Ted Kennedy

by Edward Klein

  “And then there was the sudden, horrible dawning realization that Robert Kennedy had been shot.

  “The senator didn’t say anything. There was no outcry. The one reaction I remember most vividly was that there was no reaction at all.

  “Ted Kennedy stood in the middle of the living room, staring at the screen. I stood beside him, unable to say anything. I heard him say, ‘We have to get down there.’ That was all. We just stood there, the two of us, staring at the screen, watching this thing unfold. I don’t know how long we stood there; it may have been thirty seconds or it could have been three to ten minutes. We were just frozen there, because we were learning things that were more horrible all the time.

  “Finally, the senator spoke. ‘I want to go to Los Angeles.’”1

  AT THE HOSPITAL of the Good Samaritan in Los Angeles, Ted was greeted by the members of his brother’s inner circle—Bobby’s wife, Ethel, who was two months pregnant with her eleventh child; press secretary Pierre Salinger; speechwriter Ted Sorensen; singer Andy Williams; and aide Edwin Guthman. At the end of a long hallway, Ted entered Bobby’s hospital room. His brother lay on the bed, a bullet in his brain. Surgeons had tried to save him, but to no avail. A priest was called to administer the last rites, and then Bobby was gone.

  After several minutes alone with his dead brother, Ted opened the door, and orderlies came in and lifted the corpse onto a stretcher and began strapping it down. As they finished their task, Ted went into the bathroom.

  “Ted leaning over the washbasin, his hands clutching the sides, his head bowed,” recalled one of Bobby’s aides. “I never expect, for the rest of my life, to see more agony on anyone’s face. There are no English words to describe it.”2

  Ted and his best friend, John Tunney, who was now a congressman from California, accompanied the gurney to an elevator for the ride down to the hospital’s autopsy room. The elevator stopped at a lower floor, and Allard Lowenstein, a liberal activist who had initially backed Eugene McCarthy against Robert Kennedy in the primaries, got on.

  “I felt I shouldn’t be there,” recalled Lowenstein, who had stuck with Eugene McCarthy even though his sympathies were with Bobby. “But there was no way I could get off, nothing I could do.” As the elevator reached the basement and Bobby’s body was wheeled off, Lowenstein turned to Ted Kennedy and said, “Now that Bobby’s gone, you’re all we’ve got…. Take the leadership.”3

  SEVERAL DAYS LATER, Ted found himself standing in front of an overflow crowd in New York City’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, delivering his brother’s eulogy: “My brother need not be idealized, nor enlarged beyond what he was in life. He should be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it. Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today pray that what he was to us, and what he wished for others, will someday come to pass for all the world.”4

  Ted was inconsolable. Now he was truly alone, the last surviving son of his father’s dynastic schemes, the last surviving father of his brothers’ children, the last surviving hope of many who were knocking insistently on the door of Opportunity—the blacks, the poor, the women, and the young.

  WHEN HE BURIED his brother under a Japanese magnolia tree in Lot 45-A, Section 30 of Arlington Cemetery, not far from the grave of President Kennedy, Ted Kennedy was thirty-six years old, just one year over the constitutionally imposed age for the presidency. The White House had been his father’s dream and his brothers’ dream, but it had never been his dream.

  “Never, never did Teddy want the job [of president], no matter what he said publicly,” insisted his friend Senator George Smathers of Florida. “Some politicians need recognition, some thrive on being in a more important position. It’s food for them. Ted Kennedy grew up with power all around him…. He didn’t need more power. He didn’t need to be a bigger shot than what he already was.”5

  Nonetheless, his father had once told him, “If there is a piece of cake on the plate, take it! Eat it.” And so, despite all his reservations, Ted began his long, uncertain, conflicted journey in pursuit of the presidency—a pursuit that would last for the next twenty years.

  A draft-Ted movement began immediately. Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley, who controlled the powerful Illinois delegation, and who intended to play the role of kingmaker at the Democratic National Convention that summer in the Windy City, launched a campaign to draft Ted for the number-two spot on Hubert Humphrey’s presidential ticket. Ted told Mayor Daley that he had no interest in the vice presidency. Next, Larry O’Brien—Jack’s old campaign manager, who was now working for Humphrey—called Ted. “Are you available to run with Hubert?” he asked. “No” came the answer from Ted, who said he was busy sailing.

