Daily Express Monday, April 6, 2020 21From Peter Sheridan in Los Angeles
Capsized
Murdered...
JFK, left,
and Robert
Drowned...Maeve and Gideon got into a canoe in an attempt to retrieve a ball in the waterbehaviour grew erratic, and her children
feared “the Wrath of Ethel”. “Kennedys
don’t cry,” was the family ethos. And yet
they had so much to cry about.
The assassinations of JFK and RFK were
just the beginning. Ethel lost two children.
David, 28, was found dead in a hotel in
Palm Beach, Florida, from a drug overdose
in 1984, having battled addiction for years.
Michael, aged 39, died skiing in Aspen,
Colorado, in 1997, crashing into a tree
while playing a dangerous Alpine sport.
Three of Ethel’s sons were in rehab:
David, Joseph and Robert Jr – the latter
arrested for heroin possession.
Ethel’s nephew John Kennedy Jr, the
president’s 38-year-old son, died in 1999
when the small plane he was piloting
became lost in fog and crashed off Martha’s
Vineyard in Massachusetts.
Granddaughter Saoirse Kennedy Hill, 22,
died last August of an overdose at the
Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port,
Massachusetts.
And this weekend Ethel’s granddaughter
Maeve, aged 40, and great-grandson
Gideon, aged eight, were declared dead
after being lost at sea on Thursday.Their deaths, near their waterfront home
in Shady Side, Maryland, seem like a tragic
scene from the theatre of the absurd.
“Gideon and Maeve were playing kickball
by the shallow cove behind the house, and
one of them kicked the ball into the water,”
said Maeve’s husband, David McKean.
The pair jumped in a canoe and paddled
out to retrieve the ball, but “somehow got
pushed by wind or tide into the open bay”.
The Coast Guard found their canoe
capsized and no sign of mother or child.
“It is clear that Maeve and Gideon have
passed away,” said David on Saturday, after
two days of failed searches.
Ethel Skakel was born the sixth of seven
children in a prosperous Irish-American
family, not unlike the Kennedys and with so
many children of her own was always
surrounded by family.
Yet today she grieves alone, as many
family members keep their distance
because of her advanced years and
vulnerability to Covid-19.
A deeply religious Catholic, Ethel might
recall the words of advice she once gave son
Robert Jr: “We feel like we ought to be able
to write our own scripts to our lives, and
sometimes we feel disappointed in God
when life rewrites the plot. The key is
acceptance and gratitude.
“We need to practise wanting what we’ve
got, not what we wish we had.”
For the Kennedy matriarch determined
that her family succeed at all costs, that may
be small comfort.CURSE OF THE KENNEDYS
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FOR Ethel Kennedy, the 91-year-old
matriarch of the venerable American
blue-blood clan, this weekend brought yet
more heartbreak to a lifetime of tragedy.
Her granddaughter and great-grandson
were declared dead, after going missing in
a seemingly frivolous boating accident.
Cynics speak of the “Kennedy Curse”
but for Ethel, the widow of Robert F
Kennedy, the losses are shockingly real.
“It’s never-ending for her,” a close
Kennedy family source told People
magazine. “She has lost her husband, two
of her children, her nephew John and now
two of her grandchildren, and a great-
grandchild. It’s unimaginable.”
And that’s not to mention the loss of her
brother-in-law President John F Kennedy,
having three children in rehab, one son’s
arrest for heroin possession, another son’s
shocking affair with a babysitter, and a
nephew’s rape trial.
But for much of the Kennedy clan, many
of the tragedies – too often self-inflicted
- are a result of the stranglehold Ethel kept
on the dynasty, her distant parenting and
ferocious temper.
“Her approach was what today people
would call ‘tough love’,” said her son,
Robert Kennedy Jr, aged 66, in his
biography. “Her exceptional qualities were
mainly invisible to me as a child.”
Ethel was accused of being an inattentive,
indifferent mother to her 11 children.
She was a long-time human rights
advocate and environmental activist, and
yet Robert Jr was horrified by her
“demeaning treatment” of staff as
“evidence of maternal hypocrisy”.
Ethel “divided the world into
friend and foe”, he wrote.
“Generally she judged the latter
by harsher standards, and yet
she sometimes discarded
time-honoured friendships for
minor infractions.
“I faulted her for being
mercurial and arbitrary.”
Ethel flew into rages, and her
“flurries of temper appeared to
me haphazard”.
The assassinations of
President Kennedy in
1963, and of Ethel’s
husband Robert –
the former US
Attorney General
then running for
Indifferent
president, in 1968 – cast long shadows
over the family. When JFK was killed, his
brother Bobby plunged into “six months
of just... –”, said Ethel. “It was
like Bobby had lost both
arms.”Ethel, equally derailed after her own
husband’s death, demanded that all her
children and grandchildren live up to the
Kennedys’ ideals of excellence and service,
invariably setting them all up for
disappointment. In the family’s competitive
environment winning was everything.
Robert Jr admits to “failing to be the
person whom both she and I wanted me to
be”. Daughter Kathleen Kennedy admits:
“Trying hard didn’t cut it.” Falling off her
horse and breaking a leg, she was only
taken to hospital four days later.
Ultra-competitive, Ethel was notorious
at tennis for calling close balls “out” and
chastised Jackie Kennedy for failing to join
in the clan’s roughhousing games and sports.
She branded her children “slow” if they
failed to recall details of each Sunday’s
church sermon, demanded that they
clear up yet left her own
laundry laying around, and
let her numerous children
eat breakfast and lunch
whenever they wished,
driving their chefs to
exasperation. Her