But at this fall fund-raiser at the McLean house, there was one tiny inkling, a moment that, in retrospect, captures something of the friction. It was mentioned in pretty much every story about the event as a funny, benign, father-son interlude. Although, that’s not exactly the way I remember it.
When I had first run for the Rhode Island General Assembly back in 1988, I had done a disastrous call-in radio appearance, in which I mistakenly described a VA hospital as being in the district I was running to represent—when it was just across the street that delineated the border for the next district. This geographical gaffe ignited a string of callers accusing me of being a carpetbagger who didn’t even know the streets of the district and questioning how I could possibly represent its citizens.
At this party at my dad’s, Rhode Island political leader Jack Reed—then a Congressman, now a US Senator—spoke nostalgically about the district I was running to represent in the House, saying it was dear to his heart and even noting that his grandmother had lived there. Her house, he said, was on Wisdom Avenue.
My dad couldn’t resist a dig.
“D’ya know where that is, Patrick?”
Perhaps a little too anxiously, I started describing where Wisdom Avenue and every other nearby avenue and street were located. This got a laugh. But it wasn’t that funny. It meant that some of the first national political stories about me would reprise an embarrassing anecdote that most people, otherwise, never would have known.
That said, at $500 a person, we raised $100,000 to start the campaign. That’s what some people spent for their entire congressional races.
My young campaign staff was being run by longtime aide Tony Marcella, who was just a few years older than me. He had started in politics in Massachusetts as a staffer for the speaker of the State House and then as my dad’s driver for his 1988 Senate campaign. Tony had come to Rhode Island as a volunteer on my first state rep run and now had worked his way up to being my most trusted employee.
I hired David Axelrod, a former Chicago political writer, as my media adviser. And I needed him, because while we led in the beginning, as 1994 progressed the races tightened. I also relied heavily on help from political supporters in Rhode Island, especially the new Majority Leader of the Rhode Island house, my longtime colleague George Caruolo. This was a midterm election after the Clintons had been in office for two years. The Democrat-controlled House and Senate had sputtered—the healthcare reform bill was stalled and would have to be tried again the next term—and the Republicans were gaining momentum. This was particularly bad for my father, who was in his first race since Palm Beach, facing Republican entrepreneur Mitt Romney. So it was, really, the first race of his career that it seemed possible he could lose.
—
WHILE I WAS POLLING AHEAD of my opponent, I was also starting to see for myself what it might be like to be a Kennedy in national office. During that campaign, I got my first really serious death threats.
I had experienced threats before. When I first ran for office, while still in college, the state police had heard about a threat and put a full protective detail on me. It only lasted ten days, because they caught the guy. Then, in 1989, when I was the primary sponsor of the state version of the Brady Bill, mandating a seven-day waiting period before purchasing firearms, there were more threats.
In the first week of my campaign for Congress, I received a call from Bill Barry, the ex–FBI agent who had been my Uncle Bobby’s bodyguard and often helped with family security matters. He said that during recent FBI surveillance of a top Rhode Island official, someone had overheard discussion of a plan to undermine my candidacy by purposely crashing into my car when I was driving, and then to have cocaine planted in my car to be found at the accident scene. Bill told me it was time to stop driving myself anywhere and to hire a retired state trooper to drive me to campaign events.
All was quiet for much of the campaign, and then the last week, Bill Barry called me again. This time, he said there was a credible threat from a guy who said he was coming to Rhode Island to “get” me. He arranged for an extra security detail, and finally, the man who had made the threat was arrested—with a trunk full of guns. But, luckily, nothing else happened.
In the end, I was polling way ahead and went on to win by an eight-point margin. My father’s race, on the other hand, remained tighter than he would have liked through the early fall. I remember him joking once on the phone about his poll numbers, saying, “If you get elected, make sure you don’t forget me, I may need a job.” Finally, in late October, he turned the corner with a smackdown performance against Mitt Romney at their debate at Faneuil Hall. After that, he was expected to win handily.
My family then had to decide where to be when the results came in—in Boston with my father or in Providence with me. Since they knew they couldn’t be there for the results, Dad and Vicki drove down in the afternoon, after voting, to pre-congratulate me. But that night, Teddy and Kara and all the cousins were in Boston.
Only my mother came down to Providence to be onstage with me for my actual acceptance speech, and there was something kind of wonderful about that. I had grown up looking at pictures of Kennedy elections—for JFK, Bobby, and my father—where my mom was always a presence. She had been a go-to person for all those campaigns and all those election nights: strong and beautiful and committed. But that was a side of her I had never really seen in person, since for most of my life she had been defined by her illness. So to see her there, onstage with me as the historical figure she truly was but had never been to me, was a genuinely big deal. It was like having a flashback of a memory that wasn’t actually real, like I was seeing myself in one of those family photos at my grandfather’s house of the starts of all those political careers. It was a terrific way to begin my career as a national politician.
