Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died (17 page)

“Say what you will about Ted being self-absorbed, he was a devoted father,” remarked a longtime family friend and political supporter who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Ted told me later that he felt a chill when the governess told him that Teddy had a
pain that wouldn’t go away. It wasn’t like Teddy to complain. Ted looked at his son’s leg as he lay stretched out on his bed, and discovered a rather large, hard lump on the underside near his knee. It was unlike anything he had seen, and it set off alarms.”
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Ted took his son to Georgetown University Hospital for X-rays. They showed that the boy had a tumor in the bone of his right leg. A biopsy was performed, and, according to one of the doctors, it revealed that the tumor was a chondrosarcoma, a cancer of the ligament, which was less deadly than an osteosarcoma, or primary bone cancer. Nonetheless, Teddy’s doctors were concerned that the cancer might have spread, and they recommended that his leg be immediately amputated above the knee joint.

Ted called Joan, who flew back from Switzerland. Husband and wife were together when they broke the news to young Teddy that his right leg would have to come off. In tears, Teddy wanted to know whether he was going to die. No, no, his father assured him. With an artificial leg, Teddy would be as good as ever. He’d be able to sail and ski.

“Ted was shattered,” said a friend. “Teddy Junior was actually comforting his father. The day after the surgery I came by Georgetown Hospital and gave Teddy an astronomy game from FAO Schwarz. It was about ten o’clock in the morning when Ted and Joan arrived. She had a scarf over her head but looked disheveled, which I at first thought part of her grief. But when I greeted them it was obvious she was very drunk. Her words were slurred and she couldn’t walk straight without Ted’s assistance. [Joan may have been on tranquilizers, which would have also explained her slurred speech and unsteady gait.]

“Obviously it added to Ted’s concern. But mostly I felt the boy would feel very bad seeing his mother in that condition. Nevertheless she went in and visited him. Rose was pacing back and forth
outside his room, praying out loud, and fortunately didn’t appear to notice Joan’s condition.”

F
ACED WITH THE
responsibility of caring for a desperately sick son, and consoling two other children, Joan tried to pull herself together and stop drinking. She was only partly successful.

“I would get [to the hospital] at nine in the morning,” she said. “Ted would come later. Little Teddy had to prepare for big Ted, to be on stage. He had to be strong for his father. He had to be a man for his father. He had to be a Kennedy. The whole Kennedy philosophy is not to dwell on your pain, and for God’s sake don’t be introspective, don’t feel sorry for yourself. Ted would bring in the whole front line of the Washington Redskins and they would slap little Teddy on the shoulders and say, ‘Tough guy, you’re going to be fine.’ And in the afternoon big Ted would parade all these dignitaries and nurses and this stream of people through the room to meet little Teddy. Ted really believed that we [couldn’t] let the kid have one moment to himself to rest. He should be kept entertained. And this went on until finally about five or six days later little Ted said, ‘I’m so tired but I can’t tell Dad.’ And so I had to do it.

“My whole marriage I was put in the position of being the spoilsport, but I did it for my children,” Joan continued. “I promised [Teddy] I wouldn’t tell Ted that his son was tired, that he just wanted to watch TV. Ted got mad at me and said I was no fun, that I didn’t want my son to have a good time. I had to take it. I guarded the door and I was the traffic cop.”

Though Teddy’s operation was declared a success, further pathological studies revealed that the original diagnosis of ligament cancer had been misleading. In fact, Teddy Jr.’s cancer was far more serious than that. He did have osteosarcoma, primary bone cancer.

Over the winter of 1973–74, Senator Kennedy visited several cancer research centers and spoke to experts from all over the world. In March, he convened a brainstorming session of experts at his home in McLean, Virginia.

“After the four-hour meeting,” recalled Richard Burke, the senator’s assistant, “the consensus was that Teddy should participate in a new, still-experimental course of chemotherapy to attack any remnants of the malignancy. Every third Friday, I drove the senator to National Airport, where [he met] Teddy. No matter what the senator’s mood, he was always upbeat in Teddy’s presence, for he knew that the boy would already be dreading the ordeal. Father and son flew to Boston to spend the weekend at Children’s Hospital Medical Center, where Teddy endured injections of methotrexate—a drug so toxic that additional shots of antidote were needed. The senator slept on a chair in Teddy’s hospital room and did all he could to help…. The side effects of chemotherapy were severe, including nausea and hair loss. The senator made occasional remarks to me about how strong Teddy’s spirit was, but I knew that the boy wavered between periods of optimism and gloom.”

Watching his son suffer was more than Ted Kennedy could bear. “Sometimes I hear him crying,” Ted said in April 1974. “We try to make out as though we have not noticed his sadness, but it tears the heart out of me. Now [that] the days are getting longer, he often sits at the window watching the children outside, and he cannot play with them because he is too exhausted.”

T
EDDY JR.’S ILLNESS
put an enormous strain on a family that was already rent by deep fissures. Not for the first time, Kara, the oldest child, ran away from home, and she began experimenting with drugs. Teddy, the middle child, was still far from a full recovery.
Patrick, the youngest, suffered from life-threatening attacks of asthma. Doctors put him on heavy doses of cortisone and ordered him to stay within a short driving distance of the nearest hospital emergency room.
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Meanwhile, Joan took the first important step toward admitting that she was powerless over alcohol. She checked herself into Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan, Connecticut, where Jackie’s late father, Blackjack Bouvier, had frequently gone to dry out. However, Joan’s treatments at Silver Hill were not effective, and she then spent some time at a rehab in San Juan Capistrano, California.

When the media got wind of Joan’s ordeal, they turned it into a soap opera. Her photo was on the front page of the tabloids when she fell off the wagon and was arrested for drunk driving. She became, in the words of Marcia Chellis, her personal assistant, “the butt of countless jokes inside the Beltway.”

