The Kennedys

by Thomas Maier

  In Illinois, this perception became painfully clear. In 1960, Catholics in Chicago watched the overt religious bigotry confronting Jack Kennedy, saw themselves in his situation and jolted themselves into action. Kennedy was “young, Catholic, had been discriminated against—that brought us together,” remembered Dan Rostenkowski, the city’s most powerful congressman. “Goddammit, we had people coming out to vote we thought were dead.” Twenty years later, many in the Chicago Democratic machine—which boasted several Irish-Americans among its powerful elite—endorsed Kennedy over Carter. But the recently elected mayor, Jane Byrne, was already so divisive that her enthusiasm for Kennedy wound up alienating many blacks, Hispanics and other minorities. Several Catholic politicians committed themselves to Carter or simply didn’t like the idea of undermining a Democrat in the White House. Ted’s image remained the most insurmountable problem. “There’s not a strong identification of Ted Kennedy as a Catholic, even among traditionalist Catholics,” said an Illinois congressional aide to theWashington Post. “He’s seen as a guy who has taken positions opposed by the bishops, who is separated from his wife. . . .He’s seen as a guy who is trying to usurp something that’s not really his, riding his brother’s coattails.”

  Within a generation, many Irish and other Catholic ethnics had moved from the South Side city neighborhoods and purchased homes in the distant suburbs. They were far more independent-minded than in the days when the machine’s precinct captains came knocking on their doors on Election Day to see whether they’d yet voted. Priests and nuns no longer rallied to the Kennedy name.“Catholics are much more cosmopolitan than they were in 1960,” explained Father Dennis Sanders, the principal of a Catholic high school for boys in Rostenkowski’s district. “We are an accepted people. Once you’re accepted, you don’t have to fight for it.”

  The Land of Lincoln stopped any chance Kennedy might have had of overtaking Carter for the nomination. There were signs of his demise all over. On St. Patrick’s Day, the day before the primary, Kennedy marched along a green-covered State Street and experienced the same kind of heckling that Bobby Kennedy met from the Irish during the New York parade in 1968.When somebody threw a pack of lit firecrackers nearby, the Secret Service lunged toward Kennedy and seemed momentarily to unnerve the candidate. The next day, Carter won the popular vote 65 to 30 percent. The president walked away with more than three-quarters of the delegates and an unassailable clinch on renomination. One preelection Illinois poll indicated that Catholics favored Carter by 51 to 33 percent. There were no miracle wins for Ted that spring, but rather a pattern of losses in several key states and narrow wins in races that should have been easy. When the campaign reached New York,Ted appeared almost relieved to know he wouldn’t be winning. Several journalists noticed that his stride was almost jaunty, and humor flowed freely at each campaign stop. In the New York primary, Democrats gave Kennedy a surprise victory—as they might give an ovation to an aging star on Broadway, not so much for the performance that day but for the fond memories of yesteryear. The effort against Carter was repeated with Kennedy wins in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and California, but not with a total enough to overcome the president.

  THAT SUMMER, at the Democratic National Convention inside New York’s Madison Square Garden,Ted gave his most memorable speech of the 1980 campaign. He gracefully conceded to Carter so that the president could be nominated with a rousing voice vote. Then, Kennedy reminded them of what might have been, articulating a vision of his family’s politics in a way he’d never before done so well. “It is surely correct that we cannot solve problems by throwing money at them—but it is also correct that we dare not throw our national problems onto a scrap heap of inattention and indifference,” Kennedy declared. “The poor may be out of political fashion, but they are not without human needs. The middle class may be angry, but they have not lost the dream that all Americans can advance together.”

