “Lots O’ Little.” Out of high school, Grandma Ann attended a secretarial academy she found advertised on a match book. Poor health soon drove her from the febrile Chicago slums to work on a South Dakota Indian Reservation, teaching English to tribal children under Catholic Church patronage. She returned to Chicago a year later “fit as a fiddle” and met George Skakel, who, though initially repulsed by her muscular Catholicism, ultimately surrendered to her garrulous personality and bulldog determination. They married on November 25, 1917, in a Catholic ceremony at St. Mary’s Church in Chicago. A decade later, George had seven children, three sons and four daughters, all living at 57th and Woodlawn, Chicago’s most Catholic neighborhood, with his fervent mother-in-law and equally zealous wife.
The drinking flowed from both sides of the family into my mother’s generation. Ann’s dad, Joseph Brannack, a jut-jawed Irish cop, was a giant with appetites to match. His thirst for whiskey scared off his Irish-born wife, Margaret Brannack, who fled soon after her daughter’s nuptials and spent the balance of her life with Ann and her son-in-law George Skakel. In her dotage, afflicted by the same genial species of dementia that would ultimately take my Uncle Rucky, she would stuff her stockings with fruit and persuade herself that she was Admiral Nelson. The first time my father met her, she shouted from the second story, “Who goes there?” My father, late of the US Navy, answered, “Lieutenant Kennedy. Permission to come aboard?” She slid down the bannister to formally greet him with peaches and bananas tumbling from her undergarments.
Grandpa George enlisted in the Naval Reserve in 1918 and became an officer, even though he lacked a high school diploma. He trained in Cleveland, Ohio, and served eight months as a Navy ensign during World War I, docking tugboats in New York City. He came home on Christmas Day 1918, so destitute that his only suit was his navy uniform, in which he returned to work at William Howe. St. Ambrose Church provided the neighborhood’s social and cultural gravities. My mother, George and Ann’s fifth child, still recalls both the poverty and happiness of her early youth.
Using his gift for numbers—my mother remembers him easily multiplying seven-digit numbers in his head—George recovered $50,000 for William Howe after discovering that the railroads had been cheating the coal company on hauling fees during the war. When the corporate brass refused him his commission for the recovered fortune, he quit, swearing to never work for a boss again.
George persuaded two fellow employees, Walter “Wally” Graham and Rushton Fordice (for whom my Uncle Rucky would be named), to cast their lots with his. Each contributed $1,000 to a joint pool and vacated William Howe on the same fateful day to launch their own coal brokerage. They named their venture the Great Lakes Coal and Coke Company and, later, Great Lakes Carbon (GLC). Great Lakes adopted the perilous course of buying and selling only extremely large quantities of the highest quality coal, a strategy for which both the coal sellers and their buyers, the large oil refiners, rewarded them with preferred pricing. Graham’s father-in-law was a senior executive at Standard Oil Company, which became their first customer.
Grandpa George spent his career in the world’s most polluting industries, leaving, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s words, “foul dust arising from the wake of his dreams.” While pollution probably didn’t trouble him as a moral transgression, his genius was in reducing it by devising schemes to monetize the industry’s abundant waste. Mining companies customarily abandoned coal dust in mountainous heaps around their mines. When the piles of so-called “fines” grew inconveniently large, the companies plowed them into the nearest river. Grandpa foresaw that, during the periodic coal strikes, fines might be profitably marketed to individuals and industries desperate to fire empty furnaces. He contacted mine owners across coal country proposing to buy nuisance fines for five cents a ton. Great Lakes Carbon collected thousands of tons of the stuff and, when the United Mine Workers finally struck, Grandpa sold the fines for over six dollars a ton, a bargain for oil refineries desperate for fuel.
Even though George never made it past grade school, he devoured books on metallurgy and chemistry, geology and business. Browsing through Business Journal, he learned of the exploding worldwide appetite for the pure carbon needed to create aluminum for the burgeoning aviation industry. He knew that pure carbon could be gleaned from petroleum coke (petcoke), a waste product of cracking oil into gasoline. As with coal fines, the oil industry’s solution for ridding itself of alpine heaps of refinery waste was a bulldozer and a local river. Grandpa signed 99-year contracts with Standard Oil and its competitors to purchase all those companies’ petcoke for pennies per ton. In this way he obtained a virtual monopoly on petcoke just as commercial aviation was leaving the runway.
Over the next decade, Great Lakes Carbon sold millions of tons of petcoke in the eastern United States as a substitute for coal in domestic heating, and to the electrochemical and metallurgical industries. In 1935, George and his partners spent $50,000 constructing a giant calcining furnace to refine petcoke, in Port Arthur, Texas. They had the notion to sell the purified version, thereby relieving aluminum companies of an extra step in their manufacturing process and enabling the production of aluminum of unrivaled strength. They quickly persuaded Alcoa, Reynolds, Kaiser, and the other major aluminum companies to purchase their product. They bragged that their Port Arthur oven made $50,000 every six weeks thereafter.