Besides my mother, I was flanked onstage by Senator Claiborne Pell, and we were surrounded by the people from Providence who had supported me since I was a twenty-year-old college-sophomore state rep, learning small-town, retail politics from people like Frank Di Paolo over pasta e fagioli. Now, at twenty-seven, I was going to be the youngest member of the United States Congress, representing the smallest state in the union.
But while my father and I were apart, we were both watching the same nightmare national TV coverage of the election. Republicans were capturing control of the House and Senate for the first time in over forty years. And I was about to join a Congress in which Newt Gingrich, who I considered at the time to be a right-wing bomb thrower, was going to be Speaker of the House. (Ironically, Newt and I became friends years later as he got more involved in brain research advocacy, but back then he was the ultimate political enemy.)
The only good news was that because the Democrats had lost a stunning fifty-four seats in the House—only two seats had gone from Republican to Democrat, and I was one of them—we had probably the smallest Democratic freshman class in the modern history of Congress. So we got a lot more attention than normal freshmen.
Newt announced his “Contract with America” and all the conservative legislation the Republicans were going to pass in the first hundred days—including a complete trashing of all the healthcare initiatives the Democrats had been working on for two years. The Health Security Act, which had stalled in Congress in the months before the election, was dead.
Clinton knew he had to double down on our base. So he quickly called a White House press conference to discuss raising the minimum wage. And he invited all the freshman Democrats to be there, along with the usual top leaders. I went down to the Cabinet Room as early as possible to get a good seat, right next to the President.
My dad, who was the chair of the Senate Labor Committee, arrived just before the meeting was about to start. Even after the election, I still hadn’t really spoken to him very much. He walked in, saw me sitting there next to President Clinton, and said, “I can’t believe this. How did you get
in here?”
“Well, Dad,” I said, grinning, “I actually got elected. I’m here as a Congressman.”
And there wasn’t even a beat. It was suddenly all behind us. Boom, we were simpatico. We were now . . . colleagues, not father and son—or, well, not just father and son. He was all right now. He had moved on. My dad was great about not holding a grudge. He had a strong temper but also a sense of life that was profound because he had seen so much of it—his big picture was really big.
But, also, he had won his election, and he had a sense of relief that he had closed that chapter of his life. Winning an election is like redemption.
Chapter 10
As the youngest member of Congress in 1995, I was doing my best to get acclimated and calm my nervousness. But it was a challenging time to grow up quickly in Washington, because the new Republican majority had given itself one hundred days to change everything—or at least to dismantle much of what Democrats like President Clinton and my father had been trying to build in the previous two years.
And eighteen days into those one hundred days, my grandmother Rose Kennedy died at the age of one hundred four. Gramma left forty-one great-grandchildren, myself and twenty-seven other grandchildren, and five of her own nine children—my father the youngest but, now more than ever, the patriarch.
So it did not feel like a good time for a brand-new Congressman to try to make a name for himself on big national issues, and I’m not sure I would have done that even if the Democrats were still in the majority. I felt very much like a local politician who had been sent to Washington to represent the needs of my district in Rhode Island, and that was the job I needed to learn how to do well first.
As the son of Ted Kennedy and the cousin of then-Congressman Joe Kennedy, I was immediately invited to appear at all the events—on evenings and weekends—where I could join them in networking on national issues. As the newest single Kennedy in Washington, there were also many more social pressures—and opportunities—than I was accustomed to. Nobody seemed to care that I had a serious girlfriend.
So, I decided that, as much as possible, I would keep my head down, focus on local issues, and spend my weekends back in Rhode Island, at home and with constituents. It was a political strategy but also a personal one. I felt safer and more in control in Providence than in Washington, and brought my Rhode Island campaign manager, Tony Marcella, with me as chief of staff. I also hired Terri Alford, the smart and maternal wife of a career naval officer, as my Washington receptionist; she went on to run my office and became an incredibly stabilizing figure in my life, working with me for my entire time in Congress.
When I lobbied for committee positions—which I did pretty hard, largely through my growing friendship with Dick Gephardt, who had just gone from House Majority Leader to House Minority Leader—I pushed not for traditional liberal Kennedy placements but a seat on the House Armed Services Committee. As I learned the ropes, I wanted to make sure I was in a position to protect jobs in Navy-related institutions and projects in my district: the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, the Naval War College, the Naval Surface Warfare Officers School Command, and the Naval Education/Training Center were all in the First Congressional District.
This was the beginning of my being seen as something of a hawk on defense issues. This notion was reinforced just a few months into my first term, by a crystallizing trip I took to Fort Bragg in North Carolina for the thirty-year rededication of the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center. That’s where the US Army does training for Special Forces (Green Beret/Special Ops), Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations, and where I first met my friend General Hugh Shelton, several years before he became Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
What he told me that day, about Special Ops and mental health, always stayed with me. He explained that Special Ops had the best mental healthcare of any other branch of the service.
When I asked why, he said, “We don’t look at mental healthcare as a safety net. We look at it as a force multiplier.”