  As if sensing the end of an era,Kennedy addressed himself not just to the crowd, but to history. “Someday, long after this convention, long after the signs come down and the bands stop playing, may it be said of our campaign that we kept the faith,” he said, his voice possessed of a bellowy, singsong quality. After building to a crescendo, Kennedy concluded:“For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end. For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

  The Garden overflowed with emotion as Teddy waved his good-byes, his last hurrah, to presidential politics. In the end, neither a Kennedy nor the incumbent Carter were returned to the White House. Instead, a California Republican named Ronald Reagan, who claimed his own distant Irish roots, was elected. The gradual shift of white Catholics toward the Republicans, temporarily halted during the Kennedy years, was now even more pronounced. Nationwide, Irish-Americans voted for Reagan in remarkable numbers, as did other white ethnics. With his Hollywood smile, Reagan wrapped his archconservatism in amiable, telegenic moral bromides that made sense to these ethnic groups who no longer felt like outsiders. With a Cold War passion that JFK had once expressed, Reagan and a new Pope from Poland began their own crusade against the Communists.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  A Matter of Faith

  “If you have faith, it is a wonderful thing. Try to encourage it, nurture it, transmit it. But faith isn’t given to everybody, unfortunately. And some people lose it for one reason or another.”

  —ROSE KENNEDY

  INSIDE THE ANCIENT ST. STEPHEN’S CHURCH in the North End of Boston, hundreds of mourners huddled on a cold January morning in 1995 to pay their last respects to Rose Kennedy. At age 104, Rose’s tiny, frail body succumbed to pneumonia at her Hyannis Port home alongside Cape Cod. The old Boston setting for this funeral Mass, celebrating the life of the Kennedy family matriarch, seemed fitting.

  St. Stephen’s, originally built by the Brahmins but later bought and converted by the city’s Irish Catholic immigrants, symbolized the ascendancy of a people. This grand old church was the same place where Rose’s father was baptized in 1863, born to parents who fled famine-stricken Ireland. Outside its doors, Honey Fitz introduced parishioners in 1946 to his grandson Jack Kennedy, who was running for his grandfather’s old seat in Congress. As with the church itself, Rose Kennedy’s funeral was full of memories, a reminder of all that had transpired.

  “She sustained us in the saddest times by her faith in God, which was the greatest gift she gave us, and by the strength of her character, which was a combination of the sweetest gentleness and the most tempered steel,” eulogized Ted Kennedy, her only remaining son. “She was ambitious not only for our success but for our souls.”To the amusement of all, he recalled a let- ter his elderly mother had sent him soon after his failed 1980 bid for the presidency. “Dear Teddy,”Ted read to the congregation, “I just saw a story in which you said: ‘If I was President . . .’ You should have said, ‘If I were President’ which is correct because it is a condition contrary to fact.”

  Nearly all the mourners, particularly her family, made mention of Rose Kennedy’s faith. For her daughter Eunice, her mother’s religiosity had inspired her own tireless volunteer work and acts of charity on behalf of others less fortunate. Others marveled at Rose’s devotion to her church and how her abiding belief in God had carried her through so many tragedies. One obituary quoted Monsignor Jeremiah O’Mahoney, the late pastor of her church in Palm Beach and a family friend who once said that Rose was the most religious woman he had ever met. “She wasn’t a crank, she was practical in her application of the teachings of God,” said O’Mahoney. “After Jack was killed, I phoned her and said how sorry I was. She said she wanted no sympathy, only prayers that God would sustain her.” Before he passed away in 1970, Cardinal Cushing declared that Rose “has more confidence in Almighty God than any priest or religious I have known.” Cushing own’s assuredness in God was shaken by Bobby’s cruel fate. “We all have our troubles, but why should the Kenne
dy family have all these troubles—why, why, why?” Cushing asked her. With unwavering serenity, Rose confirmed God’s love despite all that had happened. Besides, she added,“If I collapsed, the morale of the family would be lowered.”

  Family was the most visible expression of Rose Kennedy’s faith. Her children often thought she might have gone into teaching if she’d not become a mother of nine. With almost evangelical resolve, she instructed each of her sons and daughters to strive for higher goals, and her spirit seemed reflected in their rhetoric. Throughout the 1970s until she suffered a stroke in 1984, Rose remained equally “zealous,” as Ted said, in trying to influence her twenty-eight grandchildren and forty-one great-grandchildren. Seven of these children were given Rose as their first or middle names, underscoring her subtle impact on their lives. She offered suggestions and challenges on virtually everything—historical quizzes, poetry recitations (she asked each grandchild to memorize a stanza from “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” as an eighty-fifth birthday present), spiritual discussions on such topics as the meaning of Lent and even secrets of good posture. (“Caroline, keep your arms away from your sides; it makes you look thinner.”) Though she didn’t dwell morbidly on the past, she guarded her dead children’s memory like a lioness. In late 1976, when Times columnist James Reston suggested that JFK wasn’t much of an adherent to Catholicism, he received a swift rebuke from Rose.“President Kennedy did believe in and practiced his religion,” Rose wrote back to the newspaper.“He attended church regularly, was a frequent communicant at Mass, and understood the meaning and value of daily prayer.”

