Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  When Joan showed up at the appointed hour, it was with her children at her side—nineteen-year-old Kara, who had grown to be a beautiful woman with long brown hair and was now a student at Trinity College; eighteen-year-old Ted Jr., blond and solidly built like his dad and a student at Wesley; and twelve-year-old, brown-eyed Patrick, who attended school in Washington. To her left was Ethel, and Ted’s sisters Eunice and Jean were to her right. (Jackie, who was living in New York City, was not summoned. While she was still involved in many of the personal aspects of the Kennedy family, Jackie had so distanced herself from its political concerns by 1979 that she would never have been invited to a strategy meeting, nor would she ever have attended.)

  Richard Burke, who was present, recalls that the meeting began with one of the doctors stressing that Joan would “only get better when she wants to get better. But she’s got to do it herself.”

  “Well, personally, I think she’s licked it,” Ethel said of Joan, looking over at her warmly. Disregarding the earlier warning of one of the doctors that “there is no cure for alcoholism,” Ethel pushed on, “Isn’t that right? Haven’t you licked it, Joan?” Like many people, Ethel thought of a serious drinking problem as a sign of weakness or lack of will power, not a disease. So to Ethel, it was something that could just be “licked.”

  Joan didn’t say anything. Everyone else exchanged uneasy smiles.

  “Didn’t you hear what the doctor said? He said that you don’t cure this kind of thing, Ethel,” Eunice, who was always very concerned about Joan’s well-being, said impatiently. It was as if everybody in the room except Joan was hearing about alcoholism for the first time. “So, no, she is not cured,” Eunice observed. “And I don’t think she can take a campaign right now. I really don’t.”

  Joan opened her mouth to protest, then closed it again.

  “Oh, sure she can,” Ethel argued. “Can’tcha handle it, Joan? C’mon, now.”

  “Look, may I have your attention,” Dr. Hawthorne interrupted. “What we need is for each person to have a say.” Richard Burke recalls Joan raising her eyes to the ceiling in dismay.

  The psychiatrist then moderated a discussion as each person in the room gave his or her opinion on how Joan would fare in a presidential campaign. Eunice said that she was worried that Joan would not be able to handle the stress, that it would drive her back to the bottle and maybe even cause a rift with her children. Jean was silent, as she often was in situations such as this one. (Usually, when she had concerns about family matters, she would take them up with her husband, Steve, and he would then bring them to the attention of whoever was involved.) For her part, Ethel felt that Joan could deal with the pressure of a campaign, and she took it a step further to say that she would do anything in her power to help Joan, even though some observers found her reasoning to be a bit curious.

  “Oh, I so want Ted to be President,” Ethel said, dreamily. “My God, wouldn’t it be great to be back in the White House? It’s what we’ve always wanted, after all. And now it can happen. Whatever I can do to help Joan through this, that’s what I’m going to do. She should come and stay with me at Hickory Hill,” Ethel suggested. “I would keep an eye on her.”

  Suddenly, Joan spoke up. “Look, I’m not a child, Ethel. I don’t need to be looked after.”

  “Oh, I know that, dear,” Ethel said, her tone just a bit condescending. “You’re not a child. Of course not.”

  Joan looked at Ethel menacingly.

  “Okay!” Ethel said, holding up her hands defensively. “I just agreed with you.”

  There was silence in the room.

  Kara, sitting at her mother’s side, finally offered, “I’ll only go along with Dad running for President if Mom’s okay with it,” she said, squeezing her mother’s hand. Her brothers agreed wholeheartedly. It speaks well of Joan that her children were so supportive of her. Though she had moved away from home, they visited her on weekends. It hadn’t been easy for them to see Mommy move out, but they seemed to understand that Joan was taking care of herself.

  Finally, it was Ted’s turn to speak. “I want nothing more than to be President,” he said, catching Ethel’s wide grin. “The timing is right. I can do this. I believe I can win. People are sick of Carter. The energy crisis, the economy… people need a change, and that’s me.” He walked over to Joan, stood behind her, and put his hands on her shoulders. “If it will hurt Joan, though, forget it. I won’t do it. I will only proceed if I have the full support of everyone in this room, including my wife.”

