By New York Post (Politics) | Created at 2025-02-01 12:01:37 | Updated at 2025-02-01 15:40:41
3 hours ago
Last April, more than 50 members of the Kennedy clan came together to celebrate the 96th birthday of matriarch Ethel Kennedy, crowding together for a photo in her living room.
After her death in October, and the vicious family infighting that has marked Robert F. “Bobby” Kennedy Jr.’s Senate confirmation hearings this past week, the picture may be the last vestige of Camelot.
That golden age, which is associated with the storied Irish-American Democratic dynasty and John F. Kennedy’s presidency in the early 1960s, was already in trouble when the photo was taken.
Just days later, six of Ethel’s children with Robert F. Kennedy Sr. — former Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy, former US Rep. Joe Kennedy II, human rights activist Kerry Kennedy, filmmaker Rory Kennedy, lawyer Max Kennedy and businessman Christopher Kennedy — rebuked their brother Bobby’s then-presidential campaign by calling it “dangerous” and publicly endorsing Joe Biden.
Now, though, “What we’re seeing is the self-destruction of the Kennedy family,” Laurence Leamer, author of “The Kennedy Women” and “The Kennedy Men,” told The Post. “For three generations they were holding together against the world, and wouldn’t dare speak out against each other. That’s over.”
It came to an abrupt end, he said, when Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, the daughter of former president John F. Kennedy, posted a vicious letter Tuesday about her cousin on the eve of his hearings for his appointment as Secretary of Health and Human Services.
“I’ve known Bobby his whole life,” said the 67-year-old former ambassador to Australia. “It’s no surprise that he keeps birds of prey as pets because Bobby himself is a predator.”
In urging senators to reject his nomination, she went on to air more dirty laundry, including blaming RFK Jr. for getting other Kennedy family members hooked on drugs.
“But siblings and cousins who Bobby encouraged down the path of substance abuse suffered addiction, illness and death,” she wrote, “while Bobby has gone on to misrepresent, lie and cheat his way through life.”
Caroline’s letter was praised by her cousin Maria Shriver (whose mother, Eunice, was a sister to RFK and JFK) and promoted on social media by her son Jack Schlossberg, 32, who trolled Bobby on Instagram — juxtaposing clips of famous speeches by JFK and Ted Kennedy with senators grilling his cousin at the hearings.
“Vote no on Junior!!!” he posted to his 539,000 Instagram followers on Jan. 29. He also posted a video of himself to X making fun of RFK Jr’s spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological disorder that affects his speech.
Leamer slammed the comments made by both Caroline and her son, the Harvard-educated grandson of JFK.
“The language that they are using is so unKennedy like,” said Leamer. “There are other ways to make your point.”
Bishop Juan Carlos Mendez, a friend of RFK Jr.’s whose grandmother and great-grandmother knew the Kennedys in Massachusetts, agrees.
“I don’t think the family will ever be able to come back to what it was, especially after this,” said Mendez.
But Jerry Oppenheimer, author of “The Other Mrs Kennedy: An Intimate and Revealing Look at the Hidden Life of Ethel Skakel Kennedy” and “RFK Jr.: The Dark Side of the Dream,” said the family has “a long toxic history” of in-fighting.
“It’s just that back in the day — before and after the myth of Camelot — the internal battles were mostly kept quiet by an idolizing, gushing mainstream media,” Oppenheimer told The Post.
In fact, he said, the bitterness between Caroline and RFK Jr. goes back decades to the battles between their mothers — sisters-in-law Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Ethel Skakel.
“Ethel despised Jackie — made fun of her — even down to the size of her feet, calling them clodhoppers,” Oppenheimer said. “Jackie returned the artillery, banning young John and Caroline from spending time with Bobby and other of Ethel’s wild brood. And on and on it went.”
The feud continued to women’s offspring. When John F. Kennedy Jr. was running George magazine, he published a “torrid” 1997 editorial denouncing two of Ethel’s sons: “Joe for his tangled marital affairs and Michael for a seamy sex scandal with a babysitter.” The piece called them “poster boys for bad behavior,” Oppenheimer recalled.
Michael, who had a sexual relationship with the 14-year-old babysitter for his children when he was 39 years old, died in a skiing accident months later in Colorado. A former Massachusetts congressman, Joe, now 72, divorced his first wife Sheila Brewster Rauch and then sought to have the marriage annulled two years later so that he could marry former staffer Anne Elizabeth “Beth” Kelly in a Catholic Church and also take communion.
“I think the shine has been coming off the Kennedy name for many decades,” said David Baron, a Beverly Hills-based rabbi and friend of RFK Jr. “I don’t think it happened as a result of Bobby running with Trump. Politics is a blood sport.”
It certainly escalated when he tied himself to Donald Trump, however. After Bobby dropped out of the presidential race as an independent and endorsed the Republican candidate, five of his siblings released a statement calling it “a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear. It is a sad ending to a sad story.”
The public war between Bobby and most of his siblings dates at least back to his 2018 announcement that he didn’t believe that convicted killer Sirhan Sirhan had acted alone in assassinating their father, Robert F. Kennedy Sr., in 1968.
Bobby, along with his brother Douglas, a Fox News Channel reporter, later said he supported parole for Sirhan, going against his own mother’s wishes.
A year later, siblings Kathleen and Joe, along with Kathleen’s daughter Maeve (who died in a sailing accident in 2020), penned a public letter denouncing Bobby’s views on vaccines — calling them “deadly.”
Last year, Dan Moldea, who wrote “The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy: An Investigation of Motive, Means and Opportunity,” told The Post he believes that the crusade for Sirhan’s parole, which was rejected by California Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2022 and denied again in 2023, was the straw that broke the family’s back.
For her part, family matriarch Ethel Kennedy tried to hold on to the Camelot brand, but she was “a do-nothing matriarch,” said Oppenheimer, who interviewed dozens of Kennedy insiders for his books on the family.
“Her sole role in life appeared to be devotion to RFK during their marriage, and be the highly visible devoted widow after his assassination,” he told The Post “I don’t believe Ethel’s death last year in any way changed what had become the downward spiral of what had once been viewed by most of America as it’s royal family.”
Leamer agreed. “It’s immensely sad to see how this journey is ending,” he said.
One Palm Beach socialite who has known members of the Kennedy family for decades compared Caroline’s decision to write the letter to “a suicide bomber willing to blow herself and her family up just to bring down Bobby.
“What she did was the antithesis of the Kennedy family brand for decades, which was all about showing family unity and love and success against the backdrop of Hyannis Port.”
