Father's Day: Bobby Kennedy's eldest daughter remembers her daddy
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Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the oldest of Robert and Ethel Kennedy’s 11 children, speaks to her father’s enduring popularity and the affection people from varied racial and social backgrounds held for him.
The Enquirer/Mark Curnutte
CINCINNATI — He knew her mother loved Gene Kelly. So, for a birthday surprise one year, he got her Gene Kelly.
In fact, Bobby Kennedy stuck a ribbon and bow on the entertainer, shoved him in a closet and waited for Ethel to open the door.
This is what love is, remembers his eldest daughter, who was in Cincinnati last week, just days after traveling to Arlington National Cemetery to memorialize her famous father’s death 50 years ago.
This is the daddy she knew, the former Attorney General, the Senator from New York, the great hope of much of 1968 America, the dreamer was gunned down in Los Angeles hotel ballroom, the same man so many wanted to succeed his assassinated brother.
But the daddy thoughtful enough to nab Gene Kelly was the daddy that Kathleen Kennedy Townsend remembers.
“So Mommy could dance with him,” she says.
This dad was also the one who made the kids pray the rosary daily. The one who asked that they bring a daily review of current events with them to dinner each night for the family to discuss.
The same dad who would tell them about the current events of his public life. “Ashen” is how she describes his complexion the night he walked into that dining room after coming home from a trip to the Mississippi Delta. There, he told his family, he’d seen entire families living in houses smaller than that single room and whose children had distended stomachs from not having enough to eat.
The year of his death, when she was a junior in high school, her father came to her school to speak. He decided to talk about the plight of Native Americans in this country. She learned a lot that day.
When he died, she was uncertain how to honor him. In her way. She decided that she and a girlfriend would follow through on a plan to spend the summer volunteering on the Navajo reservation in Arizona. The right way to carry on his legacy.
It is, after all, what her family did.
Maybe it is what all families do. Have their traditions, their secret words, their private rituals, their triumphs, their, well, family life.
Their one-of-a-kind, idiosyncratic – at least to his children – daddy.Â
In their house in suburban McLean, Virginia, her bedroom was next to her parents’ room. She says she woke up daily to the sound of him listening to recordings of Shakespeare while he did his morning pushups and situps.
“Grunts and Shakespeare,” she says. “He once challenged Richard Burton to a Shakespeare reciting contest.”
She adds, because she’s proud of all of his accomplishments, noted that in his battle of wits with the acclaimed Shakespearean actor: “Of course, my father won.”
He was big on sports and competition. That included board games and ski races.Â
“I still have the pair of skis, and on them, I wrote, ‘K.K.B.D,’ for Kathleen Kennedy Beat Daddy, December 31, 1964,” she says. “We were skiing in Colorado. It was the first time I ever beat him.”
Her father was well-known for his love of football. At 5-feet, 10-inches, 155 pounds, he was an undersized offensive end at Harvard University and earned two varsity letters.
“We had touch football practice,” Kathleen says. “He always used to say, `If you can touch it, you can catch it.'”
Loving and warm, she says, but with high expectations for his children, including that you would dive to haul in the errant pass if you have to.
Her father loved poetry and wanted his children to know and love it, too, During Sunday dinner, he would have his children quote a poem.
And her father read the Bible to the family.
This was a Catholic family. Eleven children. And a father who embarrassed every one of them by singing hymns at the top of his lungs.
He was not Pavarotti.Â
Once, after a particularly long session of Christmas carols in church, Kathleen remembers, the nuns said: ‘You know what? The Kennedys can’t have everything.'”
She, like a lot of families on Father’s Day, may not have everything. But they have memories. Like the ones that have held him close to her for 50 years.
She remembers that her father took her to some Senate hearings in the ’50s. They were the mob hearings, the ones that made her father – the young, ambitious general counsel to the committee – a sworn enemy of Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa and organized crime in this country.Â
And yet, her father laughed when he recounted how Kathleen paid a great deal of attention that day.Â
“Some of my first words were, `I refuse to answer that question on the ground that I may incriminate myself,'” she says. Like her daddy, she became a lawyer.
A lot of families have a family business. For the Kennedys, it was public service.
Her father took her to inner-city Washington for the opening of a swimming pool. She says he had taken note that African-American children living there did not have one. He was the U.S. Attorney General at the time and called officials he knew with Catholic Charities to get it built.
“He said, ‘Kathleen, do you see those windows? There are children who live in those apartments who don’t have the same chance and opportunities that you do,'” she remembers him saying.
Her father gave her a note shortly after the assassination of her uncle, President John F. Kennedy, in November 1963.
“Kathleen, as the oldest of the next generation, you have a particular responsibility. … Be kind to others and work for your country,” her father wrote.
He wasn’t telling her to go into politics. There are lessons that children learn at home from their fathers. She was no exception. But there are lessons children learn when they are let out into the world on her own.
He gave her courage to do that.
“In my family,” she says, “girls did not run for office. I ran for office because of the women’s movement.”
As lieutenant governor, she led Maryland in becoming the first state to require community service as a prerequisite to graduate high school.
“I always knew it was and is my responsibility to work for a more just America, as my father did,” she says.
Her daddy’s words and deeds stuck with her.
But this she keeps closest to her heart: The way he would sneak up on his children. Grab them from behind and hold them tightly.Â
He would say a lot that way.
There’s a photo of her dad hugging Kathleen. He’s smiling. She’s smiling. His right arm is wrapped around her. She says she thinks she was 13. She says she thinks it was in the spring. She doesn’t remember those details.
She remembers, though, how it made her feel.
More: The lost day: How we remember, and don’t, the 26 hours after Robert F. Kennedy fell
More: Bill Clinton, Kennedy family pay tribute to RFK on 50th anniversary of his assassination
More: The night the light faded: Bobby Kennedy’s assassination changed history
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Children of Sen. and Mrs. Robert F. Kennedy arrive, June 5, 1968 at Andrews Air Force Base, Md. near Washington, after an evening flight from Los Angeles where their father was shot earlier in the day. Coming down ramp of an Air Force plane are, from bottom, Kerry, 8 assisted by an unidentified aide; Michael, 10, Courtnay, 11, and David, 13. Others inside plane include Astronaut John Glenn, back to camera, assisting Christopher, 4. Â
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