  But then Ted said something that threw the Democratic Party into a state of confusion. In his first public appearance since Bobby’s assassination, he gave a speech at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, that was covered by all the major television networks. “There is no safety in hiding,” he declared. “Not for me; not for any of us here today; and not for our children, who will inherit the world we make for them…. Like my brothers before me, I pick up the fallen standard….”6

  The speech was a bombshell. “Lyndon Johnson heard it, and decided Ted was planning a coup [at the convention],” wrote the Times’ Adam Clymer. “Daley heard it, and called to raise the idea of Ted running for President, not Vice President as he had urged before.”7

  In late August, Steve Smith—the tough-minded Kennedy brother-in-law who ran the family’s finances and its political campaigns—told R. W. “Johnny” Apple of the New York Times, “No one is going to find a shred of evidence that the senator is working for the nomination.” At the same time, however, Smith confided to friends that Ted did not have to work for the nomination; it was his for the asking. And Smith was not alone in that view. The California delegation was ready to bolt for Ted. Senator Russell Long had lined up the Louisiana delegation behind Ted. And William vanden Heuvel, who had been Bobby’s assistant at the Justice Department, was so sure that Ted could win the nomination that he phoned him in Hyannis Port and urged him to declare his availability.

  “You know,” vanden Heuvel said, “this is a long hill, the presidency. It’s a hard hill to climb, and all I’m saying to you, and I’m not trying to persuade you, is that the nomination in my judgment is yours, if you’re willing to be available to it. And I’m not pressuring you in any way, but it will probably be a long time before we’re ever this far up the hill again.”8

  But again, the answer from Ted was the same firm “No.” His friends and political associates were confused. Ted was not talking like a Kennedy. Had he forgotten Joe Kennedy’s First Commandment: “If there’s a piece of cake on the table, take it!”?

  Ted had his reasons for not wanting to run. Chief among them, he said, was that “this was Bobby’s year.”9 “The remark,” wrote the New York Times’ William Honan, “alludes to an interesting fact about the relationships in the Kennedy family; namely, that although his brothers were competitive with each other, they also accepted their places in a rigid hierarchy. The elder’s ‘rightful’ place always was on top. This meant Ted could compete against Bobby vigorously, but he could not triumph over his older brother without feeling guilt for having upset the hierarchy, and when this situation arose Ted would immediately set about to restore Bobby’s position of supremacy by making disparaging jokes about himself or otherwise permitting Bobby to get on top again.

  “When Bobby was killed,” Honan continued, “Ted felt not just grief, but guilt—guilt for having triumphed over (by surviving) his older brother, a guilt that could not be assuaged by putting Bobby back up where he had been. The fact that Ted was then offered the prize his brother was seeking, and been cheated of by an assassin, only compounded his guilt feelings.”10

  After the Democratic Convention nominated the ticket of Hubert Humphrey for president and Edmund Muskie for vice president, Ted fel
t he owed it to the party to assist in the presidential campaign. “Accordingly, he wanted to send two emissaries to the candidates,” said Lester Hyman, a trusted Kennedy operative from Massachusetts. “He had chosen Kenny O’Donnell [President Kennedy’s chief of staff] and me for the assignments. He gave me a choice between Humphrey and Muskie. Knowing how notorious Hubert was for talking and talking and talking, with total disregard for schedules, often late into the night, I decided that it would be less frustrating for me to go with Muskie, although I never had met the man. I almost immediately packed my bags and set off on a new adventure as the Kennedy representative to the Muskie campaign.”11

  In the meantime, Ted sat down for a wide-ranging interview with Warren Rogers of Look magazine and expanded on his reasons for resisting a draft: “How could I conscientiously combat allegations by Nixon—and we had to anticipate he would make them—that I was too young, that I had no record in public life strong enough to recommend me for the high office of President, and that perhaps I was trying to trade on my brother’s name.”12

  Implied but not stated: Ted Kennedy planned to use the next four years to create a record in the United States Senate that would make him eligible for the office of president.