  Ted’s magnanimous speech aside, the fact was that he could not mount a successful campaign without his wife’s cooperation. But what responsibility did she have as a political wife when she and her husband had been estranged for three years, and how could she resolve the conflict between that duty and the one to herself?

  Joan was no longer eager to camouflage her feelings and put on a happy face for the media as she had done for so many years as a Kennedy wife. She had made that much clear about a year earlier, when a Good Housekeeping reporter visited her at her Boston apartment and asked if she thought Ted still loved her. She answered, “I don’t know. I really don’t know.” Then, when questioned about her feelings for him, she remained silent. Asked if the marriage was going to end, she explained that her focus was on her recovery, not on her relationship. “I’m working on myself,” she said, “then maybe I can make up my mind from a position of strength.” This was a “new” Joan Kennedy, one who had no pictures of any of her family—or any other Kennedys—anywhere in her apartment, the only reminder of her past being a framed letter to her from President John Kennedy.

  Now the “new” Joan was being called to act like the “old” one and sublimate her own feelings for the greater good: the Kennedy good. However, Joan felt that there was more at stake than just the personal and political image of the family. This time she believed she could extend her motivation so that there would be some benefit to her, as well as to the family. Ted’s and the family’s presidential aspirations could provide her with the motivation she needed to continue her recovery, or so she thought. She believed—as she would later explain—that the discipline required to remain sober during a difficult campaign would keep her that way. If she were to start drinking again during such a high-profile time, it would prove to be humiliating not only for herself, but also for Ted and everyone in their family. She would never do that to them—at least not intentionally—and so, for the next year, she would feel that she had a strong impetus to continue her recovery. Yes, she would stop drinking for the campaign. But was this a good enough reason? She never thought of what would happen after the campaign was over.

  Finally, after each person had made his or her opinion known, it was Joan’s turn to speak. All eyes were on her as she stood up. “I want Ted Kennedy to be President, too,” she said, avoiding eye contact with her estranged husband, a man she now almost always referred to as “Ted Kennedy.” She continued, and not too convincingly, “I think he’d make a great President.” Then, looking around at all of the smiling, relieved faces, she hastened to add, “I need more time, though. I really do. I have a lot of work to do on myself…. But I’ll do it. Yes. I can do it,” she concluded firmly, “and I will do it.”

  “Then that takes care of that,” Ted said happily as he jumped to his feet. He walked over to Joan and reached out to her. She ignored him. Ted took a few awkward steps backward.

  “Well, this is just the beginning of a process,” cautioned Dr. Hawthorne. “We don’t need to make any final decisions right here, Joan.”

  “We’re on our way, though,” Ted said.

  “Oh boy! We sure are,” Ethel agreed enthusiastically. It was as if the old Ethel Kennedy had suddenly emerged, the one filled with joy at the thought of herself and Bobby in the White House, the one whose zest for life seemed to have died along with her husband.

  Joan and Ted: Creating the Illusion of a Marriage

  After the meeting of Kennedy family members a
nd doctors in Virginia, quickly laid plans went into action to—as Richard Burke would remember it—“create the illusion of a marriage” between Ted and Joan Kennedy, all for the sake of public relations and good politics. Joan would spend more time in McLean (with the liquor cabinet always locked in her presence), Ted would spend less time with his Palm Beach mistress (though he would not give her up), and the two would attend the children’s school functions together and make other personal appearances that would generate the news that they were working on their marriage.

  “I think she was searching for her own identity,” observes Richard Burke of Joan at this time, “and appeared to want to hold on to the concept of defining herself as Mrs. Kennedy. I believe she was terrified of losing that label.”

  In the intervening months, Ted’s brother-in-law Steve Smith agreed to act as his campaign manager (a post he had held during Bobby’s ill-fated campaign). Others came along to fill other positions, including Ted’s former press representative Dick Drayne, who signed on to do battle with the media for the Kennedys.

