by Edward Klein
WHEN, SOME YEARS later, Americans finally awoke from their Kennedy-induced reverie, they found, like Rip Van Winkle, that they did not recognize their own country. Out of the youth rebellion, the sexual revolution, feminism, and the other protest movements of the 1960s, a new America had been born. In many ways, it was a better America. Certainly, it was a more fluid, open, and egalitarian America. But it was also a coarser America, a country beset by violence, crime, and drugs and dominated by members of an antiestablishment culture who adopted new ways of talking, acting, and dressing.
“When one could go to a shop and buy … jeans ready-made with spots and patches, cut short and unraveled at the edges, a new intention was evident,” wrote Jacques Barzun. “When young women put on an old sweater, pearls, and evening pumps together, when young men went about in suits of which the sleeves covered their hands and the legs of the trousers were trod underfoot, they made known a rejection of elegance, a denial of feminine allure, and a sympathy for the ‘disadvantaged.’ Such clothes were not cheap; their style was anti-property, anti-bourgeois; it implied siding with the poor, whose clothes are hand-me-downs in bad condition. To appear unkempt, undressed, and for perfection unwashed, is the key signature of the whole age.”16
The swift and ferocious cultural upheaval proved too much for many Americans, who blamed liberals for ruining their country. The once-solid (and conservative) South abandoned the Democrats for the Republicans, as did millions of suburbanites who were anxious to hold on to their comfortable, if increasingly quaint, version of the American Dream. Ethnic blue-collar voters, until then the backbone of the Democratic Party, were repulsed by the counterculture; many in their ranks turned into the Silent Majority and voted for Richard Nixon as president—the first of several politically cautious, fiscally conservative presidents who broke with the big-government model of the liberal welfare state.
Thus, instead of advancing their cause, Ted Kennedy and the mythmakers of Camelot inadvertently encouraged the excesses of the counterculture. They were responsible for pushing liberalism to the fringe of American political life, where its influence on policy became marginal. In the forty-six years between John F. Kennedy’s assassination and Barack Obama’s inauguration, the Democratic Party would control the United States Senate for all but thirteen years. And yet, during most of that time, the political label “liberal” would be held in disrepute, and Ted would find himself in the ideological wilderness.
To his credit, he never gave up. He never abandoned his convictions or principles. On the contrary, he became a more effective politician. His position as odd-man-out on the floor of the Senate forced him to develop legislative skills, which, in time, enabled him to achieve incremental progress toward many of his liberal goals. Like a member of another famous political family, John Quincy Adams, who served in the House of Representatives after he was defeated for a second term in the White House, Edward Kennedy “earned the respect of his bitterest foes,” and became “as great a master of parliamentary procedure as any member of Congress in history.”17
7
ON JUNE 19, 1964—one full year after President Kennedy had sent a special message to Congress, declaring passage of the Civil Rights Act as “imperative”—the United States Senate finally took up consideration of the bill. It meant the world to Ted Kennedy, who exhorted his colleagues to pass the legislation in honor of his brother’s memory. After hours of interminable wrangling over procedural details, the senators finally began voting at 7:40 P.M. As soon as the bill passed, Ted rushed from the chamber to a car that was waiting to take him to the airport. He was expected in West Springfield, Massachusetts, where the Democrats were holding their state nominating convention. Ted was running unopposed for a full Senate term, and several hundred overheated, boozed-up delegates were milling around, impatiently anticipating his imminent arrival.
But first, Ted instructed his driver to stop at Arlington National Cemetery. At the Eternal Flame in front of his brother’s gravestone, he knelt on one knee, crossed himself, and took a moment to read the words of Jack’s inaugural address, which were engraved in the stone. We do not know what he did next, but without straying too far from the known facts, we might reasonably assume that Ted informed his brother of the events that had just transpired in the United States Senate, the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the historic consummation of John F. Kennedy’s presidency.
