affair took place; the only real fight is over when it may have begun (in Massachusetts, the legal age of consent is sixteen).
The press has a field day with this scandal, and Cohasset police launch inquiries into the statutory rape allegations, but true to form, the Kennedys clam up.
As one family friend tells Vanity Fair, “I have a sense that all of the Kennedys are in a castle with a moat around it and a gangplank that lifts up, and they’re all in there with boiling oil for journalists. They’re in a siege mentality all the time, and I think it colors their whole relationship with other people.”
That familial devotion is both admirable and a source of frustration to outsiders, many of whom view loyalty taken to this extent as disrespectful to the victims, even Mafia-esque. “The only time the family intervenes is when there’s an embarrassment in the press,” a close friend of the Kennedys points out. “The infraction is not considered important, only the public embarrassment.”
Even when Joe speaks out on the dual family dramas, it is only to say vaguely, “I view these as private and personal matters,” while acknowledging, “Sometimes in my family it doesn’t always work out that way.” Nevertheless, he states firmly of Michael, “I love my brother very much, I will always love my brother, and I will stand by my brother”—an attitude Vanity Fair deems “Omertà, Irish-American-style.”
So the question remains: Who leaked to the press?
Among the Kennedy inner circle, the finger of betrayal is pointed at their cousin Michael Skakel.
Chapter 50
Michael Christopher Skakel was born on September 19, 1960, the fifth of seven children. His father, Rushton Skakel Sr. (himself one of seven children in a family that includes younger sister Ethel Kennedy), is left to raise the six boys and one girl as a single parent when their mother, Anne, passes away from cancer at age forty-one in March 1973.
The Skakel family was already “Greenwich royalty” in Belle Haven, an exclusive neighborhood in the tony Connecticut town, even without the added luster and celebrity that Ethel’s marriage to Robert Kennedy gave them by association. Besides, the Skakels are reportedly even wealthier than the Kennedys, and traditionally Republican, which didn’t change when Ethel married into a Democratic family, not even when her brother-in-law ran for president.
According to Kennedy biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli, Ethel’s brother Jim Skakel says the family “supported Nixon, not Jack, in the 1960 election,” and claims their brother George Jr. thumbed his nose at the Kennedys by handing out the inauguration tickets Ethel gave him to the homeless. In a 1966 piece on George Jr. in the Stanford Daily, William F. Buckley Jr. tells a similar story, but claims that George Jr. felt the Kennedy staff was acting “a little pompously” at the 1961 inauguration, “whereupon he took the seating pass of an august Cabinet member and conferred it ceremoniously on a Negro porter, throwing protocol into utter panic.”
Ethel and Rushton’s father, George Skakel Sr., “was even more a self-made man than Joe Kennedy,” going from a railroad clerk to owner of the Great Lakes Carbon Corporation, one of the largest privately held businesses in the world. Following George Sr.’s 1955 death in a plane crash—and eleven years later, oldest son George Jr.’s—Rushton Sr. takes over as chairman of Great Lakes Carbon, and grows even wealthier.
Rushton Skakel’s children are known to be ill behaved—a frustrated former nanny who worked for the family in the mid-sixties remarks, “They didn’t like discipline—the kids or the parents”—though this, too, seems in keeping with Skakel family tradition, as Ethel’s brothers were also considered terrors in their Greenwich neighborhood while growing up. However, after their mother, Anne, passes away, “an even more intense level of chaos came to rule our household,” Michael Skakel recalls. He was twelve years old at the time of her death, left with little supervision and an often-absent father who handed his children off to “friends, relatives, servants, a coterie of priests and nuns and a series of live-in tutors.”
In the fall of 1975, Rushton Jr. is nineteen, Julie is eighteen, Thomas is seventeen, John is sixteen, David is eleven, and the youngest in the family, Stephen, is nine. Michael turns fifteen that September. Their friends and neighbors diagonally across the street are the Moxleys, who moved to the exclusive Belle Haven neighborhood in 1974 with their two teenagers, John and Martha. Martha, who makes friends quickly and is deemed “Best Personality” at her new school, is also fifteen, just