  Despite her vaunted status as a papal countess, Rose Kennedy was very much like thousands of other Irish-Americans who turned to their parish priests for insight.“When I told my grandmother that we read the Bible, she was horrified,” recalled Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. “She said Catholics didn’t read the Bible. Priests did that.” Although the one-dimensional portraits of her faith portrayed her as reflexive or unthinking, Rose sometimes revealed her doubts. After Jack’s assassination, Rose “spent much time in our front yard or on our beach, and walked and walked and walked, and prayed and prayed, and wondered why it happened to Jack,” she recalled in her memoir.“Everything was gone and I wondered why.” Faith in God became her salve for a wounded heart. Her emphasis on family and religion were the constants in her life, stretching to the days of Irish immigrants at St. Stephen’s Church. As her youngest son once explained,“Whatever contributions the Kennedys have made are very much tied into the incredible importance and power of that force in our lives—the family.”

  BY THE TIME of Rose Kennedy’s death, the Kennedys were touted as America’s family by the mass media. In many ways, the coverage of this Irish Catholic clan from Boston resembled the way the British followed the royal family, with no hint of irony or history. Along with Ted in the Senate, two of Rose’s grandsons served in Congress and a granddaughter was elected as Maryland’s lieutenant governor, but it was John F. Kennedy Jr. who won the greatest media honor—appearing on People magazine’s cover as “The Sexiest Man Alive.” Celebrity begat celebrity as one granddaughter, Maria Shriver, a network television newscaster, married Hollywood superstar Arnold Schwarzenegger, and another granddaughter, Kerry, married Andrew Cuomo, the son of New York’s Democratic governor. The Kennedys became a soap opera drama with whom millions of strangers identified and followed in the news. The year before Rose’s death, the funeral of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was treated like the death of a head of state with constant television remembrances of “The Camelot years.” President Bill Clinton understood the prominence of the Kennedys as a national saga. Upon Rose’s death as the family’s matriarch, Clinton declared, “She played an extraordinary role in the life of an extraordinary family.”

  Along with the public acclaim came a certain amount of schadenfreude at their self-inflicted injuries and excesses. In the years after the assassinations, stories about the Kennedy family’s private demons surfaced in the news with disturbing regularity. The Kennedys, originally touted in superlatives, now seemed like any other dysfunctional American family, awash in drugs, alcohol and sex. Whatever moral restraints that Rose Kennedy once counseled to her family seemed lost or forgotten. Despite the Chappaquiddick tragedy and its devastating impact on his presidential hopes, Ted Kennedy seemed confoundingly inured to its lessons. He fanned the tabloid flames with his private adolescent sexual antics. The next generation also appeared to suffer from its own weaknesses. Robert Kennedy Jr. scuttled any hopes of a political career when he was arrested in 1983 for heroin possession. The whole family grieved over the cocaine overdose death of another RFK son, David, who, intimates said, never recovered from his father’s assassination.

  The sexual behavior of the Kennedy men came into public cross-examination when police charged William Kennedy Smith, a son of Steve and Jean Kennedy Smith, with sexual assault against a young woman in 1991 while at the Kennedy winter home in Palm Beach, Florida. At trial, a jury eventually acquitted Smith, but not until Ted Kennedy went through an agonizing cross-examination by a local prosecutor about his own drinking earlier that night, accompanied by his son Patrick and Smith at a local bar. The trial tarnished Ted’s reputation so much that a fellow senator warned him about his drinking. His usual effectiveness appeared diminished, quite evident during the Senate investigation of sexual harassment allegations against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. At the confirmation hearings, Kennedy barely said anything.

