Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died (18 page)

I
N THE MONTHS
after Joan left him, Ted Kennedy fell into a brown study. Members of his staff wondered what was bothering him. Was it the public humiliation of being dumped by his wife? After all, it was the senator who usually discarded women like tissue paper, not the other way around. Was it the embarrassment caused by Joan’s magazine interviews, in which she divulged intimate details of their marriage? Members of the Kennedy clan were supposed to be bound by the code
omertà
. Or did it have nothing to do with his personal life? Was it the frustration of seeing his chief Democratic rival, Jimmy Carter, sitting where Ted thought he should be sitting—in the Oval Office?

Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter were as different as night and day. For starters, Kennedy loved politics and Carter didn’t. Kennedy regarded Carter as a pompous, sanctimonious ass, and as the
Times’
Adam Clymer pointed out, “Carter looked down on Kennedy,
morally, because of Chappaquiddick…. [H]e called Kennedy ‘a woman killer.’”
¹

After Carter was inaugurated as president in January 1977, he made a point of not inviting Ted to White House dinners and other official functions. Both in person and through proxies, Carter and Kennedy clashed over their opposing political points of view; Carter preached a brand of fiscal restraint and budget discipline that was a clear rebuke to Kennedy-style liberalism.

By the summer of 1978, the two men were at loggerheads over a number of policy issues, both domestic and foreign. “You talk to Carter,” Arthur Schlesinger Jr. said to Ted Kennedy. “Where does he really stand on things? He gives the impression of a man without a center. Is there a center?”

To which Ted replied: “That’s the question.”
²

Their sharpest area of disagreement was over Ted’s signature issue, national health care. On July 27, 1978, Carter noted in his diary:

I talked to Kennedy at length this afternoon, and then to Stu [Eizenstat, the president’s chief domestic policy adviser] about the health program. Kennedy insists that it be sent up before the [off-year congressional] election. I insist that it not be sent up before the election….
³

To most Washington observers, it seemed only a matter of time before Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter would have the political equivalent of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. And Carter and his closest political adviser, Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan, began preparing for just such a showdown.

“People said [about Kennedy’s taking on Carter], ‘Well, if you had done this and if you had done that, on health care’—and I always said no—you know, Kennedy looked at the polls and saw
Carter was vulnerable,” said Ham Jordan. “[Kennedy] wanted to be president and he ran…. And that wouldn’t have been changed by Carter’s calling him more or having him over for dinner, or whatever. I mean, I just, I never, I never bought that.”
⁴

It wasn’t only Ted Kennedy who was looking at the polls. Inflation, interest rates, and unemployment were going through the roof, and more and more people began to wonder whether Carter was up to the job of being president. By the summer of 1978, Carter’s poll numbers had plummeted from a 75 percent approval rating to 40 percent. Among Democrats, he was more unpopular than Harry Truman had been in 1952 and Lyndon Johnson in 1968.

As for Carter, he thought his problem was Ted Kennedy. His deep distrust of Ted Kennedy was reflected in his daily diary entries. On July 28, 1978, the president wrote:

I met again with Kennedy. Outlined what our position was on [the health program]. Told him I needed his support. That if he had to disagree or criticize to go ahead and do it. And I instructed [Joseph] Califano [secretary of health, education, and welfare] to have his press conference tomorrow about noon.
⁵

The next entry in Carter’s diary read:

Kennedy had a press conference at 3:00 to blast us on the health care system. I thought he betrayed my trust because he specifically asked us to delay our press conference from Friday noon until later so he could study it more. And then without letting us know, he scheduled his own.
⁶

· · ·

A
S EARLY AS
September 1978—more than two years before the 1980 presidential election—Carter’s aides began warning him of an almost certain primary challenge by Ted Kennedy. On September 28, Hubert “Herky” Harris, assistant director of the Office of Management and Budget, sent Carter’s chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, a handwritten note:

I understand [Kennedy] people held meetings in Boston this weekend regarding the campaign…. The meetings were to discuss the alternative courses open to Kennedy depending on what
you
representing the President might do. Best I can tell it was a strategy/tactics session, discussing various best case-worst case scenarios, and how Kennedy’s campaign could best react. The questions were posed “If I were Ham Jordan, and ‘such & such’ occurred, what would I do? How would I respond? Etc.”