During World War II, George purchased a large region of Moab, Utah, hoping to find uranium. He didn’t, but like nearly everything he touched, the venture turned to gold when he struck oil. The easy profits that flowed from his gushing wells prompted my famously laconic grandfather to utter one of the longest sentences anyone recalls him speaking: “Why didn’t I get into this racket earlier?”
Despite his lack of formal education, George studied Shakespeare at night. At the breakfast table he commonly read to the children human interest or animal stories from the Herald Tribune or the columns of Thornton Burgess. My mother recollects him as “a wonderful dad, always sweet, sensitive, thoughtful, and loving toward his children,” and a competent naturalist. He took his kids for long weekend walks and countryside drives, often stopping to identify a bird or a rare tree, or to explain a bit of natural history, his mastery of which was encyclopedic.
My mother’s siblings generally inherited their parents’ virtues, including Grandma’s zealous piety and generosity and Grandpa’s driving curiosity about history and the natural world. They espoused highly personalized brands of honor, but despite genuine efforts toward culture and charity, the Skakels never tried to pass themselves off as proper folk. They were carbon nabobs and their roughness showed itself through the generations. All the boys were genuine characters whose only aristocratic pretensions were their robust engagement in clubbing, turfing, golfing, drinking, fishing, and hunting.
My mother lived in Chicago until she was 8 years old, at which time she, with her parents and her older siblings (Georgeann, Jimmy, George Jr., Rucky, and Patricia) moved east, following their father’s business to New York, nearer to his customers and bankers. Grandpa’s company was on its way to becoming one of the largest private family businesses in the United States. The family settled in nearby Connecticut.
The Skakel house on Lake Avenue in Greenwich was a hybrid of The Philadelphia Story and The Beverly Hillbillies. Theirs was one of the most enormous mansions, in one of America’s wealthiest burbs, with so many bedrooms that it could easily accommodate 30 or more guests in addition to the family. Greenwich at that time was rural horse country with fewer than 6,000 residents, many working or living on large estates. The Skakel home was elegant, graceful, and roomy, with an eight-car garage, a village of outbuildings, an Olympic-sized swimming pool, and a fountain rivaling that at Buckingham Palace. The manse crowned a 10-acre lawn surrounded by 100 acres of woodland and fields. “Even though it was large, it just felt like home,” recalls my mother. “There was plenty of land for the kids to hunt and ride horses.” Swans preened while the children fished and swam in—and later skated on—a big lake.
Grandma Ann converted their demesne into a farm, a caper that must have struck their swanky Greenwich neighbors as déclassé. She kept horses, turkeys, ducks, 25 pigs, sheep, and two cows. French goats wandered through the house, unchallenged, with 14 dogs. “We had three hundred chickens. I would collect the eggs and milk the cows, which I loathed,” my mother recalls.
Grandma Ann’s devotion to the Catholic Church was legendary among her friends both in Chicago and in Greenwich. Silver holy water dispensers, religious icons, relics, crucifixes, and saints’ shrines with prie-dieu kneeling stations adorned most of the rooms at Lake Avenue. Religious books dominated the collection in the 60-foot-long Skakel library with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Ann attended St. Mary’s Catholic Church every morning at 7 a.m. The Skakel children grew up praying daily for their father’s conversion and Ann always carried a silver rosary and said grace before and after meals. The clan donated lavishly to Catholic charities.
My mother recalls that her mom kept the house thick with clergy and frequently hosted salons for religious societies and assembled a whirl of church groups there for teas. She cultivated a close friendship with the influential Catholic monk, Thomas Merton. The secretive right wing Catholic society Opus Dei launched its American debut at the Skakel house, in keeping with the Society’s strategy of aligning itself with wealthy, powerful, and politically conservative Catholics. Ann worked for years on her husband’s conversion, with merciless catechizing and regular prayers imploring the Creator’s blessings on the enterprise. It was the single request from her that Grandpa resisted.
My mother was a jock. She was a champion at both sailing and horseback riding and she loved tennis, football, golf, and skiing. My father and mother met during a winter trip to Mt. Tremblant, introduced by my father’s youngest sister, Jean Kennedy, my mother’s Manhattanville College roommate who had conspired with my mother to unite their families on a ski vacation.
The Kennedys and Skakels dated each other rather furiously after that first encounter. My mother remembers Jimmy and George, a notorious lady killer, dating most of the Kennedy sisters at one time or another. Despite their families’ differences, my parents were well suited to one another. They were both competitive, prudish, and pious. My father loved my mother’s lively spirit and was intensely proud of her athleticism, her humor, and her peculiar blend of deep religious faith and mischievous irreverence.
After my father and mother fell in love, my mother adopted his family as her own. Historian Arthur Schlesinger described theirs as “one of the great love stories of all time.” They married at St. Mary’s Church in Greenwich and had a reception at the Skakel mansion on Lake Avenue in June 1950, a year after my mother got her bachelor’s degree. It was a lavish affair with 1,200 guests. My father’s 27 ushers included his two surviving brothers, John and Edward; the three Skakel boys, George, Jimmy, and Rucky; and several teammates from his Harvard football squad.
