Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed

by Maureen Callahan

“I don’t think I can go on,” she said.

When Bobby asked for Mary to be diagnosed as mentally ill, Hankin refused. Bobby had already tried to institutionalize Mary, driving her, at first without her knowledge, to the psychiatric wing of a local hospital. When Mary realized where he was taking her, she jumped out of the car, and Bobby followed. He tried to restrain her.

Your wife isn’t mentally ill, Hankin told him. She is angry and depressed and emotionally immature, but she is not ill.

Hankin explained to Bobby that Mary likely suffered from borderline personality disorder, its origins Mary’s deep fear of abandonment, probably stemming from her father’s death when she was still a child.

Her drinking, which was among Bobby’s big complaints, was situational, Hankin said—another by-product of being left alone so often, for long stretches, by a husband who didn’t come home when he said he would.

Hankin knew more about Bobby than she let on. She had another client, a woman, who had been at an event with Bobby and Mary, who’d said Bobby had come on to her very strongly. Yet another client, also a woman, had been seated next to Bobby on an airplane; they were strangers, but he came on to her, too, and fast. This client had embarked on a brief affair with him. So Hankin knew well Mary’s torment.

“You know, Mary, I don’t think this is ever going to be the marriage you want. I don’t think Bobby is ever going to be the husband you want.” Really, Hankin was saying: Get out.

She told one friend that Bobby said the ugliest things to her—that she’d be “better off dead” and that things would be “so much easier” if she committed suicide. Now she was seeing pictures of Bobby with Cheryl Hines, the star of Curb Your Enthusiasm and an age-appropriate match. When Hines was in New York, she was staying with Bobby and building relationships with their kids.

After he’d filed for divorce from Mary in May 2010, he had gone into the city for a deposition with her divorce lawyers. Someone brought in lunch, and when the day was done, Bobby got up and walked out the door, leaving his leftovers and crumbs and dirty napkins for someone else to discard. The trash bin was three feet from where he had been sitting. One of the lawyers in that deposition thought it said everything about Bobby Kennedy Jr.: Entitlement. Arrogance. His trash was something for the help to take out, and that was how Bobby was treating Mary now.

Bobby was making ruthless moves now. He cut off Mary’s credit card, court-approved for $20,000 a month in living expenses. She owed $32,000 to American Express and had a balance of zero in her checking account. Her card was getting declined at the drug store, the supermarket, even her child’s doctor’s office. She was reduced to asking other moms at the school run if they had an extra $20 so she could get gas and groceries. The whole town knew she was broke.

Kerry came by to visit Mary. It was May 14, 2012, the day after Mother’s Day. Whatever was said during that house call left Mary in tears.

Two days later, on Wednesday morning, Mary put on her yoga clothes and sandals, walked out to her barn, stacked three metal crates atop each other, then used a metal ladder to tie a hangman’s knot around the rafter. When she was found that afternoon, Mary’s fingers were stuck inside the rope around her neck. She had changed her mind. She had tried to save herself.

Laurence Leamer, the famous Kennedy historian, was given access to Bobby’s side of the story. It ran in Newsweek just four weeks later, a radiant Mary on the cover, one of her toddler boys in her arms, the headline reading: BEHIND THE MARY KENNEDY TRAGEDY. Even the font size minimized her. This was a Kennedy story first, another family tragedy second, and Mary—well, Mary herself was something of a footnote. The story inside, of course, absolved Bobby of any responsibility.

All of Mary’s siblings, four sisters and two brothers, insisted that these claims were lies, that Mary’s depression was a direct result of her husband’s cheating and neglect, his threats to take the children and leave her with nothing, bringing the full weight of the Kennedy family to bear against her.

Her brother wanted to take Mary’s remains and bury her in Westchester, but Bobby fought them. He wanted her buried in the Kennedy family plot in Massachusetts. He took the matter to a judge and brought along one of his teenage sons as support for his argument, and he won.

He said that Mary blamed him for “taking her away from her profession” to be a stay-at-home mom. “I know I did everything I could to help her,” he said. In Bobby’s telling, in the church and in the press, the real victim here was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., enduring such a mentally disturbed wife all these years, a depressive and a drunk who had been hospitalized for anorexia as a young woman, who had two previous suicide attempts in her past, and who, at a low point in their divorce, was found passed out at the dinner table, face down in a plate of food.

