Sons of Camelot

The Fate of an American Dynasty

Laurence Leamer

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780060559021
• eBook ISBN: 9780062038067
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

From renowned biographer and New York Times bestselling author of The Kennedy Women and The Kennedy Men comes THE SONS OF CAMELOT, the second volume in a multi-generational history bound to be considered an American epic.

Almost a year before publication, THE SONS OF CAMELOT: The Fate of an American Dynasty was already being widely discussed and debated in the media. Based on exclusive interviews with many Kennedy family members, their closest friends and associates, and five years of research, THE SONS OF CAMELOT is neither tabloid fodder nor a sanitized authorized biography but a stunningly revealing, deeply truthful account with intimate new information on every page.

In this outstanding continuation of The Kennedy Men, his powerful American epic of the Kennedy family, Laurence Leamer chronicles the lives of the Kennedy sons and grandsons after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and their struggle to fulfill the family legacy. These lives make for a book of overwhelming drama full of exalted aspirations, notable achievements and the most spectacular mishaps, excesses and tragedies. For the most part, these Kennedy men fell far short of the great vision that Joseph P. Kennedy had for his sons and grandsons. Their lives have been a bewildering juxtaposition of the most notable achievements and the most spectacular failures. There have been needless deaths, crippling accidents, drug addiction, alcoholism and allegations of rape. Their pratfalls, mishaps, excesses and tragedies have been one of the most certain forms of American popular entertainment for the last four decades. Yet among them are those who have helped Americans to have better health care, to sail on clean waters, to raise the rights and lives of those with mental retardation, to assist the poorest of African nations, to enable those with disabilities to lead normal lives, and to give health care givers opportunities.

In Leamer's passionate narrative, each Kennedy man becomes not the passive victim of the happenstance of birth and upbringing, but a full participant in his own fate. The good that the Kennedy sons have done is amply chronicled, and so is the bad and the tragic. John F. Kennedy Jr.'s life is a thread running through the pages of THE SONS OF CAMELOT. Some may be drawn to the book largely to read the definitive portrait based largely on the full cooperation of his eight closest friends. Others may come intrigued to read the intimate story of Senator Edward Kennedy or the stirring tale of Timmy Kennedy Shriver's rise to the head of Special Olympics International. But whatever draws the readers, they will read on driven by the powerful dramatic narrative with its impeccably researched details.

Some of these pages are inspiring, some are shocking, but all the pages are truthful. THE SONS OF CAMELOT is a spellbinding history of individuals and a family, a journey of character through time told by a brilliant, masterful writer.

CHAPTER ONE

A Soldier’s Salute

On his third birthday, John F. Kennedy Jr. stood holding his mother’s hand as the caisson pulled by six gray horses rolled by, bearing the body of his father. It was a cold day, and John was wearing shorts and a cloth coat. His mother, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, whispered to her son, and John saluted his father. This was not a little boy making a stab at a military greeting, but a young actor performing a soldier’s salute. Practically everyone in America who viewed the funeral of President John F. Kennedy on television or saw the picture in the newspapers felt a poignant identity with the fatherless child. It was an indelible image, forever frozen in that moment.

After they buried the president on November 25, 1963, the Kennedys returned to the White House to celebrate John’s birthday. The party was a masquerade of joyousness within the somber patterns of this day. It was both a retreat into the safe harbor of family and an assertion that they would go on as they always had. Seated at the table with John were many of the same energetic children who the summer before had clambered onto the president’s electric cart at the Kennedy summer estate on Cape Cod. Robert Francis Kennedy and his wife, Ethel Skakel Kennedy, were there with their seven children. Alongside them were Patricia Kennedy Lawford and Peter Lawford’s daughter, Sydney Maleia.

Several of these children were old enough to know that a terrible event had occurred. Bobby’s eight-year-old son David was a boy of immense sensitivity. When he had been picked up by one of his father’s aides from parochial school only minutes after his uncle’s death, he presumably had no way to know what had transpired in Dallas, but somehow he had figured it out. “Jack’s hurt,” he said, after dialing numbers on his toy phone. “Why did somebody shoot him?”

Senator Edward Moore Kennedy had been presiding over the Senate when he learned that his brother had been shot in Dallas. His first reaction was to worry about the safety of his wife, Joan Bennett Kennedy. He had driven back to his home in Georgetown, running traffic lights and honking other vehicles out of his way. He then flew up to Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, to tell his father, Joseph Patrick Kennedy, that the president had been assassinated, but he broke into sobs before entering the room and his sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, gave Joe the news.

