"... my mother remembers. To cure this contagion, she coaxed notables of different backgrounds into unfamiliar situations. A wizard at peer pressure, she compelled her guests to play charades, freeze tag, and capture the flag, and join in rope climbing and push-up competitions. She had Cabinet members fence with bamboo sticks on gangplanks spanning the pool....When Robert Frost visited Hickory Hill after Uncle Jack’s inauguration, she made him judge a poetry-writing contest among government officials and celebrity guests. At a party for Averell Harriman’s birthday the guests came dressed as the Harrimans during some episode of their eventful lives. My mother borrowed life-size wax figures from Madame Tussauds of Harriman, FDR, Churchill, and Stalin at Yalta, and placed them unobtrusively around the living room to mingle with the crowd...."
Writes Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in "American Values/Lessons I Learned From My Family."
"At Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s party she made [Uncle] Jack’s Cabinet play kick-the-can in the woods. When Yevtushenko launched into a long, overwrought toast at dinner, film director George Stevens whispered to my mother, 'Can’t we play ‘Kick the Commie’?'" She threw parties for André Malraux... Harry Belafonte... Frank Sinatra, Richard Burton, Marlon Brando, Randolph Churchill, Liz Taylor, and Judy Garland.... My memories are a montage of magical madnesses: swimming in the pool with a seal; watching my mom ride her tall mare Killarney through the house; Tina Turner teaching my sister to dance; John Lennon and my Uncle Teddy, sitting together on a piano bench, playing and singing till two a.m., with Rosey Grier accompanying on a giant zebra-skin drum; Marlon Brando at a formal sit-down dinner, eating his food, Indian style, on the floor; breakfast with the Smothers Brothers, Alan King, Andy Williams, and Buddy Hackett, all in pajamas; Rudolf Nureyev pirouetting on the patio...."
***
How about your mother? Was she a wizard at peer pressure? Imagine her, in your family home, compelling the guests to play childish games and doing something on the level of riding a horse through the house. What would that look like? Who would be pirouetting on your patio?
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42 comments:
Well, if nothing else, he may have no peer when it comes to name dropping
It's a play for the pure estrogen vote.
Forget what MY MOTHER would do. She wasn't an exhibitionist. Would ANY First Lady in the current era get away with shenanigans like this? (Of course nowadays most of the pols are so old they have to be back at The Home before 8 pm).
But... what's the point of printing this extract, at this time, may I ask - a quote from a 5-year old book? If this were to come out in an article tomorrow, we would all be thinking: 'What a shameless name-dropper, hoping we'll all be nostalgic for the glow and bygone magic of the Kennedy's Camelot.' It wouldn't work though, without a sympathetic and adoring press corp to embellish it. Can RFKJr create his own glow, or is it all reflected glory?
"What would that look like?"
Early signs of actual madness or dementia?
We did play lots of games as kids, of course, including with adults.
Kennedy, striving to be the Bob Dole of Dem presidential candidates.
The whole "Uncle Jack" and "Uncle Teddy" schtick has got to stop, it makes him seem like an entitled child, verrrry unendearing.
my mother was a wizard at hijacking control of ANY party or event planning..
No matter how distantly related she was to the event..
And Then BITCHING AND MOANING about what a burden it was to her to Always have to be planning the events.
Even if you TRIED to keep her hands out of the mix..
Before you knew it, she'd be in Full Control.. And Bitching and Moaning about it
I would have MUCH Rather played kick the can.
How ever, my mom is now 91, and we had a picnic yesterday; my sister and i were able to:
pick the menu
pick the location
get the food (smoked pork chops, vegetable salads (carrots, etc) and toll house pan cookies
My mom only insisted on bringing a bag of potato chips.. Which made me a little sad.
But the picnic was a great success, and everybody was glad everyone was there
I think you had to be there.
Ethel is still alive!
Her parties sound like a gawdawful nightmare to me, but maybe she had a graceful touch that put others at ease while they underwent social torture.
These stories overlap with the one about how Bobby Sr. and Ethel would push guests into the pool and say something like "come on, join the fun, don't be a spoilsport."
I'm sure that will make a lot of common voters relate to him.
I really, really dislike the Kennedys, and this story moves the needle but not in the direction Robert, Jr. expected.
There was a bit of magical madness in my childhood home. My father, a future Court of Appeals judge, randomly painted scenes of the walls, my mother's adventures would take too long to describe. I rode my horse through the house many times though it was a much shorter ride. Loved it all till their marriage fell apart.
It was the sixties. The libs wanted to break everything, but did so from the comfort of an escape hatch to, say, Hyannisport, in their pink and green Lily Pulitzers.
The downward spiral of transgression is something we've been dealing with ever since.
A college roommate rode a horse through the house we were renting. We all got evicted. Back when you could get evicted.
Amazing what you can accomplish with others when your social "or else" hammer is larger than every one else's.
Like high school, only for real.
Regular readers of the New York elite media are often impressed by that sort of story. If you've ever looked at the pictures of such events in the society pages, well, they aren't really the beautiful people they pretend to be.
And why people on the conservative side are falling for this guy - it baffles me.
"But... what's the point of printing this extract, at this time, may I ask - a quote from a 5-year old book?"
