Fear and loathing in Camelot

The Lawfords' marriage broke up shortly after the assassination. Patricia scooped up Christopher and his three sisters and retreated to the East Coast, to the protective embrace of the Kennedy family, settling in Manhattan, a few blocks from Jackie Kennedy and her children. Peter Lawford never recovered from the assassination and divorce, writes his son, and began a long process of degradation from fashion-plate icon of cool to white-bearded, emaciated addict holed up, through the kindness of Hugh Hefner, in a cottage on the Playboy estate. Spying the fallen actor one evening sitting on Hef's porch with a grown Christopher, Bill Cosby told his female companion, "Look, that's Peter Lawford. Can you believe it? How pathetic is that."

"My grandmother Rose used to say, 'God never gives us more than we can bear,'" writes Christopher. "But my dad's friend Lenny Gershe observed that 'God gave Peter Lawford more than he could bear.'"

In Peter Lawford's boozy and narcotized absence, Bobby Kennedy became Christopher's surrogate father. "Symptoms of Withdrawal" offers a vivid portrait of life at Bobby and Ethel Kennedy's Civil War-era estate Hickory Hill in northern Virginia, so overrun with children and guests that it seemed like "a crazy hotel." "Big E," as he called his Aunt Ethel, tried to impose order with her "desperate and explosive brand of Catholicism," once snapping Christopher's thumb as she was breaking up a fight between him and his cousin David. Only Uncle Bobby could successfully corral his own marauding brood and the Kennedy children, like Christopher, who were left abandoned in the aftermath of JFK's assassination, whenever they gathered at Hickory Hill or the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. "There may have been a lot of important grown-ups walking around the compound, but it felt as if Uncle Bobby's focus was always on the kids," recalls Christopher. "If he was around, you'd better be certain that you were fully engaged in the day. There was no sitting around watching TV when RFK was there." If the ever-watchful Bobby spotted an idle child, he was quickly recruited for a sprawling game of touch football, where pro athletes like Rosie Grier and Rafer Johnson often stood in as "decoys and blockers" for the kids.

This bulwark of family stability vanished the night Bobby Kennedy was cut down in the crowded pantry of a Los Angeles hotel after winning the California primary. The watchful caretaker to the end, Bobby asked, "Is everyone OK?" as he lay bleeding in the arms of a 17-year-old busboy.

History was once again altered by the assassination of a Kennedy. One would have to go back to ancient Rome to find a precedent in the stunning back-to-back assassinations of two brothers at the height of their political glory -- all the way to the second century B.C. when first Tiberius Gracchus and then his younger brother Gaius were viciously hacked to death after being elected tribune of the people and antagonizing the Roman aristocracy with their democratic reforms.

But again, the Kennedy family could not bring itself to confront the deeper meaning of the murder of one of their own. Despite the disturbing evidence of a conspiracy in both murders, the heads of the family seemingly left it to others to explore these monumental crimes.

In public, Bobby Kennedy had stated that he accepted the official version of his brother's public execution in the streets of Dallas. But privately, as I have discovered through research for a book on the Kennedy brothers, RFK nurtured strong suspicions of a high-level plot and recruited several of his closest and most trusted associates to quietly investigate the crime. If he made it back to the White House, RFK confided to these associates, he would reopen his brother's case. However, perhaps out of a desire to protect his family, Bobby did not share his suspicions about Dallas widely among his relatives. Since Bobby publicly accepted the Warren Report, writes Christopher in "Symptoms of Withdrawal," the family was reassured that nothing was rotten in America.

After Bobby's murder, this became harder for the family to accept. But the Kennedys chose once more to suffer in silence. "I never heard any of the grown-ups vent any anger or hatred toward the murderers," writes Christopher. "I never heard anybody question why they did it or how ... We just ate it and tried to be good little Kennedys and demonstrate that stoic grace that everybody seemed to admire so much."

But Bobby's assassination destroyed the Kennedy kids' sense of security. Realizing "there were people in the world who wanted to blow our fucking heads off" definitely messed with their minds, Christopher dryly observes. And it removed from their lives the one adult who always seemed to be watching, who always put them first. This was driven home the summer after Bobby's assassination, when, following his late brother's tradition, Teddy Kennedy packed up the family to take them white-water rafting on Utah's Green River.

"We were looking forward to the trip as a healing ritual," recalls Christopher. "With Uncle Bobby there was no distinction between child and adult; we conquered the river together. On this trip, there was a definite chasm between the adults and the children. The adults floated along with their daiquiris and Pouilly-Fuisse and didn't want to be bothered. They were angry and not in the mood to indulge the high-jinks of the younger generation. On the second day we brought the kids' raft alongside the grown-ups and initiated a water fight, one of the staples of our trips with Uncle Bobby. The grown-ups told us to stop, and when we didn't, sent the mountaineer Jim Whittaker onto our raft to let us know they weren't fucking around by forcefully tossing [RFK sons] Bobby Jr. and David into the river. My cousins and I missed the old days. To me it was clear that Uncle Bobby genuinely liked having kids around. The glory and happiness of the early days were gone."

Next Page: Uncle Bobby had made the kids feel "that we were going to be okay ... more like Kennedys than ever"

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