With her skepticism toward authority, her self-confidence, humor, and her recklessly competitive spirit, my mother fit right in with her new Kennedy in-laws. And my grandfather Joseph Kennedy and all his children accepted her as one of their own. According to my Uncle John’s closest friend, LeMoyne Billings, “She soon forgot she was a Skakel. She became the consummate Kennedy.” Lem described her as “more Kennedy than the Kennedys.”
When I finally got to know Rucky Skakel’s children, in my mid-twenties, I was struck by the tumultuous blend of piety and deviltry. Like all orthodoxies, Rucky’s zealotry was authoritarian and occasionally cruel. I later learned that he beat Michael silly for bringing Playboy home from a trove of porn magazines the neighborhood boys found in a covey at Belle Haven Club. Michael laughs, “He told me that masturbation was the equivalent of murdering 10 million potential Christians and that sex was dirty, filthy, and disgusting and I should save it for the girl I loved.”
The families seemed ideally matched, with their Catholic piety and love of sports and outdoor adventure. But fault lines soon emerged between the Skakels and Kennedys. At least part of the schism was stylistic. When my Grandpa Joe sent his sons to Europe to work as war journalists or to study under the socialist economist Harold Laski, my mother’s brothers George and Jim were working as roughnecks on oil rigs in Utah and in Brownsville, Texas. While the Kennedys were surprisingly chary with their dough, the Skakels practiced a nearly destructive generosity that delighted Catholic charities. Grandpa Joe discouraged his children from riding first class on planes or trains, taking ski trips to Europe, playing polo, or gambling. The Skakel boys, in contrast, were the founders and outstanding players of the Metropolitan Blind Brook and Bethpage Polo Clubs and retreated with the swanks to bet the races at Saratoga every August.
The prevailing narrative of the Moxley murder trial was rooted in the canard pedaled by press and prosecutors that Michael Skakel is a “monstrous, spoiled Kennedy cousin.” Putting the “monstrous” part aside, the caricature of Michael Skakel as a Kennedy cousin always seemed strange to me. Our Kennedy parents raised the 29 grandchildren of Joe and Rose Kennedy communally. We spent our summers together in Hyannis Port sailing, swimming, fishing, and playing baseball, football, and tennis. We worked on political campaigns and at Special Olympics. We attended daily mass as a group, took our meals together, and spent every waking moment in each other’s company. I am as close to my Kennedy cousins as to my 10 brothers and sisters.
Nevertheless, as I’ve said, I never knew any Skakels growing up. My mother had turned Kennedy and was estranged from her family. To this day, I have Skakel cousins whom I’ve barely met and would not recognize.
As Michael had recalled, “the Skakels and the Kennedys were like oil and water.” The Skakels were Republican but so little interested in politics that my mother’s nuptials into a prominent Democratic family did not set off alarm bells. “When I married Daddy, it wasn’t a big deal,” she recalls. “They thought I was a little communist, but they all had good humor about it. It wasn’t taken seriously.” But when she started actively campaigning, she crossed a line. The Skakels were oil and coal Republicans, and like most people in the extractive industries, they were conservative. “Well, my parents weren’t bedrock Democrats,” my mother says dryly. “Grandpa was neither pro-government nor pro-Democrat.” While Grandpa Joe was FDR’s top donor in 1932, Grandpa Skakel piped his carbon lucre to the GOP and only rejected an offer to become the Republican Party’s national treasurer due to his antipathy for the spotlight.
The only time my mother heard her parents discuss politics was on the subject of “what a bad person President Roosevelt was” and how organized labor was destroying America. She recalls, “The Skakels were very critical of all Democrats, but particularly Roosevelt. They thought he’d be a dictator and they were extremely anti-union.” The Skakels were comfortable with people of every station. They often reached out to individuals in need. Grandpa George opened his wallet to children with disabilities and to people suffering deprivation. My Uncle Steve Smith, husband of Jean Kennedy, was unrestrained in his admiration for Grandpa Skakel. “George Skakel was the last great industrialist who really cared about his workers. He made sure all his employees had a safe, dignified workplace and wages that would put them into the middle class. He just seemed to want to share his good fortune with all the people who worked for him.”
Personal generosity aside, the principles of representative democracy, or the role of government in protecting the rights of the downtrodden or in fostering an equal playing field, were notions with which the Skakels were not particularly sympathetic. “None of that was ever discussed,” recalls my mother. “So it was pretty amazing to come to the Cape and listen to people who cared about the little guy. It was a big change having lunches or dinners with the [Kennedy] family. Well it was just so funny to hear Democrats lauded and admired and what a nice guy FDR was. This was different.”
