Their clan headquarters may have been in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, but the true center of the Kennedy political dynasty in the Fifties and Sixties was Hickory Hill, the Virginia home of Robert and Ethel Kennedy. It was a “wild, informal mixture of a children’s playground, upbeat discotheque, and a humming political headquarters,” described one regular visitor. Invitations to Hickory Hill were highly coveted, and no place better expressed the personality of its owners.
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http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/rfk/peopleevents/e_hickoryhill.html
'One of the first things any visitor noticed was the sheer number of children and animals running around the place. "There were lots of kids," remembers one of them, Kathleen Kennedy Townshend. "There were plenty of horses, many dogs, chickens, geese, goats. It was a menagerie... my brother Bobby collected reptiles. And actually the turtle was in the laundry room. The sea lion was in the swimming pool."'
The carpets are a mess, I just bet...