Cousin Bobby’s a Predator, Caroline? But Uncle Teddy, What?
Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg's stunning lack of self awareness
“We are always there for each other,” said Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg of her 27 Kennedy cousins in a letter she sent to U.S. Senators and read aloud on Instagram.
Well, maybe not exactly always. With the letter, Schlossberg hoped to deny her cousin Robert Kennedy Jr. nomination as secretary of health and human services.
There is a rawness to the Schlossberg letter that suggests some old grudge unavenged. In a murky sea of half truths and outright lies about cousin Bobby’s professional credentials there floats a glowering iceberg of pure personal spite.
At its frozen core is a stunning lack of self awareness: “It is no surprise he keeps birds of prey as pets,” says Schlossberg out of the blue, “because Bobby himself is a predator.”
If so, Bobby comes from a long line of them, dating back to at least Grandpa Joe, and including her own father, President John Kennedy.
If Schlossberg chooses to remain ignorant, I would recommend she not read Mimi’s Alford’s highly credible account of her stint as an intern in JFK’s White House, the difference between Mimi and Monica being that Mimi was a teenager and a genuine victim.
And let us not forget her beloved “Uncle Teddy,” the man who walked Caroline down the aisle at her wedding and employed his always loyal niece to introduce him on special occasions.
On the occasion of Sen. Kennedy’s 2009 funeral Schlossberg repaid his kindnesses with an irony-free eulogy that celebrated the man’s “passion, his self discipline, his generosity of heart.”
Self discipline? The Kopechne family might have some quibbles about that. The drunken senator left their daughter Mary Joe to drown in the shallow waters of Chappaquiddick while he famously schemed to save his political career.
Young Caroline may have chosen not to know the details, but the damage that Ted Kennedy wrought on the women in his orbit did not end at Chappaquiddick when Schlossberg was an 11-year-old.
In 1990, when Schlossberg was 33, intrepid journalist Michael Kelly documented for GQ a well known 1985 incident at La Brasserie restaurant in Washington, DC
As [Carla] Gaviglio enters the room, the six-foot-two, 225-plus-pound [Sen. Ted] Kennedy grabs the five-foot- three, 103-pound waitress and throws her on the table. She lands on her back, scattering crystal, plates and cutlery and the lit candles. Several glasses and a crystal candlestick are broken. Kennedy then picks her up from the table and throws her on [Sen.Chris] Dodd, who is sprawled in a chair.
With Gaviglio on Dodd’s lap, Kennedy jumps on top and begins rubbing his genital area against hers, supporting his weight on the arms of the chair. As he is doing this, Loh enters the room. She and Gaviglio both scream, drawing one or two dishwashers. Startled, Kennedy leaps up. He laughs. Bruised, shaken and angry over what she considered a sexual assault, Gaviglio runs from the room.
Schlossberg surely knew, too, about the Good Friday incident in 1991 when Sen. Kennedy commemorated Christ’s death on the cross by taking his nephew William Kennedy Smith and his son Patrick out barhopping.
The young men brought two young women home with them. “He never told us what to do,” said Schlossberg at Uncle Teddy’s funeral. “He just did it himself and we learned from his example.”
Hoping perhaps for his share of the action, a drunken Ted Kennedy, nearly sixty, wandered without pants into the room where everyone gathered.
The one woman fled in panic. The other woman remained and claimed Smith raped her. Smith’s criminal trial was long and very public. The Kennedys rallied to Smith’s defense and cheered his acquittal.
If Schlossberg dissented, she did so very quietly. After all, “We are always there for each other.”
The one line in Schlossberg’s rant about her cousin Bobby that suggests a source for her outsized animus is that he “groveled to Donald Trump for a job.”
For all her empty dissembling about cousin Bobby’s take on vaccines and measles and “his constant denigration of our health care system,” the very idea that a Kennedy might grovel to a Trump seems to have set her off.
This bootlegger’s granddaughter has had nearly 70 years to nurture a sense of her family’s grandeur. To see that dynasty steamrolled by crude upstarts like the Trumps is apparently more than she can bear.
Jack Cashill’s timely book, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6, is available in all formats.
Caroline has a short memory of her family history. Ted Kennedy was a disgusting pig and was lionized in Congress. He should have been in prison instead of the Capitol.
Poor Caroline - she inherited neither her father's charisma nor her mother's sense of elegance (For all of their faults, and there were many, her parents clearly had giftings and talents that she clearly does NOT!)
Even her deceased brother somehow managed to be charming and quick witted, although he, too, possessed the legendary Kennedy arrogance and laziness, as evidenced by the fact that he thought he could fly in conditions that were well beyond his scope of training or experience.
And from listening to her speak extemporaneously over the past couple of decades, it's obvious that she has very little natural intelligence and zero self awareness. Were it not for her last name, no one would care one wit what she thinks about anything, nor should they!