Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died (9 page)

Thus, instead of advancing their cause, Ted Kennedy and the mythmakers of Camelot inadvertently encouraged the excesses of the counterculture. They were responsible for pushing liberalism to the fringe of American political life, where its influence on policy became marginal. In the forty-six years between John F. Kennedy’s assassination and Barack Obama’s inauguration, the Democratic Party would control the United States Senate for all but thirteen years. And yet, during most of that time, the political label “liberal” would be held in disrepute, and Ted would find himself in the ideological wilderness.

To his credit, he never gave up. He never abandoned his convictions or principles. On the contrary, he became a more effective politician. His position as odd-man-out on the floor of the Senate forced him to develop legislative skills, which, in time, enabled him to achieve incremental progress toward many of his liberal goals. Like a member of another famous political family, John Quincy Adams, who served in the House of Representatives after he was defeated for a second term in the White House, Edward Kennedy “earned the respect of his bitterest foes,” and became “as great a master of parliamentary procedure as any member of Congress in history.”
¹⁷

7

O
N JUNE
19, 1964—one full year after President Kennedy had sent a special message to Congress, declaring passage of the Civil Rights Act as “imperative”—the United States Senate finally took up consideration of the bill. It meant the world to Ted Kennedy, who exhorted his colleagues to pass the legislation in honor of his brother’s memory. After hours of interminable wrangling over procedural details, the senators finally began voting at 7:40
P.M
. As soon as the bill passed, Ted rushed from the chamber to a car that was waiting to take him to the airport. He was expected in West Springfield, Massachusetts, where the Democrats were holding their state nominating convention. Ted was running unopposed for a full Senate term, and several hundred overheated, boozed-up delegates were milling around, impatiently anticipating his imminent arrival.

But first, Ted instructed his driver to stop at Arlington National Cemetery. At the Eternal Flame in front of his brother’s gravestone,
he knelt on one knee, crossed himself, and took a moment to read the words of Jack’s inaugural address, which were engraved in the stone. We do not know what he did next, but without straying too far from the known facts, we might reasonably assume that Ted informed his brother of the events that had just transpired in the United States Senate, the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the historic consummation of John F. Kennedy’s presidency.

Not long afterward, at 8:35
P.M
., a twin-engine Aero Commander 680 took off from Washington’s National Airport with Senator Kennedy and three other passengers on board: Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana; Bayh’s wife, Marvella; and Ted’s legislative aide, Ed Moss. The pilot, Ed Zimny, warned Ted that there were thunderstorms all the way from New York City north to western Massachusetts, and that they were in for a rough flight. When the plane began to pitch and roll in the dense fog, Zimny suggested that he divert the plane to another airport.

“It was like flying through a black void,” Bayh said later.
¹

But Ted was hours behind schedule and in no mood for further delays. “Damn it,” he snapped at Zimny, “we’re late already.”
²

In an act of bravado, Ted unfastened his seat belt and half stood, half crouched in the low-ceilinged plane. Moments later, the Aero Commander plowed into an orchard three miles from Barnes Municipal Airport, instantly killing the pilot and Ed Moss.

J
EAN HEARD THE
news on the 11:00
P.M
. radio,” said Rose Kennedy. “She crossed the street [at the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port] and told Bobby, who was at home in bed, and they left immediately for Ted—without disturbing their parents. So the seventh and the eighth child were a great blessing for the ninth.”
³

When Ted regained consciousness in Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton, Massachusetts, Bobby was at his bedside. Looking up at his brother, Ted said, “Is it true that you are ruthless?”
⁴

Three vertebrae in his lower spine were fractured, one of them almost completely crushed. Two ribs were broken. His lung was punctured. His blood pressure was almost negligible. Doctors were not at all confident that he would live through the night.

After a press conference the next day, Bobby had lunch with the columnist Jimmy Breslin. “I was just thinking back in there,” he said, pointing to Ted’s room. “If my mother hadn’t had any more children than the first four [Joe, Rosemary, Kathleen, and Jack], she would have nothing now.”
⁵

Later, Bobby went for a walk with his friend Walter Sheridan, a federal investigator whom Bobby had hired in the Justice Department to help him expose Jimmy Hoffa. “We just lay down in the grass,” Sheridan said, “and he said, ‘Somebody up there doesn’t like us.’”
⁶

The following day, the paralyzed Joe Kennedy was wheeled into Ted’s hospital room. His six-foot-two, two-hundred-thirty-pound son had been transferred from an orthopedic stretcher called a Stryker frame to a larger Foster frame—a pipe-and-canvas-sling contraption in which he was continually rotated, like a chicken in a rotisserie, so that the force of gravity could exert pressure on different muscles of his body without, at the same time, moving his spine. His father looked first at his son’s feet, then at his face, and then at his entire body.
⁷

“You should have seen [Joe’s] face,” said a member of the hospital staff. “His eyes were wet and pained.”
⁸

When the doctors recommended back surgery, Joe, who could
not articulate words, made his feelings unmistakably clear by moaning and groaning and storming at the doctors. He was too impatient to communicate by writing words on a pad.