  By August 1979, the decade-anniversary of Chappaquiddick, the Kennedy handlers had put together briefing papers for Ted relating to his Chappaquiddick fiasco: There was nothing new to say, he accepted full responsibility, and all questions have been answered. Ted even called the Kopechnes at their ranch home in Pennsylvania, “to see where they stood, whether or not they were going to say anything damaging,” recalled Mary Ann Kopan, Mary Jo Kopechne’s aunt.

  It might have been understandable that Ted didn’t know where the Kopechnes stood because, years earlier, Mary Jo’s family sent Joan and Ted a card when twelve-year-old Ted Jr. had his leg amputated because of cancer. It seemed odd under the circumstances. Joan responded with a nice note of her own to the Kopechnes.

  In fact, the Kopechnes had strong feelings against the Kennedys, and yet they said nothing to Ted that would indicate that they would be the slightest political liability. Ted’s call remained completely innocuous.

  “Thank God that’s over with,” Ted reportedly said when he hung up.

  On September 6, the Kennedy office leaked a new story to the media indicating that neither Rose nor Joan would oppose a possible candidacy by Ted. (Carter ridiculed the announcement, saying, “I asked my mama, and she said it was okay [for Carter to run for re-election]. And my wife, Rosalynn, said she’d be willing to live in the White House for four more years.”) The next day a CBS-TV poll showed that Ted had a 53–16 lead over Carter and that he could probably have the Democratic nomination if it was what he wanted.

  In a couple of months, Ted would be on the cover of Time magazine with the bold headline: “The Kennedy Challenge” and an accompanying story about Joan called “the Vulnerable Soul of Joansie” that did nothing to enhance her image: “Public life has not been kind to Joan Kennedy. Its wounds can be seen in the puffy eyes, the exaggerated makeup, the tales of alcoholism. Today, she is a sadly vulnerable soul and an unknown factor in her husband’s electoral equation.” In speaking of her marriage, she was quoted as saying, “Subconsciously, I’d like to have been like Ethel and had one baby after another.” The distressing article implied that Joan wasn’t even good at being an alcoholic: “She passes out after only three drinks.” The feature also reported that Joan was at her Boston home a few months earlier when Ted’s car pulled up. “Oh Christ,” she reportedly said. “Here he comes. I’m getting out of here.” Then, she strode away rapidly. Though Ted was angry at Joan when the story was published, she stood up to him well.

  The article listed as Ted’s “dalliances” alleged girlfriends Amanda Burden, Paige Lee Hufty, skier Susie Chaffee, and Margaret Trudeau, “among others.” Joan closed the magazine after reading the feature and walked away muttering, “Nice list…”

  October 20 marked the dedication in the Boston suburb of Waltham, Massachusetts, of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, giving Ted an opportunity to make remarks, along with President Carter, who was also a scheduled speaker. Jackie flew in from New York for the ceremony. (When President Carter kissed Jackie on the cheek as he moved through the crowd on his way to the podium, Richard Burke recalls, “She recoiled as if bitten by a snake.”) While there, Jackie enjoyed a warm reunion with Joan. Though the two women rarely saw each other because their lives had taken them in completely different directions, when they did have the occasional reunion, affection was deeply felt between them.

  “Oh my God, Joan! Just look at you,” Jackie exclaimed. “I’ve never seen you look so… so… together.”

  As Joan smiled, she reached out and embraced her sister-in-law.

  It was true; Joan had never looked better. She had lost the bloated look that had diminished her attractiveness in recent years. Her blonde hair was cut in a stylish pageboy, she had shed some weight, and hadn’t had a drink in almost six months. Jackie must have taken a certain amount of pride in Joan’s recovery, because, just a few years earlier, Joan showed up unannounced at her apartment on Fifth Avenue, needing to talk. She was torn, she said. Should she move out on her own to Boston, or stay with Ted and the children in McLean? Would she be abandoning her children? Would they hate her?

  “When I realized my drinking was becoming a real problem, I went to see Jackie,” Joan later recalled. “I’d been told that an alcoholic by nature starts to blame everything and everybody except himself. And that’s when I knew that I had to get away and have some time for myself. So Jackie and I talked about all that. I felt close to Jackie because both of us needed space to be alone.

