First Births, First Deaths
While the couple was thrilled to be the first to make Rose and Joe grandparents, Ethel was less stoked about the physical symptoms of pregnancy. She was used to running around and being active—and, with later pregnancies, she’d make headlines for doing just that—but this first experience was uncomfortable and, even worse, limiting. The nausea, the physical twinges and heartburn—all of it prompted Ethel to stop the tennis playing and the swimming and instead act, as biographer Jerry Oppenheimer put it, “like a patient preparing for major surgery.” Sue Drake, a friend of Ethel’s, recalled that the mom-to-be was sick and miserable initially. “She was basically terrified by the whole thing,” Drake said. “She wanted to do what was right, but she was scared.” It didn’t help that the baby hung on a good two weeks past Ethel’s due date.
Bobby and Ethel had moved into a Rambleside guesthouse in the summer of 1951 to await the birth. One night as they watched television with the family in the sitting room, Ethel let out a scream. Bobby rushed his twenty-three-year-old wife to Greenwich Hospital and called on trusted Nurse Hennessey to help.
“He called me and said, ‘Ethel has gone to the hospital, and the doctor is kind of worried. . . . Will you come down? Will you fly right down?’ ” Hennessey hesitated. She didn’t like to fly at all, but she refused to fly alone, so Bobby flew up, met her at the airport, and boarded with her on a return flight, and the two arrived in Greenwich to be by Ethel’s side.
On July 4th Ethel gave birth to a healthy daughter they named Kathleen, after Bobby’s late sister, Kick. Senator Joseph McCarthy—for whom Bobby was still working—would be the child’s godfather. Hennessey, who would attend the birth of all of Ethel’s eleven children, recalled that the young mother was anxious and depressed after the birth. “Ethel had a lot of problems,” the nurse later said. “I wouldn’t call it a nervous breakdown. I would say it was exaggerated anxiety. It was a very difficult, quite hard delivery for Ethel and she was suffering when I got there.” Physically, it had been a grueling delivery, one that would leave Ethel aching for days with an internal injury caused by the baby being so big—likely in part because it was overdue—inside of Ethel’s petite frame. It didn’t help Ethel’s mental state that she had trouble nursing Kathleen and had to bottle feed her instead, Hennessey said.
As happens with many new moms, the expected feelings of motherly love and joy didn’t immediately wash over Ethel, and some of her recent worries bubbled to the surface. She told Hennessey that she’d been lonely in the little house in Charlottesville, where Bobby studied all the time and she mostly had superficial friends. “With her old friends she could discuss intimate things,” Hennessey later said. “In Charlottesville, Ethel didn’t have that luxury. She didn’t have her mother or father or an aunt or an old friend to help her. She felt she had been thrown into pregnancy far away from home.” And now that the baby was born, she worried about the family’s next step. “Nothing in her life was settled and that bothered her,” Hennessey said. “She was concerned that she didn’t have her own home with Bobby to go back to. She didn’t feel it was natural going back to her parents’ house.”
It was a rare, unguarded moment for Ethel, who usually put on a happy front for others, and this instance of atypical vulnerability wasn’t shared with the rest of the family—possibly not even Bobby, Hennessey said. When Ethel finally left the hospital for Rambleside two weeks after giving birth, she immediately ordered a dozen red roses for Rose Kennedy, starting a tradition that she’d keep for ten more births—a tribute to the family matriarch and Ethel’s acknowledged role model. Hennessey moved into a guesthouse with the baby, and every morning, she’d bring Kathleen to Ethel in the main house, where the new mom stayed with Bobby. The proud father seemed thrilled to have a girl because he could cuddle her. “Little boys are different,” Hennessey remembered him saying. “You can love a little girl.”
That summer, Ethel was active again. Returning to Hyannis Port, she and Bobby swam, sailed, and took long walks along the beach. But Bobby was still weighing his next career move, and he was gone for long stints at his father’s behest while he sorted out the future. Bobby debated joining a law firm in New York, but public service had been hammered into him so much as a young man that entering private practice would have been a betrayal of the family ethos. He decided to put his connections to use: Senator McCarthy helped him get his first job with the Department of Justice’s Internal Security Division, where Bobby would earn $4,200 a year investigating records kept by suspected spies. Ethel was thrilled that they’d be able to settle down, especially as she learned in the fall of 1951 that she was already pregnant again. But the flirtation with stability would be short-lived. Jack was going to run for the Senate in 1952, and he tapped Bobby to be his campaign manager. Bobby had worked for the Justice Department for just three months. “It was a major decision,” Ethel recalled. “He felt he was just starting out his own career and he had to put it on the back burner. It was a big sacrifice.”
