Word: hilled
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Ethel is up every morning at 7 for breakfast with the children. Before attending Mass, she shuttles youngsters back and forth to school in one of the several car pools her large brood involves her in. Eight children are at Hickory Hill with her now. She sits down to every meal with them, says the rosary and reads the Bible with them every night. She comforts, counsels and disciplines?quite strictly sometimes. "Once in a while she gets sore as hell at them," says a family intimate. "Bobby never struck any of the kids. Ethel, I think...
Outsiders may consider it bathetic, but this feeling is genuine at Hickory Hill and it runs close beneath the surface. Ethel's constant motion provides her own defense against misery. It is painful for her to sit still for any length of time, her hands idle, her thoughts closing in on her. Then her pert features droop, reflecting the ravages of sorrow...
They moved through a succession of homes?first in Charlottesville, then in the Georgetown section of Washington, and finally Hickory Hill in 1956?Bobby rising through the capital hierarchy, Ethel raising his children and presenting him with a new one almost every year. No matter how busy either of them became, they were never out of touch during the day. If Bobby was conducting hearings as a congressional committee counsel, Ethel would arrive in the morning, attend the hearings, drive home for lunch with the children, return for the afternoon hearings, then go back home and call her friends...
What convictions Ethel held, she held with a fierce tenacity that drove her into any verbal fray, often oblivious of the consequences. Veteran New Frontiersmen remember with mixed amusement and embarrassment that she was the champion asker of gauche questions at the Hickory Hill seminars where Bobby brought his people together with leading intellectuals. Once, seated next to Chief Justice Earl Warren on a plane trip, Ethel launched into a long harangue about the school-prayer issue that was then before the Supreme Court, forgetting that Justices never discuss their current cases. While Warren sat in discomfited silence, Ethel bore...
...weeks after the funeral, there were rumors that Ethel and her children would leave Hickory Hill. Nothing could have seemed more plausible. Why not cast off painful associations and turn away from Washington politics? Why not, in fact, spend some time in international travel and socializing? Ethel would not have it. "No one ever gave a thought to leaving Hickory Hill," she says. "This is where we'll stay...