The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [370]
Ethel was her children’s instructor, not by rote but by example. She taught them that for a Kennedy the only answer to “too much” was “even more.” At the Washington International Horse Show, her children watched as she suddenly decided to compete in an exacting competition in borrowed clothes on a borrowed mount on which she had practiced for only five minutes. Others had practiced for months, even years, to guide their horses over the hurdles, but such tedium was not for Ethel. She did not win a ribbon, but she finished, and she had shown her sons the blood that coursed through their veins.
At Halloween most mothers tried to restrain their rambunctious sons from thinking of the annual event as a respite from the rule of law and considered it a time when a treat was infinitely preferable to a trick. Not Ethel. She drove her children to the sedate precincts of Georgetown, where bewildered neighbors watched as she led her motley brood in a “trash barrel assault” on the home of her sister-in-law Jean.
Jokes, to Ethel, always had an edge to them. She not only liked to win, be it tennis, charades, or politics, but believed that it was her right to win. Ethel was looking for an edge, no matter what it might be, and she taught her children this as well.
If Ethel had been a middle-class mother in Baltimore or Binghamton, she probably would have been considered dangerously manic. But she was celebrated in the Washington of the New Frontier. The journalists adored her, for she enlivened even the most mundane of moments. In Rome at the end of one European trip, the reporters gave their beloved hostess a Vespa. Ethel jumped on the scooter she had never driven before, roared around the block again and again, and stopped only when she went banging into a car.
At Hickory Hill there was only one song that was sung, and only one dance that was danced, and that was whatever song and dance Bobby and Ethel had chosen. Ethel was a spiritual cop, always scanning the crowds, looking for any traitors less than loyal to her Bobby and to their lives as Kennedys. Bobby’s wife could smell the taint of betrayal where others sniffed only roses.
Bobby’s favored reading material ran to popular biographies and political books, not the heavy tomes he thought had to be lifted to become a heavyweight intellect. He created the Hickory Hill seminars in which the ladies and gentlemen of the New Frontier heard some of the major intellectuals of their day, a regimen decidedly easier than having to read them. After listening, the Democratic gentry were supposed to question these great minds in eloquent discourse. The ladies, it turned out, were supposed to listen and learn and keep quiet; when Mrs. Nicholas Katzenbach was so bold as to ask a question, she had the feeling that Bobby cringed at her bad taste.
Even Bobby at some point seemed to realize that these seminars were exposing not great minds but vapidness and pretensions. On one occasion the host left the living room and sat outside. “Don’t you want to come in?” he said to Seigenthaler, who also had walked out. The aide had been willing to go to Alabama, where he had been beaten unconscious by a mob, but he was unwilling to listen to any more of this. “What do you think?” Bobby asked. “This should be on tape,” Seigenthaler said, his irony nicely played. “You should have television cameras in there.”
As often as not, no matter what time of day or night, there was some great momentary drama unfolding on stage central at Hickory Hill. It was perhaps a cook tired of morn-to-midnight orders who had thrown her apron to the ground and stomped out. Or possibly