According to Skakel family legend, in September 1955, two years after my birth, Grandpa George reportedly made the momentous announcement to Father Abbott of Thomas Merton’s abbey at Gethsemani in Kentucky that he wanted to convert. It was the answer to years of beseeching, imploring, and unctuous supplications by every member of the Skakel clan, and fervent benedictions by their posse of clergy. Grandpa told Father Abbott he wanted to begin the process when he returned from a business trip to the West Coast. He and Grandma took off in a converted Air Force B26 bomber on October 3, 1955. They spent a day in Tulsa and left at 9:45 p.m. the following evening for Los Angeles. Thirty minutes into the flight, both aircraft engines exploded in mid-air. The bomber lit up the sky like a comet and plunged to the ground near Union City, Oklahoma. They were both 63 years old. Police identified Grandma’s body by the rosary wrapped around her charred hand.
Uncle George Skakel Jr. had joined his father’s business in 1947 and two years before Grandpa’s death, he became president of Great Lakes Carbon. By then, the company had 3,000 employees and was manufacturing and selling petroleum coke; carbon and graphite products, including electrodes and fiber; charcoal briquettes; crude petroleum and natural gas filters; and building materials. Its headquarters were at 18 East 48th Street, New York.
In the glow that followed my parents’ marriage, Uncle George, an experienced sailboat racer, once agreed to crew for Uncle Jack Kennedy, then a US senator skippering a 28-foot Wianno Senior, in a Cape Cod Regatta. George promptly discovered his discomfort at taking orders from his in-law. He abandoned the enterprise mid-race by jumping into the ocean and swimming to the distant island of Nantucket. It was a signal that George and the Skakel brothers had soured on the Kennedys. There were no more trips to the Cape.
The Skakels supported Nixon in 1960, which stung my mother, but she bore the wound in silence and continued to love her family from a distance. During Uncle Jack’s presidential inauguration ceremonies in 1961, George Skakel, for the sake of fun and to show his contempt for the new Democratic president, distributed a pile of coveted, top-shelf family tickets that my mother had acquired for the Skakel family, to some hard-boiled hoboes from Washington’s skid row. Uncle Jack’s close friend and fellow PT boat skipper, Red Fay, found himself sitting among a dozen pickled winos in the reviewing stand. That, of course, was very funny, but the Skakel brothers became increasingly vocal about opposing my father in his political endeavors, contributing heavily to his opponents. My mother recalls that Rucky was annoyed at my father, then US Attorney General, for bringing an anti-trust suit against Rucky and his business partners when they tried to move their baseball team, the Milwaukee Braves, to Atlanta. The Skakel group eventually prevailed. My father’s unwillingness to pull strings felt like treachery to the Skakel brothers, who, in turn, contributed to my father’s opponent, Kenneth Keating, during his 1964 New York Senate race. After my father’s death, my Uncle Steve Smith, who managed my mother’s financial affairs, challenged the management of Great Lakes Carbon by the surviving Skakel brothers. Steve felt that Jimmy and Rucky weren’t sharing GLC company revenues among the non-management siblings, including my mother. For years, my mother and her sisters stood on the sidelines and watched Jimmy and Rucky deploy GLC’s fleet of company planes all over the world on golf, hunting, fishing, and ski trips that the girls suspected were only tangentially related to business. Uncle Steve hoped he could restore some financial discipline to the company that my mother’s father had built. When Uncle Steve’s efforts failed, chilly relations between the families turned frigid.
“Let me tell you something,” says Julie Skakel. “My father drilled into our heads that we were never to mention the Kennedy name. We weren’t even allowed to call Kennedy Airport Kennedy Airport. We had to call it Idlewild.” Michael says, “As a kid, it seemed my dad was angry at your family. Remember he and all the Skakel brothers were right-wing Republicans. Dad was furious that Martin Luther King slept around and included all Democrats in his condemnation, particularly your family. He thought King was dragging the nation into an immoral pit of sexual depravity and perdition and that you guys were encouraging him.”
Every year my mother’s brother Rucky rode in the Rancheros Visitadores, an exclusive, male-only club, on a 60-mile pack trip through the Santa Ynez Valley near Santa Barbara. Ranchero’s 600 members were California’s oil, gas, and real estate tycoons, the exclusive right-wing aristocracy of the Republican Party. It was one of the macho seasonal musters of the Bohemian Grove’s business elite. Members would bond by riding, drinking, dressing in drag or in cowboy costumes, and performing skits. Stephen Skakel showed me a framed picture from the 1967 ride. Then-Governor Ronald Reagan is handing a guffawing Uncle Rucky a mocking cartoon caricature of his brother-in-law—Robert Kennedy—with great Bugs Bunny teeth, protruding ears, and a mop of unruly hair. The Skakels were Kennedy doppelgangers: iconoclastic, irreverant, and unimpressed by the references to American royalty that sometimes attended their in-laws.