Ted returned immediately to Washington, where this evening he stood at the birthday party next to his brother Bobby. Ted managed to keep up a facade of good cheer in front of the children, but his surviving brother wore a gray mask of mourning. Bobby had been the president’s alter ego and protector. He could finish his brother’s sentences and complete a task that Jack signaled with no more than a nod or a gesture. He had loved his brother so intensely and served him so well that within the administration it was hard to tell where one man ended and the other began.

Now Jack was dead. That was grief enough to buckle the knees of most men, but that was only the beginning of Bobby’s agonies. He was the attorney general of the United States, and John F. Kennedy had died on his watch. Bobby may have feared that his responsibility went even further, that the man or men who murdered the president—be they CIA agents, Cuban exiles, mobsters, or a strange lone man enraged at the attack on Castro’s Cuba—had been egged on by a policy that the attorney general himself had instituted.

When Jack died, Bobby’s immediate reaction was to try to discover who might have killed his brother, first looking within his own government. Then he protected the president’s secrets by locking up his papers and files. Bobby’s grief was sharpened further by the fact that Vice President Lyndon Johnson was now president. Bobby considered Johnson a vulgar usurper who, he believed, would turn away from his brother’s principles and ideals.

One of Bobby’s first acts after his brother’s assassination was to write a letter to his eldest son, reminding eleven-year-old Joseph Patrick Kennedy II of the obligations of his name. “You are the oldest of all the male grandchildren,” he wrote. “You have a special and particular responsibility now which I know you will fulfill. Remember all the things that Jack started—be kind to others that are less fortunate than we—and love our country.” Young Joe was the oldest of all the Kennedy grandchildren, and if it was not burden enough to be faced with the violent death of his beloved uncle, he now was being given another, even heavier load to lift.

Bobby sent the letter to Joe, but the message was meant for all his sons and nephews. More than anything else, Jack willed to his brothers, son, and nephews a treasure chest of promise, golden nuggets of what might have been and what might yet be. Just as the forty-six-year-old leader would be forever young, his administration would be forever unfulfilled. Historians would endlessly debate the qualities of distinction he had shown in the Oval Office, but he would stand high in the minds of his fellow citizens, remembered by most Americans as one of the greatest of presidents.

As they attempted to fulfill the mandate that Jack had left them, Bobby and Ted had an immense capital of goodwill and feeling unlike anything an American political family had known before. Americans had worn the black crepe of mourning for Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, but they did not seek to elevate their heirs or to see their presidencies as part of an ongoing family endeavor in which a brother or a son might rightfully assume that same mantle of high power.

As his son was buried, Joe lay bedridden in the family home in Hyannis Port. The family patriarch was not so much sad and prayerful as angry and belligerent toward a God who had let his second son die. He raged blasphemously, frightening his wife Rose, who sought in God a solace and understanding she found nowhere else.

Joe had considered himself a man of what he called “natural cynicism.” He believed that in each generation a few powerful men were the rightful leaders of their generation. He thought that he and his sons were part of this natural aristocracy. Acting as if there were few limits to his conduct, few moral parameters inside of which he had to live, he tramped over borders that held back lesser men, scaled walls into territories where laws were whatever a man imposed.

Joe’s greatest goal in life had been to see that one of his four sons became president of the United States. To advance Jack’s career, he had been ready to do what had to be done, whether it was providing money, manipulating behind the scenes, or meeting with mobsters in 1960 when Jack was running for the presidency.

Joe may have been a man of massive hypocrisies, but in his own mind, and the minds of his sons, his life came seamlessly together. Joe knew that he had achieved so much in America because of the liberty and opportunities. He believed that sons of privilege and wealth had an obligation to serve their country and to return something of the bounty that they had inherited. Joe taught that blood ruled and that they must trust each other and venture out into a dangerous world full of betrayals and uncertainty, always returning to the sanctuary of family. His sons took on part of Joe’s psychological makeup, the sense of lives without boundaries and ambitions without restrictions.

By any measure, Joe was an extraordinary man, the shrewdest, the most focused, the most willful of human beings. Joseph P. Kennedy created one great thing in his life, and that was his family. With acumen as great as his wealth, and limitless purpose, he built a family of sons who sought to reach the peak of American political life.

Jack had the deepest insight into the family of any of his siblings. He understood how difficult it was to survive his father’s admonitions and directives. He saw that there was a dichotomy between a life of personal happiness and a life spent in the pursuit of power. In the geography of Jack’s life, he could take only one road. With the death of his brother, Joseph Patrick Kennedy Jr., in World War II, he took the narrow pathway to power, forsaking the quest for happiness and personal fulfillment.