My source is reliable, but this report is for info only. I don’t know of any decisions made or specific conclusions drawn. They are clearly
planning
.
⁷

On December 9, 1978, Herky Harris’s warning seemed to be borne out when Ted Kennedy delivered a speech to an overflow crowd in Memphis, Tennessee, that was widely interpreted as his opening shot for the 1980 Democratic nomination against a sitting president of his own party. Ted did not try to disguise his anger over Carter’s plan to increase the military budget and cut back social spending.

“Sometimes a party must sail against the wind,” Ted said. “We cannot afford to drift or lie at anchor. We cannot heed the call of those who say it is time to furl the sail.”

The audience went wild. But two men standing in the back of the auditorium—Hamilton Jordan and Pat Caddell, President Carter’s pollster—did not join in the cheering. When Ted’s speech was over, Jordan turned to Caddell and said, “That’s it. He’s running.”
⁸

But Ted hadn’t quite made up his mind yet. In March 1979, shortly after he celebrated his forty-seventh birthday, Ted visited Carter in the White House. Ted’s weight, his flyaway hair, and his Benjamin Franklin-style reading glasses made him look as old as Carter, who was eight years Ted’s senior. Carter greeted Ted with a tight, condescending smile, and the two men retired behind closed doors to discuss the knotty issue of national health care. When they were finished, Ted looked at Carter and told him that he had “tentatively” decided to support him for reelection in 1980.

Carter didn’t believe him. Nor, for that matter, did anyone else in Washington. In June 1979, the subject of a potential Carter-Kennedy face-off came up at a White House dinner for members of the House of Representatives.

“We are having a good time with the president,” recalled Congressman Tom Downey of New York, “and [Carter] comes and joins us…. And the conversation turned to the primaries, and Toby [Moffett, a congressman from Connecticut] asked about the Kennedy campaign. And Carter turned to him and said, ‘If Ted Kennedy runs in [the] New Hampshire [primary], I’ll whip his ass.’”

A
ND SO, BY
the early summer of 1979, Jimmy Carter was poised for an all-out war against Ted Kennedy. But Carter wasn’t prepared for what happened next. In the wake of the Islamic revolution in Iran, which toppled the shah and installed the radical Ayatollah Khomeini, the price of crude oil doubled, the supply of oil fell, and long lines of cars began appearing at gas stations all across America.

The energy crisis of 1979 exacerbated the widespread feeling that the country was adrift under Jimmy Carter. All the opinion polls confirmed that impression; they showed that Democrats now preferred Ted Kennedy over Jimmy Carter by a margin of 53 percent to 16 percent.

Carter’s presidency appeared to be in a free fall. To save it, he went on television to deliver a fireside chat to the nation. He wore a cardigan to illustrate the need for energy conservation, but the baggy, ill-fitting sweater only made him look like a wimp.

“In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God,” he said, “too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.”

The president sounded as though he was blaming the American people for the country’s problems, instead of assuming responsibility himself. And although he never used the word, his talk became known derisively as Carter’s “malaise” speech.

“That speech was so contrary to everything I believe in that it upset me,” Ted Kennedy said later. “I was alone watching it. I didn’t talk to any political reporters for three weeks before; you know how political reporters are—they keep coming around to take your pulse…. [Then] I spent four weeks making a
personal
decision, not even talking with key people you respect.”

To make that personal decision, Ted had to take into account his frayed marriage to Joan. Was their relationship repairable? Was it possible for Joan to forget the past and join him in the greatest adventure of their life—the pursuit of the presidency? If he won the White House, could Joan function as First Lady?