Ethel already had tasted Kennedy campaigning during Jack’s congressional bid, but now, as a wife and full-fledged member of the family, she would be expected to play a much more visible role. She joined Rose and Jack’s sisters in hosting the famous tea parties and remained front and center as the summer waned, even as her stomach ballooned in the later months of her pregnancy.
Privately, Ethel worried about her unborn baby. Her sister Georgeann, also pregnant, had been stricken with rubella—German measles—which was known to affect fetuses in utero. Fear plagued Georgeann’s pregnancy, and unfortunately, Alexandra was born blind and deaf, with profound developmental disabilities. She labored to breathe and eventually was placed in a home for the terminally ill. Ethel prayed on her rosary that her own unborn child wasn’t affected, as she had been in contact with Georgeann when the vicious illness developed. Her worries proved unfounded: on September 24, 1952, Ethel gave birth to a healthy boy that Bobby chose to name Joe, after his departed older brother.
“All of her prayers had worked,” Hennessey later said, providing a clue to understanding her and Ethel’s basic affinity. “As soon as she was told the baby was fine, she visibly relaxed.” It was not the only good news the Kennedys enjoyed that fall: in November, Jack won election to the Senate.
By the time she was married, Ethel had parted ways with her Republican upbringing so much that she would later wince when admitting that her parents weren’t “bedrock Democrats.” “I just totally put the Republican part behind me,” she later said. The Skakels took notice, she added with an eye roll: “I think they thought I was a little Communist.” The political divide eventually translated into a personal one, family members told Oppenheimer. Though the two families were seemingly similar on paper—large, Irish Catholic, rich—theirs was a clash of personalities. The Kennedys saw the Skakels as obscene and boorish; the Skakels saw the Kennedys as amoral hypocrites. Ethel’s mother, Big Ann, found it especially offensive that Joe engaged in such flagrant affairs, and she lost respect for Rose because of how much she tolerated his behavior. Neither Ann nor George cared much whether Jack won his Senate seat, nor were they impressed with the publicity Ethel was getting for helping the campaign. “The only talk about the Kennedys was the jokes the Skakels made about them,” said Virginia Skakel, who married Ethel’s brother Jim in 1952. “There was no closeness between the two families at all.”
Once, after the Senate campaign, Ethel’s brother George Jr. sailed with Jack in a race off Martha’s Vineyard. Jack barked at him to adjust the sheets, but George Jr. was sure that if he followed the instructions, they’d lose the race. “Look, Jack,” he shot back, “are you going to keep screaming at me to trim this sail when I know damned well better than you do how it ought to be trimmed?” Jack yelled at him to “shut the hell up and do as you’re told!” An insulted George Jr. flipped Jack the bird, jumped into the water, and swam two miles back to shore, leaving the senator without a crew.
The two families clashed when it came to money as well. Though Big Ann was always on the lookout for a bargain, she was not cheap, and she’d raised her children without any concept of budgeting. Once, when told that her checking account was overdrawn, Ethel said naively, “It can’t be. I still have some checks left.” This caused some friction and prompted Rose to try to convince Ethel’s parents to help reel in their daughter’s shopping sprees, but Big Ann wasn’t interested in passing along the message. “If Bobby can’t treat Ethel in the manner to which she’s accustomed, we’ll just take her back,” she said, later adding, “I thought you Kennedys had nothing but money.”
Rose would tactfully try to rein in her daughter-in-law. Once, she wrote her a letter: “Bobby took me to the top floor of your house the other evening and I noticed a Jaeger-LeCoultre clock in one of the maid’s rooms,” she began, noting that the fancy clocks sold for “$50 or $60 in Switzerland.” “It is very easy to get a good electric clock for $4.95 and this would be most suitable for the maid’s room.”
Joe wasn’t as delicate. At a family gathering, he barked that all of the children were spending well beyond their means, except for Joan and Ted. “No one appears to have the slightest concern for how much they spend,” Joe said. Then he zeroed in on Bobby’s wife. “Ethel, you are the worst,” he said. “There isn’t the slightest indication that you have any idea what you spend all your money on. Bills come in from all over the country for every conceivable item. It is utterly ridiculous to display such disregard for money.”
“Dad, I think you have made your point,” Bobby interjected just as Ethel, red-faced and tearful, ran from the room. Bobby chased after her. After a few moments, they reemerged. “Ethel, don’t worry,” Jack said. “We’ve come to the conclusion that the only solution is to have Dad work harder.”
