Ted Kennedy

by Edward Klein

  As a result, Ted had many admirers on the Republican side of the aisle. “Ted always keeps his word,” said Senator John McCain. “This is essential in a small group of people like the Senate. There is no bullshit with Ted. You know exactly where he is coming from. He does what he says he will do. He is a great listener in a body of poor listeners. This makes it easy to deal with him. Look, I’ve had my fights with him. We disagree on a lot of things. But Ted doesn’t have a mean bone in his body. He likes people. And he doesn’t hold a grudge.”12

  Second, Ted did a lot of favors, big and small. In 1998, Senator Trent Lott, then the Republican leader of the Senate, sent Ted a handwritten note, which Ted framed and hung in his office. “Your thoughtfulness truly amazes me,” Lott wrote. “First the print from Cape Cod. Then the special edition of Profiles in Courage. I brought it home and reread it. What an inspiration! Thank you, my friend, for your many courtesies. If the world only knew.”13

  Late one night, Orrin Hatch, the conservative Republican from Utah, came upon Ted in the Capitol after Ted was already three sheets to the wind.

  “Ted,” Hatch said, “I’ve got a favor to ask.”

  “Done!” Ted said, throwing his arm around Hatch.

  “No, hear me out,” Hatch said. “You remember my aide, Frank Madsen….”

  “Great fellow! Great fellow!”

  “He’s now in Boston….”

  “My hometown! My hometown!”

  Hatch then asked his favor: Would Ted join him in speaking to two hundred young Mormon missionaries at Boston’s Faneuil Hall? Ted instantly agreed, and Hatch had his office draw up a memo. The next day, Ted called Hatch.

  “Orrin,” he said, “what else did I agree to?”

  Several weeks later, Ted Kennedy stood in front of an audience of young Mormons in Faneuil Hall. He had kept his promise.14

  YET ANOTHER IMPORTANT key to Ted’s success as a senator was his staff, which numbered more than one hundred, and was by far the largest on Capitol Hill. Like his father and his brother Jack before him, Ted hired the best and brightest assistants, even if he had to pay some of them out of his own pocket.

  “Other Senate offices aspire to run the same kind of political operation, but they don’t have the same Prussian precision that Kennedy’s staff does,” remarked an aide who had worked for three senators.15

  “Kennedy uses staff people the way Pony Express riders used horses: Ride ’em hard and then leap to another horse,” said Thomas M. Rollins, former staff director of Kennedy’s Labor Committee. “He’s a genius at managing people.”16

  Ted was known for his ability to absorb a prodigious amount of information in a short period of time. When he left the office at the end of the day, he was always accompanied by “The Bag,” which contained his homework for the evening. “Material is sorted into four folders: Must Do, which includes staff memos—usually one page, single-spaced—on the following day’s activities; Invitations; Signature Needed; selected Mail and Other Reading,” wrote the Washington Post’s Rick Atkinson. “In the morning, Kennedy hands The Bag to a secretary, who parcels out memos and other documents to the appropriate staffers. Scribbled in the margins are the senator’s notations and marching orders, usually terse and barely legible: ‘see me’ or ‘let’s talk’ or ‘o.k.’ or, if something displeases him, ‘ugh!’”17

  * Two years later, the Catholic Church granted Ted an annulment of his marriage to Joan, declaring that marriage to be null and void. Joan did not contest the annulment decree; she agreed that Ted had never intended to honor his marriage vow to be faithful.

  PART FIVE

  “A Master Legislator”

  18

  IN 1996, FOLLOWING two years of bitter haggling, Joan announced that she and Ted had reached a revised divorce settlement. Under this agreement, she didn’t receive any additional funds. But, she added rather cryptically, she was “now protected in the event of Senator Kennedy’s death.”1 Some people interpreted this to mean that Joan would continue to receive alimony payments even if Ted’s death preceded hers.

  After several more spectacular mishaps, Breathalyzer tests, court-ordered probation, and confinements for alcohol abuse at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, Joan’s children decided to take more drastic legal measures. In this, they were encouraged by their father and Vicki, who felt that Joan got kid-glove treatment from everyone because of her frail condition. Kara, Teddy Jr., and Patrick sought—and were granted—legal guardianship of their mother’s medical treatment and supervision over her daily affairs.