To find out the answers to those questions, Ted asked Lawrence Horowitz, a thirty-four-year-old physician and top staffer on Ted’s health subcommittee, to convene a panel of experts from around the
country to review Joan Kennedy’s medical history. Ted wanted to know whether his running for president would put an unbearable strain on Joan’s health. For by now it had become clear that Joan had problems that went beyond alcoholism; she was having episodes of severe mood swings that are experienced by people with bipolar disorder.

The daylong meeting took place in the first week of September 1979 at a hotel in Virginia, and it included Joan’s principal psychiatrist. When Ted showed up in the evening, the doctors gave him their consensus opinion: To the extent that Joan would be kept busy in a focused and structured atmosphere, a presidential campaign would be a plus, not a minus, because it would relieve Joan of her current feeling of isolation.

Ted also asked Dr. Horowitz to speak with Kara and Teddy Jr. and tell them that their father was seriously considering running for president. (Patrick was already on board and didn’t have to be persuaded.)

“And I would say [Kara and Teddy Jr.] were not wildly enthusiastic,” Horowitz recalled. “But they … didn’t say, ‘We don’t want him to run.’ Both of them said, ‘If this is what he wants to do, we’ll support him.’ And out of that and listening to their concerns, I got the senator’s permission to go to the White House to ask for Secret Service protection.”
⁹

S
INCE THE DAYS
of Joe Kennedy, the Kennedys had been regarded as masters at manipulating the media. Reporters fawned over John and Robert Kennedy when they ran for president. And Ted likewise had many friends in the press. For the rollout of his presidential campaign, Ted offered to give an interview to Roger Mudd
of CBS News, who was considered a friend of the family. Ted had helped find a job for Mudd’s son, and Mudd had been a guest at Ted’s home on Squaw Island.

Mudd and the executives at CBS News jumped at the chance to get Ted in front of the cameras. They agreed to tape two interviews—one at Ted’s home on Squaw Island, the other in his Senate office—then splice them together and run the whole thing as an hour-long special in early November—three days before Ted’s official announcement that he was running for president.

Ted knew that the CBS brass considered him a big “get;” by giving CBS an exclusive, he was doing the network a favor. He therefore viewed the arrangement with Mudd in the same vein as a political deal—one hand washing the other. In return for doing a softball interview, Mudd would get a leg up in his competition with Dan Rather over who would succeed Walter Cronkite as anchor of the
CBS Evening News
. That, at least, was Ted’s theory. In practice, things didn’t work out that way when the TV cameras began rolling.

“So he comes across, as so many reporters and journalists in Washington knew him to be, as a physically dominating, very fine-looking, handsome sort of an Irish sculpted lord,” Mudd recalled of the interview. “But at times hopelessly inarticulate … grasping for words. Not terribly well collected. But nonetheless a major force that just fills the screen. And then suddenly to have this great face and visage not being able to put a complete sentence together in answer to some very simple questions.”
¹⁰

“Why do you want to be president?” Mudd asked in the interview.

“Well,” Kennedy began, “I’m—were I to—to make the—announcement … is because I have a great belief in this country, that it is—has more natural resources than any nation in the world … the greatest technology of any country in the world … the greatest
political system in the world … And the energies and the resourcefulness of this nation, I think, should be focused on these problems in a way that brings a sense of restoration in this country by its people … And I would basically feel that—that it’s imperative for this country to either move forward, that it can’t stand still, or otherwise it moves back.”

Ted’s disastrous performance in the Mudd interview reflected a fatal flaw at the heart of the Kennedy campaign organization: Ted’s handlers didn’t treat him like an ordinary political candidate who needed to be prepped for his media close-up. Instead, they treated him like royalty. Certain words were never to be mentioned in Ted’s presence, words such as “Chappaquiddick” or “alcoholism” or “adultery.” Nobody had the guts to speak frankly to Ted about Joan’s drinking, Ted’s womanizing, and the residual fallout from Chappaquiddick. If these negatives were brought up at all, they were bundled together in a single, innocuous phrase: “the character issue.” The only person who was close enough to Ted to force him to confront “the character issue” was Steve Smith, the campaign manager, but according to Susan Estrich, the deputy campaign manager, Smith was a total washout.