The Kennedy of Hickory Hill
SET back from a crescent-shaped driveway, the white Georgian manor sits atop a grassy knoll, its bright red door beckoning in the sunshine of an early Virginia spring. The air is vibrant with the commotion of shrieking children and barking dogs at play beneath budding oaks and hickories. A woman—joking, chiding, cajoling—bustles in and out of the house, chatting with friends who come to visit, taking on an older child at tennis (and winning), carrying a beer to a gardener on the 5½-acre grounds.
It is a familiar domestic scene. A passerby would hardly give it a second glance—except for one fact. This is a Kennedy home: Hickory Hill, the domicile of Ethel Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy's widow, mother of his eleven children. And what happens in the life of a Kennedy automatically becomes the object of universal fascination.
The apotheosis of the Kennedy family has created whole new categories of national history, mythology and gossip. It started with Jack's rise to the presidency, and his death by an assassin's bullet in Dallas. It became even more tragic as Bobby reached for his brother's mantle, only to be cut down himself. It continued with the agonizing trial and conviction of Sirhan Sirhan, Bobby's assassin. It promises to grow with the senatorial prominence and presidential prospects of Ted Kennedy.
Somehow, Ethel Kennedy has remained just outside the glare of publicity. She is one member of the family whose every move is not chronicled, whose private life is not public property. According to a recent Gallup poll, Americans regard her as the country's most admired woman.* It is an assessment born of sympathy, not knowledge. The public does not know her today. Perhaps it never did. Since that grim night in Los Angeles ten months ago, she has lived almost entirely in the seclusion of Hickory Hill and Hyannisport, breaking into the news only in December, when she bore her eleventh child.
Yet those close to Ethel and to the life she has reconstructed regard her with something approaching awe. She has, they contend, emerged in many ways as the most remarkable member of her remarkable family. New York's Senator Jacob Javits describes her with absolute conviction as "the greatest of the Kennedys, male or female."
Mistress of the Ménage