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In one respect, Ethel went Bobby one better—or worse, as the case may be. The word "neutral" had no meaning for her, as applied to the Kennedys. If people were not for her, then they were against her and she against them. Senator Joseph McCarthy, for whom Bobby once worked as a committee counsel, won her favor as a "pal," and she blindly defended him long after he fell into disgrace. But it did not pay even pals to incur her wrath —as another McCarthy, Senator Eugene, learned when he and Bobby became rivals for the Democratic nomination. Encountering Ethel at one point during the campaign, McCarthy leaned down as usual to kiss her cheek. He should have known better. "Hello, Gene," said Ethel icily, extending her hand.
Others on the receiving end of her spite might have been happy with a handshake. When Bobby was Attorney General, Ethel seethed at FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's ill-concealed disdain for his young boss. So she jabbed away at Hoover's sorest point, his running feud with Los Angeles Police Chief William Parker. Into Hoover's personal suggestion box one day she popped a note, signed by her, saying "Parker for FBI Director."
What convictions Ethel held, she held with a fierce tenacity that drove her into any verbal fray, often oblivious of the consequences. Veteran New Frontiersmen remember with mixed amusement and embarrassment that she was the champion asker of gauche questions at the Hickory Hill seminars where Bobby brought his people together with leading intellectuals. Once, seated next to Chief Justice Earl Warren on a plane trip, Ethel launched into a long harangue about the school-prayer issue that was then before the Supreme Court, forgetting that Justices never discuss their current cases. While Warren sat in discomfited silence, Ethel bore down relentlessly with remarks like, "There is no way to ban God from public schools; God is everywhere." The court's ruling against public school prayer was announced the next day.
Only one thing disconcerts Ethel, and that is flying. Airplanes have brought nothing but tragedy into her life. In 1955, her father asked her mother to fly with him on a business trip to Los Angeles in his company-owned plane. Mrs. Skakel usually preferred to take the train, but this time she made an exception. Near Tulsa, Okla., the plane exploded in midair, killing all aboard. Ethel's sister Ann phoned her the news. Ethel was silent for a few seconds, then said: "It's all right. It's all right." Softly, she added: "Goodbye." Ann was momentarily appalled. "Then I realized —this was Ethel's great strength."
Ethel was to display the same stoic fiber eleven years later, when her brother, George Skakel Jr., was killed in the crash of a light plane in Idaho—a crash that also claimed Bobby's close friend and onetime Kennedy aide Dean Markham.