The Top Seven Kennedy Sex Scandals
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/addiction-in-society/200805/the-top-seven-kennedy-sex-scandals
As Ted Kennedy's malignant brain tumor became public knowledge, opponents, friends, and pundits rushed to laud his accomplishments. Serving in the Senate since 1962, Ted Kennedy has been one of our most accomplished legislators. He has a big heart, works hard, and is extremely knowledgeable about both legislative content and procedure. Sometimes Kennedy (as when he vehemently opposed entering the war in Iraq) seems like the only American politician who can speak his mind freely. His efforts on behalf of those without privilege or power - as in the case of health care - are especially important and admirable.
Little has been said about his prior legal, marital, and ethical lapses, on the other hand. These are typical omissions in polite society. (I wonder if supporters feel that if they don't remind God of his lapses, Kennedy is more likely to get into Heaven.) However, as scientists of the mind, we at PT blogs are obligated to consider the entire range of human behavior. And the various Kennedys' sexual misdeeds are so notable that they raise - once again - the question of the relationship between power, recklessness, and sex. (See Why Politicians Get Laid More - the Low Road to the High Life, Sex Addicts Anonymous Meeting, Politicians' Division, and Edwards' confession shows us just how nutty and narcissistic he is.)
Here, in reverse order of importance, are the top seven Kennedy sex scandals:
7. Joe Kennedy, son of Robert Kennedy and former Congressman, secretly had his 12-year marriage to Sheila Rauch annulled by the Vatican. Rauch only found out about the annulment years later, after Kennedy remarried. She wrote a very angry book about the experience, Shattered Faith, since the Church's decreeing that the marriage never existed left her twin sons in everlasting limbo. Rauch pointed out that only powerful people like the Kennedy's could unilaterally cancel 12 years of marriage. (This raises the question of whether the Church can gain entry to Heaven for powerful people who have sinned.)
6. One of the storied political couplings of the twentieth century was between Andrew Cuomo, son of former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, and Kerry Kennedy, daughter of Robert Kennedy. The younger Cuomo was forced to withdraw his own bid for the governorship (although he is now the governor of New York) in 2002 when it was revealed that his wife, to whom he had been married 13 years and with whom he had three daughters, had been having a long-term affair with a married man. Kerry Kennedy's philandering shows that Kennedy disregard for marital niceties extends to the distaff side of the family as well.
5. An extremely unappetizing Kennedy scandal involved Joe's brother and campaign manager, Michael. Like his brother and sister, Michael was stably married with children when it was revealed he had been having an affair with a family babysitter, beginning when the girl was 14! This, of course, is a crime that would get a non-Kennedy registered as a sexual predator. For some reason (perhaps bribery and threats to her and her family), the girl refused to press charges, and Kennedy entered treatment for sex and alcohol addiction. Michael Kennedy had been keeping an extremely low profile when he died in an accident on a family skiing trip.
4. All of these scandals concerned third-generation Kennedy's. But the stories of sexual assaults, infidelity, and religious hypocrisy began with the family's patriarch, Joe Kennedy. In Swanson on Swanson, silent screen star Gloria Swanson revealed having an affair with Kennedy when, she claimed, he forced himself on her during his business trips to Hollywood when he left his saintly wife, Rose, at home in Massachusetts. (Swanson was most pissed off that, despite his legendary financial acumen, Joe lost a ton of her dough.) Other Kennedy family historians report that the elder Kennedy made advances on his sons' girlfriends!
3. Back to the younger Kennedy's, in 1991 Kennedy nephew William Smith was charged with rape while staying with uncle Teddy in the family's seaside estate in Palm Beach, FL. The woman claimed she met Smith at a night club at which he was accompanied by Ted Kennedy and his son, Patrick. Later, while ostensibly showing her around the estate, Smith began pursuing and pawing her as she tried to escape. Other women were found who described having similar experiences with the Kennedy nephew, but Smith was acquitted.
2. Both President Jack Kennedy - whose sexual escapades were legendary - and younger brother Bobby had closely contiguous sexual liaisons with Marilyn Monroe. Numerous conspiracy theories have been developed around the Kennedys' involvement in Monroe's death, which occurred in the aftermath of these affairs. At a minimum, the relationships were extremely damaging to Monroe's fragile mental health.