  Judge Robert Terry ruled that Joan was “incapable of taking care of herself by reason of mental illness.” The exact nature of her illness was not revealed, but according to a family friend, it referred to Joan’s bipolar disorder and depression. “The children are there for her as much as they can be, but she has no husband and no significant other, and she’s someone who really needs someone to be with her,” said the friend.2

  “My brother, sister, and I love our mother very much,” Patrick said. “She has done so much for us throughout our lives, and we will take whatever steps necessary to ensure she gets the medical treatment and care she needs and deserves…. These decisions are never easy, and in our case, all too early in our mother’s life.”

  Joan was sixty-eight years old when Teddy Jr. was chosen by his siblings to be their mother’s legal guardian.

  AS TED KENNEDY approached his seventieth birthday, he began to think more and more about his family’s legacy. He had high hopes that his nephew John F. Kennedy Jr. would follow in his footsteps and be the one to fulfill the promise of a Kennedy Restoration. Ted believed that, of the thirty Kennedy cousins in John’s generation, only JFK Jr. had the charisma to go all the way to the White House. Thus, in the summer of 1999, Ted met with JFK Jr., who was thirty-eight years old, to discuss his entry into political life. It was Ted’s strongly held view that JFK Jr. should set his cap for the New York governor’s race in 2002. New York was a solid Democratic state, and the capital of Albany, with its easy access to the financial makers and shakers of Wall Street, would be an ideal launching pad for the presidency.

  JFK Jr. was attracted by his uncle’s proposition. But he had a serious problem. His marriage to Carolyn Bessette was on the rocks, and divorce seemed a virtual certainty. The brutal publicity stemming from a divorce, as Ted knew from bitter personal experience, was harmful to a political career, and so Ted decided to intervene to save his nephew’s marriage.

  “New York’s archbishop, John Cardinal O’Connor, loved being in the limelight and dealing with important people,” said an associate. “At the Kennedy family’s request, he got involved and tried to save John’s marriage. He acted as a marital mediator with John and Carolyn.”

  But the cardinal was too late. For on July 16, 1999, John F. Kennedy Jr., along with Carolyn and her sister, Lauren Bessette, took off from a small field in New Jersey after dark in John’s Piper Saratoga high-performance plane to attend a wedding on Martha’s Vineyard. Within minutes, they disappeared into the roiling fog over Long Island Sound. That was Friday. On Monday, July 19, 1999, the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration’s vessel Rude located the fragments of John’s plane off the coast of the Vineyard.

  “The divers went in and recovered the human remains,” Captain Burt Marsh, the U.S. Navy’s supervisor of diving and salvage, told the author of this book. “It took a couple of hours. You can never play down the impact of recovering remains under circumstances like this. No diver likes that idea. It’s not their favorite thing.”3

  The retrieval of JFK Jr.’s body—thirty years to the day since Ted Kennedy had driven his car off the bridge on Chappaquiddick Island—revived talk of a Kennedy Curse. It was a shattering experience for John’s friends, relatives, and admirers, and the entire country was plunged into a period of mourning. Less noticeable, John’s tragic death altered the basic dynamics within the Kennedy family.

  To begin with, there was a radical change in the
relative wealth of family members. In the 1950s, Joseph P. Kennedy had been listed by Fortune as the ninth wealthiest person in America; in today’s dollars, he was a billionaire. By the 1990s, however, Forbes reported that the Kennedy family “barely qualifies for the Forbes Four Hundred,” the magazine’s list of the richest Americans. Joe’s children—Jean, Eunice, Patricia, and Ted—were worth about $30 million each; their children—the so-called Kennedy cousins—were worth far less.4