As I said yesterday, I'm reading the book because RFK Jr did an interview that just came out that interested me in which he urged the reading of this book.
I often read books that aren't brand new and if I'm reading it and run across a passage I find distinctly interesting, then I blog it. That's the culture of this blog. Anything I blog automatically has a point of getting blogged. It fits my practice or it wouldn't have happened. Can't be wrong.
What does Mimi Beardsley have to say about all this?
I’d rather hear more about what he can do for his country than what his country did for him.
Rabel asks: “And why people on the conservative side are falling for this guy - it baffles me.”
The largely bought and paid-for media decline if not outright refuse to afflict the comfortable Biden regime—RFK, Jr. does not balk at doing just this.
I guess the Corn Pop stories will continue.
My widowed mother (1962, with four sons born 1949 - 1959) spent a lot of weekends until the late '60s in the master bedroom, emerging only to eat something unhealthy and complain about what we had or had not done.
Ethel had a lot more kids, but a lot LOT more money.
Hard to imagine wax statues of FDR, Churchill, and Stalin being placed "unobtrusively" in a living room where a party will soon be held. On the other hand, unlike his father and uncles, Bobby Jr. doesn't seem like the type to go in for kidding.
Any funny anecdotes about her nephew, Michael Skakel?
Ethel Kennedy had 11 kids and in April she turned 95. Quite amazing. As far as the name dropping goes, how many of those famous visitors came, not for the company, but for the future pleasure of being name droppers themselves?
OK, boomer.
Bragging about all the dead people you used to hang out with doesn't give the impression he imagines among people who aren't boomers. If he wasn't running against extremely old candidates he would be laughed out of the room by Millenials and Gen Z.
The whole "Uncle Jack" and "Uncle Teddy" schtick has got to stop,
========
has Uncle Teddy a murdderer yet by this time?
Learning (once again) what the Camelot elite did behind closed doors makes me so want to be ruled by their like in our future - NOT!
What a pantload. (OK, I'll cut him some slack for being a child when witnessing all this, but still the proper response for an intelligent adult writing about these events should be, "Wow, that sucked. Time to move on and write about something different.")
OTOH, the Camelot groupies still can't get enough of this dreck...
These stories overlap with the one about how Bobby Sr. and Ethel would push guests into the pool and say something like "come on, join the fun, don't be a spoilsport."
Oh God, I always hated That Guy! And there have been a lot of them in my life. Marrying the man I married had expanded my world tremendously, but That Guy encounters have been part of the deal.
A comedian playing to an audience that's afraid not to laugh.
I believe Neil Diamond put on a concert at Hickory Hill or something. I'm surprised his name wasn't also dropped, or is this an incomplete list?
I wouldn't mention the pool, where his daddy and uncle screwed subordinates and casual pick-ups.
Here's some more for your reading list: the Atlantic magazine article and
entire book he wrote asserting his cousin didn't brutally assault and murder Martha Moxeley, blaming a black man instead.
Fun post to read. Your commentariat are in a decidedly curmudgeoned (to invent a word) mood.
Jim Caviezel said "its not just one island, there are hundreds of them". a story like this noting bizarre behaviour (even of those who participated) tells me that strata of society will do ANYTHING.
I am done with them.
I find it hard to believe that the college-age contingent of Democrat voters care about or would even know the names being dropped here in the manner that horses shit. It comes off as bizarre. Does anyone on the BLM/DEI/Trans Train to Social Justice Land admire the white mischief of a bygone era he's describing here?
The guy is a pure crackpot. Always has been. Junior is simply the next in a long line of wealthy family black sheep the press insists we must be interested in. Think Harry & Meghan, but with far greater potential to do damage.
"Any funny anecdotes about her nephew, Michael Skakel? "
This is the only reference to Michael Skakel:
"My mother’s youngest brother, Rucky, was confident that he was immune to the alcoholic dementia that ran through the Skakel family, despite abundant evidence to the contrary. “I already had that,” he once told me, thoughtfully. “And I don’t think you can catch it twice.” His confidence was misplaced. He died of the disease in 2003, at age seventy-nine. Fortunately, he was non compos mentis by the time his son, Michael, was convicted during a media lynching in 2001 of a murder he did not commit, and sentenced to serve twenty years to life in prison."
Kennedy Jr., Robert F.. American Values (p. 83). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
"Fun post to read. Your commentariat are in a decidedly curmudgeoned (to invent a word) mood."
Thanks.
The comments often go off in a way I am not trying to encourage. I keep going, following my own instincts, and am glad to see some of the readers experiencing the material in the manner intended.
Ethel sounds... manipulative. I'm putting that in the kindest way.
The whining about name dropping reminds me of people who complain about the movie Gone with the Wind being filled with cliches. Name dropping is when you have some peripheral contact with someone famous and speak of it as a meaningful interaction. These people came to RFK's house. I prefer him to talk about this honestly than give us some sort of "Aw, shucks, I'm just a regular guy" BS.
Jerry Oppenheimer's book about RFK Jr. says Ethel was a neglectful and abusive mother -- and a nut case. Bobby Jr. was sent to and kicked out of a series of boarding schools. https://nypost.com/2015/09/13/inside-ethel-kennedys-cruel-neglect-of-her-troubled-kids/
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