“What happens to the human spirit is like what happens to a high cliff when the waves are too strong and too high and too constant,” said Muffy Brandon, one of Joan’s best friends. “The cliff erodes and the underpinnings get shaky. That’s what happened to Joan.”

I
N AUGUST
1974, faced with certain impeachment, Richard Nixon resigned from office, and Vice President Gerald Ford succeeded him as president. A month later, the early polls showed that Ted Kennedy led all the likely Democratic and Republican candidates for president in 1976.

Ted felt that 1976 was his year. He was confident that he could beat Gerry Ford. But Ted was also worried about what the pressures of a presidential campaign would do to his family. Several of his nephews, for whom he had assumed responsibility after Bobby’s
death, were in trouble with drugs. Bobby Jr. was arrested for possession of marijuana; he fled to the Berkeley campus in California, where he was spotted living on the street and begging for handouts. And Bobby Jr.’s brother David was seriously addicted to cocaine and heroin.

Closer to home, Ted’s children were having nightmares about his running for president; they feared he would be shot dead like their uncles Jack and Bobby. Ted took to telephoning Teddy Jr. every day just so the boy could hear his reassuring voice.

“Do you think Teddy is strong enough?” Ted asked his aides, knowing that the answer was no. He had even greater reservations about Joan’s ability to withstand the pressures of a campaign.

“By sheer coincidence,” recalled John Lindsay of
Newsweek
, “I was on an airplane with Joan. She had been in a drying-out tank in Point David, which was just four or five miles up the coast from San Clemente [California]. She was coming back and was in a really awful condition. Whatever she’d been out there to have done had not been done. She was vague and she was on tranquilizers. We got down to Dulles terminal that Saturday night. It was raining and miserable. All the kids were there. But Ted wasn’t. I went home and said to my wife, ‘If this guy takes this family through a presidential campaign, there is no pain in hell that is enough for him.’”

In September 1974, while he still enjoyed a comfortable lead in the polls, Ted Kennedy announced that he would not be a candidate for president in 1976. He cited family responsibilities. When he heard the news,
Newsweek’s
John Lindsay said: “This is the best thing this man has ever done in his life, as a human being.”

I
F TED’S DECISION
not to run for president in 1976 was a test of character, he passed it with flying colors. By taking himself out of
the race, however, he had all but handed the White House to Jimmy Carter, a peanut farmer and former governor of Georgia who came from the conservative wing of the Democratic Party, which Ted held in low esteem.

One night in July 1976, during the presidential campaign between Carter and Gerald Ford, Ted went to his brother-in-law Steve Smith’s Manhattan apartment for dinner. There, he had a long talk with the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who had been close to his brother Jack.

“I don’t want to appear a bad sport,” Ted told Schlesinger. “My brothers and I have always played by the rules. I can’t change on that. But a lot of people have put a lot of work and belief in things. I can’t go to them and say they must trust Carter or that he believes in the things they believe in. I don’t know what he believes in myself.”

“He was speaking, as he often does, in a rush of words and somewhat cryptically,” Schlesinger noted in his diary that night. “He has the Kennedy habit of articulating enough of a sentence to open up a point and then, assuming the point is made, jumping to the next sentence. So I am not altogether clear whether he was talking about Carter in general or in particular relation to national health insurance.

“There was a certain sadness about Ted,” Schlesinger’s diary entry continued. “One felt he could not escape the apprehension that history may have passed him by. The highest expectations have been instilled in Ted, and now it looks as if Jimmy Carter, whom no one ever heard of, will be the President for the next eight years. Yet one must never forget the unpredictability of life. And Carter will always have the felt presence of Ted Kennedy on his left.”

· · ·

I
N
1977,
JOAN KENNEDY’S
mother, Ginny, died the ghastly death of an alcoholic. Ginny’s passing was a terrible blow to Joan, not least because Joan saw it as a prophecy of how she herself might end her days. And so, once again, she vowed to do something about her drinking.

At the age of forty—and after nineteen years of marriage—she packed her bags and left Ted. She moved into a condominium apartment in Boston overlooking the Charles River. She began seeing a psychiatrist and attending meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous.

“I needed space—my own space—and time to see what my needs are, now and for the rest of my life,” she explained. “It’s sad to say, but I think I had to suffer an awful lot and cause my family and friends a lot of trouble in coming to grips with myself. Now that I’ve faced the drinking problem, I feel that I can do anything I really want to do.”
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Breaking away from Ted wasn’t easy, Joan confessed. And what made it even harder was the fact that Kara, Teddy Jr., and Patrick all chose to remain at home in McLean with their father.

“Ted and I are so different,” Joan said. “He’s a super-Dad. I’m not a super-Mom. He’s like a Pied Piper with our kids and all the nieces and nephews—everything’s exuberance and activity. By comparison I’m quiet—good for times when the kids like to cuddle up and just visit….”

Joan enrolled in Lesley College, a small teacher’s college in Cambridge, to pursue a master’s degree in music education. She and Ted spoke on the phone practically every day, and he frequently made the trip to Boston, where he sometimes participated in Joan’s psychiatric sessions.

“People ask whether the newspaper stories about Ted and girls hurt my feelings,” Joan said. “Of course they hurt my feelings. They went to the core of my self-esteem. When one grows up feeling that maybe one is sort of special and hoping that one’s husband thinks so, and then suddenly, thinking maybe he doesn’t…. Well, I didn’t lose my self-esteem altogether, but it was difficult to hear all the rumors. And I began thinking, well, maybe I’m just not attractive enough or attractive anymore, or whatever, and it was awfully easy to then say, Well, after all, you know, if that’s the way it is, I might as well have a drink.”
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