by Thomas Maier
Camelot’s proponents took pains to deny any such competing myth. “There is no curse upon the Kennedys,”Ted Sorensen insisted right after RFK’s 1968 assassination. “They have more than their fair share of ill fate because they had more than their share of the courage and conviction required to dare and to try and to tempt fate.” Soon, however, the true ending of the Camelot legend came when Ted Kennedy’s Oldsmobile 88 slipped into the darkened Chappaquiddick in the summer of 1969. He had been drinking that night, sharing laughs and memories with those from Bobby’s presidential campaign. He got in the car and left with a young blonde volunteer named Mary Jo Kopechne. When the car tipped off the bridge,Ted managed to save himself, but Kopechne drowned. The deadly accident and the senator’s failure to alert authorities until hours later ended all realistic hopes that he might someday become president.
Days after,Kennedy went on television to explain the inexplicable. In an otherwise carefully prepared speech crafted by the old Camelot circle of advisers, the last Kennedy brother wondered aloud “whether some awful curse did actually hang over all the Kennedys.” His dismissal of such a notion in the same speech seemed too late. The die was cast, the idea indelibly imprinted in the American psyche.
Probably the most difficult explanation that night was to his frail and infirm father, upstairs in a bedroom of the same Hyannis Port house where Ted gave his televised speech.“Dad, I’ve done the best I can,” he apologized, “I’m sorry.”The pale, contorted face of Joe Kennedy stared at his son without reply. Since his stroke in 1961, the once all-powerful patriarch had faded from public view altogether. He could no longer help his children, encourage their ambitious climbs, save them from their falls or make a call to a friend on their behalf. In his room, Joe had become a political afterthought, muffled voices outside his door deciding whether he should be disturbed by news from the outside world. With tears in their eyes, they came to tell him of Jack’s death, and then Bobby’s, and he could do nothing but stare. If he still had hopes for Teddy to take his brother’s place in the White House, they were now gone. For even if he could utter a response, there were no words adequate for this sense of loss.
After Ted’s Chappaquiddick disaster, Joe Kennedy’s body and spirit withered. In November 1969, the doctors alerted the family that their patriarch was dying. When the end came, at his bedside were Rose and all his surviving children—Ted, Eunice, Jean and Pat (Rosemary was still institutionalized)— along with the rest of the extended family. Jackie flew in from Greece and spent a night comforting him. The Kennedys all clutched their rosaries and prayed the familiar prayers of their church. At age eighty-one, Joe lay unconscious, a life of frenetic striving now in total repose. When his family had finished murmuring the “Our Father” together, he was dead.
ONCE MORE, CARDINAL CUSHING tended to the Kennedys. Presiding over the funeral Mass, the family’s favorite priest avoided black vestments and instead dressed in the white robes as Rose asked, underlining their belief in Christ’s resurrection and an eternal afterlife. Only the family and close friends were invited, including Frank Morrissey and the other old cronies. “Brethren, we have become a spectacle to the whole world, to angels as well as men,” the cardinal began. In death, the old controversies surrounding Joe Kennedy arose once more. The Chicago Tribune remembered him for backing Senator Joe McCarthy; the New York Times paid halfhearted homage to Ambassador Kennedy, reminding readers that “his pleas for appeasing Hitler, his repeated advice that Great Britain was finished, were appallingly wrong diplomatically and historically.” Among those in public life, a sincere condolence came from Irish leader, Eamon De Valera, who knew very well how much the Kennedys meant to his country as well as their own.
The most meaningful tributes, however, were from the family itself. Several family members acted as honorary pallbearers and readers of prayers, and grandson Robert Kennedy Jr. served as an altar boy. During the funeral Mass, eight-year-old John Kennedy Jr. repeated by heart the twenty-third Psalm (“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want . . . ”); Ted gave his own eulogy. “This is not as much a final prayer to Dad as a reminder to those of us he left behind of his deep love for us and our obligation and responsibility to lead the kind of lives he would want us to lead,” the youngest son explained. Then he read from a memorial to their father written by Bobby a few years earlier for The Fruitful Bough, a small privately printed book of recollections gathered by Ted. No matter how painful, it seemed fitting that Bobby—the Kennedy son most like their father— should provide a posthumous eulogy. Most of all, Bobby remembered his father’s drive, his ambitiousness for his sons without overwhelming or eclipsing them.“He loved all of us—the boys in a very special way,” Bobby wrote. “I can say that, except for his influence and encouragement, my brother Jack might not have run for the Senate in 1952, there would have been much less likelihood that he would have received the Presidential nomination in 1960, I would not have become Attorney General, and my brother Teddy would not have run for the Senate in 1962.”