“Dad doesn’t like doctors and doesn’t believe half of what they say,” Ted remarked later.
⁹

D
ESPITE HID PARALYSIS
and aphasia, Joe Kennedy wasted no time putting his formidable publicity machine to work on behalf of his injured son. As in the case of Jack’s health problems, Ted’s injuries were treated as an opportunity to create a positive political spin. The aim was to drape Ted in the mantle of Jack’s high-minded leadership. Newspaper stories described how such eminent Harvard professors as the economist John Kenneth Galbraith and Jerome Wiesner, JFK’s science adviser, came to the hospital to conduct private seminars for Ted as he slowly rotated in his Foster frame. The public was treated to a peek at Ted’s highbrow reading list—a biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the collected papers of the Adams family (which claimed two presidents), and Winston Churchill’s multivolume history of World War II.
¹⁰
To further the resemblance between Ted and his dead brother, Ted took up one of Jack’s favorite pastimes: painting landscapes. And like Jack, who had famously written
Profiles in Courage
while recuperating from back surgery, Ted was hard at work putting together a book of reminiscences, titled
The Fruitful Bough
, about his father.

“When we grew a little older,” Bobby wrote in the book, “we realized that [our father] wasn’t perfect, that he made mistakes, but by that time, we realized everyone did.”
¹¹

Eleven days after his accident, while he was still recovering in Cooley Dickinson Hospital, Ted received a phone call from the man
who had succeeded his brother in the White House, President Lyndon Baines Johnson.

LBJ
: My friend, I’m sure glad to hear your voice.

Kennedy
: … I wanted to call and tell you how much we appreciate it—Joan appreciates everything you’ve done.

LBJ
: I haven’t done anything, but I’m sure ready and willing.

Kennedy
: You sent all those wonderful people up from the Army—[Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus] Vance did, and they made a great deal of difference and everyone’s been so kind down there and they’ve taken great care of me. Really coming along now. Making some progress.

LBJ
: You got a bad break, but my mother used to tell me that things like that develop character and it’ll make you stronger when you get older, [
chuckles
]

Kennedy
: I don’t know about that. You’re ready to trade a little of that…. That’s what I keep reading in all that mail. They say you get down on that back a little while and think and do a little suffering, you’ll be a better man.
¹²

I
N MID-DECEMBER, TED
emerged from the hospital wearing a cumbersome back brace. His father’s PR campaign had succeeded: many people believed that Ted’s painful months in the Foster frame had turned him into a new and better man—someone who was mature beyond his thirty-two years. That, of course, remained to be seen. But one thing was certain: his near-death experience and miraculous recovery
had
turned him into a living legend.

In January 1965, when he and Bobby (who had won a Senate seat from New York) were sworn in together, the spectators in the
Visitors Gallery burst into cheers. The next day, Ted was greeted on the floor of the Senate as a conquering hero.

“The junior senator from Massachusetts will be written in history as one of the great men,” said Birch Bayh, who, at the risk of his own life, had crawled back into the burning plane to pull the badly injured Ted Kennedy from the wreckage. Leverett Saltonstall, Ted’s Republican colleague from Massachusetts, said, “I have admired the courage, the morale, the patience, and the frustration he has undergone in the hospital.” And Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, who lost an arm in battle during World War II, rose to declare that Edward Moore Kennedy, “our beloved junior senator from Massachusetts,” should have his own chapter in his brother’s
Profiles in Courage
.

8

O
N BASTILLE DAY
, July 14, 1967, Joan Kennedy gave birth to her third child. (Three years earlier, she and Ted had had a stillborn baby boy, who was buried in the Kennedy plot at Holy-hood Cemetery in Brookline, Massachusetts.) The new baby, Patrick Joseph Kennedy II, was named after his great-great-grandfather, who had come to America from Ireland in 1848 and who died of consumption on November 22, 1858—105 years to the day before the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
¹

Ted and Joan’s Georgetown townhouse could no longer accommodate their crowded household—three children (Kara, Teddy Jr., and Patrick) under the age of eight plus a nanny and a housekeeper. After looking at existing homes, Ted decided to build a new house on a six-acre tract of land in McLean, Virginia, near his brother Bobby’s place at Hickory Hill.

For an architect, he chose John Carl Warnecke, who had designed Ted’s house in Hyannis Port, Bobby’s pool house at Hickory
Hill, and President Kennedy’s gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery. Jack Warnecke was more than the unofficial Kennedy family architect; the tall, handsome, divorced architect and the recently widowed First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy had conducted a secret romance for quite some time, and had only broken it off the previous Christmas when Jackie started seeing Aristotle Onassis.
²