Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died (8 page)

A
LMOST SINGLEHANDEDLY
, Joseph Kennedy had created a new phenomenon in American politics: the Kennedy Dynasty. He had put a son in the White House, another in the Justice Department, and a third in the United States Senate. It was widely assumed that after Jack’s two terms, Bobby and Ted would follow him into the Oval Office. Together, the three brothers would rule for nearly a quarter of a century: Jack, 1961–1969; Bobby, 1969–1977; and Ted, 1977–1985.

But like so many best-laid plans in politics, this one never came to fruition. Exactly one year and sixteen days after Ted’s victory, Jack was dead, and Joe Kennedy had to watch helplessly from his wheelchair as the Kennedy Dynasty crashed head-on into the Kennedy Curse.

· · ·

T
HE CRASH OCCURRED
on Ted and joan’s fifth wedding anniversary. Washington’s best caterers were setting up tables and centerpieces for a party planned for that night at the Kennedys’ townhouse in Georgetown. Joan was at the Elizabeth Arden salon on Connecticut Avenue, getting her nails done and her hair lightened. Ted was at the Capitol, sitting in for the president pro tempore of the Senate. The chamber was practically empty; a half dozen members were lolling behind their desks, listening to Stuart Symington, the white-thatched Democrat from Missouri, drone on about the country’s dire balance-of-payments situation.

It was Friday, November 22, 1963.

All of a sudden there was a commotion at the door, and William Langham Riedel, the Senate’s press liaison officer, burst into the chamber and came running down the aisle and up to the rostrum. “Senator Kennedy,” he said breathlessly, “Senator Kennedy, your brother the president has been shot!”
¹

Symington caught the panicky tone in Riedel’s voice and stopped speaking in midsentence. He looked up at Ted. As Symington later recalled, Ted “sat back suddenly in his chair as if he had been hit by a whiplash. With typical Kennedy guts, he very slowly assembled his papers, picked them up, and walked out.”
²

H
E’S DEAD,” BOBBY
said when Ted reached him on the phone at the White House. “You better call [our] mother and sisters.”
³

Ted and his sister Eunice hopped on a presidential helicopter and flew to Hyannis Port. There, they found Rose Kennedy walking alone on the beach. “Even when I heard Jack was shot,” she said, “I thought, those things happen. I never thought the first moment that
it was going to be serious. I never think the worst.”
⁴
Joe Kennedy’s private secretary, Diane Winter D’Alemberta, recalled: “The thing which ultimately brought me to grips with the incomprehensible reality was a hand-clapped cadence and the dear, familiar voice [of Rose Kennedy] repeating over and over again, ‘No-crying-in-this-house! No-crying-in-this-house!’”
⁵

Ted and Eunice went upstairs to break the news to their paralyzed father. Before Ted opened the door to his father’s bedroom, he stationed Joe’s private physician in the hallway outside, ready if necessary to administer a sedative. Then, with tears streaming down his cheeks, Ted told his father that Jack had been assassinated.

“Ted dropped to his knees and buried his face in his hands,” nurse Rita Dallas said.
⁶

“He’s dead, Daddy, he’s dead,” Eunice cried.
⁷

A
FTER THE FUNERAL
, someone asked Ted: “Is it ever going to end for you people?” To which he replied: “There are still more of us than there is trouble.”
⁸

That was a brave thing to say. But it was not true. His father was without the power of speech. His mother had become a religious zealot with a waning interest in worldly matters. Of Joe and Rose’s nine children, three (Joe Jr., Kathleen, and Jack) were dead; a fourth (Rosemary) had been lobotomized into a vegetable-like existence; and a fifth (Patricia) was struggling with alcoholism. With each new blow to his family, Ted was stripped of one more source of emotional support.

Of course, there was still Bobby. But Bobby could not replace Jack as Ted’s guide and counselor. Bobby might have been the brother closest to Ted in age, the one who spent the most time with Ted as he was growing up, but Jack had been Ted’s guiding light. He, not
Bobby, represented everything Ted hoped to become—witty, stylish, charming, charismatic, and tough. Ted and Jack enjoyed the same Irish sense of humor, with its merciless needling and ragging. Jack was dashing and a man of large appetites—traits that Ted particularly admired. Bobby was not cut from the same cloth.

