RFK Jr. by Jerry Oppenheimer

Author:Jerry Oppenheimer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250032966
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

TWENTY

Emotional Changes

Bobby was faced with both love and sorrow in the nine months between asking Emily Black to be his wife and the loss of the one person he truly loved.

In August 1980, he joyfully announced to Emily’s mother that he had asked her daughter to marry him. But in May 1981, his mentor and father figure, Lem Billings—who had for years shared his dreams, ambitions, and drugs—suddenly died. The two passages, marriage and death, would have a great emotional impact on Bobby going forward.

Emily’s mother naturally was thrilled that her daughter was to become a Kennedy wife but kept the news to herself. Well, almost. She had actually tipped off the ladies in her bridge club that her daughter was going to marry RFK’s namesake. “The real Bobby Kennedy?” they demanded to know, thinking this was all just a fairy-tale dream of hers.

Bobby had already attempted to bond with his future brother-in-law, the low-level Bloomington Hospital employee Tom Black, by sending him, in early 1980, an odd gift—a pair of boxing shoes. Black was starstruck by his sister’s boyfriend and had boasted about the prize gift to a pal, Tom Richardson, who had trouble believing that the small-town, quiet, bookish Emily, which is how he remembered her, could have become involved with a member of one of the most politically powerful and privileged families in American history.

“We thought he was full of it,” Richardson said. “We thought he was daydreaming.”

By the time the engagement became public—leaked presumably by one of the Kennedys to a New York gossip column—Emily’s proud mother, Libby Pawley, was boasting to everyone and anyone who would listen about her future son-in-law and what a “really nice boy” he was. She told them that he was a Harvard graduate, that he had attended the prestigious London School of Economics, that he had even had a book published, and had been interviewed by People magazine, which she often flipped through at the hairdresser. Moreover, she confided to friends, there was talk that one day he might even be president, and she envisioned her daughter as his First Lady.

Emily, her mother felt, had hit the jackpot.

It was clear from how excited she had sounded that the retired kindergarten and first-grade teacher knew very little about what her daughter was actually getting into—that Bobby had a reputation as a druggie and a womanizer, and that the Kennedy clan wasn’t always held in the highest esteem. But to her mom, Emily was a real-life Cinderella marrying the royal family’s prince—or, as the local Bloomington newspaper asked in a headline when the engagement became public in October 1981, was “Emily Our Own Lady Di?” As it would turn out, that was a prescient question because, like Princess Diana’s troubled marriage to Prince Charles, Emily’s union with Bobby Kennedy Jr. would be tumultuous and end badly.

At the time the engagement became publicly known, Emily’s mother still had not had the pleasure of meeting Bobby’s mother, and may not have known that the

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