Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died (11 page)

“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 felt 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

T
ED 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

T
ED’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

T
HAT 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 silk 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.”

T
HE 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.”
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