Even though Joe was bedridden and unable to be the firm voice of the family, his presence still shadowed the Kennedy sons and grandsons, as it would even after his death. With the assassination of Bobby in 1968, Joe would give three of his sons to the nation. Jack and Bobby would be revered by millions as heroes who had been cut down before they finished their great work. Whatever other goals Ted, his sons, and his nephews may have had, they were morally obligated to try to complete what his brothers had begun.

The survivors were overwhelmed by what faced them. Even families that do not reach the heights scaled by the Kennedys falter and fall in the next generation, disappearing from public consciousness and squandering much of their wealth. That is true throughout the world. Americans talk about “going from shirtsleeve to shirtsleeve.” To the Irish it is “from clogs to clogs.” The Chinese say “from rice paddy to rice paddy.”

A family begins in poverty. The first generation struggles upward against great odds. The second generation enjoys the fruits of success, while the third generation often dissipates most of what their predecessors had gained. It is not always three generations, but the pattern is a recurring one.

What is implicit is the idea of regression to the mean, which is not simply a statistical law but a rule of nature. A hungry, ambitious man of energy and willful determination is likely to have heirs who are ambitious and talented, but short of the founding father. The wealth and status that the founding generations will to their heirs carry within them the seeds of their loss. Not only are the heirs probably less talented and forceful, but they have grown up in indulgent circumstances that hone their frailties.

The story of the Kennedy family began in 1849 when Patrick Kennedy arrived in East Boston from County Wexford in southeastern Ireland. On the boat he met Bridget Murphy, like himself an impoverished Irish peasant. They married and had four surviving children, three daughters and a son. When Patrick died in 1858, Bridget worked for a time as a servant and later in a notions shop in East Boston that she eventually purchased. She sent two daughters off to work—one as a dressmaker, the other as a millworker—and gave her son, Patrick Joseph “P.J.,” the money to open a tavern. P.J. became a liquor wholesaler, a member of the Massachusetts legislature, a political boss, and one of the most successful men in East Boston. He and his wife, Mary Augusta Hickey, had two surviving daughters and a son, Joseph Patrick.

In a classic second-generation pattern, P.J. was content to have his son stay in East Boston consolidating all that he had gained. Joe’s mother, Mary Augusta, had far greater ambitions. She pushed Joe to attend Boston Latin School, the best public school in America, and then Harvard College. Joe had the sense of place and confidence of the second generation and the ambition, energy, and initiative of a man raised up from abject poverty. At twenty-five, he became president of a Boston bank in which his father had a major interest, and then he married Rose Fitzgerald, the mayor’s daughter.

Joe went on to make millions as a stockbroker and investor. He was a financier of bootleg liquor. He was the leading Catholic layman in America. When he went to Hollywood to produce films, he was celebrated as a family man who would bring morality back to the industry. He did so while living in Beverly Hills with the actress Gloria Swanson. He believed that history was made by great men, not great peoples. As ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, Joe was not so much pro-Nazi as pro-power. He considered Hitler a powerfully commanding figure who had mobilized the German people to overwhelm an effete, declining Great Britain. Joe was the beloved father of nine children and a satyr who preyed on his sons’ dates. He seduced a virginal secretary and kept her as his mistress for ten years as she worked in the Kennedy home in the presence of Joe’s wife, Rose. Joe’s infidelities “just tore at the human fundamentals,” reflects Chuck Spalding, one of Jack’s closest friends. “It left them with vulnerability in that area—it was like a contagious disease.”

Joe oversaw the marriages of his sons and daughters, which were blessed by the leaders of the Church, celebrated in the society pages, and attended by the American elite. The marriages of the surviving families would almost all end in failures. Despite her Catholic faith, Patricia Kennedy Lawford left her actor husband, Peter Lawford, making her son Christopher Kennedy Lawford the first Kennedy son of divorce. After years of difficulties, Ted and Joan’s marriage also ended in a divorce that was deeply troubling to their two sons, Edward Moore “Teddy” Kennedy Jr. and Patrick Joseph Kennedy. Jean Ann Kennedy Smith and her husband, Stephen Edward Smith, appeared to have a stable marriage, but Steve kept a series of mistresses. That did not make it easy for their two sons, Stephen Edward “Steve” Smith Jr. and William Kennedy “Willie” Smith. Of all the families, only Eunice Mary Kennedy Shriver and R. Sargent “Sarge” Shriver Jr. provided a traditional family setting for their four sons, Robert Sargent “Bobby” Shriver III, Timothy Perry “Tim” Shriver, Mark Kennedy Shriver, and Anthony Paul Kennedy Shriver, but that did not inoculate them from the psychological dilemmas that faced all the grandchildren.