—
ALL THE NEW STRESSES of being in a new job in a new place made my bipolar disorder that much more challenging to manage and keep secret. I had, by this time, also started overusing prescription painkillers. I had been introduced to them during and after my back surgery, and they seemed like the quickest and easiest way to stop feeling pain and anxiety without technically breaking any laws or having alcohol on my breath. But mostly I drank, late at night, to get to sleep. I’d do it at home, or at this bar, the Red River Grill, that was near my apartment at Justice Court, walking distance to the Capitol.
Part of the challenge of these illnesses is that they can make you feel anxious and unstable where there is no real external reason to feel that way. But I had lots of reasons to feel stressed, if not completely terrified.
The first time I rose to speak in the House, for example, I forgot to request unanimous consent to extend my remarks—a violation of parliamentary procedure—and then a veteran colleague had to tell me to try looking into the camera when I spoke. Behind my back, but not always out of earshot, my elders and detractors referred to me as “Congressboy” rather than Congressman. The press called me “the un-Kennedy” and said that the “charisma gene had eluded” me.
My staff, some of whom had come with me from Providence, were still learning how to function in the nation’s capital; when they weren’t sure what to do, they would quietly call someone on my dad’s veteran staff for advice. But while his staff was helpful, there were lessons my father wanted me to learn myself. I had run up a substantial debt campaigning, which I knew he could help me pay off by sponsoring a couple of big fund-raising events. While I now realize he was probably right to force me to figure out how to solve this problem, I recall being very angry with him about this at the time.
I was, in some ways, a very old twenty-seven, and in other ways a very young twenty-seven. This was, after all, my first true full-time job.
Still, even with my steep learning curve, it was a good time to be one of thirteen freshman Democrats in the House, when the conservative “Contract with America” made every vote for our party really count.
—
ONE OF THE MOST RESONANT experiences of that first year was the trip to Israel in November for the funeral of assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. I was part of the large US delegation, which included twenty-one other House members and my father and sixteen of his Senate colleagues.
Before we left, my dad and I made a visit to Arlington National Cemetery, to the graves of his brothers. Rabin’s death felt, in so many ways, like the deaths of my uncles—not just the murder of an incredible human being but the attempted murder of a cause, uniquely led by this inspiring individual through the power of his own personal narrative. When he was taken, the dream was taken. My father decided it would be appropriate to carry dirt from Arlington to sprinkle on Rabin’s grave. Because of his back problems, he couldn’t really even bend over. So I knelt down and scooped up some earth from around JFK’s gravesite and put it in a Ziploc sandwich bag we had brought. And then I walked down the path to Uncle Bobby’s grave and did the same thing.
We sat together on the plane to Israel, on Air Force Two. It was the first time we had traveled together in a long time and since nobody else had family members with them, the trip also became a bit of a father-son bonding experience. It was actually a good thing I was there, because he had a hard time with the funeral. It was very crowded, and I think he just struggled with the painful symbolism of Rabin’s assassination. All the other heads of state tossed dirt from the grave site onto the coffin, and we were waiting until the end, with our little Ziploc bag. And then at a certain point he was pushing me, saying, “Now, now, now, go put the dirt in.”
I can still hear his voice saying it, “Now, now, now!” I think that dirt actually helped him emotionally navigate the situation; it gave him something else to focus on
.
I was surprised by how difficult that funeral was for him. Growing up, I remember going with him to so many funerals, so many visits to the homes of families of the fallen. When someone dies, the Kennedys are seen as experts in how to deal with it. My dad gave so many eulogies, sat in so many living rooms, and walked through so many houses like he was a family member. I think the most powerful thing I witnessed as his son was the consolation he gave those who were suffering the unbearable loss of a young person—usually a son—who died serving our country. He had incredible empathy, because he always brought with him the experience of losing so many family members tragically, suddenly, and in their prime.
So I was not surprised when, after the funeral, many of Rabin’s family members and friends wanted to talk to my father about how a family and country deal with assassination, how the legacy of a public figure can be maintained after his murder. It was unusual to be an expert on such trauma. Especially back then, when the impact of trauma was so little understood and appreciated.
It is amazing, actually, how the world of PTSD and trauma-based mental illness has changed over the last two decades. Today, because of the overwhelming evidence of how PTSD has hurt a generation of American veterans, the controversies concern mostly how to lower the PTSD-driven suicide rate and how best to treat this unique set of illnesses. When Rabin died, there was very little understanding of the role of trauma-based illnesses. And except for Vietnam veterans, many patients who suffered from post-traumatic illnesses had their traumas questioned, downplayed, or even denied; they were sometimes told it didn’t matter if their traumas were real or imaginary, for the purposes of treatment, something we would never consider saying to someone traumatized in combat. I think, honestly, most Americans didn’t really take PTSD very seriously until after 9/11, when the traumas and their impact were undeniable, and shared by so many.
A Common Struggle: A Personal Journey Through the Past and Future of Mental Illness and Addiction Page 12
