Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died (20 page)

“I know, you’re not going to run for president,” Shrum said, as
the two men settled down over their martini glasses in the living room of the Big House.

“That’s right,” Kennedy said. “And I don’t want to argue.”

“I’m only going to say one thing,” Shrum said. “You get to run against George [Herbert Walker] Bush and that really is your best chance.”

“I know that,” Kennedy said, “and I don’t want to run.”
⁷

Ted made the formal announcement in a five-minute speech on TV. “I will run for reelection to the Senate,” he said. “I know that this decision means that I may never be president. But the pursuit of the presidency is not my life. Public service is…. The thing that matters most, the greatest difference we can make, is to speak out, to stand up to lead, and to move this nation forward. For me at this time the right place is the Senate.”

H
E HAD LIBERATED
himself from the long shadow of the presidency—or, as he put it, from “the fog surrounding my political plans.”
⁸
From now on, he wanted to be judged by one thing and one thing only: his performance in the Senate.

“Kennedy is at his best when he is not in the running,” wrote Garry Wills. “… [T]he reporters following him in 1980 noticed a sense of freedom growing on him as his chances faded. He performed best when he was showing his mettle as a survivor, not bidding to take over. Forced by fame, by his name, toward power, he tightens up. Allowed to back off, he relaxes.”
⁹

Ted threw himself into his Senate work. In 1985, he and Republican Lowell Weicker mustered the necessary votes to override a veto by President Reagan of legislation to impose economic sanctions on the apartheid government of South Africa. That same year,
Ted and Chris Dodd introduced a bill that granted employees up to twelve weeks of unpaid leave to deal with a family medical crisis.

During the eight conservative years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, Ted remained an unrepentant liberal. He traveled widely to the poorest sections of Appalachia, including the hamlet of Little Mud, Kentucky, where he pledged to be the advocate for the average man and woman, “a voice for the voiceless.”

“He is the first Kennedy to be a loser in politics, and he gives every sign of not anticipating a second chance,” wrote the columnist Murray Kempton. “He makes witness now, not as a candidate, but as a kind of steward; he travels to call attention not to himself but to the needs of others…. Since no tactic can avail him any longer, we have to assume that only principle carried him to Little Mud. His generation of the Kennedys can never command again; it endures in him only to oppose, the most elevated of all political functions. If he lives wherever ghosts may live, John F. Kennedy, the grandest of successes, must be surprised and proud to have a brother who could bring such a victory out of failure.”
¹⁰

Despite his profound political differences with Ronald Reagan, Ted maintained a cordial relationship with the president. But in July 1987, when Reagan nominated Judge Robert H. Bork to the U.S. Supreme Court, Ted unleashed a torrent of invective. For those with a short memory, Ted reminded them that it had been Bork, as solicitor general, who had done Richard Nixon’s dirty work and fired Archibald Cox as the special Watergate prosecutor.

“Robert Bork’s America,” Kennedy said, “is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on
the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and often is the only—protector of the individual rights that are at the heart of our democracy.”

Ted came in for some well-deserved criticism for painting Bork as a wild-eyed fascist, which was patently unfair to the judge. Bork’s conservative supporters accused Ted of indulging in demagoguery, but they never really recovered from Ted’s initial salvo. Three months later, and after hundreds of hours of testimony, the Senate rejected Bork’s nomination 58–42.

Republicans responded to their defeat at the hands of Ted Kennedy with a mixture of emotions—anger, frustration, bemusement, and grudging respect. “Just think of Kennedy’s monumental hypocrisy of defending women by attacking Bork, while Kennedy harassed women all his life,” Tony Blankley, the former editorial-page editor of the conservative
Washington Times
, told the author of this book. “On the other hand, Republicans understood that Kennedy was just taking care of business.”
¹¹

Grover Norquist, the conservative grand sachem who founded Americans for Tax Reform in 1985 at the request of President Reagan—and served on the board of directors of the National Rifle Association and the American Conservative Union—expressed admiration for Ted’s political skills.

“I’ve worked with Kennedy on several issues, including the deregulation of railroads and airlines,” Norquist told the author of this book. “He had the brilliance to think three steps ahead. I’ve also worked with him on immigration issues and the goal of bringing Iraq War translators to the United States. We put together a left-right coalition, which included David Kean, chairman of the American Conservative Union; Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas; and Ted Kennedy. Ted was always civil. He always made a point of calling me himself. Recently, I was in Utah and I got a call from
Kennedy telling me that everything was moving ahead. He’s pleasant, cheerful, easy to work with.”
¹²

B
UT TED’S METAMORPHOSIS
was only half complete. When he wasn’t accomplishing parliamentary miracles on the floor of the Senate, he was still behaving like a frat boy on a drunken toot. He and his bachelor pal, Senator Chris Dodd, were involved in a couple of sleazy episodes that made news, including the sexual harassment of a waitress at La Brasserie, a well-known restaurant on Capitol Hill.

Following his divorce, Ted moved into the “Big House”—his father’s house—in the Kennedy Compound, where his mother still lived. He had always viewed Hyannis Port, not McLean, Virginia, or Washington, D.C., as his true home. On weekends, after the Senate adjourned, he would fly to the Cape with one of his girlfriends. His schedule rarely varied: He and the girl would arrive between 6:00
P.M
. and 8:00
P.M
. at the Big House, where his private chef, Neil Connolly, had dinner waiting for them. Often they would be joined by friends, usually Senator Chris Dodd or former senator John Varick Tunney, both of whom brought along
their
weekend companions.

