Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died (2 page)

“The senator and I have met before,” I said. “You were visiting Jamie and Phyllis Wyeth on Monhegan Island.”

“Oh, yes, um, I remember that, ah, day, ah, well,” he said.

But he was slurring his words and speaking more loudly than necessary, and I concluded that he’d had too much to drink. Still, it was interesting to note that, even when inebriated, Ted Kennedy displayed impeccable manners. He had not yet turned fifty and could still hold his liquor.

A
GAIN, A DECADE or so went by before I met Ted Kennedy for the third time. It was the early 1990s, and I’d left the
Times
after eleven years as editor of its Sunday magazine and was now writing for
Vanity Fair
and
Parade
. I’d been invited as the sole journalist to attend a private dinner given by a group of wealthy contributors in honor of Senator Kennedy at the “21” Club, a Manhattan mecca for top business executives and Wall Street bankers.

Ted was preparing for a reelection campaign, and although he’d established a record as one of the Senate’s all-time greats (he’d had a hand in passing every major health, education, and civil rights bill over the past thirty years), he was in serious political trouble back home in Massachusetts. As a result of his entanglement in the sordid Palm Beach rape case against his nephew William Kennedy Smith, Ted’s poll numbers had sunk to an all-time low. It looked as though the unthinkable might happen: a Kennedy might actually lose a race in Massachusetts.

He loved the Senate, and he intended to fight with every weapon at his disposal to keep his seat. His father, Joseph P. Kennedy, had once famously said: “Politics is like war. It takes three things to win. The first is money and the second is money and the third is money.”
⁶
Ted Kennedy had come to that night’s dinner to raise a lot of money.

He was now sixty years old, and when he entered the room, I hardly recognized him. There, in the middle of his creased and crumpled face, was his alcohol-ravaged nose—a rough, veined protuberance that was as gnarled as the knot of an oak tree. His bloated body was bursting at the armpits of his suit jacket.

He was seated at a big round table next to his attractive new wife, Victoria Reggie Kennedy, a tall, dark-haired, hazel-eyed woman who was twenty-two years his junior. Vicki glowed with vigor and self-confidence. A successful lawyer in her own right, Vicki had a way of inserting herself into the conversation without appearing to upstage the senator. In fact, it soon became apparent that Vicki was there to look after Ted, monitor his answers, adjust them if necessary, add some nuances—and make sure that he didn’t drink too much. She sent the waiter away when he attempted to fill her husband’s wineglass for the third time. Ted seemed perfectly content to let Vicki run the show.

His speaking disability was on full display that evening. He had trouble answering the simplest questions. He talked in sentence fragments and at times didn’t make much sense. Each time he faltered, he’d look over at Vicki, who’d beam back at him, and each time he seemed to draw renewed confidence from her. I couldn’t help but notice the submissive way he related to Vicki, and compare that with the cool indifference he’d shown Joan on Monhegan Island some twenty years before.

By the end of the evening, I’d come to an extraordinary conclusion: This was no longer the same Ted Kennedy I had first met on Monhegan Island.
This
Ted Kennedy was a less agitated, restless, and fretful man; he was also less self-conscious and ill at ease, less vain and egocentric.

Fundamental change in a person of Ted Kennedy’s age is rare. But here was living proof that it was possible. There could be no mistaking the fact that the remote and unresponsive Ted Kennedy of Monhegan Island—the
fugitive
Ted Kennedy—had morphed into someone else. He seemed like a more fully developed human being.

What, I wondered, accounted for this remarkable transformation?

T
HAT QUESTION HAS never been far from my mind in the years following the “21” Club dinner. Since then, I’ve written a half dozen books, including three about the life and death of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and one about the tragic history of the Kennedy family titled
The Kennedy Curse
. As I delved deeply into the massive literature on the Kennedy family and interviewed hundreds of their friends and associates, I noted that Ted Kennedy’s metamorphosis was hardly ever scrutinized in the thousands of words that have been written about him. He was, I concluded, the least understood and the most underappreciated Kennedy of them all.

And so, when he came out for Barack Obama—marshaling the legendary power of the Kennedy name to help boost Obama’s presidential candidacy—I decided to devote a book to Ted Kennedy. At the time, he hadn’t been diagnosed with incurable brain cancer. He still planned to run for reelection in 2012, when he would be eighty years old. But after his brain surgery, he had to confront the somber prospect that he wouldn’t be around to serve another term in the Senate.

That realization must have been the crudest blow of all. For the Senate had come to define Ted Kennedy even more than his famous last name. An unabashed liberal, he had many things he still hoped to accomplish—rights to be protected, wrongs to be redressed. But he had a particularly aggressive form of brain cancer, and he knew that he was running out of time.

Since his brain surgery in June 2008, each day had been a reprieve; each week a miracle. And when those weeks had turned into months, his family and doctors were astounded by his resilience, as was the entire country. All Americans, including those who did not agree with his liberal politics, were in awe of his gallant last stand. He was no longer sitting in for his dead brother. He had become his own portrait in courage.