1. What could most interfere with Ted Kennedy's passage to Heaven (as it frustrated his aspirations to be president) was his involvement in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. Following a party with six young female campaign workers on the island of Chappaquiddick, Kennedy was giving Kopechne a ride back to her hotel when he drove off a bridge. Kopechne drowned in the car, and Kennedy left the scene to consult with Kennedy family advisers. In fact, he never reported the incident, which was discovered independently the next morning! Kennedy was charged only with leaving the scene of an accident.
Of course, you and I can wonder how our lives would have been derailed if we were involved in a situation like this (Kennedy was married). But the Kennedy's are not deterred by such experiences, as the subsequent actions of his nephews and niece indicate. Are there separate rules - both legal and psychological - for people like the Kennedy's?
Pre-order Stanton's new book, with Ilse Thompson, Recover! Stop Thinking Like an Addict and Reclaim Your Life with The PERFECT Program.
P.S. (Feb 19, 2009): Perhaps the greatest "scandal" - more of a tragedy - was the case of Ted's wife at the time of Chappaquiddick, Joan Bennett Kennedy, who became a ravaged alcoholic (in 2005, when she was 68, her children took legal guardianship of her affairs after several late-life drunken episodes). The "Kennedy wife thing" of tolerating non-stop cheating while establishing her own life didn't work well for her (unlike Jackie). According to the Boston Globe: "During the [wedding] festivities, Jack [who was 15 years his brother's senior], Ted's godfather and best man, wore a microphone because the Bennetts had hired a film crew as a wedding gift. Later, watching the footage, Joan would hear Jack whisper to his brother that marriage didn't mean you had to be faithful." Question for Kennedy buffs - did Ted contribute to Joan's lifelong alcoholism?
Stanton Peele, Ph.D., J.D., is the author of Recover! He has worked in the addiction field since the publication of Love and Addiction in 1975.
In Print: Recover!: Stop Thinking Like an Addict and Reclaim Your Life with The PERFECT Program Online: Stanton Peele Addiction Web Site (SPAWS)
https://www.historyhit.com/a-detailed-list-of-jfks-affairs/
Robert F. Kennedy Dying - ABC News Clip (June 5, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzqoS3W4sjU
Why Ethel Kennedy Would Have Forgiven Robert F. Kennedy Anything – Including Possible Affairs
https://people.com/celebrity/robert-f-kennedy-after-jfks-death-infidelity-rumors-and-more/
Robert F. Kennedy – best known to his family and friends as Bobby – still continues to be a figure of public fascination, nearly 50 years after his assassination.
A new book, Bobby Kennedy: The Making of A Liberal Icon, by Larry Tye, shares new insights on the late Senator’s tragically cut-short life. Tye spoke with Bobby’s widow, Ethel Kennedy, 88, about the events that shaped his life.
PEOPLE spoke with Tye about some of the biggest revelations from the book – and what the people in Bobby’s life had to say about them.
1. Bobby most likely had affairs – but Ethel was his one true love.
Like the rest of the Kennedy men, Tye says Bobby was a “flirt” and believes Bobby did have affairs throughout his marriage – possibly including Lee Remick and Kim Novak. A big reason for any potential infidelity? The Kennedy family culture, Tye tells PEOPLE.
“Bobby Kennedy came from a family where marital infidelity was not necessarily a virtue, and wasn’t practiced a whole lot,” he said.
Despite the influence of his family, Tye says Bobby was most likely the Kennedy male who was least likely to stray.
“He was probably the most puritanical and probably the most sanctimonious of Joe Kennedy’s boys,” Tye says.
It all comes back to love for and relationship with his wife, Ethel, who Tye spoke with while writing the book. Bobby, he says, was more faithful than any of the other Kennedy men.
“There’s a reason that Ethel has lived with these rumors for 50 years and has stopped listening to or reading about them,” he says. “What she cared about is not only did Bobby always come home, but that he came home to her and the kids.”
“He hugely loved Ethel Kennedy,” Tye says. “They’re one of the great romances of American politics.”
The affection between the two was mutual – so much so that, on Ethel’s end, she would have forgave any transgression her husband committed.
“She was so in love with him, she would have forgiven him anything.”
