Final April, greater than 50 members of the Kennedy clan got here collectively to have fun the 96th birthday of matriarch Ethel Kennedy, crowding collectively for a photograph in her front room.
After her demise in October, and the vicious household infighting that has marked Robert F. “Bobby” Kennedy Jr.’s Senate affirmation hearings this previous week, the image could be the final vestige of Camelot.
That golden age, which is related to the storied Irish-American Democratic dynasty and John F. Kennedy’s presidency within the early Sixties, was already in hassle when the photograph was taken.
Simply days later, six of Ethel’s youngsters 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 marketing campaign by calling it “dangerous” and publicly endorsing Joe Biden.
Now, although, “What we’re seeing is the self-destruction of the Kennedy family,” Laurence Leamer, creator of “The Kennedy Women” and “The Kennedy Men,” instructed The Submit. “For three generations they were holding together against the world, and wouldn’t dare speak out against each other. That’s over.”
It got here to an abrupt finish, he mentioned, 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 Well being and Human Providers.
“I’ve known Bobby his whole life,” mentioned 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 extra soiled laundry, together with blaming RFK Jr. for getting different Kennedy relations hooked on medication.
“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 mom, 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 well-known speeches by JFK and Ted Kennedy with senators grilling his cousin on the hearings.
“Vote no on Junior!!!” he posted to his 539,000 Instagram followers on Jan. 29. He additionally posted a video of himself to X making enjoyable of RFK Jr’s spasmodic dysphonia, a neurological dysfunction that impacts his speech.
Leamer slammed the feedback made by each Caroline and her son, the Harvard-educated grandson of JFK.
“The language that they are using is so unKennedy like,” mentioned Leamer. “There are other ways to make your point.”
Bishop Juan Carlos Mendez, a pal 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,” mentioned Mendez.
However Jerry Oppenheimer, creator 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,” mentioned the household 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 instructed The Submit.
Actually, he mentioned, the bitterness between Caroline and RFK Jr. goes again many years to the battles between their moms — 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 mentioned. “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 girls’s offspring. When John F. Kennedy Jr. was working George journal, he revealed 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 referred to as them “poster boys for bad behavior,” Oppenheimer recalled.
Michael, who had a sexual relationship with the 14-year-old babysitter for his youngsters when he was 39 years previous, died in a snowboarding accident months later in Colorado. A former Massachusetts congressman, Joe, now 72, divorced his first spouse Sheila Brewster Rauch after which sought to have the wedding annulled two years later in order that he may marry former staffer Anne Elizabeth “Beth” Kelly in a Catholic Church and likewise take communion.
“I think the shine has been coming off the Kennedy name for many decades,” mentioned David Baron, a Beverly Hills-based rabbi and pal of RFK Jr. “I don’t think it happened as a result of Bobby running with Trump. Politics is a blood sport.”
It actually escalated when he tied himself to Donald Trump, nevertheless. After Bobby dropped out of the presidential race as an unbiased and endorsed the Republican candidate, 5 of his siblings launched a press release 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 general public warfare between Bobby and most of his siblings dates not less than again to his 2018 announcement that he didn’t consider that convicted killer Sirhan Sirhan had acted alone in assassinating their father, Robert F. Kennedy Sr., in 1968.
Bobby, alongside together with his brother Douglas, a Fox Information Channel reporter, later mentioned he supported parole for Sirhan, going in opposition to his personal mom’s needs.
A 12 months later, siblings Kathleen and Joe, together with Kathleen’s daughter Maeve (who died in a crusing accident in 2020), penned a public letter denouncing Bobby’s views on vaccines — calling them “deadly.”
Final 12 months, Dan Moldea, who wrote “The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy: An Investigation of Motive, Means and Opportunity,” instructed The Submit he believes that the campaign for Sirhan’s parole, which was rejected by California Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2022 and denied once more in 2023, was the straw that broke the household’s again.
For her half, household matriarch Ethel Kennedy tried to carry on to the Camelot model, however she was “a do-nothing matriarch,” mentioned Oppenheimer, who interviewed dozens of Kennedy insiders for his books on the household.
“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 instructed The Submit “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 mentioned.
One Palm Seashore socialite who has recognized members of the Kennedy household for many years in contrast Caroline’s determination to write down the letter to “a suicide bomber keen to blow herself and her household up simply to deliver 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.”