The Skakel boys knew that all their devilments came at a price they’d sooner or later have to pay—and they did. Uncle George Skakel Jr. died in an Idaho air crash on September 24, 1966, flying into a remote wilderness airstrip near the Shepp cattle ranch in the Salmon River Valley near Riggins, Idaho. My father’s close friend Dean Markham, CIA agent Lou Werner, and two other friends died with him. They were beginning a 10-day pack trip to hunt elk in the Idaho wilderness. The plane, a single-engine Cessna 185 owned by Great Lakes Carbon, became trapped by the nearly vertical walls of Crooked Creek’s box canyon and crashed while the pilot was making a desperate, last-ditch attempt to turn. George’s friend, Francesco Galesi, who witnessed the crash, recounted to me that, as the plane headed for the wall, George waved goodbye from the co-pilot’s seat to his family and friends who had arrived on earlier flights. According to Galesi, George was wearing the broad grin he reserved for moments of extreme peril. The plane nicked some pine trees, hit the palisade wall, and tumbled into the river. George was 44 years old. The crash scene was only a few miles from where my father, my siblings, and I had camped on a Salmon River whitewater trip the previous summer.
In a New York Times obituary, conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. bemoaned his buddy George Skakel’s death, which was reported across the nation’s front pages. Buckley echoed the Skakels’ disdain for the Kennedys, explaining that George was a force in his own right and should not be memorialized for his relationship to the Kennedys. Buckley recalled Uncle George “as a young tycoon and sportsman” of “enormous competence, curiosity, charm” who was “impulsive in mischievous and irresistible ways … in the tradition of the total American man,” but with the genius for life comparable to that of Leonardo da Vinci.
Following George’s death, his brothers Jimmy and Rucky took over management of Great Lakes Carbon. Neither of them had George’s interest in the business or his management skills. By 1985, the company was on life support and the family sold it for pennies on the dollar. With competent management, the company quickly regained its value. Ironically for me, a professional environmental advocate, Great Lakes is today one of the shining stars in the Koch Brother’s constellation of carbon companies. Bill Koch told my mother that her father’s company may be the Kochs’ most profitable acquisition.
Funerals were about the only thing that would get my mother back to Greenwich. Eight months after George’s death, his widow, Pat Skakel, choked to death on a piece of shish kebab during a dinner party at her home in Greenwich. Their parents’ deaths left my four cousins orphaned. Pat’s New York Times obituary contained a line about my cousins that synthesized the Skakel family gestalt: “Mark, 13, is still in Greenwich Hospital, recovering from cuts and burns he suffered while experimenting with explosives.”
Seven-year-old Michael Skakel was among nearly a million Americans who attended my assassinated father’s funeral in June 1968. I was 14. Neither of us recalls meeting each other. Michael’s mother, age 42, died in an agonizing death from brain cancer a year later.
My mother’s youngest brother, Rucky, was confident that he was immune from the dementia that ran through the Skakel family. “I already had that,” he once told me, thoughtfully. “And I don’t think you can catch it twice.” His confidence was misplaced. He died of the disease in 2003, at age 79.
Prior to 1981, I only recall seeing the Skakels once—in June 1965. I have only a distant memory of that day when I briefly visited them at 71 Otter Rock Drive, the house in Belle Haven that became central to the Moxley case. Uncle Rucky bought it in the 1960s with his wife, the former Ann Reynolds. Aunt Ann, another Manhattanville graduate, hailed from the wealthy Chicago suburb of Winnetka, and was as devout a Catholic as Rucky. I was 11 years old when I rode in a trailer from Hickory Hill to join my family in Hyannis Port for summer vacation. We stopped in Greenwich—the halfway point—for the night. It was my first introduction to Rucky Skakel’s children. I only recall that there were a lot of them and they seemed wild. Michael would have been 5 years old. I have no memory of him. In 1975—at the time of Martha’s murder, I would not have recognized him, and at that time in his life, Michael had no recollection of ever having met a Kennedy.
Politics probably played second fiddle to the Skakels’ maverick nature as the force that kept the Skakels and Kennedys apart. “It wasn’t just that your family were Democrats,” explains Rush Jr. “Even without the political differences, I doubt we would ever have seen you guys. That older generation of Skakels were unbranded iconoclasts. They were right-wing Bohemians—totally individualistic. They liked to keep to themselves. They didn’t mingle. They had such huge personalities and they were all so volatile and competitive. Even if they liked your politics, they wouldn’t have liked the rivalry. They all seemed to agree to love each other from a distance—and the farther the better. That’s why Jimmy moved to California and Aunt Pat to Ireland—to get away from their siblings. They were outsized characters too large to share the spotlight. They needed open range.
“We didn’t see you until we all got mobile and found each other,” Rush continues. “I didn’t know Uncle Jimmy’s kids growing up and I never went to the Terrien/Dowdles, even though they lived in the same town. I didn’t know them until I was 16 and I started riding my bike over to the fortress at Sursum Corda to see the Dowdle kids. The parents made no effort to put us together.”