Bobby knew it was time for him to work harder, too. After Jack’s election, he again needed a job, and he again turned to Senator McCarthy for help. McCarthy had been made chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Government Operations Committee, more commonly called the McCarthy Committee. Bobby didn’t land the high-profile job he wanted—McCarthy had already promised it to Roy Cohn and Bobby still didn’t have a lot of post-graduate experience—but he was offered a job to be the committee general counsel’s assistant. McCarthy said Bobby could move up as he gained experience. After conferring with his father, Bobby took the gig, which paid just ninety-five dollars a week. It didn’t last long. By November 1953, after a public confrontation with Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s right-hand man, Bobby had resigned and taken a job assisting his father on a presidential committee on government reform.
Ethel was sent to Washington to go house hunting, and she eventually found a furnished four-bedroom detached home—one of the few in Georgetown—near the entrance of Dumbarton Oaks. It was outside of the $500-a-month limit Bobby had set for Ethel, but she managed to charm the owner into dropping the rent. Finally, after more than two years of bouncing between her parents’ home and her in-laws, Ethel had an address she could call her own. Soon, she’d begin filling it with more children. On January 17, 1954, Ethel gave birth to the couple’s second son, Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. David Anthony followed on June 15 the next year.
Four months after David was born, tragedy struck the Skakel family. George and Big Ann had just thrown an anniversary party for their youngest daughter at Rambleside and were headed to California, where George had been shifting gears from petroleum coke to real-estate development. George loved to fly but wasn’t crazy about commercial flights, so he began buying surplus military aircraft from the government, which he’d then have converted for civilian use. He and Ann would set off on a whim, and access became a perk of working for Great Lakes Carbon. “George Skakel was quite fond of the old bomber, but others found the plane uncomfortable,” Oppenheimer wrote. “Passengers were forced to sit in the bomb-bay section and had to crawl on their bellies to get from one end of the ship to other. And a few had recently questioned its safety.” Some said they smelled the sickly stench of fuel inside the plane, but when they alerted the pilot, he shrugged off the concerns.
On October 3, 1955, Skakel’s plane exploded in the air over Oklahoma. He and Ann were killed instantly, as were two others flying with them. Georgeann, Ethel’s oldest sister, learned the news when Ann’s social secretary called her in the morning and asked, “What’s all this nonsense I hear about your parents being dead?” The news had been splashed across the Greenwich Time as the front-page banner headline: “Mr., Mrs. Skakel, 2 Pilots Die in Plane Crash . . . Exploded in Mid Air over Oklahoma; Were Flying to Coast on Business Trip.”
For years, Ethel would refuse to talk about her parents’ death. In 2012, after her daughter Rory, by then an Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker, asked to make a movie about her mother, Ethel opened up just slightly. “It was hard on everybody. It was,” Ethel said somberly about her parents’ deaths. Bobby—once again managing his brother Jack’s senatorial campaign—was supportive, she said. “I remember he was campaigning and I really felt it would be good to be with him, and, God love him, he got off the train and drove home. He had to drive all the way through the night, and he did it.”
As hundreds of people filled St. Mary’s on October 7 for the funeral, Ethel arrived with Bobby. Virginia Skakel remembered hugging her sister-in-law. “There were no tears from her, or from any of them,” she recalled. “Instead of crying, they laughed. It was their way of coping. It was the only way they could cope.”
It was the first of many tragedies that Ethel would experience, and she handled it the only way she knew how: with prayer and deflection. “She does go to mass every day,” her eldest daughter Kathleen would later say, “and you always see her holding the rosary, but she certainly doesn’t talk about it and she doesn’t discuss it and she doesn’t reflect on it. She wanted a lot of people around and, I would say, not solitude. I think that’s how she got through a lot of the really, really tough things.”
While Rose’s faith provided a framework within which she could ruminate quietly over her losses, Ethel’s faith seems to have been more reflexive, its consolations more automatic. Rather than providing a vocabulary for the process of grief, as it had for Rose, Ethel’s faith replaced grief. Those she lost were in heaven. God had a plan. That was the beginning, middle, and end of the story.
The deaths of George and Big Ann put an end to the madcap era of Rambleside. None of the children wanted the sprawling estate, and it sat on the market for five long years until it finally sold for $350,000. For Ethel, there would be no point in mourning its loss. She and Bobby were about to create their own magical kingdom for their kids on a similar estate near Washington.