Host and guests would unwind with a glass or two of Irish whiskey, and then sit down for a large seafood dinner on the verandah overlooking the ocean. Cordials were passed around after dessert. Sometimes Ted would screen a movie in the Kennedys’ private theater.

First thing Saturday morning, Ted would go for a bracing swim in the ocean and then partake of a hearty breakfast of pancakes or crepes. By 11:00
A.M
., Ted and his guests would board his boat, the
Mya
, for a day’s sail. Neil Connolly saw to it that the
Mya
was
stocked with sandwiches, seafood salad, beer, and cases of red and white wine.

Heavy weather did not deter Ted. His guests might choose to stay on shore, but he would sail, rain or shine, in the winter as well as in the spring and summer, even in stormy weather. He was content to sail alone, and he generally did not return until five o’clock in the afternoon.

On Sunday mornings, he would attend Mass at Our Lady of Victory Church in nearby Centerville. When his mother was still alive, he might bring a priest to the Big House to say Mass for her. After lunch, he boarded a private plane and flew back to Washington.
¹³

S
TORIES ABOUT TED KENNEDY’S
abuse of alcohol and his compulsive womanizing became a staple of tabloid journalism. He was romantically linked with many prominent playmates: ski champ Suzie Chaffee, Countess Lana Campbell, socialite Helga Wagner, British debutante Louise Steel, and German princess Angela Wepper.

However, one relationship received scant media attention—his six-year-long love affair with a saucy blonde by the name of Claudia Cummings. Ted went to great lengths to keep Claudia under wraps. Why he did so was anyone’s guess. It was possible that he was more smitten with Claudia than he was with any of his other paramours. It was also possible that Claudia, who later became a backup singer for Jimmy Buffett, simply wasn’t the type Ted wanted to be publicly associated with.

At the time they met, in early 1986, Claudia—a five-foot-eight-inch, one-hundred-and-fifteen-pound former Miss Alabama—was working as an Eastern Airlines stewardess. Ted ran into her on a flight
from West Palm Beach to Washington National Airport, and an affair quickly developed. The normally frugal Ted lavished Claudia with a full-length Blackglama mink coat, flowers, love notes, and promises he wouldn’t keep.

“During a trip to Ireland with Claudia in the late eighties,” said a source close to the Kennedy family, “Ted took along Teddy Junior more or less to act as a beard for him with Claudia. Ted introduced Claudia as his son Teddy’s girlfriend, and even insisted that Claudia make a point of being seen going into Teddy’s bedroom at night, then come into his, Ted’s, room through a connecting door.”

Teddy Jr., who was known to friends for his exceptionally sensitive nature, developed a crush on Claudia. Unlike his younger brother, Patrick, a more thick-skinned sort who had adopted his father’s careless attitude toward women, Teddy Jr. didn’t have the stomach for womanizing. In March 1992, when Teddy learned that his father had abruptly ended his affair with Claudia, the young man called her and cried his heart out.
¹⁴

B
Y THEN, TED’S
self-destructive behavior—his compulsive eating, boozing, and sexual escapades—had developed an unstoppable momentum of its own. The inevitable crack-up occurred on the Friday of Easter weekend in 1991 in Palm Beach, the scene of many past Kennedy revels. Just before midnight, Ted woke up his son Patrick, twenty-three, and his nephew William Kennedy Smith, thirty, and asked them to go bar crawling with him.

Later that night, Smith returned to the Kennedy mansion on North Ocean Avenue with Patricia Bowman, a woman he had picked up at Au Bar. Patricia Bowman later charged that Smith raped her on the lawn of the estate, while Ted (naked except for a long-tailed
Oxford shirt) and Patrick (who was making love to another woman) were within earshot, and did nothing to stop the rape.

In the morning, Ted hid from the police when they showed up at the Kennedy mansion to investigate the rape charges. The police later said they were investigating possible obstruction-of-justice charges against the senator.

Ted was shaken by the public’s reaction to the scandal, which was far worse than the political reverberations from Chappaquiddick. Though Ted himself was not charged with the alleged rape, most people held him responsible for leading his young son and nephew into such a sleazy mess. According to a
Boston Herald
/WCVB-TV poll, 62 percent of Massachusetts voters said they believed that Kennedy should not run for reelection in 1994.

Realizing his predicament, Ted sought the help of one of his closest friends in the Senate, Orrin Hatch, a conservative Mormon from Utah. “Now, Ted [didn’t come] here and [say], ‘Orrin, will you help me?’” Hatch recalled. “He didn’t say it that way. He wouldn’t say it that way. He said, ‘Orrin, can we send the media out to you?’ I said I’d be glad to help, because I didn’t think he deserved the pummeling he got on that [Palm Beach] issue….

“Well,” Hatch continued, “I believed that to the extent that he can, he really cares for me, and I’ve been to his home many times, and he’s always been gracious and so forth. I do care for him and so I said to him … ‘Ted, if you keep acting like this, I’m going to send the Mormon missionaries to you.’”

“His old Irish face got all red and his eyes kind of teared up and he said, ‘I’m just about ready for them.’”
¹⁵

17

T
HE POLITICAL LEGACY
that Ted had built over the years in Massachusetts seemed to be falling apart,” recalled a Kennedy family lawyer. “He was close to being suicidal. He was slowly killing himself each day; drinking himself to death, not eating right, not taking care of himself at all. He wandered around Hyannis Port half drunk, unshaven, looking like a bum. He would stop people and start inane conversations. He’d stop children and talk to them. It appeared that he was losing it. His nephews and sons were always rounding him up.”
¹