“I miss him every time I see his children,” Ted said of his assassinated brother. “I miss him every time I see the places, like Cape Cod, which had such meaning for him and still have for all of us. I miss him at the times our family used to get together, such as his birthday and Thanksgiving. I miss the chance to tell him about things I’ve done which I feel proud of, and I miss his encouragement and advice at times of difficulty. I miss him as you’d miss your best friend….”
⁹

And yet, it was one of the great ironies of Ted’s life that he, as well as Bobby, missed a brother who was, in many respects, a glorified version of the flesh-and-blood Jack.

“After his death,” wrote James Piereson, president of the conservative William E. Simon Foundation, “Kennedy was soon portrayed by family loyalists as something of a liberal hero who (had he lived) might have led the nation into a new age of peace, justice, and understanding…. This portrayal was encouraged by tributes and memorials inspired by Jacqueline Kennedy and friends and other family members of the slain president, and by numerous books published after the assassination, particularly those by presidential aides Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Theodore Sorensen, both of whom portrayed the fallen president as the brightest star of the time and a leader impossible to replace.”

Piereson continued: “Sorensen wrote that Kennedy was the equal of any of our earlier presidents. Schlesinger went further to say that ‘He re-established the republic as the first generation of our founders saw it—young, brave, civilized, rational, gay, tough, questing,
exultant in the excitement and potentiality of history.’ There was a sense in these tributes that the loss of John F. Kennedy had deprived that nation and the world of a new beginning.”
¹⁰

Like Bobby, Ted embraced this romantic ideal, even though the legend did not fit the facts. From the time Jack entered politics in 1947 until the day he was shot sixteen years later, he steered a pragmatic and moderate course. He was an ardent Cold Warrior who approved assassination plots and increased the federal defense budget by billions of dollars. He was a fiscal conservative who cut taxes to stimulate the economy. His approach to civil rights and other liberal causes was governed by realism and caution. He even refused to pose for pictures with the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. for fear that such photographs could cost him reelection.
¹¹
He was, to use his own words, “a liberal without illusions.”

But this was not the JFK whom Bobby and Ted chose to enshrine in memory. The legend, not the man, served as their template for Kennedy-style liberalism. Where the real JFK was careful never to get too far out in front of public opinion, Bobby and Ted embraced the mythic JFK who was lionized as a revolutionary cultural figure. Where the real JFK believed in arming for peace, Bobby and Ted rejected militant anticommunism and American exceptionalism (the idea that America is favored by Providence) as key elements of foreign policy.
¹²

“President Kennedy,” Bobby declared, “was more than just president of a country. He was the leader of young people everywhere. What he was trying to do was fight against hunger, disease, and poverty around the world. You and I as young people have a special responsibility to carry on the fight.”
¹³

What’s more, Bobby and Ted accepted the fable that their brother was a martyr to a great cause. In their version of events, Jack, like Abraham Lincoln, was the champion of black America. Jack’s
role as a great emancipator had made him the target of reactionary elements on the political Right. Of course, this narrative ignored the fact that Jack’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a committed communist, not a right-winger. But Bobby and Ted brushed aside this inconvenient truth—each for his own reason.

Bobby was tormented by guilt. He could not shake off the suspicion that his enemies in organized crime were responsible for his brother’s assassination. As chief counsel to the Senate rackets committee in the 1950s and, later, as attorney general, Bobby had waged a crusade against Sam Giancana, the Chicago Mafia boss, and Jimmy Hoffa, the Mobbed-up president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Bobby had expected these men to come after
him
, to retaliate against
him
—not against Jack.

After Jack’s murder, Bobby carried a copy of Edith Hamilton’s
The Greek Way
. In it, he had underlined a comment by the fifth-century historian Herodotus: “All arrogance will reap a harvest rich in tears. God calls men to a heavy reckoning for overweening pride.” In his struggle to overcome the crushing weight of his survivor’s guilt, Bobby underwent a dramatic transformation; he shed his persona as a nasty and vindictive person—Jack’s “hatchet man”—and assumed the idealized persona of his dead brother.

