I gained extraordinary access to the diaries nearly a year after the suicide of Mary Richardson Kennedy, his second wife, who hanged herself in May 2012. At the end of a dinner with a trusted source at an Upper East Side bistro, I excused myself to go to the restroom, and when I returned, the diaries were in a plastic shopping bag hanging from the side of my chair. Nothing was spoken. I knew what I had.
Flipping through the unwieldy journals on the subway ride home, I confess I was only looking for the sex. Rather, I was searching for the descriptions of sex that my source had told me about. I found the lists of dozens of women at the back of the books. Beside each name—they are mostly first names—Kennedy had purportedly assigned a number from 1 to 10 to describe how far things had progressed, with “10” denoting intercourse, according to my source, who heard the explanation from Richardson Kennedy.
Richardson Kennedy had allegedly given the diaries to a friend in case she needed to use them as leverage in their protracted divorce negotiations, at a time when Kennedy appeared to hedge on disclosing his family’s financial assets. The divorce was never finalized, and Richardson Kennedy was still married—still a Kennedy wife—when she died. (Kennedy has said that the diaries were stolen from him.)
Her death generated a great deal of interest, especially after Kennedy moved her remains from one part of the St. Francis Xavier Cemetery in Barnstable, MA to another, after her burial. Kennedy said that he wanted to move her to a plot that he had recently bought so she could be closer to her family members. Others just found it strange.
With the diaries, I suddenly had a scoop, even as my editors and I debated what the public good was in writing about the personal life of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in 2013.
For us, the documented philandering was certainly proof that Bobby, as he is known, was living within the tradition of a long line of known Kennedy womanizers, beginning with his grandfather Joe Kennedy, who had a lengthy affair with Hollywood actor Gloria Swanson, and continuing with his uncle and father, both of whom were attached to Marilyn Monroe and others.
