Hickory Hill
When Ethel and Bobby first spied Hickory Hill—the estate that would forever be linked to their legacy—it actually belonged to Jack and Jackie. The Georgian spread, which they bought for about $125,000 from the family of a late Supreme Court justice, stretched across six acres of beautifully landscaped grounds across the Potomac River from Washington. It was Jack and Jackie’s first time owning a home, and Jackie was hard at work designing and overseeing the renovation of a nursery for the baby, expected in September of 1956. However, after the little girl was delivered, stillborn, by cesarean section in August, Jackie couldn’t bear to stay in the McLean home anymore, so she and Jack sold it to Bobby and Ethel, who found it ideal to accommodate their fast-growing family. It was a beautiful, thirteen-bedroom, thirteen-bath estate of white brick with roots in the Civil War era—George Brinton McClellan, the general in charge of the Union Army during the war’s early years, made the home his headquarters. Like Rambleside, it was known for its trees—this time, hickories rather than elms—though it was far less opulent than Ethel’s childhood home.
She and Bobby bought it in 1956 and moved in with the children—which by now also included No. 5: a daughter named Courtney, born September 9, 1956. Ethel found out she was pregnant again just months after the family settled into the house. Michael was born February 27, 1958. After Michael, Ethel actually managed a nine-month rest before conceiving again.
Bobby’s prestige was steadily growing, first prompted by his head butting with Roy Cohn in the 1954 Army–McCarthy hearings. Cohn was the man whom McCarthy had hired as chief committee counsel to the Subcommittee on Investigations—the job Bobby had wanted. But as McCarthyism gained steam, the senator’s targets had widened to include many government agencies, universities, the defense industry, and the United Nations. His critics were hesitant to speak out for fear they’d be labeled Communists, an association that could cost them their jobs and livelihoods. McCarthy finally made a critical miscalculation when he launched a two-month investigation into Communist infiltration of the army. The assault backfired, incurring the wrath of not only army brass but also President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who’d devoted his life to the institution. The hearings that followed were televised and riveted the nation, and Bobby joined in, feeding questions to Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington and snickering as Jackson ripped apart McCarthy and Cohn. As Evan Thomas wrote in Robert Kennedy: His Life:
During a recess, Cohn stormed across the hearing room to Kennedy and threatened to “get” Senator Jackson. “You can’t get away with it, Cohn,” Kennedy snarled. The conversation rapidly deteriorated. “Do you want to fight right here?” Cohn demanded. He started to swing at Kennedy, but aides pulled them apart. With a tight smile, Kennedy turned away. The papers found sport the next morning: the headline in the New York Daily News was “Cohn, Kennedy Near Blows in ‘Hate’ Clash.”
The year after the hearings, Bobby became chief counsel of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. With McCarthy’s Communist hunts no longer en vogue, Bobby turned his attention to organized crime, working with the federal Bureau of Narcotics for a crash course in mobsters. He seemed fascinated by this lawless underworld. Here he was, the only Kennedy son so straight-laced that he was actually able to cash in on a $1,000 reward his father offered for not drinking or smoking until age twenty-one, joyriding with cops at night to learn about the dark forces that secretly ran the city. Once, a drunk in a bar recognized Bobby’s photo from the McCarthy hearings and called him a “rich kid” and hurled insults at his father. Mel Finkelstein, a police photographer for the tabloids, was certain the drunk would slaughter Bobby in a fight, but as the man turned around, Bobby swung and caught him in the face, breaking his nose.
Soon, Bobby was zeroing in on the Teamsters Union. In 1957 an Associated Press story headlined “Senate Probers Link Rackets to Teamsters Union” laid out the latest allegations: “Senate investigators said today they will use secretly recorded gangster conversations and testimony from prostitutes, gamblers and others to show whether some West Coast officials of the Teamsters Union had ties with the underworld.” Bobby, by then a part of the Senate Rackets Investigating Committee, and its chairman, Senator John McClellan, were named in one newspaper report after another as the allegations surfaced: A Portland racketeer “spilled like Niagara Falls to a special Senate committee” that he was used as a front man to open up “gambling joints, houses of prostitution, punchboard operations and the like in Portland.”