In the rain, they drove from Hyannis back toward Boston, to the Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline, not far from where Joe and Rose had once lived and where the future president was born. Though others fashioned the Camelot myths around the Kennedy legacy, it was Joe who fashioned the reality, was the architect of their lives. They would never be the same without him. Cushing said a few last prayers before they all left. From then on, like some old Celtic myth where the flock is left without its leader, the Kennedy family awaited their next turn of fate.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Last Hurrahs
“YOU’RE A DISGRACE TO THE IRISH!” a woman screamed as Senator Edward Kennedy walked away from Boston City Hall, the same place where his grandfather once ruled as champion of the city’s Irish immigrants.
On the plaza that September morning in 1974, Kennedy wanted to explain his support of a controversial federal court order calling for busing to achieve school desegregation. Instead he got booed off the stage, unable to say anything. Under the court’s plan, hundreds of black students from Roxbury and other minority communities would be transported into white neighborhood schools, while Irish and other white kids would be shipped into Roxbury High, infuriating their parents into a near riot. “Let your daughter get bused there so she can be raped!” the angry crowd shouted at Kennedy. They turned their backs to him and sang “God Bless America” to drown out his attempts to speak. As he left in frustration, the senator found himself surrounded by a sea of angry Irish faces screaming obscenities. Some threw eggs and tomatoes. One woman tried taking a punch at him.
No one wanted to listen.
THE IRISH IN BOSTON were always diehard Kennedy people, the core constituency of so many family political campaigns in the past. In spite of their vast differences in wealth and education, these working-class residents shared with the Kennedys an identifiably Irish Catholic ethos, a sense of obligation to family, church and country. During the post–World War II era,the conservative side of the Kennedys’ politics appealed to these voters as much as the progressive—from the anti-Communist rhetoric of Senator Joseph McCarthy to the close affinity with the church and Cardinal Cushing. From the days of Honey Fitz, the Kennedy family always seemed to know what it was like to be Irish in Boston. They understood from experience the prejudice of the Brahmins, and the embittered feelings of being an outsider. These people viewed JFK as the embodiment of the American dream, the one among them who had made good. They cried when Jack was assassinated and Bobby was buried, and they kept a remarkable fidelity to Ted after the Chappaquiddick debacle. As they proved with James Michael Curley, the Boston Irish were willing to embrace a colorful rogue so long as they knew he was on their side. “Let them say what they want about our people—and we have many faults—they cannot say we are not loyal to our chieftain,”Ted once declared in 1964, at a St. Patrick’s Day ceremony to celebrate his brother’s old “Irish Mafia.”
Busing proved different, a distinct parting of the w
ays. A few days after Kennedy’s confrontation, thousands of people from the old white ethnic neighborhoods such as Charlestown—the same area of Boston that John Kennedy once represented in Congress—were shouting again. On this first day of school, as buses filled with black children arrived, they cried “Niggers, go home!”They were not going to listen to a Kennedy, nor were they going to listen to the highest-ranking voice of Roman Catholicism in Boston. Cushing’s successor, Humberto Medeiros, the Portguese-born, first non-Irish cardinal in Boston in more than a century, vaguely endorsed the government’s busing edict and deliberately kept his distance from his enraged Irish parishioners.“The poor Irish, lacking the mighty church-state institutional edifice that had protected and guided them in years past, were left to sink into racism,” writer Nicholas Lemann later observed.
