Manhattanville
The nuns at Manhattanville had encountered plenty of precocious young women over the years, but none was quite like Ethel Skakel—especially when she joined forces with her roommate, Jean Kennedy. Just as the high jinks in the Skakel home lent to local folklore, so, too, did Ethel’s pranks at the pious college.
Once, the girls wondered aloud what the nuns wore to sleep. Ethel decided there was only one way to find out, so she pulled the fire alarm, and the nuns scurried into the halls in their nightgowns. Another time, after being snubbed by an Irish boy showing his horse at a New York horse show, Ethel snuck into the stables and painted the boy’s horse green with vegetable dye, in honor of his Irish roots. Then there was the time Ethel targeted Monsignor Hartigan for arriving on campus in a fancy new Cadillac. She put a handwritten note in his windshield that read, “Are the collections good, Father?”
Years later, Ethel would remember one prank above most others. She and Jean had racked up serious demerits that the nuns tallied in a dreaded book. Ethel’s offenses were many: chewing gum in assembly, disorder in the tearoom, talking during lunch. She had so many demerits that she was going to be “campused,” forced to stay at Manhattanville while the other girls were free to go to the annual Harvard-Yale football game.
“This is ridiculous to ground us at this age,” Jean complained. “We’re too old to be grounded.”
Ethel agreed, recalling that they “took the demerit book and threw it down the incinerator, and went to the Harvard-Yale game.”
Rose Kennedy worried that the high-spirited Ethel was leading Jean down a troubling path, and so she tried to separate the girls. “Mother didn’t think we were studying, and Mother thought that Ethel was a bad influence,” Jean later recalled. “I had had honors when I graduated from Noroton, and my marks went steadily down. So she put up a wall between us.” The divide didn’t last, however, and even after Bobby passed up Ethel to date her sister, Ethel still worked her way into the Kennedy clan. In 1946, as Bobby and Pat dated, she went to work on Jack’s congressional campaign, ringing doorbells, passing out literature, and telling anyone who would listen just how “terrific” a candidate John F. Kennedy was. “We’d drive up to Boston and lick stamps,” Ethel recalled. “I thought, this is so exciting! We went house to house and talked to people. And why they would listen to a 17-year-old who knew nothing, I have no idea. But it was a great experience. It was a room full of people who I had never rubbed elbows with before.”
Ethel had never paid much attention to politics before she was drawn in by Jean’s enthusiasm. In fact, her parents were conservative Republicans. Her father considered Franklin D. Roosevelt an enemy because of the president’s plan to impose new regulations on big business. “George hated Roosevelt,” Jay Mayhew, Great Lakes’ chief geologist and George’s longtime friend, would later say. “He felt that Roosevelt would run the country into the ground. He felt Roosevelt could have become a dictator.”Asked years later whether she had any consciousness of their political beliefs growing up, Ethel replied, “None whatsoever.”
Still, Ethel worked doggedly for Jack’s campaign, scurrying to sometimes six or seven neighborhood parties a day, serving cookies and pouring coffee and handing out brochures. She found the whole process invigorating, and after the campaign ended, returned to college a fervent believer in the Kennedy cause. She even wrote a college thesis on Kennedy’s book Why England Slept and peppered in enough firsthand research to earn an A.
After graduation, she toured Europe with Jean and Eunice and, upon her return, decided to enroll at Columbia University for graduate work. By then, Bobby was ready to settle down. Though he was the seventh born to Rose and Joe, he planned to be the first married—and he hoped to raise a family bigger than his own.