Another person who had great influence over the new generation of Kennedys was a man who had been close to the family since the 1930s, someone they all loved and respected despite his eccentricities—and maybe even because of them. His name was Kirk LeMoyne Billings, known to all as “Lem.” No examination of the third generation of Kennedys could ever be complete without an understanding of Lem.
Lem was born in 1916 in Pittsburgh. In 1933, at the age of sixteen, he became best friends with the then-fifteen-year-old John F. Kennedy while the two were students at the Choate preparatory school and then later, for a year, at Princeton. “He was well-liked and someone to whom all of the other students seemed to gravitate, including Jack, who had really taken a liking to him,” Senator George Smathers once said. “From the time Jack brought Lem home to spend Christmas with the Kennedys at Palm Beach [in 1933], Lem was a part of that family. Jack told me there was this instant camaraderie between not only him and JFK but with the whole bunch of ’em. There was always a lot of strange excitement around Lem. For instance, Jack told me that during the summer break of ’34, Lem was burned by a defective hot water valve in the shower at the Kennedys’ home and had to be hospitalized for three weeks. Whoever heard of such a thing happening? Only to Lem.”
Lem was a tall, gangly fellow at six foot four with curly dirty-blond hair and large, thick glasses. One could tell that, in his youth, he’d been a college wrestler and crew captain. As an older man, there was imperiousness in the way he held his head; he walked with pride as if he knew his worth. Maybe he wasn’t handsome in the accepted sense of the word, but his vitality made him seem somehow better-looking. He was well-mannered, extremely meticulous about all things, especially his appearance—only the best, most expensive wardrobe, for instance. While some might say he leaned toward being effeminate, no one in the family ever made fun of him; he was much too beloved. Sure, when he first entered the White House after Jack was elected, he stood between Pat Lawford and Eunice Shriver and, motioning all around him, struck a flamboyant pose and stole a line from Butterfly McQueen in Gone With the Wind: “Lordy! We sure is rich now!” But that was just Lem. He had his little quirks; for instance, though he was a year older than JFK, he fibbed during the first of his eleven oral history interviews for the JFK Library (in 1964) and said they were the same age rather than admit to his true age.
Lem would always have unfettered access to JFK and the White House throughout Jack’s term as President. When Bobby and Ethel had their sixth child in 1958, they named him after Lem—Michael LeMoyne Kennedy. After Jack died in 1963, it was as if Lem, who was then forty-seven, had nothing to live for, his grief was so debilitating. Though he did go on, he was never quite the same.
Lem was delighted when Bobby decided to run for President in 1968, feeling as did everyone else in the family that this was their moment to reclaim what they’d lost with the murder of Jack. Of course, it wasn’t meant to be. While losing Jack had been devastating, Bobby’s death was more than Lem could handle. He completely spiraled out of control, turning to drugs and alcohol in his grief.
“The adults in the lives of the younger generation didn’t spend a whole lot of time talking about Jack or Bobby because it always took them down a road that was off-limits,” observed Ben Bradlee. “When they did speak of them, it was serious and solemn. But good ol’ Lem had no fear of the subject. In the years after Bobby’s death, he became even more open and excited about sharing his stories of the fallen Kennedy men. He was the one with the incredible scrapbooks full of correspondence, photos, and all sorts of other mementos. He was a font of information for pretty much every member of the younger generation. I think he made Jack and Bobby come alive for them with his great stories of courage and wisdom, and his hilarious tales, too. He made them human. He was, in many ways, a surrogate father, though he would always bristle at that notion. He never wanted to be thought of as a father figure, but rather a friend or perhaps a mentor. Thank goodness he was in the lives of Jack’s and Bobby’s kids, as well as Ted’s, Eunice’s, and all of them.”
“You must stop turning away from your rightful place in history,” Lem would tell the young Kennedys, especially brothers Bobby and David Kennedy and their cousin Christopher Lawford, the three to whom he had become closest. While he understood their need to search for their own identities outside the Kennedy legacy, he never wanted them to risk losing their true selves and abandoning their real responsibilities in the process. “Embrace your destiny, don’t turn away from it,” he would tell them. “And remember what Grandma Rose used to say: ‘Never forget that you are a Kennedy. A lot of work went into building that name. Don’t disparage it.’”
THOUGH THEY DIDN’T really have much to do with each other in that they were at different stations in the family pecking order—one a close family friend, the other an important household staff member—their loyalty and devotion to the Kennedys, as well as their pride of association, is what Lem Billings and Ena Bernard had in common as family caretakers. They played their rightful “parts,” as Ethel Kennedy might have put it, in regard to the upbringing of her many children. In the process, both would find themselves depended upon during the most challenging of times, especially in regard to the difficulties brought on by her most troubled sons—Bobby Jr. and David.