As the world knew, the grandsons of the other two families lost their fathers. After the assassination of President Kennedy, Jackie attempted to provide a strong, emotionally healthy home for her son. Much of the psychological drama in John’s life would be about his quest for a father figure, and then for fatherly ideals, a search that could never be fully successful. Bobby and Ethel’s seven sons, Joseph Patrick II, Robert Francis Jr., David Anthony, Michael Le Moyne, Christopher George, Matthew Maxwell Taylor, and Douglas Harriman, had an intense, sometimes emotionally overwrought mother who seemed to find balance only in her bottomless devotion to her husband.

The younger Kennedys did not have their grandfather’s brutal determination, and many of their advantages proved illusory. Although several of them did important work in politics, for the environment, and in social service, none of them approached their fathers’ achievements at a comparable age. Their grandfather had shown business acumen and daring, but the one forthrightly profit-making business that one of his grandsons managed to start, the magazine George, had as its crucial asset the Kennedy name, and it lost millions. One grandson became the first Kennedy to retire from political office. A second became the first Kennedy to refuse to seek a higher office largely because he feared he could not handle the legacy. A third grandson, after raising one of the largest war chests ever accumulated for a congressional race, became the first Kennedy to lose a congressional primary. And a fourth grandson, the one with perhaps the most political promise, died in a plane crash as he was contemplating running for office.

In the years after President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, among these two surviving sons and seventeen grandsons, four would die violently: one by assassination, one by drug overdose, one by playing a dangerous game on the ski slopes, and one in a private plane crash brought on largely by overconfidence. These men would be the drivers in automobile accidents that killed one young woman and crippled another. Five others would die traveling with these men. At least seven of these Kennedy men would be for a time drug addicts or self-proclaimed alcoholics, while several others would have publicly unacknowledged problems with alcohol or drugs. Two of them would be accused of rape, one involving a fourteen-and-a-half-year-old. Although there were Kennedy men who lived lives without public troubles and pursued causes of immense social goodness, the sad litany above includes sons from five of the six Kennedy families. It is a startling tally, and one that speaks to a complex tale of hidden lives and often untoward conduct leading to tragic consequences.

These many tragedies and misfortunes have been seen by some almost as divine retribution for the hubris and limitless ambition of Joseph P. Kennedy, a clan doomed by its heritage and its genes to endless tragedy and mishap. What is lost in such analysis, and is equally the most inspiring and most devastating aspect of this history, is that these Kennedy men made their own lives. Yes, they bore a heavy load of heritage. Yes, they had the rich blood of inheritance, but they were not puppets pulled by the strings of history.

The son of Camelot who rode at night down the rutted road to Chappaquiddick also spent the next decades building one of the most distinguished careers in the Senate. The son of Camelot with a limitless future who flew his plane into a murky sky to his death was not the passive bystand...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• The Sons of Camelot
• 1. A Soldier’s Salute
• 2. Sheep Without a Shepherd
• 3. Games of Power
• 4. The Senators Kennedy
• 5. Peaks and Valleys
• 6. A Brother’s Challenge
• 7. War in a Distant Clime
• 8. Standing in the Rubicon
• 9. A Race Against Himself
• 10. Journey’s End
• 11. Ports of Call
• 12. Ted’s Way
• 13. The Road Not Taken
• 14. Boys’ Lives
• 15. Sailing Beyond the Sunset
• 16. Running Free
• 17. A Clearing in the Future
• 18. Outcasts
• 19. The Shriver Table
• 20. John’s Song
• 21. Keeping the Faith
• 22. Bobby’s Games
• 23. A Life to Be Stepped Around
• 24. The Games of Men
• 25. Left Out in the Cold
• 26. Joe Jones in New Haven
• 27. John at Brown
• 28. An Actor’s Life
• 29. Saving Grace
• 30. Peter Pan on Rollerblades
• 31. Jungle Waste
• 32. A Man Apart
• 33. Good Friday
• 34. Love, Loyalty, and Money
• 35. Team Play
• 36. Best Buddies
• 37. Adrenaline Addicts
• 38. Michael’s Way
• 39. A Child of the Universe
• 40. Games Kennedys Play
• 41. Humbert Humbert
• 42. A Tattered Banner
• 43. “Ladies and Gentlemen, Meet George”
• 44. A Father and Son
• 4. John’s Best Shot
• 46. Poster Boys for Bad Behavior
• 47. Clinton and the Kennedys
• 48. A Life of Choices
• 49. Night Flight
• 50. Beguiled and Broken Hearts
• 51. Life Lessons
• 52. Times of Testing
• 53. Ripples of Hope
• Source Abbreviations
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Books by Laurence Leamer
• Copyright
• About the Publisher
• Notes