2. He was friends with Joseph McCarthy – and attended his funeral.
Despite their differing politics, there was a level of respect between the two famed politicians (McCarthy was the Republican senator who famously led a communist “witch hunt” in the 1950s) that has been “airbrushed” out of Bobby’s life, Tye says.
Tye says that in his discussions with Ethel, she acknowledged her husband’s “close friendship” with McCarthy in a way that people have been “denying forever.” Early on in his career, Kennedy worked for McCarthy for seven-and-a-half months.
“He believed in what McCarthy was doing then,” Tye says, calling Bobby a “cold warrior.” “He believed that he was one of the few guys out there who had the courage to go after communism in an era where he thought this was a huge threat.”
When McCarthy died in 1957, Kennedy attended his funeral, but did so without any attention. He sat in a back row in the balcony and asked reporters not to mention his attendance.
“It was Bobby Kennedy showing that he was loyal to a guy who gave him a break,” Tye says.
3. It was Bobby who took JFK’s death hardest – but it took a bit before it really hit him.
When his family – and the entire country – was in a state of mourning after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, it was Bobby who was the family’s rock in the storm – initially.
“The one that held it together in the Kennedy family and in America, more quickly and longer than anybody, was Bobby Kennedy,” Tye says.
But Bobby’s strong facade only lasted so long. As the rest of the world was beginning to move on, the depth of what had happened truly hit him, and he sunk into a deep despair, that would likely today be considered clinical depression.
“He had lost his best friend, the reason for everything he had done [that was] important professionally,” Tye says.
His grief, he says, was perhaps even more intense than JFK’s widow, Jackie Kennedy. He filled his office with photos of his late brother, lost weight, had trouble sleeping and frequently visited John’s grave at Arlington Cemetery.
“His life was, in large part up until then, in service to his brother.”
4. It can’t be confirmed if Bobby had an affair with Jackie Kennedy – but Tye says they understood each other in a deep way.
There’s long been talk of a rumored affair between Bobby and and Jackie, which Tye says his own research can’t confirm. But there’s no doubt that in the years after his brother’s death, he and Jackie understood each other on a deeper level because of their shared experience.
“I think he felt that the one person that could understand just how deep his grief was, if anybody could, it was Jackie Kennedy,” Tye says. “It was definitely special.”
“The one person he could be consoled by was Jackie Kennedy.”
Of whether their close friendship ever turned romantic or sexual, Tye says: “I could well have been, but it could well not have been.”
Their relationship also grew closer as Bobby saw himself as a “surrogate father” to Jackie’s kids John Jr. and Caroline, and felt he had to “hold Jackie’s hand” in the years after JFK’s death.
“There’s no doubt in the world that they had a very special consoling of one another in that time.”
Bobby Kennedy: The Making of A Liberal Icon by Larry Tye will be released on July 5.
The day Robert Kennedy met Allen Ginsberg: 'Have you ever smoked pot?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/27/robert-kennedy-allen-ginsberg-meeting-account-day-met
Robert Kennedy holds the hand of a supporter in Indiana, early May 1968. Photograph: Andrew Sacks/Getty Images
In 1968, the senator welcomed the beat poet into his office, beginning what could have been an unusual relationship
Allen Ginsberg hadn’t had an appointment that morning in early 1968 when he appeared at the Washington office of Senator Robert F Kennedy. But Kennedy agreed to see him anyway, and heard him out on everything from the plight of heroin addicts to federal drug policy to global warming to the war in Vietnam to the invention of LSD to the degraded state of New York City to how everyone, including his own mother, had let down Jesus Christ. (For a Jewish mother not to understand her son, Ginsberg told Kennedy, was “the most terrible thing of all”.)
1968: the year that changed America
At one point Ginsberg, loquacious and impassioned and hirsute, sporting jeans and a workingman’s cap, posed a question to Kennedy, the devout and strait-laced father of 10: had he ever smoked pot? A smiling Kennedy said he had not. “Oh, come on!” Ginsberg remonstrated. “You can tell me! I won’t tell anyone!” And when Kennedy, then agonizing over a White House run, dug in – the dangers of dope hadn’t yet been determined, he noted – Ginsberg went off on him.