  To be sure, some of the Kennedy family’s difficulties were an aftermath of the extraordinary violence they suffered. Many friends noted, for example, the emotional strains that Ethel Kennedy displayed in trying to run a fatherless household. This third generation of Kennedys, many of whom gained significant achievements in their own right, occasionally spoke of their pain.“I remember, after my father died, the desolation I felt, the endless ache of missing him,” recalled Joseph P.Kennedy II, Bobby’s oldest son, elected to the same congressional seat once occupied by JFK and Honey Fitz. “I discussed it one night with my sister, Kathleen who said: ‘When times get really tough, or I’m unsure what to do, I still talk to Daddy—and he’s there.’”Young Joe made these candid admissions at the January 1998 funeral of his brother, Michael Kennedy, whose senseless death at age thirty-nine seemed to illustrate all the American public’s ambivalence toward the remaining Kennedys.

  Though he thought of running for public office, Michael Kennedy preferred to live out his family’s legacy of public-spiritedness in his own manner. For years, Michael served as chairman of a nonprofit organization supplying heating oil to poor people. Previously, he helped coordinate relief missions to Africa, helped set up a Roman Catholic university in Angola and organized an anti-handguns advocacy group. His personal life also appeared ideal; he married Vicki Gifford, the daughter of sports broadcaster and football legend Frank Gifford, and the couple had three children. Yet Michael, too,was afflicted with this latter-day Kennedy curse of poor judgment and tragic outcomes. In 1997, law-enforcement authorities exposed his affair with his teenage babysitter and contemplated criminal charges. The embarrassing publicity that resulted forced his resignation as an adviser to his brother’s campaign for Massachusetts governor.

  Alarmed by how the family’s reputation was being sullied and frittered away, Michael’s cousin John Kennedy Jr. wrote a thinly veiled disclaimer about “poster boys for bad behavior,” which rankled but accurately put a finger on his generation’s penchant for self-destructiveness. “Perhaps they deserved it,” JFK Jr. wrote about the public’s disapproval for his cousins’ behavior.“Perhaps they knew better. To whom much is given,much will be required, right?”That last line was a reminder of Grandma Rose’s constant invocation of St. Luke to her young. Michael’s tawdry behavior turned to tragedy a few months later when he was killed while recklessly playing football on skis. His head smacked into a tree and he died in his sister’s arms. Once again, the press revisited their ruminations on a so-c
alled “Kennedy curse” and ran the long list of tragedies haunting the family.

  THIS NEW GENERATION of Kennedys often mirrored the complexity of many Catholics in America as they tried to sort out their own personal lives within the changing moral dictates of the church. The reforms of Vatican II were in the past. The forgotten era of “The Two Johns” faded under Pope John Paul II, whose reign began in 1978 and lasted for the rest of the century.

  In his greatest triumph, this pontiff helped end the atheist threat of communism in Eastern Europe. Totalitarianism dominated his native Poland where Karol Wojtyla spent most of his life, actively resisting the Nazis and then the Soviets. With the same rigid determination of his embattled Polish church, Pope John Paul II looked upon Western culture as spiritually weak,hedonistic and sex-obsessed. In place of liberal reformers such as Cushing and Medeiros, this Pope placed Cardinal Bernard Law into the archdiocese of Boston and appointed other conservatives into top American positions, typified by Cardinal John O’Connor in New York, whose generous nature did not extend to Irish gay and lesbians wishing to march in the St. Patrick’s Day parade. These conservative cardinals became bastions of the Pope’s Cold War orthodoxy, stalwarts of the faith but often blind to its faults and unbending in its rules.

  The Kennedys no longer shared a close relationship with the Vatican, certainly not as in the days when Galeazzi showed them around St. Peter’s. Nevertheless, after his successful trip to Poland in 1987, Ted Kennedy journeyed to Rome; he was welcomed by a grateful Pope who bestowed a blessing on the Kennedys as one of the “great Catholic families of America.” But back in America, the pontiff ’s cardinals were not always pleased with the Kennedys and their stance on personal and public matters. These differences often reflected just how much everyday life had changed for American Catholics.