Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died (23 page)

“It was all very informal,” this person continued. “Ted greeted us at the door. We sat around the living room. There were only principals, no staff, because Ted knew that staff always takes a hard-core position; they’re interested in certain predetermined outcomes. But Ted isn’t that way. His rhetoric can be fiery, but he uses it to give him cover in coming to a compromise. And that’s what he did that day.”
¹

The Senate approved the slightly watered-down Kennedy-Edwards-McCain bill by a vote of 59 to 36, which, thanks to the recent powwow at his home, Ted felt confident President Bush would sign. But he was in for a rude disappointment. The House of Representatives passed a more conservative version, which could not be reconciled in conference with the Senate version.

And so, no bill was ever sent to the president. To a nonpolitician, the outcome could be seen as a loss for Ted Kennedy. But that was not the way it was interpreted by his Senate colleagues. They knew that he had reached across the great divide of party and ideology, that he had not burned any bridges, that he would live to fight another day, and that—what was most important in the halls of the Senate—he had won everyone’s respect.

“He’s a legislator’s legislator,” said Senator Jon Kyl, a staunch conservative Republican from Arizona. “At the end of the day, he wants to legislate, he understands how, and he understands compromise.”
²

Learning to settle for half a loaf, Ted had compiled a legislative record unsurpassed by any living senator. Among the scores of bills bearing his name or imprint, he could take credit for the Civil Rights Act of 1964; the Voting Rights Act of 1965; the expansion of the voting franchise to eighteen-year-olds; the 1997 Kennedy-Hatch law providing health insurance to children; the 1982 Voting Rights Act
extension; the 1996 Kennedy-Kassebaum bill, which made health insurance portable for workers; the 1998 law that allocated billions for AIDS testing, treatment, and research; the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act; the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act; and the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act.

How did Ted evaluate his own record? What did he think of the comparisons that some made between him and the Senate greats of the past—Calhoun, Clay, and Webster?

“I’m finally hitting my stride,” he said in his typical self-effacing manner.
³

The historian Michael Beschloss put it more elegantly during a ceremony in the caucus room of the Russell Senate Office Building, where JFK had announced in 1960 that he’d be a candidate for president.

“I don’t need to tell anyone in this room that if you had to choose one of the great historical figures in the U.S. Senate in the past two centuries, Edward Kennedy would be at the top of the list…. I often think of President Kennedy, who in the 1950s had to choose some of the great Senators whose portraits would be painted on a wall here on Capitol Hill. I think that if he were to do that today, his brother would be on that wall as a master legislator….

“If you wanted to write the history of America over the last seventy years, you couldn’t do better than to study Edward Kennedy’s life,” Beschloss continued. “Oftentimes the presidency gets more attention than many Senators who have served, and when you have a Senator who has served as Edward Kennedy has served for [more than forty] years, it’s a very good example of the fact that … a Senator who makes that much impact can do more to change American history than some presidents of the United States.”
⁴

· · ·

A
S HE GREW
in political stature, Ted cut back on his drinking and dissociated himself from some of the people he had run with in his salad days. However, there was one person from the past whom he could not ignore: his ex-wife Joan. In the early-morning hours of Tuesday, March 29, 2005, Patrick Kennedy was roused from sleep by a call from his brother, Teddy. Their mother had taken a serious fall. She had been found bleeding on a Beacon Street sidewalk. She was in the hospital with a concussion and a broken shoulder.
⁵

Over the next few days, Patrick learned the sad truth about his mother. She had stopped going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and had been secretly guzzling mouthwash and vanilla extract. Doctors told Patrick that his mother’s drinking had inflicted so much damage on her kidneys that she might need dialysis to stay alive.
⁶

“You want to make sure there’s someone there for her all the time,” Patrick said, “but at the same time you don’t want to encroach on her privacy too much. When things like this happen, it makes you feel as though maybe you should have done more to make sure there’s someone with her 24/7, and perhaps that might become necessary.”
⁷

Two days later, Patrick, a six-term Democratic congressman from Rhode Island, announced that he would not follow his father into the Senate. He was dropping plans to challenge Senator Lincoln Chaffee, a Republican, in 2006. “My family means everything to me,” Patrick said.