“That’s a pretty inhuman answer to give,” he scolded. “What kind of a president do you want to be? On the subject of something as spiritual and sweet as pot, if you’re going to sit around giving an IBM-machine answer, that’s not going to satisfy the [younger] generation.
“The trouble with you is you have the reputation, which is substantiated by that kind of an answer, of being kind of a heartless, anti-faggot, anti-tenderness, mechanical politician on the make,” Ginsberg went on. “And what this country needs, if anything, is tenderness. Tenderness is the key to the solution of the ecological problem, as well as all the other human problems. Tenderness to mother nature, tenderness to our fellow man, including tenderness to fairies and junkies, is what at this point is desired by the entire younger generation. What they’re looking for is a politician who’s friendly and tender-hearted.”
“He really resented that,” Ginsberg recalled for the writer Jean Stein in January 1970, a year and a half after Kennedy’s assassination. Ginsberg was one of dozens of Kennedy associates and acquaintances Stein and her co-author, George Plimpton, interviewed for American Journey, an account built around the train ride carrying Kennedy’s remains from New York to Washington for burial at Arlington National Cemetery. Kennedy told Ginsberg that day that he was quite the opposite – hard-hearted, or cold-hearted, or a cold fish – “Some phrase like that,” Ginsberg said. It was Kennedy’s reflexive response to anyone accusing him of softness or sentimentality.
It’s hard to imagine many other senators circa 1968, or circa 2018 for that matter, inviting a beat poet into his inner sanctum, then hearing him out. In fact, Ginsberg had had little luck that morning on Capitol Hill, wandering the halls, trying to buttonhole congressmen; before heading into Kennedy’s office, he’d tried Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon and, told he wasn’t around, had pestered Morse’s secretary into taking a memo from him. The Robert Kennedy being honored these days, as the 50th anniversary of his murder approaches, is a man of uniformity – uniform courage, and goodness, and tolerance. It’s someone his intimates don’t recognize. “People have been writing about Kennedy as if he was Mother Teresa,” said Adam Walinsky, his longtime aide and chief speechwriter. “He was a lot of things, but he was not Mother Teresa. He was sensitive but he was a tough guy.”
Robert Kennedy was in fact a man of contradictions. One of them was that as rigid and doctrinaire and Manichean as he could sometimes be – traits that had equipped him to work for Senator Joseph McCarthy and manage his older brother’s presidential campaign in 1960 – he could also be intensely curious and open-minded. He sought out people who might startle or even abuse him, because they’d tell him something new. “Don’t stack it with Uncle Toms or middle-of-the-roaders,” he advised Budd Schulberg in May 1967 as Schulberg gathered representatives from the writers’ workshop he’d created in Los Angeles following the Watts riots to meet Kennedy. “I’d like to hear from the militants, how they’re really thinking.”
He was to do the same thing in Indianapolis on the night Martin Luther King Jr was killed, courting local radicals and street people rather than more predictable establishment types, even though he knew they’d hit him up for money or chew him out. Kennedy would seethe during such sessions. He could be lounging by his pool, he’d tell his detractors; he didn’t need to take such crap. But then he’d cool down, and ponder, and evolve, and do.
With Ginsberg that day he was testing the limits of his own tolerance. He had issues with homosexuality, or at least some gay men thought so; he’d once enraged Gore Vidal by publicly removing Vidal’s arm from Jacqueline Kennedy’s shoulder during a White House party. “There was something exotic about me that he couldn’t entirely accept,” Truman Capote once said of him. “He was trying to accept it like some sort of old father doesn’t want to accept long hair on a kid, or sideburns, but yet, he’s sort of stuck with him.” Kennedy had made one homophobic crack about James Baldwin after his ill-fated meeting with him and other black intellectuals in May 1963, and another three months later about Bayard Rustin on the eve of the March on Washington. “So you’re down here for that old black fairy’s anti-Kennedy demonstration?” he’d asked Marietta Tree.
But that day in Kennedy’s office – Ginsberg placed it in late 1967 or early 1968; it was more likely the latter – the senator welcomed him in. Whether the poetry with which Kennedy famously consoled himself following his brother’s murder included Howl or Kaddish or anything else of Ginsberg’s is uncertain. But Kennedy clearly knew of him; in his book To Seek a Newer World, he’d noted how, on different occasions, both Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union had expelled him. “Established communists, like other bureaucratic totalitarians, have no fondness for revolutionaries,” he’d written.
