Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died (3 page)

A
LONE WITH JACK
in his small office, Ted got his first good look at his brother. He was pleasantly surprised by Jack’s appearance. For years, their father had gone to great lengths to cover up the fact
that Jack suffered from several serious medical conditions, including Addison’s disease, a sometimes fatal malady that was caused by inadequate secretion of hormones by the adrenal cortex. Joe Kennedy feared that if the truth got out, it would sabotage Jack’s political career.

“Each health problem was treated as a political problem, to be
spun
” wrote Chris Matthews. “[Jack] had developed, in fact, a reliable smoke screen. When he needed crutches, it was because of the ‘wartime injury.’ When he turned yellow or took sick because of Addison’s disease, it was billed as a recurrence of malaria, another reminder of wartime service.”
⁶

The newly sworn-in senator had gained some needed flesh; he weighed a hundred and sixty pounds—about fifteen pounds more than his average for the past five years.
⁷
The whites of his eyes weren’t yellowed from jaundice, indicating that he had his Addison’s disease under control. And he didn’t need to use crutches for his chronic bad back.

But if Ted was impressed by Jack’s appearance, he didn’t think much of his brother’s office. It consisted of three tiny windowless rooms—one for the new senator; another for his chief of staff and administrative assistant, Ted Reardon, and his legislative assistant, Ted Sorensen; and a third for Evelyn Lincoln, his personal secretary, and a pool of secretaries and unpaid assistants who answered constituent mail.
⁸

“Kennedy worked at a furious pace,” noted biographer Michael O’Brien. “Many mornings he was bursting with new ideas. ‘I have several things for you to do,’ he would say to [Evelyn Lincoln] as soon as he entered his office. ‘First… Second … Third …’ While dictating letters, he would pace back and forth or swing a golf club at an imaginary ball. He insisted mail got immediate attention.
Helen Lempart, one of his secretaries, said everyone had to make up a folder saying how many pieces of mail came in, how many were answered, and what the backlog was. There was a constant tracking of people in and out.”
⁹

The hallway between Jack’s office in Room 362 and Richard Nixon’s in Room 361 was busy all day long. “The two of them were continuously tripping over cameras,” recalled Evelyn Lincoln. “You couldn’t get through. Hardly a day went by, when Nixon was in Washington, that all kinds of cameras and press equipment were not lined up outside his door.”
¹⁰

Despite Nixon’s later reputation as a politician who had a kind of Hatfield-McCoy feud with the TV camera, he was actually far ahead of his colleagues in his sophisticated grasp of the power of television.
¹¹
Jack Kennedy was so impressed by Nixon’s exploitation of the new medium that he made a point of telling his brother Ted about it.

After the
New York Post
revealed that Nixon had been the beneficiary of a secret “rich men’s” slush fund, Nixon fell into danger of being dumped by Dwight Eisenhower as his vice-presidential running mate. To save his job, Nixon went on television and gave his famous “Checkers speech”—a demagogic appeal that involved the family dog, Checkers. As a result of that speech, millions of telegrams poured into Republican National Committee headquarters imploring Eisenhower to keep Nixon on the ticket.
¹²

As far as Ted could tell, Jack and Dick Nixon seemed to have a mutual admiration society. “One reason for the across-the-hall cordiality,” wrote Chris Matthews, “was that while Kennedy and his staff assumed even back then that the 1960 Republican presidential nomination was Nixon’s to lose, the vice president had little reason to suspect Kennedy as a rival…. By all outward appearances,
[Kennedy] seemed a genial dilettante destined for a long, no-heavy-lifting career in the Senate….”
¹³

Nixon was not the only one who sold Jack Kennedy short. When Ted Sorensen told friends that he was interviewing for a job with the new senator, they warned him against taking it. “Kennedy’s commitment to civil liberties, New Deal spending, church-state separation, and civil rights was uncertain; and his closeness to his famously conservative father gave [my friends] pause,” Sorensen explained. “… Senator Kennedy wouldn’t hire anyone his father wouldn’t hire, and … Ambassador Kennedy had hired only Irish Catholics.”
¹⁴

But Jack’s stunning victory over Lodge in the 1952 election had elevated him to the status of a political comer. He had managed to defeat an incumbent Republican in a year when the Republicans swept the White House, the Senate, and the House. He was featured in magazines, and was sought after by the new medium of television.

“When he walked into a room, he became its center,” Ted Sorensen recalled. “When he spoke, people stopped and listened. When he grinned, even on television, viewers smiled back at him. He was much the same man in private as he was in public. It was no act—the secret of his magic appeal was that he had no magic at all. But he did have charisma…. It had to be experienced to be believed. It wasn’t only his looks or his words; it was a special lightness of manner, the irony, the teasing, the self-effacement, the patient ‘letting things be.’ Although he could be steely and stern when frustrated, he never lost his temper. When times were bad, he knew they would get better—when they were good, he knew they could get worse.”
¹⁵

Jack bore an uncanny resemblance to Lord Melbourne, a
nineteenth-century British prime minister who was the subject of his favorite biography,
The Young Melbourne
, by David Cecil. Like Melbourne, Jack “thought poorly of the world, but enjoyed every moment of it.”
¹⁶
Biographer Cecil might have had Jack in mind when he wrote of Lord Melbourne: “He had the family zest for life, their common sense, their animal temperament. But some chance of heredity … had infused into this another strain, finer, and more unaccountable. His mind showed it. It was not just that he was cleverer than his brothers and sisters; but his intelligence worked on different lines, imaginative, disinterested, questioning. It enjoyed thought for its own sake, it was given to curious speculations, that had no reference to practical results.”
¹⁷