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, we all began finding each other and discovering that we had a lot in common. My little brother Max met Michael and Rush Jr. by chance in 1978, while skiing at Waterville Valley, New Hampshire. The following year, my brother Michael Kennedy heard he had a Skakel cousin attending the Élan School in Poland, Maine. My brother, who was on his way to run Maine’s Kennebeck River with a group of friends, stopped by Élan to meet his cousin for the first time and invite him kayaking. Surveying Élan’s vacant-eyed inmates, Michael Kennedy added uncertainly, “You can bring your friends.” Michael Skakel remembered the visit with a smile. Shaking his head he said, “He had no clue what he’d walked into! He looked like he’d just blundered into the Thunderdome.” It quickly dawned on Michael Kennedy that he had stumbled into some kind of squalid and sinister reform school. Shocked, he asked Michael Skakel, “What are you doing in here?” The visit caused an uproar. Élan inmates and counselors recognized Michael Kennedy and realized, for the first time, that Michael Skakel was some species of Kennedy relative. Despite having been at Élan for months, he had never told anybody of the connection. The counselors accused him of putting on airs. “I took a big pounding after Michael [Kennedy] left,” Michael recalls.
We all shared the Skakel sense of fun and a love for the outdoors. At that time, most of the boys from both families were getting sober. Michael has five brothers—all soft spoken, handsome, and athletic. Initially, I became closest to his brother Rush Jr., with whom I share a birthday. The brothers, for the most part, did not adopt their parents’ right-wing politics. They were smart, funny, kind, considerate, and unassuming—never ostentatious, even though, in our company, they had a lot they could have boasted about. Each of the Skakel boys was a gifted athlete excelling at the same sports the Kennedys loved.
The first time I remember meeting Michael was in the early winter of 1983. He was recently sober. Michael had graduated from Élan two years earlier, in June 1980, at age 19, with a high school diploma he hadn’t earned. “I was hardwired to drink myself into oblivion every day,” he told me. “The moment I left Élan, I was back in the bottle with a vengeance. My drinking was worse than when I got locked up. I felt as if my alcoholism had been doing push-ups the entire two years that I was dry in Élan.” His discovery that year of cocaine accelerated his free fall. He flunked out of Bradford College and lost his job in the computer room at Great Lakes Carbon. “I was still in denial,” he says. “I thought my only drinking problem was that I had two hands to hold bottles and only one mouth.”
On October 25, 1982, a month after his 22nd birthday, Michael believes that God spoke to him. He was driving on North Street in Greenwich when he heard a voice ask, “Do you want to keep doing this your way?” A vision of blackness and death flooded his mind, and he watched himself plummeting into a pit. The voice continued, “Or do you want to do it my way?” at which time, a comforting image of a solitary flame replaced the grim spectacle. “I believe it was the Holy Spirit in the car,” he says. “I didn’t tell anybody for 10 years because I was embarrassed. I thought people would think me crazy.” A half hour after seeing the vision, he walked into his first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Michael has been drug and alcohol free for the 34 years since.
His life improved immediately. He cofounded and funneled the entirety of his savings—$50,000—into The Serenity Project, a program that helped expose the abuse at Élan and contributed to alumni efforts to finally shut it down. “I didn’t want one more kid to go through the hell that I went through.” He volunteered for Mother Theresa’s men’s shelter in the Bronx. When Mother Theresa visited the facility, Michael gave her a bear hug and lifted her off her feet. “I later read that she abhorred being touched,” confesses Michael sheepishly. He was also working with the crisis intervention team at Greenwich Hospital and making regular presentations about substance abuse through an outfit called Freedom from Chemical Dependency (FCD) to students, parents, and teachers in classrooms in Darien, New Canaan, and Greenwich. After finally receiving a proper diagnosis for dyslexia, he enrolled in Curry College in Milton, Massachusetts, which offers a special program for students with learning differences. In 1990, he graduated with honors.
I got sober in September 1983, a year after Michael. I lived in Mt. Kisco, New York, only 10 minutes from Greenwich. Michael became one of my closest friends and we spent much of the time over the next 15 years in each other’s company. We skied, fished, hiked, camped, scuba dived, and traveled together, often with my wife and children. During that time, I sometimes spent as many as two or three weekends a month with Michael. I brought my children to the Skakels’ ski house in Windham, New York, almost every weekend in the winter. We all slept in the bunk room, ate pizza, and skied all day. Together, we taught my six kids to ski, starting when they were 2 years old. My children adore Michael. His natural gentleness, his humor, and his childlike vulnerability give him an easy manner with children. His gift for communicating with kids and making them laugh and his genuine love for playing with them make him a popular favorite among their many fun and funny older relatives. Children appreciate that he is never overbearing, pretentious, or phony.
