Tour the Kennedy Family’s Houses in Virginia and Hyannis Port, Massachusetts

This article originally appeared in the August 1987 issue of Architectural Digest.

The summer of 1986 marked another turning point in the life of Ethel Kennedy. Her oldest daughter, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, was running for Congress in Maryland and her oldest son, Joseph P. Kennedy III, was campaigning for Tip O'Neill's congressional seat in Massachusetts.

Ethel Kennedy threw herself energetically into both campaigns, a role she hadn't played since the late 1960s. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend recalls the reaction her mother got. “The whole staff was amazed. At fundraisers, she instinctively noticed the few people who were undecided and would go up to them and charm them. Without question, she is the best campaigner I've ever seen.”

Mrs. Kennedy's energy is no surprise to her friends. John Douglas, one of Robert F. Kennedy's assistant attorneys general and a close family friend, says, “After Bobby's assassination she did not retire from life. She kept up with the news, and the family's houses remained centers for her children. Continuity is very important to the Kennedys.”

To Jean Kennedy Smith, who as Ethel's roommate at Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart would introduce her friend to her brother Bobby, Ethel's enthusiasm hasn't abated. “No wonder she is such a drawing card at campaign rallies,” Smith says. “She was eager, enthusiastic and fun then and she still is. She is locked up in her children—their careers, their homes. She's a wonderful grandmother. And she cares so much about the memorial.”

Since the death of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, Ethel Kennedy has devoted much of her time to the memorial established in his name by family and friends to keep alive his, humanitarian ideals. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, who is on the board of directors along with several of her siblings, says, “My father believed that people should be treated fairly, that there should be social justice. My mother feels the same way She wants the memorial to excel and she works hard at it and gets involved in all the details.”

Operating out of a small house in Georgetown, the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial gives three awards a year. The journalism awards, founded in 1968 by a group of journalists who covered his last campaign, go to categories in print, television, radio, photojournalism and editorial cartoons. Past winners include Paul Conrad of the Los Angeles Times and Bill Moyers of CBS. The nineteenth annual award, presented last May, included first prizes in print and photojournalism to the Dallas Morning News and Sam Rawls of the Atlanta Constitution, among others.

The book awards were endowed by historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., from the proceeds of his biography Robert Kennedy and His Times. The first award was presented in 1980 to William H. Chafe for Civilities and Civil Rights; Greensboro, North Carolina and the Black Struggle for Freedom.

The human rights award, established in 1984, was first given to CO-Madres, a group of mothers and relatives of political prisoners who have disappeared in El Salvador. Three South Africans, Beyers Naude, Allan Boesak and Winnie Mandela, were presented with the second award. In 1986 it was given in absentia to Zbigniew Bujak and Adam Michnik, two Poles associated with the Solidarity movement.

But even with her renewed duties of campaigning for her children, the strongest elements of continuity in Ethel Kennedy's life are her two houses: Hickory Hill in Virginia, and the summer home at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. In 1956 Robert and Ethel Kennedy bought Hickory Hill from John F. and Jacqueline Kennedy and settled in with their growing family. Built circa 1815, the mansion has been imbued over the years with the lively open-door policy of the Kennedy family. The light and air and friendliness of the house is apparent inside and out. It's in the barking of the Newfoundland puppies and King Charles spaniels as they welcome their owner home. It's in the wealth of colors from bouquets of flowers throughout and the potted pink geraniums and white petunias, pink and white being two of Ethel Kennedy's favorite colors.

Standing in the master bedroom, with its French fireplace, its eighteenth-century French furniture and chintz, Ethel Kennedy looks out of the glass sliding doors that give onto a view of the sloping lawn below, with its giant oaks and maple trees, its six-foot-high boxwood that leads to the swimming pool and pool house. “It's a great view, particularly in a snowstorm,” she says quietly.