The Catholic Church became complicit in this brand of urban Northern racism. Boston’s parochial schools, once a haven for the children of Catholic immigrants when they were victims of prejudice,were now benefiting from racism. White students fled to these private Catholic academies as a fortress against the increased enrollment of black kids bused to their local public school. In 1973, before the court-ordered desegregation plan, white students made up about 60 percent of the public school enrollment in Boston; by the mid-1980s, after years of bickering and protest, the number of white students dropped to 26 percent. Although Medeiros discouraged white flight, most estimates indicate that about two thousand more white students each year were sent by their parents from public to parochial schools. Over the coming decade, black support for busing also fell dramatically, from about half favoring it in 1974 to a favorable rating of only 14 percent by 1982, according to a Boston Globe poll.
In jumping into the local busing imbroglio,Ted broke a fundamental rule of Kennedy politics. For years, both his father and his brothers had studiously avoided intramural disputes in Massachusetts politics. They tended to keep their distance from the Purple Shamrock and the corrupt practices of Honey Fitz’s old cronies. With millions of their own, Joe Kennedy and sons didn’t have to accept someone else’s bribes to make their fortune. Despite calls to reform the state party,Ted steadfastly resisted. “Like Prince Hamlet,Ted is at the moment conducting a desultory dialogue with himself, undecided whether to plunge body and soul into the tangled issues of his state and party, or, like his late brother, withdraw from them,” observed the Saturday Evening Post in 1965 during one Massachusetts squabble.
But in the 1970s,Ted Kennedy felt compelled to enter the local dispute on school desegregation, mostly because of the ideological commitments already made by his family. During the 1960s, his brothers enforced (and became vilified) for federal desegregation orders carried out in the South. When Federal Judge W.Arthur Garrity Jr.’s decision to desegregate became law in Boston,Ted responded to the call of the Boston Globe and other city liberals to get involved in Boston’s debate. “We can’t express one rule for Birmingham, Alabama and another rule for Boston, Massachusetts,” Ted explained at a news conference on same day he was hooted down at City Hall.
IN THIS DISPUTE, Kennedy was pulled by conflicting loyalties. Judge Garrity, a soft-spoken thoughtful man who happened to be an Irish Catholic himself, had been appointed to the federal bench on Kennedy’s recommendation. He was Ted’s second choice when his first became a public fiasco. Back in the mid–1960s,Ted sought to fulfill his father’s wish that the old family crony, Francis X. Morrissey, be placed on the federal bench. For years, Morrissey worked for the Kennedys as an all-purpose political fix-it man. Morrissey knew and kept the family secrets. As his reward, Morrissey became a local judge and badgered the Kennedys for a federal appointment—so much so that he became a pest. Joe Kennedy scolded Morrissey in 1960 for presuming that a federal judgeship would be “marked” for him.“I cannot imagine that I ever said that to you,” he wrote, perhaps to cover his own tracks. The senior Kennedy’s debilitating stroke in 1961 certainly didn’t help Morrissey’s chances. While their father was still alive, however, the Kennedy brothers wanted to make good on the old man’s wish. “It’s the only thing my father ever asked me,”Ted reportedly told a friend.
Soon after Ted convinced President Johnson to nominate Morrissey, the truth about their crony’s suspect legal credentials was exposed in the Boston Globe (the articles about Morrissey won a Pulitzer Prize). As it turned out, Morrissey’s law degree came from a “diploma mill” in Georgia. He claimed he was practicing law there at the same time that he was running for the Massachusetts legislature and registering to vote as a Boston resident. The Kennedys and Cardinal Cushing tried to come to Morrissey’s rescue, but his nomination was soon withdrawn. In his place, Garrity—who once worked in JFK’s campaigns—was nominated successfully for the federal bench. His opinion in the school busing case, which stressed equal opportunities for all minorities in America, reflected the best of the Kennedy civil rights philosophy. Previously, Ted Kennedy had voiced doubts about the effectiveness of long-distance busing, but Garrity’s ruling left little choice. He seemed honor-bound to speak out and support the judge’s decision. As Kennedy once told a federal task force in Boston examining civil rights abuses,“For so long as we live in separate societies, one rich, one poor, one black, one white, one complacent, one despairing, we will not be the city we could be.”