Not long afterward, at 8:35 P.M., a twin-engine Aero Commander 680 took off from Washington’s National Airport with Senator Kennedy and three other passengers on board: Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana; Bayh’s wife, Marvella; and Ted’s legislative aide, Ed Moss. The pilot, Ed Zimny, warned Ted that there were thunderstorms all the way from New York City north to western Massachusetts, and that they were in for a rough flight. When the plane began to pitch and roll in the dense fog, Zimny suggested that he divert the plane to another airport.
“It was like flying through a black void,” Bayh said later.1
But Ted was hours behind schedule and in no mood for further delays. “Damn it,” he snapped at Zimny, “we’re late already.”2
In an act of bravado, Ted unfastened his seat belt and half stood, half crouched in the low-ceilinged plane. Moments later, the Aero Commander plowed into an orchard three miles from Barnes Municipal Airport, instantly killing the pilot and Ed Moss.
JEAN HEARD THE news on the 11:00 P.M. radio,” said Rose Kennedy. “She crossed the street [at the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port] and told Bobby, who was at home in bed, and they left immediately for Ted—without disturbing their parents. So the seventh and the eighth child were a great blessing for the ninth.”3
When Ted regained consciousness in Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton, Massachusetts, Bobby was at his bedside. Looking up at his brother, Ted said, “Is it true that you are ruthless?”4
Three vertebrae in his lower spine were fractured, one of them almost completely crushed. Two ribs were broken. His lung was punctured. His blood pressure was almost negligible. Doctors were not at all confident that he would live through the night.
After a press conference the next day, Bobby had lunch with the columnist Jimmy Breslin. “I was just thinking back in there,” he said, pointing to Ted’s room. “If my mother hadn’t had any more children than the first four [Joe, Rosemary, Kathleen, and Jack], she would have nothing now.”5
Later, Bobby went for a walk with his friend Walter Sheridan, a federal investigator whom Bobby had hired in the Justice Department to help him expose Jimmy Hoffa. “We just lay down in the grass,” Sheridan said, “and he said, ‘Somebody up there doesn’t like us.’”6
The following day, the paralyzed Joe Kennedy was wheeled into Ted’s hospital room. His six-foot-two, two-hundred-thirty-pound son had been transferred from an orthopedic stretcher called a Stryker frame to a larger Foster frame—a pipe-and-canvas-sling contraption in which he was continually rotated, like a chicken in a rotisserie, so that the force of gravity could exert pressure on different muscles of his body without, at the same time, moving his spine. His father looked first at his son’s feet, then at his face, and then at his entire body.7
“You should have seen [Joe’s] face,” said a member of the hospital staff. “His eyes were wet and pained.”8
When the doctors recommended back surgery, Joe, who could not articulate words, made his feelings unmistakably clear by moaning and groaning and storming at the doctors. He was too impatient to communicate by writing words on a pad.
“Dad doesn’t like doctors and doesn’t believe half of what they say,” Ted remarked later.9
DESPITE HID PARALYSIS and aphasia, Joe Kennedy wasted no time putting his formidable publicity machine to work on behalf of his injured son. As in the case of Jack’s health problems, Ted’s injuries were treated as an opportunity to create a positive political spin. The aim was to drape Ted in the mantle of Jack’s high-minded leadership. Newspaper stories described how such eminent Harvard professors as the economist John Kennet
h Galbraith and Jerome Wiesner, JFK’s science adviser, came to the hospital to conduct private seminars for Ted as he slowly rotated in his Foster frame. The public was treated to a peek at Ted’s highbrow reading list—a biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the collected papers of the Adams family (which claimed two presidents), and Winston Churchill’s multivolume history of World War II.10 To further the resemblance between Ted and his dead brother, Ted took up one of Jack’s favorite pastimes: painting landscapes. And like Jack, who had famously written Profiles in Courage while recuperating from back surgery, Ted was hard at work putting together a book of reminiscences, titled The Fruitful Bough, about his father.
“When we grew a little older,” Bobby wrote in the book, “we realized that [our father] wasn’t perfect, that he made mistakes, but by that time, we realized everyone did.”11
Eleven days after his accident, while he was still recovering in Cooley Dickinson Hospital, Ted received a phone call from the man who had succeeded his brother in the White House, President Lyndon Baines Johnson.