  “I was always a person who could be alone and like it. Jackie and I were the Kennedy wives who were different that way. We treasured our privacy and, for instance, enjoyed slipping away and reading a book on the beach. I believe that private time is growth time. Although I don’t talk about this much to the children, I think I’ve provided an example that having a camaraderie and private time is equivalent to having a full life.”

  Jackie had been a bit ambivalent about the notion of Joan leaving her children. However, she also must have related to Joan’s desperation. A little more than fifteen years earlier, she had considered leaving Caroline and John with Ethel and Bobby, so distraught was she after Jack’s death. Ultimately she had decided against it. However, her situation was different from Joan’s. In time, Jackie would be able to pull herself together, whereas Joan’s alcoholism had made it impossible for her to be a good and dependable mother. Her sobriety had to come first now—which is what she had been told at Alcoholic’s Anonymous—above everything else, even her children. Because Jackie had alcoholism in her own family and had often fretted that she, too, could fall prey to it, she understood Joan’s misery.

  “Listen, you do what you have to do, for Joan,” Jackie told her favorite sister-in-law, according to what Joan later recalled to Joan Braden. “If you take care of Joan, the rest will fall into place. How many years have I been telling you that?”

  “Too many years,” Joan said, with a laugh.

  Now, just a short time later, Joan seemed like a new woman, in control and ready to face the future. “Is it true?” Jackie wanted to know. “Is Ted going to run?”

  Joan confirmed the information, saying, “We’re going to give it our best shot, anyway.”

  “Well, if Ted runs,” Jackie warned her, “you’ll have to be twice as strong as I was when Jack and I were in the White House, Joan. It’s much worse now than it was for us then,” she said, probably referring to the post-Chappaquiddick Kennedys’ world and the media’s evergrowing interest in the private lives of politicians. “It feels to me like everyone is watching,” she said. Joan had to agree.

  Jackie and Ethel were pleasant to one another at the library’s dedication, but it was clear to all observers that, even after all these years, they had never resolved the differences between them brought about by Jackie’s marriage to Aristotle Onassis. Sometimes they were thrown together, though, in situations involving their children, and for those times they were cooperative with
one another, such as when Jackie’s son John ran away from home when he was about eleven—to Hickory Hill.

  When young John had informed his mother that he was leaving, she not only told him to go but also packed a suitcase for him. As it would happen, John Jr. would be one of those rare children who would run away from home with his own Secret Service agent, John Walsh, in tow. Defiantly the youngster, suitcase in hand, walked down Fifth Avenue to the corner of 83rd Street, where he and Walsh hailed a cab. The two were driven across the Triborough Bridge to LaGuardia, where John and the agent caught a plane to Virginia. Once there, Jackie arranged for them to be picked up and taken to Hickory Hill. (After dropping John off, Walsh turned around and went back to Manhattan.) Before the boy’s arrival, Jackie had already spoken to Ethel and explained that he was having trouble in school, refused to apply himself, and said he would rather live with his cousins than hear his mother nagging him about his studies. Ethel agreed to make it as tough as possible for John at Hickory Hill.

  In just a few days John found that visiting Hickory Hill and living there were two very different things. After Bobby’s death, Ethel ran Hickory Hill like a boot camp, never letting up on her children when it came to chores—painting the house, doing the gardening, picking up after the assortment of animals. And there were always the competitive sports that John was never good at as a youngster. Baseball, football, tree-climbing—it was all more than the young prince could take. On the plus side, he could eat anything he wanted to. Ethel’s cook was instructed to prepare for the children anything they demanded, whenever they demanded it. John was used to a prearranged menu; he would ordinarily eat whatever was placed before him, or he wouldn’t eat at all. However, after four days of his favorite peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, he was on the phone begging his mother to rescue him from his banishment. He promised to study, and with the threat of all those Hickory Hill chores hanging over his head, he did his best in the future to apply himself to his schooling. “And if you don’t,” Jackie would tell him, “I’m sending you back to Aunt Ethel’s.”*