During that time Michael and I attended hundreds of 12-step meetings together. Every evening at Windham we put my kids in front of a VCR and spent the next hour in some church basement. I got a kick watching Michael inspire laughter reciting his wild stories of addiction and recovery. He shares his experience, strength, and hope with openness and raw, soul-wrenching honesty that melts hearts, cheers program veterans, and encourages newcomers. Michael’s natural generosity and openheartedness mesh perfectly with the 12-step formula of service. After nearly every meeting, I watched him seek out and comfort the most shattered or bereft newcomers. He scribbled his telephone number on napkins and AA’s big books and then spent hours on the phone comforting fragile and hopeless neophytes, helping them make it through the often despairing days of early recovery. Together, we would pick them up for meetings or sit with them in diners to work through the hard days or nights.
Rather than being bitter or self-pitying over a difficult, often-brutal childhood and his two-year nightmare in Élan, Michael had transformed those years of torture, neglect, and abuse into his greatest capital asset: empathy. Michael is hypersensitive to suffering in others. I’ve watched his openness about his own struggles alleviate pain and inspire courage in recovering alcoholics. That’s not hyperbole. During his sentencing proceedings, 90 people would send letters to the court supporting Michael, with 18 of these attesting that Michael Skakel’s moral support and guidance kept them sober. Many of them, including his brother Stephen, said that Michael had saved their lives.
Michael is among the most solidly spiritual people I’ve ever met. He always carries a rosary and prays it daily. (In prison, he prayed three rosaries on his knees at 3:30 p.m. every afternoon.) During the first decade of our sobriety, we often attended mass together daily. Michael’s deeply held religious beliefs and faith in God infuse his every action. He is always trying to do “the next right thing.” Yet he lives his beliefs and he practices his religion quietly.
Don’t get me wrong; we weren’t spending all day in church or meetings. Despite his bulk, Michael, like his brothers, is a graceful and gifted athlete. Like his brother Rush, he is a superb skier. In 1990, Michael qualified for the US World Cup team for speed skiing and earned sponsorships from Swix Wax and Swanee Glove. He was named to the US National Speed Ski Team in 1993 and represented America on the World Cup circuit for the next four years. He landed among the top 10 competitors in World Cup tournaments in Sweden, Norway, and France. In 1997 on the legendary track at Les Arcs, Michael clocked 136 mph. He finished that year ranked third in the United States and 18th in the world. He was 26 years old.
Michael always dresses well. Usually he is in outdoor gear, neat and well-groomed, wearing hunting pants and a sweater, with tweeds that evoke his rustic Celtic heritage. Contrary to the malicious press reports, he has never worn an ascot. He is indeed the opposite of a snob. Humble and hilarious, devoid of pretense or vanity, he is curious about everyone and comfortable in every company. He is nearly always the butt of his own jokes.
Almost nothing the prosecutors said or the press wrote about Michael during the trial was true. No one ever deserved the label of “monster” or “this spoiled brat” less than Michael Skakel. Michael is constitutionally honest and a natural-born gentleman. At all times, he is self-effacing, generous, and unfailingly courteous, as exhibited with his impeccable manners: opening doors for everybody, standing when a woman enters the room, and holding their chairs when they sit or stand. After his trial, jurors complained that Michael had endeavored to ingratiate himself by standing when they entered the courtroom. He wasn’t trying to flatter. Courtesy is his nature.
During a visit to Loblolly, Florida, when Michael’s cousins and siblings were on the water or playing tennis or golf, Suzanne M. Walsh, a Montessori school teacher from Windham, New York, told me that she spotted Michael crouched in the sweltering 95-degree heat beneath a merciless sun with a bucket of pitch tar and a bale of shingles, putting a new roof on the ramshackle cinderblock home of an elderly lady who once worked for his family. Michael regularly bought her groceries. During a post-hurricane delivery, he noticed a fissure in her roof and returned the next day to patch it. Walsh recalls another day mentioning to Michael that she needed to drain her pond. “Without a word, Michael came over, set up his sump, and did the job.”
Michael offered Walsh a ride in Windham in January 1998 only to find an elderly homeless man sitting in front of the car. Michael stopped and talked to the man. With no cash to give him, Michael opened his trunk and pulled out his winter coat, draped it around the fellow and sat down and talked with him for a short while. Then Michael gave him a pat on the back and said, “Keep warm.”
In 1991, I was at Michael’s Westhampton, New York, wedding when he married Margot Sheridan, whom he met during a Colorado skiing vacation. Margot, a tall, beautiful ski instructor and former racer, had a ready laugh and large, bright, wideset eyes framed by high cheekbones on a broad, open face reminiscent of her great grandfather, Civil War General Philip Sheridan. The two lived in Quincy, Massachusetts, while Michael was finishing college. In the early 1990s they moved to Windham, New York. In 1994, my brother Michael Kennedy, recently sober with Michael Skakel’s help, asked Michael to join him in Massachusetts to work on Senator Edward Kennedy’s 1994 reelection campaign. Michael and Margot moved to Cohasset, Massachusetts.