What Ted properly saw as noble, many angry Irish, Italian and other ethnic residents of South Boston perceived as arrogant. In particular, the Boston Irish, who had still viewed themselves as a minority long after their numbers became dominant, were often blind to their similarities with others. There seemed always a tension between the generous impulses of an embattled minority and the defensive posture of those feeling left behind in society. Historically, Kennedys and Fitzgeralds shared the view of that great Irish immigrant, John Boyle O’Reilly, who recognized the similar plight of Negroes and the Irish in the 1880s.“So long as American citizens and their children are excluded from schools, theaters, hotels and common conveyances, there ought not to be any question of race, creed or color— every heart that beats for humanity beats with the oppressed,” he wrote. But by the 1970s, not all Irish Catholics were as magnanimous. Many lived in Boston’s aging neighborhoods and had enjoyed little success in life. Working–class Irish Catholic residents of South Boston hadn’t the money to move out to tony suburbs or to send their children to private academies. Their dreams were still blunted by low-paying, dead-end jobs; indeed, they were not unlike the black families they called names. They certainly didn’t want the church or some rich Kennedy telling them what was right for their children. “The rage against Kennedy reached such a torrent because of the feeling, especially among Irish Catholics, that Kennedy, one of theirs, had betrayed them,” wrote historian Ronald P. Formisano, nearly two decades later.
Once his core constituency, Kennedy’s Boston Irish retreated for a time into a misplaced anger and resentment at blacks. One night in 1975, some extremists attempted to firebomb John Kennedy’s birthplace and scrawled “Bus Teddy” on its sidewalk. In another incident, a militant group from Restore Our Alienated Rights (ROAR) jumped at Kennedy as he left a Quincy high school. They jabbed him with American flags and slashed his tires, forcing him to leave by subway with a police escort. Though heckled and jeered, Kennedy never attacked the Irish—what he called “my people”— for their behavior. He refused to call them bigots. He seemed to understand what their objections were, even if they didn’t agree with him on the proposed remedy. Oddly enough, the Irish criticism of Ted’s alleged betrayal occurred about the same time the senator experienced an awakening of his own Irish Catholic roots.
WHEN THE RIGHT moment arose, friends knew they could count on Teddy to sing the old Irish songs, to tell the stories carried down from the old days. “He could, when the mood stirred him, make any party come alive,” recalled Theodore H. White, “as when he attended the wedding of Kenneth O’Donnell, John Kennedy’s aide, and, lifting his tenor voice, led all the guests in Irish songs so that th
e wedding became a blessing in the memory of all there.”
After his brothers’ deaths, many family obligations became Ted’s responsibility, a burden he managed well. The summer after President Kennedy’s assassination, he traveled to Ireland, retracing many of his brother’s steps in Dunganstown and elsewhere. He thanked the Irish for all that their hospitality meant to Jack. His Irish Catholic background seemed a crucial component in his makeup, an important cultural factor in deciphering Ted Kennedy as a public figure. Part of his pleasing victory for the Senate in 1962 against Republican George Lodge—son of Jack’s 1952 opponent Henry Cabot Lodge and great-grandson of Honey Fitz’s old Brahmin opponent—was his family’s awareness of how the Irish in Boston overcame their detractors. “The identification of the Kennedy family with the Catholic Church is so great that really Ted is a Prince of the Church in this state,” a Lodge aide complained, “You can’t lay a glove on him.” Ted Kennedy’s dutiful nature carried over in religion as well as politics. Whatever his own difficulties with the church, he remained deferential to its rites and rituals. In the Senate, part of his great effectiveness stemmed from his willingness to work collegially within the high chamber’s rules and honor its traditions and decorum.“There is a great deal that is very Catholic about Edward Kennedy: the almost instinctive respect for institutions (Congress and unions, for example) that makes him more conservative than many people would like to believe, and the separation between public and private morality that the church’s rigid regulations forces on its children very early on in life,” a Kennedy friend told Richard Reeves in 1974. “Whatever you think of Teddy’s personal morality, he is a publicly moral man.”
