One day, when Robert Kennedy Jr. was about six months old, he was being cared for at his parents’ home at the Cape by Fina Harvin. There was a knock on the door; it was the milkman making his regular delivery. Fina ran to let the serviceman in and, while in the kitchen, she heard a thud and a loud squeal. She then ran back to the bedroom and realized that little Bobby had rolled right off the bed and onto the floor. She scooped the crying infant up into her arms, sure she’d done the baby harm. At that moment, the phone rang. It was Bobby Sr., the baby’s father. “I think I broke little Bobby,” Fina said, crying. She explained what happened. “How high is the bed?” Bobby asked. She said it was about four feet. “Oh, that’s okay,” Bobby said, laughing. “Another foot, though, and the poor kid would probably be a goner.” Thirty years later, when Bobby Jr. was giving a speech in Boston, he quipped, “People always ask me all the time how I turned out the way I did. Well,” he said, pointing at Fina, “it’s because that woman right over there once dropped me on my head.”
Born on January 17, 1954, Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. was the third of Bobby’s and Ethel’s eleven children. He was nine when his uncle Jack was assassinated and fourteen when his father met the same terrible fate. As it happened, Bobby was one of the Kennedy children who was not in Los Angeles when his father was killed. At the time, he was in a Jesuit boarding school in North Bethesda, Maryland. A priest jostled him awake to tell him that there was a car outside, waiting to take him back to Hickory Hill. He didn’t say why. It was one of his mother’s secretaries, Jinx Hack, who told him that his father had been shot.
Hours after the shooting, Bobby found himself on Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey’s plane, Air Force Two, with his older siblings, Kathleen and Joe, to meet the rest of his family already on the coast. He was at his father’s bedside at Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles when Bobby passed away. He then served as one of the pallbearers at his funeral. In the years that followed, he would speak of these memories with a certain detachment, as if it all had happened to someone else. Though he seemed to not connect to it, his entire life would be shaped and defined by this tragedy. It wouldn’t be until he was perhaps in his forties that he really understood it.
“I have to say that I think it was simply because he was named after his pop that the adults in the family always thought Bobby was the leading contender in the race of who could one day be President,” Christopher Lawford once observed. “He really didn’t show any interest in social studies or politics, and I think he went out of his way to avoid such subjects in school. As much as the adults—especially his mother—wanted Bobby to be that person, that’s how much he didn’t want to be that person. He went the other way, as if to say, ‘You know what? I am going to so not be that person, you won’t believe how not that person I am going to be.’”
Being alone in the house with his mother was the last thing Bobby ever wanted, even when his father was alive. When RFK decided to campaign for the presidency in 1968, his namesake begged to be sent to a boarding school just so that he wouldn’t have to deal with Ethel. “Are you scared of your mother?” Ena had asked him. “Of course, I am,” he admitted. “Isn’t everyone?” Ethel gladly sent him away. “I seldom lasted longer than a few days at home when I returned from distant schools for vacation,” Bobby later recalled. “My homecomings were like the arrival of a squall. With me around to provoke her, my mother didn’t stay angry very long—she went straight to rage. Her moods were like milk on a hot stove: one moment everything seemed fine and a second later the stove had disappeared.”
In July 1970, a skirmish with the law would be the catalyst for Bobby’s railroad odyssey. He and his cousin Bobby Shriver were busted for selling pot to an undercover police officer. Ethel didn’t handle it well. It was just a year after Ted’s misadventure at Chappaquiddick and was the last thing she and the rest of the family needed at that time. “She went on a tirade after the arrest and really laid into Bobby, tossing his skinny ass into the bushes outside their home and then evicting him from the house,” said Joseph Gargan.
Eunice was just as angry, but she knew where to draw the line—she definitely wouldn’t call her Bobby names or throw him out of the house; that wasn’t her style. Instead, she sent him to his room for a couple of days and waited for Sarge—who had been in California—to return. After the Shriver parents reasoned things out with each other and decided on a course of action, Sarge sat down with Bobby and talked to him. Looking downcast, Sarge said he was gravely disappointed in his son and hoped to God he’d never repeat this mistake. Importantly, he also reassured him he wasn’t a bad kid. He said he was a good son who’d just made a bad choice. Bobby Shriver recalls the way his father dealt with this episode as being a seminal moment in his life. “I knew from that moment on that my dad would have my back,” he said, “and then I spent the rest of my life trying to make sure it wasn’t necessary. When you know your father is there for you, it makes a big difference in the life of a teenager. I just wished Bobby had had this same kind of support. He’d really suffer because of a lack of it.”
Bobby Shriver said he never did drugs again after that troubling incident. The same couldn’t be said for Ethel’s boy. Not only did he continue smoking marijuana, he moved on to heroin and other narcotics—and he even liked to brag about it. “Don’t even pretend to understand me if you haven’t done acid,” Bobby would tell people.
One family friend recalls, “I remember Bobby and I got our signals crossed about something having to do with his drugs. He completely overreacted. He threw me up against a wall. ‘I am the last person you want to fuck with,’ he screamed at me, ‘because I will fuck you right back.’ I thought, Okay, this guy’s a loose cannon you don’t want to ever cross.”
Ena Bernard would take Joe and Bobby, sit down with them in the kitchen, and try to reason with them. “You have to be better boys,” she would tell them while serving them heaping bowls of chocolate ice cream. “Why do you have to be so bad? Do you know how much you’re hurting your mother?” She warned them that if they didn’t behave, “I’ll give you a pow-pow.” That was her way of saying she was going to give them a spanking, though never once did she ever lay a hand on them. At the time, the kids were getting ready for a photo shoot for Look magazine, for an article about how well the family was faring after Bobby’s death. Most of the Kennedy children disliked such photo sessions, where, as Bobby put it, “we have to be this nauseatingly smiling family when none of it is true.” Ena promised the boys that if they would just tolerate the photo session they could then go horseback riding. All of the kids had horses in the Hickory Hill stalls and had been riding through the Virginia woods from a very early age, taught by Ethel to jump fences, high hedges and, on occasion, even automobiles. Ena could get the boys to do pretty much anything if she just promised an afternoon gallop as a reward.
By this time, Ena was deeply entrenched in the Kennedys’ world. “My mother’s nickname in our family became Banco de Costa Rica [Bank of Costa Rica],” Fina recalled with a chuckle, “because we would always go to her for money since we knew she could get it from Mrs. Kennedy. For instance, I once ran my American Express card up to six thousand dollars and couldn’t pay it. I was so upset about it, as was my mother. ‘I will take care of it, don’t worry,’ Mrs. Kennedy said, and she paid the whole thing off. So my mother felt a real responsibility to the Kennedy kids, to make sure they were all right, to be a mom to them when they were unhappy with their real mom. ‘These boys are hurting,’ she would say. ‘They miss their father. I will not give up on them.’”