LBJ: My friend, I’m sure glad to hear your voice.
Kennedy: … I wanted to call and tell you how much we appreciate it—Joan appreciates everything you’ve done.
LBJ: I haven’t done anything, but I’m sure ready and willing.
Kennedy: You sent all those wonderful people up from the Army—[Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus] Vance did, and they made a great deal of difference and everyone’s been so kind down there and they’ve taken great care of me. Really coming along now. Making some progress.
LBJ: You got a bad break, but my mother used to tell me that things like that develop character and it’ll make you stronger when you get older, [chuckles]
Kennedy: I don’t know about that. You’re ready to trade a little of that…. That’s what I keep reading in all that mail. They say you get down on that back a little while and think and do a little suffering, you’ll be a better man.12
IN MID-DECEMBER, TED emerged from the hospital wearing a cumbersome back brace. His father’s PR campaign had succeeded: many people believed that Ted’s painful months in the Foster frame had turned him into a new and better man—someone who was mature beyond his thirty-two years. That, of course, remained to be seen. But one thing was certain: his near-death experience and miraculous recovery had turned him into a living legend.
In January 1965, when he and Bobby (who had won a Senate seat from New York) were sworn in together, the spectators in the Visitors Gallery burst into cheers. The next day, Ted was greeted on the floor of the Senate as a conquering hero.
“The junior senator from Massachusetts will be written in history as one of the great men,” said Birch Bayh, who, at the risk of his own life, had crawled back into the burning plane to pull the badly injured Ted Kennedy from the wreckage. Leverett Saltonstall, Ted’s Republican colleague from Massachusetts, said, “I have admired the courage, the morale, the patience, and the frustration he has undergone in the hospital.” And Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, who lost an arm in battle during World War II, rose to declare that Edward Moore Kennedy, “our beloved junior senator from Massachusetts,” should have his own chapter in his brother’s Profiles in Courage.
8
ON BASTILLE DAY, July 14, 1967, Joan Kennedy gave birth to her third child. (Three years earlier, she and Ted had had a stillborn baby boy, who was buried in the Kennedy plot at Holy-hood Cemetery in Brookline, Massachusetts.) The new baby, Patrick Joseph Kennedy II, was named after his great-great-grandfather, who had come to America from Ireland in 1848 and who died of consumption on November 22, 1858—105 years to the day before the assassination of John F. Kennedy.1
Ted and Joan’s Georgetown townhouse could no longer accommodate their crowded household—three children (Kara, Teddy Jr., and Patrick) under the age of eight plus a nanny and a housekeeper. After looking at existing homes, Ted decided to build a new house on a six-acre tract of land in McLean, Virginia, near his brother Bobby’s place at Hickory Hill.
For an architect, he chose John Carl Warnecke, who had designed Ted’s house in Hyannis Port, Bobby’s pool house at Hickory Hill, and President Kennedy’s gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery. Jack Warnecke was more than the unofficial Kennedy family architect; the tall, handsome, divorced architect and the recently widowed First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy had conducted a secret romance for quite some time, and had only broken it off the previous Christmas when Jackie started seeing Aristotle Onassis.2
The 12,500-square-foot house that Warnecke designed at 636 Chain Bridge Road in McLean cost more than $750,000 (nearly $5 million in today’s dollars). It had a thirty-two-foot-high living room with a magnificent view of the Potomac River and the wooded banks on its other side. Approached from the outside, the gray-shingled house with peaked roofs looked like a New England country home. Inside, it was a different story. Joan worked with society decorators Keith Irvine and Thomas Fleming, who furnished the living room with an old English mantel, an antique Turkish rug, and five sofas upholstered in yellow-and-white chintz.