J
ACK HAD A
better mind than Ted, and Ted knew it. Once, Ted confessed to the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.: “I’ve been trying to read that list of books which Jack said were his favorites. Could he really have enjoyed those books? I tried to read Bemis on John Quincy Adams and Allan Nevins on the coming of the Civil War, and I just couldn’t get through them.”
¹⁸

But in many other ways, Ted surpassed his brother. For one thing, Ted was taller and far handsomer than Jack. And Ted’s prowess on the football field earned Jack’s praise and envy. “[W]hile Ted was not what I would call a natural athlete,” said Henry Lamar, his football coach at Harvard, “he was an outstanding player, the kind that carried out his assignments to the letter…. I’ve never seen any of [the Kennedy brothers] really excited, but Teddy, in particular, would respond to a hard knock by playing harder…. He was that kind of kid. The harder you played against him, the harder he’d play against you.”
¹⁹

And there was yet another difference between the brothers.
Ted was the one who most closely resembled his grandfather, the fun-loving and gregarious Honey Fitz. If Ted did not have a first-rate mind, he had a first-rate political temperament. Jack readily conceded that Ted was the best politician in the family.

But perhaps the biggest difference between the two brothers was in the way they viewed public service. A pragmatist at heart, Jack did not look upon government as a means of promoting an ideology. Like his hero, Lord Melbourne, he believed the world was ruled mainly by “folly, vanity, and selfishness,”
²⁰
and there was not much that government could—or should—do about it. By contrast, Ted was deeply troubled by the plight of the less fortunate. Although at this stage of his life he was still trying to formulate a coherent political philosophy, he was on his way to becoming a tribune of the powerless, the persecuted, and the downtrodden.

“His induction into the army as an enlisted man exposed him firsthand, in a way none of his naval officer brothers had experienced, to the fact that many people, especially blacks, came from severely disadvantaged backgrounds, and that so much of what he had taken for granted all his life was utterly foreign to them and, moreover, forever unattainable by them,” wrote Joe McGinniss in his 1993 study of Ted,
The Last Brother
.
²¹

Another biographer, Ralph G. Martin, came to the same conclusion in his 1995 Kennedy family history,
Seeds of Destruction: Joe Kennedy and His Sons
. “All his life, Teddy had lived in a privileged cocoon,” Martin wrote. “He had been cloistered, insulated. Private schools, tennis, sailing, parties. Suddenly [in the army] he was scraping food off metal trays and sleeping in a barrack with young men who spoke a different language of a different world. It was probably one of the most important experiences that had ever happened to him. It would redirect his life into a real world.”
²²

After his two-year hitch in the army, Ted was discharged in
March 1953. He was readmitted to Harvard but had several months to kill before returning to college in the fall. In the meantime, he told Jack, he planned to volunteer as a basketball coach with underprivileged black and Puerto Rican kids in Boston’s tough South End neighborhood.
²³

*
In his constitutional duty as presiding officer of the Senate, where he has the power to cast a tiebreaking vote, the vice president keeps an office in a Senate office building.

2

M
ANY OF THE
differences between Ted and Jack could be traced to the fact that they were almost fifteen years apart in age and had had strikingly different childhood experiences. Jack had been a frail boy with an intellectual bent; he spent a great deal of time reading in bed while recovering from a variety of illnesses. By contrast, Ted had been a robust and healthy child who displayed little intellectual curiosity. As the baby of the family, he was doted on by his older sisters. Jack’s childhood illnesses were so life threatening that he grew up believing he was living on borrowed time. Ted grew up feeling immune to the laws that govern other people, and somehow divinely protected from the inevitable consequences of his deeds and misdeeds.

Yet a series of family traumas helped forge an extremely close bond between the two brothers. In the 1940s, three of their siblings—Rosemary, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., and Kathleen—met tragic fates.

In 1941, their father had his mentally disabled, twenty-three-year-old daughter Rosemary lobotomized, because her uncontrollable behavior and sexual acting out threatened to ruin his plans to put a son in the White House. At the time, Jack was a twenty-four-year-old and about to become a naval officer. He heard about Rosemary’s tragic fate but was not around to witness it in person. Ted, on the other hand, was an impressionable nine-year-old boy attending prep school who lived through the family trauma.

The lobotomy—a barbaric procedure that consists of cutting the connections to and from the prefrontal cortex of the brain—was botched, and Rosemary was reduced to a life of incontinence and incoherent babble. She was sent to live at St. Coletta, an institution for the retarded, in Jefferson, Wisconsin, where she died, at the age of eighty-six, in 2005.

In later years, Ted would say that Rosemary’s plight inspired him to make health care one of his chief political causes.
¹
But before he entered public life, Rosemary’s ghost was a persistent and disturbing presence. Her mysterious disappearance was a forbidden topic in the Kennedy household. When young Teddy asked his mother about his missing sister, Rose Kennedy would only say that Rosemary had been sent away because she “could not keep up with” the other children.
²

This was an unnerving thing to tell a child in a family where brothers and sisters were constantly pitted against each other in contests of strength and skill. Children who kept up won parental approval. Those who couldn’t were sent to the kitchen to eat their dinner alone—or, as in Rosemary’s case, banished from the clan.