After the election, Michael worked briefly as a real estate agent for RM Bradley in Boston and then went to work at Citizens Energy Corporation, the energy nonprofit founded by my elder brother Joe, to provide affordable energy and other services to the poor. Michael Kennedy had been running the company since Joe went to Congress in 1986. In 1995, Michael Skakel became Citizen Energy’s international director, supervising projects and assistance to impoverished communities in underdeveloped countries. While employed at Citizens Energy, he helped launch projects in Angola, Ecuador, and Cuba.
In 1997, Michael had a falling out with my brothers. Led by Dominick Dunne and Mark Fuhrman, the wolves were beginning to circle, pointing fingers at Michael as a murderer. Aggravated by his occasionally debilitating PTSD resulting from his time at Élan, Michael partly blamed my family for his woes. Michael became convinced that Joe and Michael Kennedy were promoting his arrest for the Moxley murder. “Michael was mad at your whole family,” explains his elder brother Rush Jr. “It wasn’t completely unjustified. We all knew that the Skakels had nothing to do with the Kennedys. Yet here he was being persecuted because of this thin, tendentious relationship between our two families. It was like a witch hunt. They were gonna burn him at the stake no matter what the evidence said. That inconsequential link with your family turned out to be this powerful fuel that kept burning and burning ’til it consumed him. It was the Kennedy connection that fed and enriched the press and the whole drama served the interests of the people who hate your family. So they kept fanning the flames. The irony was that Michael never identified himself as a ‘Kennedy cousin’ and yet that became his epithet. I don’t blame him for being angry and suspicious toward your family. Michael doesn’t have a drop of Kennedy blood and yet the relationship destroyed his life and destroyed Tommy’s life. You could say that it destroyed everyone in our family in one way or another. I made the choice to keep my head down and even to leave the country. [Rush Jr. moved to Bogotá, Colombia, with his family in 1995.] I saw how destructive and toxic that whole relationship between your family and the press was. Between the media and the Kennedy haters, it was like a bluefish feeding frenzy. Innocence and guilt were irrelevant. Everyone in the blood plume was gonna get mangled. Just take a look at Benedict’s legal theory as it unfolded. He was not just trying to jail Michael; he was implicating our entire family in a horrible 30-year conspiracy.”
Michael left his job at Citizens Energy Corporation and went to work with the International Institute for Alcoholism as a volunteer. He traveled to Russia with the group in order to bring the message of AA to prisons in St. Petersburg. Michael accepted an offer as executive director of the organization, a job that fell through when Mark Fuhrman’s book Murder in Greenwich named Michael as Martha Moxley’s killer. Before long, Michael was under grand jury investigation. Overnight, he became unemployable. The media madness put increasing stress on his marriage; the couple suffered a miscarriage. They sold the Cohasset house and moved to Florida to live with his father and stepmother. While in Florida, Margot gave birth to their son, George Henry Skakel, on December 7, 1998. Michael did housework and took care of the baby while Margot taught golf and worked in school six days a week to get her sports and massage therapy certification. Michael also took care of Rucky, who was suffering from a long menu of physical and mental health problems. “He’d had prostate cancer,” Michael says. “I’d been changing his diaper for two years. I took him to church every day, sometimes twice a day, seven days a week.” They lived in Florida for two years.
After Michael was arrested in 2000, the couple moved back to Windham, New York, in order to be closer to Connecticut. Under pressure from the relentless media pounding and vitriol, Michael and Margot separated in the fall of 2000, and were divorced on September 19, 2001. The divorce decree gave them joint custody of their son.
One Sunday in 2001, after dropping George off with Margot at Windham, Michael saw a broken-down van filled with children on the opposite side of Interstate 287. A man with a military buzz cut stood next to the van helplessly watching traffic pass. A couple miles down the road, Michael did a U-turn and went back. The man, a soldier heading back to West Point, and his wife said they’d been stranded for over an hour. Michael was the first person to stop. Michael called a tow service and waited with the family. When the hooker truck arrived, the driver told him that all the nearby garages were closed. The tow to West Point would cost over two hundred dollars, and the soldier didn’t have the money. Michael paid the driver, the kids piled into the tow truck for a fun ride, and Michael drove the man and his wife up to West Point in his car. At this point in his life, Michael spent his waking moments hoping that nobody would recognize him and take him for the monster the media had so effectively convinced the world he was. Nevertheless, and despite Michael’s objections, the soldier insisted on taking Michael’s address. His wife wanted to send a thank-you note. A few weeks later, Michael received a handwritten note from Major Sean Lewis. The letter would later provide him comfort in prison.
Dear Michael,
I want to thank you for your kindness and true selflessness in assisting me and my family during our time of need. Your actions were far above the call of duty. It took my wife about two seconds to figure out who you were after she read your full name. I wish you had told me. Nothing would have changed in regard to how I would have treated you. …
I do not know why you stopped to help us. I do not know why my prayer of “God, please send just the right person to help us” was answered by Him sending you. But what I do know is that God meant for you and my family to come in contact through our misfortune.
Thank you again, from the bottom of my heart.
In God’s precious grace