“The ongoing situation that is occurring with his mother has really taken a personal toll on Patrick,” said Anthony Marcella, Patrick’s former chief of staff. “It has been personally very painful to him. Not only seeing her suffer from this terrible illness, but to do it in such a public way is really tearing him apart.”

Even then, however, Patrick and his siblings might have left well enough alone if they hadn’t discovered that their mother had secretly transferred the Squaw Island house out of her name and into a trust controlled by her second cousin, Webster Janssen, a person her children didn’t know. Janssen had asked Cotton Real Estate of Hyannis to put the house on the market for $6,495,000.

Since their father’s marriage to Vicki, the children hadn’t felt welcome in the Big House. They considered the Squaw Island house to be
their
home as much as it was their
mother’s
. And so, the children took their mother to court, and an acrimonious battle ensued for control of the house. A trial date was set for June 13, 2005, in Barnstable Probate and Family Court to hear the
Kennedy
v.
Kennedy
lawsuit.

“I think they are mean-spirited and vindictive,” said Webster Janssen, referring to Joan’s children. “And they should get on with their lives and stop badgering poor Joan…. She’s sort of living under house arrest most of the time.”
⁸

“Basically,” Teddy Jr. replied, “my mother’s taking it out on us by trying to sell the house.”
⁹

In the end, an embarrassing public trial was averted at the last moment when Joan and her children resolved their differences out of court. Under the agreement, the trust established by Janssen was dissolved and the Squaw Island house was taken off the market. In addition, the trial judge appointed a nonfamily guardian to keep an eye on Joan, and also put her fortune, estimated at $9 million, in the hands of a new trust overseen by two court-appointed trustees.

“She is very upset about the whole thing, very stressed out,” Janssen told the author of this book. “She can’t go anywhere on her own.”

Why did Joan Kennedy agree to become a ward of the state? It appeared that, in return for accepting a court-appointed guardian,
Joan obtained the right to sell the Squaw Island house, just as she had wanted to in the first place. And in fact, six months after the out-of-court settlement, Joan put the house back on the market for $6.5 million. Although Ted Kennedy had the right of first refusal, he had assumed a hefty mortgage when he bought Jack’s old house in the Compound from Caroline Kennedy, and he didn’t have the cash to meet Joan’s price. As a result, the house, which the Kennedys had long cherished as part of their heritage, went to a stranger, whose identity remained undisclosed.

“When it came down to it, Joan really had no choice about becoming a ward of the state,” said a family friend. “The fact is, she had been threatening suicide, and if she hadn’t agreed to a guardian, she could have been institutionalized. This way, at least she’ll be able to participate in family gatherings, pursue her interest in music, and take part in various charitable events. That’s a lot better than being locked up in a mental institution.”
¹⁰

Ted felt sorry for Joan. But, as he told friends, he did not think he was responsible for her problems. They had been divorced for more than two decades, and Joan had to walk her own path. His responsibility, he felt, was to nurture and promote the Kennedy legacy.

I
N JANUARY
2008, Ted endorsed Barack Obama for president of the United States. At the time, it seemed like a risky move. He did not merely express a marginal preference for Barack Obama over Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was then being touted as the overwhelming favorite to win the Democratic Party nomination. In a typically extravagant gesture, he wheeled out his nieces Caroline Kennedy and Maria Shriver to help him anoint Obama as nothing less than the embodiment and personification of his brother John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Like JFK, Barack Obama would “lift our spirits and make us believe again.”