Kennedy “didn’t recoil from people”, Walinsky recalled. “He listened. And he listened not just with his head, but with his heart and his guts. And he listened to the right things. And he paid attention. He was willing to pick up wisdom and insight from wherever it came. He wasn’t about to throw that guy out of his office because he was a New York hippie and he had a big beard and he was an obvious ‘faggot’, as he described himself. None of that got in the way. And it wasn’t just politeness. I mean, he really wanted to know what that guy had to teach him – if he had anything.”
“The way in which Kennedy operated on so many things was intuitive,” noted Peter Edelman, the senator’s longtime legislative assistant, who had received Ginsberg in an anteroom and then, after checking with the senator, escorted him back to see him. “When Walter Reuther wanted Robert Kennedy to go meet Cesar Chavez, I walked into the office and I say: ‘The subcommittee on migratory labor is going to have hearings in California on Cesar Chavez’s farm workers strike and would you be willing to go?’ He said ‘yes’ without asking anything else. There were obviously many things he thought about a lot, like what was he going to do about Vietnam, but he had this intuitive thing where he would just instinctively say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ about things sometimes. It could be annoying because you hadn’t had a chance to make your case.”
To Walinsky, it was clear why, barely four years after Dallas, the fatalistic Kennedy bristled at Ginsberg’s lecture on tender-heartedness. “I could see him taking umbrage at that,” he said. “Because, remember, by the time this happens, he’s had his Gethsemane and he’s pretty much aware that his Calvary is ahead of him. And by that point, he’s picked up and held a lot of little poor kids, who probably have pellagra all over them. So when he gets lectured on tenderness, maybe he’s thinking, ‘Who is this guy?’ Has he been where I’ve been?’ Many times I saw that aspect of the senator – that he could be irritable when he was completely misunderstood.”
‘I shut up and let him talk’
Ginsberg had first attempted to see Kennedy in 1965, the year he’d entered the Senate; Ginsberg had been in town to testify about his experiences with LSD before a Senate subcommittee investigating drugs, a panel on which Kennedy sat. That was when he’d met Edelman, who told him he’d just missed the senator. “I had the impression that he had gone out just to avoid me,” Ginsberg remembered. “But that might have been my paranoia.” He and Edelman had had dinner together that night, and kept in touch some afterward. So three years later, with draconian drug legislation pending, Ginsberg came calling for Kennedy again, armed with a bag full of clippings and his harmonium.
Kennedy began their conversation that day by asking Ginsberg a very un-senatorial question: which of two Russian poets, Andrei Voznesensky or Yevgeny Yevtushenko, he preferred. Ginsberg expressed a clear preference for one of them – Edelman can’t remember which – because, as Ginsberg explained it, “he kisses with his mouth open”. If that made the sometimes priggish Kennedy blanch, he didn’t show it. Ginsberg then launched into the main purpose of his visit.
The “law and order” problem in New York, he said, was really a hoax, concocted by various interest groups – the mafia; the police; the federal law enforcement establishment – each with its own reason for keeping narcotics illegal and denying junkies the heroin to which, under a supreme court case from 1925, they were entitled when received under a doctor’s care. Restore the civil rights of drug addicts, he urged, implement the British system of providing addicts with drugs under controlled conditions, and the crime problem then ravaging urban neighborhoods like his own on New York’s Lower East Side would disappear.
“That was the first basic thing that I laid down, meanwhile, diving into my bag and pulling out scraps of newspaper clipping to illustrate what I was saying – statistics,” Ginsberg remembered. “He listened, sort of, but I could see that his attention was wandering. He thought I was indulging in inappropriate behavior of some sort or other. I don’t think he was able to concentrate that long to realize the significance of the information I was giving him. So then I shut up and let him talk.”
Allen Ginsberg, Howl and the voice of the Beats
Given the floor, Kennedy asked Ginsberg what relationship, if any, there was between his friends – “hippie or flower power people, the hip generation people”, as Ginsberg described them – and black power leaders, and whether some sort of coalition between them might work. It was, said Walinsky, part of Kennedy’s ongoing effort to fashion new, progressive alliances to counter the political mainstream: were these people who could be harnessed, Kennedy wondered, and was Ginsberg the kind of person who could harness them?