Among Bobby’s targets: Teamsters president Dave Beck and vice president Jimmy Hoffa. It was harrowing work that earned Bobby plenty of enemies. The year before, syndicated labor columnist Victor Riesel had been attacked an hour after finishing a radio broadcast that assailed the leadership of a Long Island local of the International Union of Operating Engineers. A man emerged from the shadows and threw acid in Riesel’s eyes, leaving the columnist blinded for life. Once Bobby’s sights were turned on the Teamsters, he got an anonymous threat that the next victims of an acid attack would be his children. Unnerved, Ethel forbade the children to leave school at the end of the day with their classmates. Instead, they sat in the principal’s office until their mother came to pick them up in person. There’s no evidence, however, that Ethel even considered asking Bobby to back off for the sake of the family. In fact, quite the opposite.
“I think her inner Skakel came out and she was emboldened,” son Chris would say years later, “and I think that helped my father through that difficult time.”
Ethel became a regular fixture at many of Bobby’s racketeering hearings, often bringing the older kids with her. “I think it might’ve been a little over their heads, but it gave them a taste of what their daddy did,” Ethel said later.
Sometimes she’d lead the youngsters in a cheer inside the car as they drove past Hoffa’s Washington headquarters. “What’s up there?” she’d ask, to which her children would reply, “The Teamsters Union!”
“And what do they do there?”
“Work overtime to keep Jimmy Hoffa out of jail!”
“And?” Ethel would prod.
“Which is where he belongs!” the children would squeal.
On September 8, 1959, when Ethel delivered Mary Kerry, who would go by her middle name, the family was gearing up for Jack’s presidential run. Three days after the birth, Bobby resigned from the Senate Rackets Committee. He and Ethel dove into the campaign without hesitation, leaving the children with nannies as they stumped nationwide. Later, daughter Kathleen—who turned nine the year of the election—said that she remembered 1960 mostly for “daddy’s absence.” He’d be gone for months-long stretches at a time, particularly during the hotly contested West Virginia primary, where each of the Kennedy wives was flown in to help. In September, Ethel headed to Chicago with her sister-in-law Joan. In three days, the two women attended well over a dozen rallies, meetings, and teas in private homes, primarily with women voters. The children sometimes joined the campaign, wearing special outfits and slapping “Nixon” stickers on stop signs to create a “Stop Nixon” message. “[Bobby] really wanted the children with him, so whenever we could, the children campaigned, too, and I think the children really loved it,” Ethel said.
In July, Boston Globe reporter Thomas Winship wrote a whimsical story describing the circuslike atmosphere that six of the youngsters created as Jack officially became the Democratic nominee in Los Angeles. “Kids spilling cokes on their pretty dresses and blue top coats, empty paper bags and broken balloons under the chairs,” Winship described. “Louella [sic] Hennessey had her hands full but her calm smiling face belied it. Somehow the kids never strayed very far from her.” Three of the children had Brownie cameras in tow, though they seemed too distracted by all the balloons floating toward the ceiling to use them.
Ethel, while uncomfortable with public speaking, filled the role whenever it was asked of her. She and Bobby appeared on The Tonight Show with host Jack Paar, who jokingly introduced Mrs. Kennedy as “this lovely little girl here, the mother of seven children, who has given birth to her own precinct.”
“Do you have any news for us?” Paar prodded.
Ethel, catching the pregnancy innuendo, laughed. “No, I don’t!”
Asked what her children thought of the campaign, she quickly replied, “Mostly they think it’s taking an awfully long time for Uncle Jack to become president.” The audience laughed.
It was a grueling pace, but when the votes were counted, everyone was too excited to be exhausted, Ethel later recalled. The family gathered at the Hyannis Port house for a portrait. “Nobody looked tired in the photograph,” Ethel reflected. “I was just so full of joy knowing that the rest of the world would now know how great Jack was.”
The newly elected Jack needed someone in the cabinet he could trust absolutely, and over Bobby’s initial objections—and after Adlai Stevenson and Connecticut governor Abe Ribicoff both turned the position down—he appointed his little brother to the post of attorney general. Predictable charges of nepotism followed, but Bobby was easily confirmed.
The energetic faces of the “New Frontier” were enormously popular, especially when any of the kids were part of the equation. Seven-year-old Bobby Jr. once visited Uncle Jack at the White House bearing a gift: a wriggling salamander. A news photographer captured an image of a bemused Jack watching as Bobby made a home for the lizard in a vase. The accompanying story was appropriately perplexed: “There was this salamander named Shadrach presented to the President of the United States today, and the question is what does he do with it?”