  But upon the death of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in May 1994, Caroline and John had shared equally in a vast inheritance. This included their mother’s fortune (worth an estimated $70 million); Jackie’s 366-acre oceanside property on Martha’s Vineyard ($50 million); President Kennedy’s share of the family trust created by Joe Kennedy ($30 million); their father’s Hyannis Port house ($3 million); the proceeds from the family’s sale of the Chicago Merchandise Mart and other related properties ($76 million); and the profits from two auctions of family artwork, furniture, and jewelry ($40 million).5

  At the time of JFK Jr.’s death, he and Caroline were each worth more than $100 million. Caroline and her three children—Rose, Tatiana, and John—were the prime beneficiaries of JFK Jr.’s estate, which effectively doubled Caroline’s net worth to more than $200 million. Now, suddenly, Caroline was not only the sole surviving member of Camelot’s First Family; she was also by far the richest Kennedy cousin. Her rank in the ambitious and competitive Kennedy clan soared.

  Ted had always been crazy about Caroline. And Caroline reciprocated his feelings. It was Uncle Teddy who had walked Caroline down the aisle at her wedding to Edwin Schlossberg, a designer of interactive museum exhibitions, which was held at the Kennedy Compound in 1986. “My brother Jack is here tonight,” Ted said at the wedding reception. “He would be so proud of his daughter. He loved her so much.” And it was Uncle Teddy who had taken care of the arrangements for JFK Jr.’s cremation and burial at sea, and his funeral, sparing Caroline those gruesome tasks.

  Following that funeral, Ted seemed to treat Caroline differently than he did other members of the family. At first, the change was almost imperceptible. But gradually it became apparent that Ted was transferring his political dreams for JFK Jr. to Caroline. When it came to public exposure, Caroline resembled her mother, who had shunned the spotlight. Given Caroline’s shy and reclusive nature, she was at first naturally reluctant to pick up the torch dropped by her brother. And yet, she was aware that if she didn’t claim the flame, some other Kennedy cousin would step forward and try to take her beloved brother’s place.

  19

  IN JUNE 2001, the Senate was embroiled in one of the biggest health-care debates in its history. At stake was the Bipartisan Patient Protection Act. The conservative version capped punitive damages at $500,000 in federal court. The liberal version, which was supported by Ted Kennedy, John Edwards, and John McCain, capped damages at ten times that amount—$5 million.

  President George W. Bush threatened to veto the Kennedy-Edwards-McCain bill if it landed on his desk.

  “The way Ted handled this impasse explains why he is called the Lion of the Senate,” said a former White House aide. “Ted invited Josh Bolten, the White House deputy chief of staff; Nicholas Calio, the president’s assistant for legislative affairs; and John McCain to his house in the Sheridan-Kalorama neighborhood in D.C. When Ted Kennedy invites you to his house, you go, not because he’s a Kennedy, but because he’s earned your respect for successfully coauthoring so much legislation with both Democrats and Republicans.

  “It was all very informal,” this person continued. “Ted greeted us at the door. We sat around the living room. There were only principals, no staff, because Ted knew that staff always takes a hard-core position; they’re interested in certain predetermined outcomes. But Ted isn’t that way. His rhetoric can be fiery, but he uses it to give him cover in coming to a compromise. And that’s what he did that day.”1

  The Senate approved the slightly watered-down Kennedy-Edwards-McCain bill by a vote of 59 to 36, which, thanks to the recent powwow at his home, Ted felt confident President Bush would sign. But he was in for a rude disappointment. The House of Representatives passed a more conservative version, which could not be reconciled in conference with the Senate version.

  And so, no bill was ever sent to the president. To a nonpolitician, the outcome could be seen as a loss for Ted Kennedy. But that was not the way it was interpreted by his Senate colleagues. They knew that he had reached across the great divide of party and ideology, that he had not burned any bridges, that he would live to fight another day, and that—what was most important in the halls of the Senate—he had won everyone’s respect.