Ted had a different perspective. To Ted’s way of thinking, Jack had been martyred because of his efforts to unlatch the door of opportunity for millions of Americans. Therefore, Ted felt he had the obligation to take up his brother’s unfinished work by redefining the meaning of liberalism. As Ted saw it, this new liberalism was not merely a pragmatic approach to change, like FDR’s New Deal or Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Rather, it was a moral attitude toward life, a sympathetic posture in favor of the underdog—women, blacks, the poor, and the disabled. In Ted’s mind, these minorities were entitled to
preferential
treatment.

Ted’s brand of liberalism, unlike JFK’s, was forged in the crucible of the anti-Vietnam War movement. “Starting with antiwar feeling …—’make love, not war’—the young Americans picked up the anti-capitalist animus of the Marxist 1930s, and merged these emotions with either primitivism or nihilism, depending on temperaments,” wrote Columbia University professor Jacques Barzun in his monumental work
From Dawn to Decadence—1500 to the Present
. “Some of the rebels formed communes in which they lived like early Christians or nineteenth-century Utopian groups—brother-and-sisterhoods with property and workload in common; others hid in basements to make bombs and blow up business by way of advertising their views…. A … protest, at one of the leading universities in California, is to be remembered … for the slogan … the crowd chanted during the demonstration: ’
Western Civ. has to go
!”
¹⁴

For Ted, as for many antiwar demonstrators, America was a sick and violent society that had to atone for the sins of genocide against Native Americans and for the oppression of women, blacks, and other minority groups. The purpose of liberal reform “was to begin to even the historical score against those who had previously tilted the game unfairly in their own favor.”
¹⁵

Ted was not alone in his belief that a bill had come due on America’s guilt. In the 1960s and ‘70s, many people agreed with him that Americans had to pay for their complicity in the death of the young president. To a significant degree, Lyndon Johnson built the edifice of the Great Society—his ambitious and wildly expensive program aimed at eradicating poverty and racial injustice—on the foundation of the nation’s collective culpability for JFK’s assassination. Many worthy things were accomplished under the banner of guilt—most notably, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawing racial segregation in schools, public places, and employment, and the
Voting Rights Act of 1965 eliminating discriminatory election practices against African Americans.

W
HEN, SOME YEARS
later, Americans finally awoke from their Kennedy-induced reverie, they found, like Rip Van Winkle, that they did not recognize their own country. Out of the youth rebellion, the sexual revolution, feminism, and the other protest movements of the 1960s, a new America had been born. In many ways, it was a better America. Certainly, it was a more fluid, open, and egalitarian America. But it was also a coarser America, a country beset by violence, crime, and drugs and dominated by members of an antiestablishment culture who adopted new ways of talking, acting, and dressing.

“When one could go to a shop and buy … jeans ready-made with spots and patches, cut short and unraveled at the edges, a new intention was evident,” wrote Jacques Barzun. “When young women put on an old sweater, pearls, and evening pumps together, when young men went about in suits of which the sleeves covered their hands and the legs of the trousers were trod underfoot, they made known a rejection of elegance, a denial of feminine allure, and a sympathy for the ‘disadvantaged.’ Such clothes were not cheap; their style was anti-property, anti-bourgeois; it implied siding with the poor, whose clothes are hand-me-downs in bad condition. To appear unkempt, undressed, and for perfection unwashed, is the key signature of the whole age.”
¹⁶

The swift and ferocious cultural upheaval proved too much for many Americans, who blamed liberals for ruining their country. The once-solid (and conservative) South abandoned the Democrats for the Republicans, as did millions of suburbanites who were anxious to hold on to their comfortable, if increasingly quaint, version of the
American Dream. Ethnic blue-collar voters, until then the backbone of the Democratic Party, were repulsed by the counterculture; many in their ranks turned into the Silent Majority and voted for Richard Nixon as president—the first of several politically cautious, fiscally conservative presidents who broke with the big-government model of the liberal welfare state.