Some thought Caroline Kennedy, who was inspired by Obama, had influenced Ted Kennedy in his choice of the charismatic first-term African American senator. But that was only partly true. After all, other Kennedy cousins—such as Bobby Kennedy’s children Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Robert Kennedy Jr., and Kerry Kennedy—were zealous supporters of Hillary Clinton.
¹¹
More important, Ted Kennedy saw himself as the guardian of liberal orthodoxy, the tribune of leftist interest groups—trade unions, feminists, environmentalists, teachers’ unions, black activists—that defined the base of the Democratic Party.
¹²

Ted believed that, after four decades of cautious-to-conservative administrations under both Republican and Democratic presidents—Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II—the political pendulum was finally swinging back in his direction, from Right to Left, and that Barack Obama represented a once-in-a-generation opportunity to restore activist government as the country’s dominant public philosophy.

Until now, the United States had experienced only five such political realignments, marking the end to one period of American history and the beginning of another: the election of 1800, in which Vice President Thomas Jefferson defeated President John Adams and ushered in a generation of Democratic-Republican Party rule; the election of 1828, in which Andrew Jackson, the first president not born of privilege, defeated John Quincy Adams; the election of 1860, which brought Abraham Lincoln to the White House and unleashed the forces of the Civil War; the election of 1932, in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the coalition that defined the modern Democratic Party; and the election of 1980, in which Ronald Reagan launched a generation of conservative rule.

As Ted Kennedy saw it, with the election of Barack Obama, the long Dark Age in American politics—a period that began with JFK’s assassination—would finally draw to an end, and a great liberal awakening would follow. Universal health care would finally become a reality. And America’s tattered reputation would be restored throughout the world. Such was the breadth and scope of his confidence in Obama and the future.

Ted’s endorsement of Barack Obama was a breathtaking moment in the political life of the country. For it pitted the fabled Kennedy Dynasty, with its vast fund-raising resources, against the powerful and equally well-funded Clintons in a battle for the heart and soul of the Democratic Party. In point of fact, the senator had never wholeheartedly embraced the Clintons. Like most politicians, he had a long memory, and he had never forgotten that the Clintons had worked on behalf of his archrival, Jimmy Carter, at the 1980 Democratic National Convention.

Since then, Ted had grown ever more leery of the Clintons and their efforts, through the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, to distance themselves from the liberal Kennedy wing of the Democratic Party. And so, when Hillary gave an interview during the primary campaign crediting President Lyndon Johnson, rather than John F. Kennedy, for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Ted Kennedy did not view it as a trivial oversight. It went to the heart of his feelings about his brothers and the cause they had bequeathed him. Ever since his maiden speech in the Senate, on April 9, 1964, the senator had been at pains to lay claim to civil rights as a unique Kennedy legacy.

“No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long,” the senator declared in his maiden speech, his voice choking on his tears. “My brother was the first President of the United States to state publicly
that segregation was morally wrong. His heart and his soul are in this bill. If his life and death had a meaning, it was that we should not hate but love one another; we should use our powers not to create conditions of oppression that lead to violence, but conditions of freedom that lead to peace.”
¹³

Over the years, some dismissed Ted Kennedy’s devotion to the cause of civil rights—indeed, his commitment to the poor, the persecuted, the sick, and the mentally ill—as a transparent political stratagem, a cynical way to get votes. Others portrayed him as a hypocrite—a rich man who did not live by the very laws and regulations he prescribed for everyone else. But Ted Kennedy’s expressions of empathy with the underdog were more than empty platitudes; his ability to understand and share the feelings of others was woven into the narrative of his life.

S
PEECHIFYING ON BEHALF
of Barack Obama, Senator Kennedy was a wonder to behold. His arms flailed and flapped, his face turned a brilliant red, and he piled hyperbole on top of hyperbole. At an Obama rally before a friendly Hispanic crowd in Laredo, Texas, the senator broke into an off-key rendition of the Mexican song “Ay Jalisco No Te Jajes” (“Don’t Give Up on Me”). Then, with his snow-white hair falling over his forehead, he delivered an electrifying oration, proving again that he remained one of the great stump speakers of his time.