  PART TWO

  “Something Terrible Is

  Going to Happen”

  10

  TED WAS NOT the only one looking ahead to 1972. The voice of the Establishment, the New York Times, was running stories that cast Ted Kennedy as Richard Nixon’s all-but-inevitable opponent the next time around.1 In fact, the editors of the Times were so certain that Ted would challenge Nixon in 1972—and become a prime target for assassination—that they updated his obituary and set it in galley proofs.

  Ted professed not to care; he was not afraid to die. “If someone’s going to blow my head off,” he said, “[I want] just one swing at him.”2 But that was his bravado talking. He lived with the fear that he would be the next Kennedy brother to go.

  The weight of responsibility was more than Ted could bear. It paralyzed him. A month after Bobby’s assassination, he got into his car in McLean, Virginia, and drove to the Capitol with the intention of returning to his desk on the floor of the Senate. But he could not get out of the car, and he drove home. He spent time at his house on Squaw Island with Joan and their three children, Kara, Teddy Jr., and Patrick. But their father hardly said a word to them; he walked right past them as though they didn’t exist. He sought solace in the sea, sailing a rented yawl all the way up to Maine. He did not bathe; he did not shave; he hardly ate. When he came back to Hyannis Port, he looked in on his parents.

  “Dad rose up in his chair, his eyes wide, pointing a finger at me….” Ted said. “I didn’t know what was wrong—the old sweater I was wearing, or something. I went over to kiss him, and he held up his hand and put it on my chin. It wasn’t much of a beard, a couple of weeks or so. But I hadn’t had a haircut the whole time. My mother threatened to shave off the beard herself right there, but I did it. We all had a good laugh afterward, and, seeing my father laugh like that at last, my mother said, ‘I wish we could do this every day.’”3

  Ted thought about quitting politics. Asked by Joe Mohbat of the Associated Press whether he could stand up to party demands that he run against Richard Nixon in 1972, Ted replied: “Damn right I could, in an instant. I honestly don’t feel any obligations to pick this one up…. [Campaign events] pretty much turn me off now. When I first came into this in 1962, it was really good, easy. But the kicks aren’t…. I mean, meeting Molly Somebody and hearing about her being Miss Something…. What’s it all for? I used to love it. But the fun began to go out of it after 1963, and then, after the thing with Bobby, well….”4

  TED’S COMPULSIVE WOMANIZING and drinking were subjects of persistent gossip on Capitol Hill. Many of his colleagues expressed concern that Ted was headed for a crack-up. But back then, reporters did not write about such intimate personal matters; they believed public figures should be judged solely on the substance of their performance, not on the morality or immorality of their personal lives.

  A particularly revealing—and unreported—incident occurred during a trip that Ted took in April 1969 with a group of fellow senators to Alaska. The purpose of the trip was to gather facts about the conditions of impoverished Indians, Eskimos, and Aleuts. On the way home, Ted began drinking from Bobby’s silver hip flask. “First time I’ve used it,” he told writer Brock Brower. He soon became wildly drunk and started running up and down the aisles of the plane, shouting “Es-ki-mo Power!” Aides tried to quiet him down, but he would not listen. “They’re going to shoot my ass off the way they shot Bobby,” he said. “They’re going to shoot my ass off the way they shot Bobby….”5

  At Dulles Airport, a large crowd had gathered to welcome the senatorial delegation home. Joan was there with all three of her children.

  “We started to get ourselves together,” recalled one of the journalists. “I looked out and everybody was there all right, the TV cameras, the whole world. I left behind Kennedy and he did look awful, his eyes were like oysters on the half shell. Joan saw him and her jaw dropped four feet. I remember thinking, That’s all for you, buddy. Then little Patrick rushed over to him, and Kennedy picked the little boy up and kissed him, and Patrick’s head blocked off the cameras, and Kennedy was home free. The kid stole the show.”

  “John Lindsay at Newsweek … called me up after that trip,” recalled Lester Hyman, a Kennedy family friend. “And he said, ‘I got to tell you something. Your friend Ted Kennedy is in a lot of trouble psychologically.’ And he told me about the drunken incident. And [Lindsay] said [Ted] was just totally out of control, and he said … ‘I really believe … he just can’t handle things right now.’ And he added, ‘There’s something wrong, and if [Ted] doesn’t do something about it, I believe something terrible is going to happen to him.’”6

  11

  THAT SUMMER, JOHN Lindsay’s prediction came true. On July 20, 1969, the major television networks interrupted their live coverage of astronaut Neil Armstrong’s scheduled Moonwalk to deliver a news bulletin. The day before, Edward Kennedy had been involved in an automobile accident on a remote island off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. The senator had survived when his car plunged off a bridge into the water below, but a young woman riding in his car had died.