  “He’s a legislator’s legislator,” said Senator Jon Kyl, a staunch conservative Republican from Arizona. “At the end of the day, he wants to legislate, he understands how, and he understands compromise.”2

  Learning to settle for half a loaf, Ted had compiled a legislative record unsurpassed by any living senator. Among the scores of bills bearing his name or imprint, he could take credit for the Civil Rights Act of 1964; the Voting Rights Act of 1965; the expansion of the voting franchise to eighteen-year-olds; the 1997 Kennedy-Hatch law providing health insurance to children; the 1982 Voting Rights Act extension; the 1996 Kennedy-Kassebaum bill, which made health insurance portable for workers; the 1998 law that allocated billions for AIDS testing, treatment, and research; the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act; the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act; and the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act.

  How did Ted evaluate his own record? What did he think of the comparisons that some made between him and the Senate greats of the past—Calhoun, Clay, and Webster?

  “I’m finally hitting my stride,” he said in his typical self-effacing manner.3

  The historian Michael Beschloss put it more elegantly during a ceremony in the caucus room of the Russell Senate Office Building, where JFK had announced in 1960 that he’d be a candidate for president.

  “I don’t need to tell anyone in this room that if you had to choose one of the great historical figures in the U.S. Senate in the past two centuries, Edward Kennedy would be at the top of the list…. I often think of President Kennedy, who in the 1950s had to choose some of the great Senators whose portraits would be painted on a wall here on Capitol Hill. I think that if he were to do that today, his brother would be on that wall as a master legislator….

  “If you wanted to write the history of America over the last seventy years, you couldn’t do better than to study Edward Kennedy’s life,” Beschloss continued. “Oftentimes the presidency gets more attention than many Senators who have served, and when you have a Senator who has served as Edward Kennedy has served for [more than forty] years, it’s a very good example of the fact that … a Senator who makes that much impact can do more to change American history than some presidents of the United States.”4

  · · ·

  AS HE GREW in political stature, Ted cut back on his drinking and dissociated himself from some of the people he had run with in his salad days. However, there was one person from the past whom he could not ignore: his ex-wife Joan. In the early-morning hours of Tuesday, March 29, 2005, Patrick Kennedy was roused from sleep by a call from his brother, Teddy. Their mother had taken a serious fall. She had been found bleeding on a Beacon Street sidewalk. She was in the hospital with a concussion and a broken shoulder.5

  Over the next few days, Patrick learned the sad truth about his mother. She had stopped going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and had been secretly guzzling mouthwash and vanilla extract. Doctors told Patrick that his mother’s drinking had inflicted so much damage on her kidneys that she might need dialysis to stay alive.6

  “You want to make sure there’s someone there for her all the time,” Patrick said, “but at the same time you don’t want to encroach on her privacy too much. When things like this happen, it makes you feel as though maybe you should have done more to make sure there’s someone with her 24/7, and perh
aps that might become necessary.”7

  Two days later, Patrick, a six-term Democratic congressman from Rhode Island, announced that he would not follow his father into the Senate. He was dropping plans to challenge Senator Lincoln Chaffee, a Republican, in 2006. “My family means everything to me,” Patrick said.

  “The ongoing situation that is occurring with his mother has really taken a personal toll on Patrick,” said Anthony Marcella, Patrick’s former chief of staff. “It has been personally very painful to him. Not only seeing her suffer from this terrible illness, but to do it in such a public way is really tearing him apart.”

  Even then, however, Patrick and his siblings might have left well enough alone if they hadn’t discovered that their mother had secretly transferred the Squaw Island house out of her name and into a trust controlled by her second cousin, Webster Janssen, a person her children didn’t know. Janssen had asked Cotton Real Estate of Hyannis to put the house on the market for $6,495,000.

  Since their father’s marriage to Vicki, the children hadn’t felt welcome in the Big House. They considered the Squaw Island house to be their home as much as it was their mother’s. And so, the children took their mother to court, and an acrimonious battle ensued for control of the house. A trial date was set for June 13, 2005, in Barnstable Probate and Family Court to hear the Kennedy v. Kennedy lawsuit.

  “I think they are mean-spirited and vindictive,” said Webster Janssen, referring to Joan’s children. “And they should get on with their lives and stop badgering poor Joan…. She’s sort of living under house arrest most of the time.”8

  “Basically,” Teddy Jr. replied, “my mother’s taking it out on us by trying to sell the house.”9