Adults attempt to comfort Bobby, but one child dares to confront him with the truth. “Your brother’s dead! Your brother’s dead!” journalist Peter Maas recalls a boy of around seven shouting at Bobby during a Christmas party for orphans. The event is Bobby’s first public outing since the funeral, and everyone in the room is aghast. “The little boy knew he had done something wrong, but he didn’t know what; so he started to cry,” Maas reports. “Bobby stepped forward and picked him up, in kind of one motion, and held him very close for a moment, and he said, ‘That’s all right. I have another brother.’”
And he has eight children. The day before Jack’s funeral, he writes each of them a letter and instructs his siblings to do the same with their children. “It was natural for Bobby to take charge,” Ted recalls. “He’s been sort of a second father to us.” To Joe, Jack’s godson and Bobby’s oldest son, Bobby writes, “Remember all the things that Jack started—be kind to others that are less fortunate than we—and love our country.”
Of his work at the Justice Department, Bobby says, “I don’t have the heart for it right now,” and through the end of 1963 he remains at Hickory Hill.
The naturally bright atmosphere at Hickory Hill turns somber. “At this breakfast, not long after my uncle’s death,” Bobby’s son Michael remembers, “my father had the discipline to tell the older children to write down the significance of Jack’s death to the United States.” Although Michael was only five years old at the time, he says, “I remember that incident very, very well. I remember thinking, Oh, I’m glad I don’t have to do that yet.”
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend (the eldest of Bobby and Ethel’s children) remembers the typical ambiance of Hickory Hill as a “wild, informal mixture of a children’s playground, upbeat discotheque, and a humming political headquarters.” Her childhood home bustled with “lots of kids. There were plenty of horses, many dogs, chickens, geese, goats. It was a menagerie…my brother Bobby collected reptiles. And actually the turtle was in the laundry room. The sea lion was in the swimming pool.”
In late January 1964, a Pacific trip to Japan and Indonesia “restores him [Bobby] to activity,” according to Arthur Schlesinger. He begins to act on the pronouncement Jack made to a reporter during his Senate service: “Just as I went into politics because Joe died, if anything happened to me tomorrow, my brother Bobby would run for my seat in the Senate. And if Bobby died, Teddy would take over for him.”
Politics has changed, become more personal. One driving factor is the revelation of a long-held Kennedy secret. After her botched lobotomy in 1941, Rosemary Kennedy—now the oldest living Kennedy sibling—was shuttled around to various facilities, leaving Eunice, her closest sibling, with no idea of her sister’s whereabouts “for a decade after the surgery.” Since 1949, however, Rosemary has been under the care of the nuns at the St. Coletta facility in Wisconsin. Her biographer Kate Larson believes that Jack may have visited Rosemary while campaigning in 1958, though he made no mention of his sister during the national presidential contest. Only in 1960, when Jack is president-elect, is Rosemary mentioned as his “mentally retarded sister who is in an institution in Wisconsin,” in a publication for the National Association for Retarded Children.
Outspoken Eunice, who, as executive vice president of the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation since 1957, has already spent years advocating for the intellectually disabled, pushes further. “Don’t bother to sit with them; they can’t learn, so forget them; give them a lollypop to suck and a bench to sit on,” she mocks. “That’s what we’ve been fighting.”
“You know how Eunice is if she wants you to do something for her,” Jean Kennedy Smith explains to Jackie. “She won’t take no for an answer. She will pester you until you will either go mad or do what she asks.”
“Just give Eunice what she wants,” Jack tells his aides. In 1961, the Kennedy administration forms the Panel on Mental Retardation and in 1962, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (renamed in 2008 for Eunice Kennedy Shriver).
In 1962, Eunice invites photographers from the Saturday Evening Post to Timberlawn, her Maryland estate, where she’s established a summer camp for children with disabilities—the first of its kind in the United States—staffed by volunteers recruited from local schools, diplomacy corps, and even a prison.
Images of happy children riding in pony carts and swimming in the pool accompany Eunice’s September 1962 essay, “Hope for Retarded Children,” the first public telling of her sister Rosemary’s story (minus details of the lobotomy).
On October, 24, 1963, during what would prove to be his last weeks in the Oval Office, Jack signs into law the Maternal and Child Health and Mental Retardation Planning Bill, remarking, “We can say with some assurance that, although children may be the victims of fate, they will not be the victims of our neglect.”
Though President Johnson publicly carries through on JFK’s social programs and ensures the passage of the late president’s sweeping Civil Rights Act on July 2, 1964, privately he resents the power and influence Bobby retains. According to Johnson, Bobby “acted like he was the custodian of the Kennedy dream, some kind of rightful heir to the throne.”
Bobby will never forget LBJ’s planned speech closing for November 22, 1963, canceled after Jack was assassinated. “And thank God, Mr. President, you came out of Dallas alive.”
When the time comes in 1964 for Johnson to choose a running mate in the next election, his first at the top of the ticket, Bobby is last on his list.
“I’d waited my turn,” Johnson said. “Bobby should have waited for his.”
Chapter 28
In the summer of 1964, Ted is on the campaign trail, seeking the Democratic nomination for reelection to his Massachusetts Senate seat. On June 19, 1964, the Kennedys’ pilot warns against flying into weather conditions around West Springfield, Massachusetts—site of the state Democratic convention—so Ted instead charters a small plane. Disastrously, the plane crashes near Easthampton, killing two of five on board. Ted escapes with a punctured lung and broken vertebrae in his back, though his long convalescence later causes him to miss accompanying Bobby on his historic climb up—and dedication of—Mount Kennedy.
Bobby, accompanied by federal investigator and family friend Walter Sheridan, visits Ted in the hospital. “Somebody up there doesn’t like us,” Bobby confides to Sheridan when they take a walk outside, continuing, “It’s been a great year for the giggles, hasn’t it?”
On August 24, the Democratic national convention is under way in Atlantic City. When Bobby takes the stage to deliver a tribute to JFK, he is unable to speak over the delegates’ cheers and applause, which runs for sixteen minutes, confirming the enduring power of the Kennedy name. According to presidential historian Michael Beschloss, “Johnson had nightmares that he would get to the Democratic Convention in 1964, and in would come Bobby Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy—stampede the delegates to vote not for LBJ but RFK for president.”
Johnson has taken precautions, not only moving Bobby’s tribute to closing night (after the presidential and vice presidential nominations are secure) but assigning Bobby an FBI detail. As Atlantic City–based agent William Sullivan would later testify to the Watergate Committee, “Robert Kennedy’s activities were of special interest, including his contacts with [Martin Luther] King.”