Mary Richardson Kennedy was buried near Eunice Shriver, JFK’s sister—given pride of place among the Kennedys, a public acknowledgment of her station. One week later, in the middle of the night, without telling Mary’s siblings or obtaining the required legal permitting, Bobby Kennedy Jr. had Mary’s coffin dug up and moved seven hundred feet away.

Mary was left to face traffic, no headstone marking her grave, buried alone.

Kick Kennedy was already famous when she arrived in England in 1938 at age eighteen, she and Jack the stars among US ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy’s nine children. Old Joe favored her openly. “All my ducks are swans,” he said. “But Kick is especially special.”

Kick, like Jackie, had gone from Debutante of the Year to a career in journalism. Like Jackie, Kick was distant from her mother but worshipful of her father. Her easy wit, her vivaciousness, made her the star of high society wherever she went, from Paris to London to America.

Kick and Billy were opposites in every way: he was tall, she was tiny. He was slow in thought, speech, and movement; Kick was electric. He had an aristocratic bearing and regard for politesse; Kick had no use for any of that, showing her affection through jokes and gentle mockery. She was American, he was not. She was Catholic, he was Protestant. Kick was born Kathleen; he was born William Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington, heir to a mansion in London, a castle in Ireland, descendant of a seventeenth-century namesake who had helped to dethrone a Catholic king. Together, they fit. He quickly became her Billy.

Kick was among the beautiful and privileged youth of England partying at the edge of the world, losing themselves in midnight strolls through grand topiary mazes on even grander estates, young women in gowns of the finest silk or gossamer chiffon strolling through damp, verdant grass, swinging champagne bottles in one hand and lit cigarettes in the other, the shimmering stars strewn against a velvet night sky in a quiet that would not last.

“All you can hear or talk about at this point is the future war which is bound to come,” Kick wrote in September 1938. “Am so darn sick of it.” War would mean going back to the States. It would mean losing Billy.

Now, that loyalty seemed to mean nothing. Kick knew her mother might not approve of Billy’s religion, but she never anticipated her mother’s cruelty. She never anticipated her mother disowning her. After all, Rose’s own parents hadn’t approved of Joe Kennedy, but she’d married him anyway. Was this some particular grievance that Rose had against Kick?

Billy’s father was as aghast at the romance as Rose Kennedy. The Devonshires were anti-Catholic; Billy and Kick were, in essence, a Montague and a Capulet.

there was no question that when war came, Billy would serve in combat. There was also no question that Ambassador Kennedy would order his children back to the States, adults or not, once war broke out.

Kick’s greatest conflict with her father had nothing to do with Billy at all, but with Hitler and America’s role in the war. Joe, as US ambassador to the United Kingdom, had sought to meet with Hitler and had encouraged appeasement with the Nazis; he thought democracy, in Western Europe and America, would soon be dead, and that Germany would establish a new world order—one that he in fact agreed with. Joe Sr. blamed the “Jew media” in the United States, as he wrote to Viscountess Nancy Astor, condemning their coverage of Hitler and his atrocities for setting “a match to the fuse of the world.” Kick’s oldest brother, Joe Jr., admired the führer

The dislike of the Jews, however,” he continued, “was well-founded. They were at the heads of all the big business, on law etc. It is all to their credit for them to get so far, but their methods had become quite unscrupulous… The lawyers and prominent judges were Jews, and if you had a case against a Jew, you were nearly always sure to lose it… As far as the brutality is concerned, it must have been necessary to use some.” Kick’s father was grooming Joe Jr. to run for president of the United States.

Catholicism wasn’t their one true religion. Power was.

Kick remained a virgin till marriage. And oh, how that frustrated John White. After they went out for dinner or a movie, Kick would sometimes allow John back to her place. She’d let him sit on her bed, rub her back, but nothing else. When White would press for more, Kick would only say: That’s the way it is.

John fell in love with Kick. They shared newsroom banter right out of The Front Page. He called her “an ignorant, thick-headed mick,” and she’d call him “a shrinking, bald-headed, irritable old man.” White often said that Kick was the most fun to argue with because she was always wrong.

by March of 1942, Jack was off to war. It took Kick another fifteen months, but her stubbornness paid off: on June 23, 1943, she boarded the Queen Mary as a new member of the Red Cross, headed to London. To Billy. They married on May 6, 1944, in a seven-minute-long civil ceremony.

Everyone she knew in England, even her milkman, had given Kick their clothing ration coupons for her modest wedding dress—a testament to how much they loved her, this young woman whose wealthy family was so withholding. On her wedding ring Billy had inscribed, “I love you more than anything in the world.” Only one member of her family was present—her brother Joe Jr., who was serving in London.