Bobby Jr. had found the creature in his back yard, which was hardly a surprise. Much like the Rambleside of Ethel’s childhood, Hickory Hill was like an unregulated zoo, with ponies, horses, goats, pigs, cows, and chickens. Ethel once brought home a seal. “He had to be fed fish every day but he didn’t like the eyes, so there were always hundreds of eyes all around,” Ethel later recalled. “Ugh. That we could’ve done without.” (The seal eventually was donated to the Washington Zoo after pushing Kathleen into the pool.) Ethel said the animals helped make Hickory Hill magical. “You’d be walking up to the front door and a herd of horses would come galloping by,” she said. “It was kind of unusual.”
Ethel also would host pet contests—sometimes for the best, sometimes for the most bizarre—and the Kennedy children, taking after their competitive mother, played to win. A supposed conflict of interest arose for family friend and humorist Art Buchwald, who was asked to help judge one of the contests. He later defended his calls in a tongue-in-cheek piece he wrote in the Boston Globe under the headline “Judge Stays Impartial under Terrific Pressure.” “Then we got to the most unusual pet class,” Buchwald wrote. “This was a tough one, because one of the Kennedy children brought in either a large lizard or a small alligator. My 8-year-old daughter had entered a hamster and I was in a tough spot. Mrs. Kennedy kept tugging my arm and my daughter kept tugging my shirt. I decided that there was a tie for first place.”
Ethel became a regular fixture in newspapers’ society sections, and the parties she threw at Hickory Hill surpassed the legends created at Rambleside. The press labeled her “Washington’s No. 1 Hostess” and filled their pages with tales of raucous poolside antics. Guests in fancy attire were routinely tossed into the pool in a rite of passage that came to be called “dunking.” The water capers climaxed in June 1962 at a party for Ethel and Bobby’s twelfth wedding anniversary, which was attended by some three hundred guests. Ethel laid some wooden planks across the pool and put a table and some chairs on top of the makeshift bridge. She and astronaut John Glenn tiptoed out and sat at the precariously positioned table, which predictably lurched, tossing Ethel into the water. Arthur M. Schlesinger—a Harvard historian, speechwriter, and special assistant to the president—plunged in next. “We changed our clothes and the party went pleasantly on,” Schlesinger recounted.
Rose was said to disapprove of Ethel’s wild parties. “Rose Kennedy thought Ethel’s parties were outrageously overdone,” Barbara Gibson, Rose’s secretary, said years later. Certainly Rose, who esteemed civility and formality—some of her fondest memories being of parties at the English court when her husband was ambassador—would have preferred parties more reflective of the dignity of her sons’ offices.
The parties usually featured live music that blared well into the morning hours. Though Hickory Hill was spread across six acres, the tunes wafted into neighbors’ homes. Some took advantage of the entertainment. “At 3 o’clock in the morning, with all that wonderful Lester Lanin music coming in our windows, we got up and danced in our bare feet right in our bedroom,” one neighbor said.
Others weren’t as embracing. At one party, the orchestra leader kept bellowing over a loudspeaker, “Any more requests?”
A neighbor called back, “How about a little more peace and quiet!”
Ethel transferred more than just Rambleside’s parties to Hickory Hill, however. She also introduced monthly seminars to discuss a variety of issues, much as Big Ann had done in the stately library of the Greenwich home. Sometimes those invited were deep thinkers. Many were politicians. The gatherings, dubbed “Hickory Hill University,” were also influenced by Bobby’s Student Legal Forum days, and sometimes the “classes” were held at other locations, though the Hickory Hill University moniker remained. Usually twenty people attended the seminars, including some of Bobby’s cabinet colleagues. One regular recalled Ethel attempting an intellectual battle with British philosopher A. J. Ayer, challenging him to explain why he rejected metaphysics. When Ayer asked Ethel to define the term, she hesitated, and then said, “I mean whether conceptions like truth and virtue and beauty have any meaning.” And the debate ensued.
Ethel’s childhood prankster ways never left her, and as her husband ascended politically in Washington, she earned the reputation of a cutup. General Maxwell Taylor, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, arrived at an early 1963 party in his honor to find a life-size dummy hanging from a tree by a parachute harness. Ethel had hoped it would make Taylor, who had parachuted into Normandy on D-Day, feel more “at home.” She once sprayed a young member of a European royal family with shaving cream. Another time, she used live bullfrogs as centerpieces for a St. Patrick’s Day dinner party. The antics earned her the nickname of America’s new “knacky baby” in London, where she once arrived at a party with a suitcase and disappeared to change into a rhinestone-studded black shift that was far shorter than most dresses Ethel tended to wear. The risqué gesture was calculated, on her part, to lighten the mood. Ethel declared, “Everybody was talking about Vietnam and I thought we all needed a change of pace!”