Ethel Kennedy has always been loath to talk about herself. Her friends know her as an energetic, generous woman, whose deep Catholic faith and self-deprecating sense of humor have helped her through many traumatic periods. There were, in fact, many similarities between her childhood and that of her late husband. As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote in his biography, “The Skakel family, like the Kennedy family, was athletic, boisterous, competitive and filled with the will to win.” As one of seven children, Ethel Skakel was a natural athlete who rode, played tennis, swam and generally enjoyed her childhood in Greenwich, Connecticut. The early death of her parents, in a plane crash in 1955, was the first heavy blow in her life.

The late 1940s and early 1950s, however, were periods of intense excitement. Robert Kennedy graduated with a law degree from the University of Virginia. An intense, shy man who unlike his older brothers was an average athlete and student, Bobby needed the support that Ethel provided. Her warmth and open, uncomplicated love of life and her husband gave him the reassurance and security he needed for his emotional side to blossom and mature.

As he rose in public service—chief counsel for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations— Ethel Kennedy would attend hearings daily, visiting Capitol Hill with their children in tow. It was a time, a friend once remarked, when their dogs still outnumbered their children. By the time John F. Kennedy was president and Bobby was attorney general, Hickory Hill was “the most spirited social center in Washington,” wrote Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. “One night at a dinner, with thirty guests crowded into a small dining room, Ethel, who serenely said grace before every meal, finished with the codicil: 'And please, dear God, make Bobby buy me a bigger dining room table.' Soon there was a bigger table, in time a new wing, and the parties expanded accordingly.”

“I remember the night the French ambassador's wife got her dress ruined,” Ethel Kennedy recalls. Dinner was on the lawn, with the tables set on the sloping hillside. All would have been well had not one enthusiastic guest become so excited at something that she bounced her hands on the table. Mme Hervé Alphand, the elegant wife of the French ambassador, wearing a white Dior evening gown, “was absolutely drenched in a deluge of red wine.”

That tale prompts another, also concerning a French citizen: a dinner for André Malraux, the late writer, philosopher and art historian. “Tables on the lawn again, and it was too late to do anything about it or move anything when the rain began. We just had to sit there, taking it, in the drenching rain.” Columnist Rowland Evans remembers the occasion as being typical of the happy chaos that reigned at Hickory Hill. “Unexpected guests arrived and were made welcome, doors banged as waiters made their way up and down the slippery slope, children emerged, dogs joined the party. And Malraux, delighted with the whole scene, came up with one of the few English words he knew—'Hellzapoppin!' ”

Ever since 1925, when Joe Kennedy rented a summer house on the beach at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, the Kennedys have traditionally retreated there en masse each summer. What has long been dubbed the “Kennedy compound” is an enclave of turn-of-the-century cottages separated by lawns. Sen. Edward Kennedy, who has played an indispensable role in Ethel Kennedy's life in the years since Robert's death, often stays at his mother's house and is a regular visitor at Ethel's. When Ethel's children were still young, she recalls that her brother-in-law would hardly be out of his car before eleven pairs of feet would swarm around him.

The children may have grown, but Hyannis Port remains the center of their summers. Last summer saw a break with tradition when, instead of organizing the annual clambake for Edward Kennedy, the event was held for Joe. And amid the general hustle and bustle Ethel Kennedy still finds time to organize tennis matches and go sailing. John Douglas describes a typical day at the shore. “Tennis in the morning, then sailing with Ethel as skipper—and that's exciting. Then maybe more tennis, generally house guests, supper at home, Eunice or Teddy and their children probably coming over. Pretty early to bed.”

It has been many years since the presidential campaign of 1968 when the rooms at Hickory Hill and Hyannis Port were filled with the hot arguments of young speechwriters, who had to be quiet when the children came in to say goodnight to their father and it would be, in the words of George Stevens, Jr., “wall-to-wall pajamas.”

It would probably not surprise Robert Kennedy to know that his wife and children are continuing the work he began and that a new generation is carrying on the Kennedy political legacy. Nor that the spirit of the two houses he loved lives on, just as he would have wished it. Every year there will be more small people coming down to say goodnight to their grandmother, and the pajamas will still be wall to wall.

Related: See More Celebrity Homes in AD