“The master bedroom suite is in a wing all of its own,” reported Dorothy McCardle on the women’s page of the Sunday Washington Post. “It includes a paneled den and a very masculine bathroom for Teddy, a very feminine, rose-hued bath-dressing room next door for Joan, and a huge bedroom with its own fireplace. The bedroom walls are covered with white silk moiré.”3
BY THE TIME the house was completed, it was the spring of 1968, and Ted was caught up in a fierce family debate over whether Bobby should follow the lead of Senator Eugene McCarthy, a hero of the anti-Vietnam War movement, and challenge President Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic nomination. Ted was initially opposed to the idea. And he believed that if his father were still at the top of his game, and could communicate, he would advise, “Don’t do it.”4 But once President Johnson took himself out of contention, Ted changed his mind. He tried to talk Eugene McCarthy into withdrawing from the race in favor of Bobby. And when that did not work, Ted joined his brother-in-law Steve Smith as one of Bobby’s campaign managers.
From then on, Ted was absorbed by his brother’s campaign. Bobby won the Indiana primary with 42 percent of the vote to 27 percent for McCarthy. The same day, Bobby beat Vice President Hubert Humphrey, 2 to 1, in the District of Columbia primary. A week later, Bobby won in Nebraska. Then it was on to Oregon, where Bobby suffered a stunning defeat at the hands of McCarthy’s legions of antiwar supporters. Next up was California, a must-win state for Bobby if he was going to convince party leaders that he was a viable candidate in the fall.
Under all this pressure, Ted was drinking heavily again. Stories of his escapades with women on the campaign trail made their way back to his home at 636 Chain Bridge Road and to Joan Kennedy. It turned out that Ted’s near-death experience in the plane crash and his months of painful recuperation had not, as widely advertised, turned him into a new man.
None of this came as a surprise to Joan. Two or three years before, she had read in Women’s Wear Daily that Ted was having an affair with Amanda Burden, an ethereal blond socialite, who had recently married Carter Burden, a multimillionaire descendant of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt. “It was quite well known that [Ted] was having an affair with a married woman,” Joan later said. “At that point, Rose Kennedy came up to me [in Palm Beach] and said, ‘My dear, you can’t believe any of these things you are reading. Women chase after politicians.’”5
But Joan found it impossible to take Rose’s advice. In despair, she turned more and more to drink. She had probably inherited a genetic predisposition to alcoholism from her parents, and people began to notice that she was often unsteady on her feet. Sometimes she stumbled and fell. Her breath often smelled of alcohol. She saw a psychiatrist, who prescribed tranquilizers.6
“It wasn’t my personality to make a lot of noise,” Joan said. “Or to yell or scream or do anything. My personality was more shy and retiring. And so rather than get mad or ask questions concerning the rumors about
Ted and his girlfriends, or really stand up for myself at all, it was easier for me to just go and have a few drinks and calm myself down as if I weren’t hurt or angry. I didn’t know how to deal with it. And unfortunately, I found out that alcohol could sedate me. So I didn’t care as much. And things didn’t hurt so much.”7
9
THAT WAS A rough affair, that rally,” said David Burke, Senator Ted Kennedy’s right-hand man, recalling a June 1968 campaign event in San Francisco that featured Ted as the main speaker. “There were a lot of unfamiliar faces, a lot of people who were pushing and shoving…. There was no sense of control. And people kept yelling and screaming things that had nothing to do with Robert Kennedy’s victory [in that day’s California Democratic primary], and I felt frankly uncomfortable for Edward Kennedy. I told him we ought to get out of there, and we did as soon as possible.
“We drove back to the Fairmont [Hotel],” Burke continued, “and went to our suite up there on the fourth floor, and of course the first thing we did was turn on the television set in the living room to get the latest [primary voting] results and see what was happening down there in LA. The instant the set lit up we heard someone say there’s been a shooting at the rally. I assumed, and I think Edward Kennedy assumed, that the rally they were talking about was the one we had just left….
“As we were listening, we saw Steve Smith on the screen asking people, over and over, to be calm and be quiet and leave the auditorium. We knew, of course, that he hadn’t been at our rally. This was Los Angeles, and there had been a shooting down there.