(Ginsberg replied that he’d smoked pot a couple of times with Stokely Carmichael, but that was about it for bridge-building. Kennedy also asked about LSD; Ginsberg told him it provided a religious experience like those described by William James, and that its development in 1945 was as important as the atom bomb’s around the same time. “He just nodded and listened,” Ginsberg said.)
Ginsberg then described the greenhouse effect and how, should car exhaust continue to warm the upper atmosphere, large land masses would be covered with water within 40 or 50 years. He warned how air and noise pollution were making New York City uninhabitable and, more generally, how pollution and drug laws harmed not only individuals but had led to “a metabolic poisoning of the body politic” culminating in the war in Vietnam. The United States was like a sick person, he said. “Is that clear?” he asked Kennedy. “Am I making sense to you?” Though he didn’t understand everything Ginsberg said, Kennedy replied, he got his drift. And all of it, he said, “sounded very poetic”.
Fearful of wearing out his welcome – “I’ve taken up enough of your time. You’re probably as busy as I am, or busier,” he conceded – Ginsberg prepared to leave, but not before asking a couple more questions. What did Kennedy think was going to happen to their country? Would the military-industrial complex, the one controlling Lyndon Johnson, get worse? “It’ll get worse,” Kennedy replied, looking him in the eye as he did.
Ginsberg bade Kennedy goodbye and rejoined Walinsky and Jeff Greenfield, then a junior speechwriter on Kennedy’s staff, in their small office. Only then, with a start, did he realize he’d neglected to do something with the senator, something more important than any words they’d exchanged. And, as luck would have it, Kennedy happened into the room. It was as if he’d hadn’t had quite enough of Ginsberg, and had come back for a bit more.
“Wait a minute,” Ginsberg told him. “I wanted to sing you the Hare Krishna mantra. Can you stay and listen? It’ll just take one minute.” After Kennedy agreed, Ginsberg pulled out his harmonium. “He has this one-tone mouth harp, so he blows his note on that – what’s the sound? Mmmmmmmmmmgggg?” Edelman recalled. Ginsberg chanted two choruses. “I think Kennedy was kind of … I don’t know if it was delighted or amused,” Greenfield recalled. “I think he was kind of intrigued.” “What was that?” Kennedy had asked. “That’s a magic spell for the preservation of the planet,” Ginsberg told him. “Hear it once and you’re immediately enlightened.”
“The guy on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue needs that more than I do,” said Kennedy. “You ought to sing that to the guy up the street.”
“Well, make an appointment for me,” Ginsberg replied. But he never did see Lyndon Johnson.
The 'Bobby phenomenon': Netflix doc looks at Robert Kennedy's stellar political rise
Soon Ginsberg was on his way, unsure whether anything he’d just said to or done with Kennedy had stuck. And so he remained until that May, a couple of months after Kennedy’s entry into the presidential race, when someone from the senator’s office named Phil Mandelkorn called him.
Mandelkorn, who’d just left Time to work on the Kennedy campaign, told Ginsberg he was writing some speeches for Kennedy, and that the senator wanted to see the materials Ginsberg had brought with him that day. “So I put together a bunch of Xeroxes of clippings and scientific papers that I’d accumulated, and sent it off,” Ginsberg told Stein. “DOPE FIEND NEWS,” Ginsberg, compulsive archivist that he was, wrote on the manila envelope. “A Collage of Newsclips analyzing JUNK PROBLEMS related to Crime on the Streets and POT LAWS AS POLITICS.” “Please try to show this to Senator Kennedy,” he’d scrawled on the side. It was dated 10 May 1968.
Had Kennedy ever given that speech? Stein asked Ginsberg. “I don’t think he ever got to actually work out the material,” Ginsberg said: barely three weeks later, he noted, Kennedy was dead. But on the day in early 1968 when Allen Ginsberg stopped by to see him, it turned out, Robert Kennedy had, indeed, been listening.
David Margolick is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and author of The Promise and the Dream: The Untold Story of Martin Luther King, Jr and Robert F Kennedy
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