PART ONE
“There Are More of Us
Than Trouble”

1

Washington, D. C., April 6, 1953

T
RAIN NO
. 173, the
Federal Express
, hurtled through the night at nearly seventy miles an hour. Tucked away in the swaying Pullman sleeping car was the youngest member of the Kennedy clan, Edward Moore Kennedy—“Eddie” to his sisters, “Teddy” to his brothers, “Ted” to the rest of the world. He was an exceptionally handsome young man, just turned twenty-one, with a mane of glistening hair, the trademark Kennedy teeth, and the build of an athlete. At six foot two and two hundred pounds, he barely fit into the narrow Pullman bed, and at each bend and curve along the way, he had to hold on to the bed railing to prevent himself from falling out of his berth.

The
Federal Express
chased the ghostly beam of its headlamps
through Boston, Providence, New Haven, New York, Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore. After the Baltimore Yards, the engineer notched the controller up to eighty miles an hour for the run into Washington, D.C. When the train reached signal number 1339, about two miles from Union Station, Ted finally found the sleep that had eluded him for the past several hours.

He was groggy as he stepped off the train onto Track 16 a few minutes before 7:00
A.M
. He grabbed his suitcase and made his way down the deserted sidewalks of Delaware Avenue to the Senate Office Building. He was something of an architecture buff, and the simple majesty of the building impressed him. Inside, twin marble staircases led from the rotunda to an entablature and coffered dome. The great space was empty except for a lone guard asleep behind the security desk. Ted didn’t disturb him as he set out in search of Room 362, his brother Jack’s new office.

“I can remember the first time I ever visited there,” he recalled many years later. “It was back in 1953 and I was a schoolboy. My brother John had just been elected to the Senate. I’d come down to visit him on the night train. Getting in early, I arrived at his office at about seven thirty in the morning. No one was there. So I sat down on my suitcase out in the hall.

“Next door was the office of the vice president, and just then Nixon came along,”
^*
Ted continued. “He introduced himself and invited me into his office. It was the first time I’d ever met him. We had a pleasant talk, sparring about who got in first in the morning and that sort of thing.”
¹

· · ·

J
ACK KENNEDY SHOWED
up a little before nine o’clock. The Kennedy brothers had not seen much of each other in quite some time. Jack had been busy running for the Senate—his launching pad for the White House—while Ted had been getting himself into trouble. At the end of his freshman year at Harvard, he was suspended for hiring a student to take his final Spanish exam. When his father found out about it, he went ballistic. Ted knew how to blarney his father; he explained that in order to play football at Harvard, you had to demonstrate a proficiency in a foreign language, and knowing how important it was to his father that he make the team, he had cheated on the test.

“From then on [my father] was calm,” Ted said. “It was just ‘How can we help you?’ and he never brought up the subject again.”
²

Harvard’s longtime president James Bryant Conant made it clear that Ted could seek readmission after an appropriate time had elapsed, and Joseph Kennedy immediately began a campaign to get his son back in the college’s good graces. But war had broken out in Korea, and Ted saw a chance to atone for his disgrace by enlisting in the army. Thanks to his father’s influence, Ted served his two-year stint far from the front lines, as a private first class in the military police in Europe. He was in France when he heard the news that Jack had won a come-from-behind victory over Massachusetts’s senior senator, Henry Cabot Lodge.

From Paris, Teddy whipped off a congratulatory telegram:

IL EST FATIGUE ET TRISTE SES YEUX SONT ROUGE CE QUE VOUS FEISIEZ [SIC] A LODGE NE DEVRAIT PAS ARRIVER AUX MORTS
=TED (“HE IS TIRED AND SAD HIS EYES ARE RED WHAT YOU WERE DOING TO LODGE SHOULDN’T HAPPEN TO THE DEAD. TED”)
³

Ted’s telegrams were collector’s items. He once telegraphed his father:

HAPPY FATHERS DAY HAVING BARRELS OF FUN SEND MONEY FOR MORE BARRELS LOVE = TED
⁴

He inherited his love of verbal jousting from the Fitzgeralds, his mother’s side of the family. The youngest of nine, Ted was doted on by his grandfather, John Francis “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, the former mayor of Boston and an Irish politician of the old school. As they strolled down the streets of Boston, Ted would watch—and learn—as Honey Fitz greeted everyone with a vigorous handshake or, in the case of pretty young women, with an effusive hug.

“When I was going to school,” Ted recalled, “I’d get Sunday lunch off and I’d go on into the Bellevue Hotel and have Sunday lunch with [Grandpa] … and he would take you all through the kitchen and introduce you to all of the waitresses. On several occasions, I remember [Bobby] was there—and he would join us. And then in the afternoon he’d take us for a walk through the Boston Common and we’d go down to the Old North Church and sit outside in a chair and look up at the steeple and view the architecture…. Once in a while we’d start out the door to go and view these various historic sights and he’d get wrapped up in conversation with friends and we’d never get there…. I heard my first off-color story from Grandpa. He was laughing so hard.”
⁵