  The young woman’s name was Mary Jo Kopechne. She was one of the so-called Boiler Room girls who had worked as an aide to Senator Robert Kennedy in his presidential campaign. Despite their affectionate if somewhat condescending nickname, the Boiler Room girls were women of considerable substance who had demonstrated an interest in politics. Chosen for their brains and tough-mindedness, they acted as the campaign’s eyes and ears, compiling intelligence reports, keeping track of primary delegates in key states, and negotiating deals on behalf of the candidate.

  Of all the Boiler Room girls, Mary Jo Kopechne was the one who least resembled the picture of a brash political operative. A pretty ash blonde with a slight build (she weighed a hundred and ten pounds), she had the prim manner of a devout Catholic schoolgirl. For a time, she had considered becoming a nun. She enrolled in Caldwell College for women, a school run by the friars, nuns, and sisters of the Dominican Order. After she graduated with a degree in business administration, she moved to Montgomery, Alabama, to teach impoverished black children at the Montgomery Catholic High School. But eventually, her dedication to social and political activism led her to Washington, D.C., where she ended up working for Robert Kennedy.

  “Mary Jo Kopechne was among the most highly regarded [of Bobby Kennedy’s aides],” wrote Burton Hersh, a writer who was closer to the Kennedys than most journalists. “She herself worked exhaustively with Bob’s staff, spent one whole night typing his decisive breakaway Vietnam speech at Hickory Hill, traveled on his behalf—they knew each other well enough to share Kennedy-style ‘in’ jokes, banked, like so many Kennedy jokes, off such drolleries as those of a prominent Louisiana politico whose s
ilk suits and shirts and alligator shoes left both of them giggling.”1

  Though all of the Boiler Room girls were deeply committed to Bobby’s presidential crusade, none showed greater passion than Mary Jo. While the other women occasionally took time off to be with their boyfriends, Mary Jo, who was approaching her twenty-ninth birthday, appeared to live a celibate life. After her death, her parents would claim that Mary Jo had been planning to marry a member of the Foreign Service. But that statement came as news to her friends. As far as they could tell, Mary Jo had never had a serious relationship. If she was ever in love with a man, it was Bobby Kennedy—but only in a platonic way.

  “After Bob died, there was a great deal of sadness cleaning out his headquarters,” said Joey Gargan, a cousin and boyhood chum of Ted Kennedy’s who had worked on Bobby’s campaign. “The girls who worked so hard were devastated, like all of us were. [Mary Jo] was very hurt by Bobby’s assassination, deeply wounded.”2

  That first summer after Bobby’s assassination, Joey Gargan invited Mary Jo and eleven other Boiler Room girls to Hyannis Port to give them a “break in this sad ordeal.” For three days, they swam and sailed and reminisced about Bobby. Ted Kennedy was too distraught to attend, though Joan Kennedy put in an appearance. The women had such a good time that, a year later, Joey asked Ted if they could repeat the Boiler Room girls’ reunion during the 1969 Edgartown Regatta.

  “Gee,” Ted said, according to Joey Gargan, “that would be lots of fun. Let’s do it.”

  THE WEEKEND OF Chappaquiddick, [Ted] and I flew up to Boston, and then down to the Cape together,” said Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, who had replaced John F. Kennedy in the House of Representatives when Kennedy moved over to the Senate. Years later, O’Neill recalled that on the shuttle to Boston, Ted had talked about personal matters, including the Edgartown Regatta, in which he planned to race his brother Jack’s boat, the Victura. He mentioned to Tip that Joey Gargan was urging him to go to a party for the Boiler Room girls, and that he, Ted, did not want to go, but felt obliged to show the flag. And then, seemingly out of nowhere, Ted turned to Tip and said: “Jeez, I’ve never been so tired in my life.”3