Kick had married the love of her life and, as Jack noted, Britain’s most eligible bachelor. She was profiled in Vogue and approached by Life magazine for a story hailing the nuptials as “the greatest gesture for Anglo-American relations since the Atlantic Charter.”

Kick later confided to two friends that her wedding night had been a disappointment, that Billy was terribly inexperienced. Oh, Billy. The soldier who ran in fear; the dashing bachelor who was probably a virgin. They moved into a hotel while awaiting Billy’s orders. Kick was going to make this marriage work, and she wasn’t going to give Rose an inch of satisfaction; she wrote home of the peace that had come over her.

Billy would die just four months after the wedding, killed in action by a German sniper. Rose was not sorry. Kick had returned to the States on August 16, upon learning that her brother Joe had been killed while flying a combat mission. Jack met her at the airport, and Kick collapsed in his arms. Now, not one month later, Billy, too, had been killed in combat, shot in the heart in Belgium.

“So ends the story of Billy and Kick,” she wrote in her diary. “Life is so cruel.” She treasured a letter Billy had written to her and reread it often. “I have been spending a lovely hour on the ground and thinking in a nice vague sleepy way about you & what a lot I’ve got to look forward to if I come through this all right,” he wrote. “I feel I may talk about it for the moment as I’m not in danger so I’ll just say that if anything should happen to me I shall be wanting you to try to isolate our life together, to face its finish, and to start a new one as soon as you feel you can. I hope that you will marry again, quite soon—someone good & nice.”

Even as a grieving young wartime widow, she was still, in her mother’s eyes, a sinner. Rose’s rejection stung all the more after Kick received a beautiful letter from Billy’s mother, somehow strong enough to console this shattered young woman. “I want you never, never to forget what complete happiness you gave him,” she wrote. “All your life you must think that you brought complete happiness to one person.

All your life I shall love you—not only for yourself but that you gave such perfect happiness to my son whom I loved above anything in the world. May you be given the strength to carry you through these truly terrible months. My heart breaks when I think of how much you have gone through in your young life.”

Her father, in his way, tried to console her, lavishing Kick with gifts and even encouraging her to write a book.

he gave her his ultimate gift: his blessing for her to stay in England, among Billy’s family and friends, without guilt.

Above all, Joe wanted Kick to find love again.

Two days after what would have been her and Billy’s first wedding anniversary, the war ended, and one year after that she met Lord Peter Fitzwilliam at a ball given for the elite wartime unit known as the Commandos, established at Churchill’s request after the evacuation at Dunkirk.

Fitzwilliam sparked something in her. Tall, dark, and ten years Kick’s senior, he was a star in London’s social set: convivial, stylish, brave—a war hero!—exceedingly wealthy. Dangerous. He liked fast cars, fast boats, and fast women. His family owned mansions in England and Ireland. He had a private plane. He bought racehorses and summered on the French Riviera. He could provide Kick with the travel and luxury to which she was accustomed.

He had infamously abandoned Olive on their honeymoon for another woman. He brought his mistresses home for dinner or shooting weekends and paraded them in front of his wife, whose job was to make sure they were well fed and cared for. And when Olive decompensated and became an alcoholic, she was blamed for making Fitzwilliam’s life a misery, not the other way around.

He wasn’t just a Protestant but a soon-to-be-divorced one. If Kick married him, Rose said, she would consider her daughter well and truly dead.

Joe agreed to meet Kick and Peter in Paris, at the Ritz, on a Saturday afternoon in May. To celebrate, she and Peter decided to fly to Cannes before Paris. Kick was so excited that she packed two suitcases for three days, a wardrobe reflective of the sexual sophisticate she had become: expensive negligees and lacy underwear, heirloom jewelry gifted by the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, a black garter belt, a douche, her birth control.

Kick knew how fragile life was now and had no intention of sacrificing a thing. She had been through a crucible and emerged a woman of the world so well regarded that she hosted Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen of England, and her sister Princess Margaret at the Cavendish estate.

Meteorologists had forbidden a takeoff. Fitzwilliam insisted. The last twenty minutes of that flight were so terrifying that everyone on board likely knew they were going to die.

A wing was shorn off. One engine fell, then the other. The tail detached. The little plane gained speed as it headed straight for a mountain. It took first responders four hours to reach the crash site.