Ted Kennedy Read online

  ALONE 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

  JACK 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.

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  MANY 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.

  In an Irish American family, there was no greater punishment than that. “[C]lan relationships—and Irish society was built upon the clans—were the binding cement that meant survival,” wrote George Reedy in From the Ward to the White House: The Irish in American Politics. “The most despised figure in all Irish literature is The Informer, the monster who betrays his fellow countrymen to the oppressor. There were no binding contracts enforceable in a court of law to hold together men and women scheming to circumvent power. That left only one instrument available for the enforcement of discipline—social ostracism. In a society organized along the lines of family ties, it was a potent instrument indeed. To be isolated from one’s family was a one-way ticket to Hell.”3

  None of the Kennedy children felt this menace more keenly than Teddy, the youngest of nine. A sunny child with “a choirboy smile,” Teddy seemed to lack the killer instinct of his older brothers. “Teddy bends over backwards to be fair when he’s playing tennis,” a friend once noted. “He’s scrupulous about the calls, always giving the advantage to his opponent—and I haven’t seen that in any other Kennedy.”4

  Though he was fat and awkward as a child, Ted tried to keep up with his brothers, especially with the eldest, Joe Jr., whom everyone in the family idolized. In 1944, Joe Jr.’s bomb-laden airplane exploded over the English coast, killing him instantly. Teddy was twelve years old at the time, and he retained a memory of two priests visiting his father at Hyannis Port to offer their comfort and consolation.

  “Then [my father] came out of the sunporch,” Teddy recalled, “and said, ‘Children, your brother Joe has been lost. He died flying a volunteer mission. I want you to be particularly good to your Mother.’”5

  Years later, after John Kennedy became president, he ruminated on how Ted’s life had been influenced by Joe Jr.

  “So if you say what was Joe’s influence,” JFK said, “it was pressure to do your best. Then the example that Joe and I had set put pressure on Bobby to do his best. The pressure of all the others on Teddy came to bear so that he had to do his best. It was a chain reaction started by Joe, that touched me, and all my brothers and sisters.”6

  The family tragedies didn’t end there. In May 1948, while sixteen-year-old Ted was attending Milton Academy, south of Boston, he received word that his favorite sister, Kathleen, the widow of William John Robert Cavendish, the heir of the 10th duke of Devonshire, had died in another plane accident. And so Ted came of age at a time when three of his siblings were enshrined in the family pantheon as iconic figures. Rosemary was a martyr; Joe Jr., a hero; and Kathleen, a victim. It was hard enough to compete with your siblings as the youngest of nine; it was impossible to compete with the idealized memories of Rosemary, Joe Jr., and Kathleen. Surely Ted must have wondered why the last and the least had been spared while the best and the brightest had been cut off in the flower of youth.

  “When you have older [children],” Rose Kennedy said, “they’re the ones that seem more important. When the ninth comes along you have to make more of an effort to tell bedtime stories and be interested in swimming matches. There were seventeen years between my oldest and my youngest child and I had been telling bedtime stories for twenty years.”7

  If Teddy could claim any distinction at all, it was as the family clown. His nickname was “Fat Stuff,”8 and, according to one family biographer, he was “so slow of foot that Bobby or even Jack could dance around him and run down the expanse of lawn for a touchdown.”9

  Not surprisingly, he was the target of merciless teasing, even by his own mother. “I think [Teddy] has put on ten pounds …,” his mother wrote in a round-robin letter to her children in 1942, when Ted was ten years old. “He dances very well, has remarkable rhythm, and shakes his head like a veteran when he does the conga. He only fell down once last week, so he is improving….”10

  Rose was still making fun of her son nearly twenty years later. “Jack gets a great kick out of seeing Ted dance,” she wrote in November 1961, “as Ted has [a] great sense of rhythm but he is big & has such a big derriere it is funny to see him throw himself around….”11

  Many chroniclers of the Kennedy family have noted that Joe Kennedy was away from home for long stretches during the time his youngest son was growing up. One of Ted’s classmates at Fessenden, a prep school in West Newton, Massa
chusetts, recalled that Joe and Rose Kennedy never once visited their son during his two years at the school.12

  Rose was away a lot of the time, too; she took more than a dozen trips to Europe in the first five years of Teddy’s life. However, in the absence of Teddy’s father, Rose ruled (in person or through surrogates) with absolute authority. For instance, although Joe Kennedy boasted that he gave each of his children a thousand dollars for not smoking or drinking—and put them on the honor system—it was actually Rose who was the enforcer. “I got the idea from the Rockefellers,” she said, “and I told Joe.”13 It was she, not their father, who meted out discipline and punishment.

  JOSEPH PATRICK KENNEDY was one of those odd historic figures who are showered with tributes and honors during most of their lifetime and then heaped with abuse in their final years. Throughout the 1920s and ‘30s, while he was amassing one of the great American fortunes, he was hailed as a brilliant businessman and financier, a valued adviser to presidents, and, for a brief moment, a presidential contender himself. As ambassador to Great Britain during the years before World War II, he seriously misjudged Adolf Hitler’s murderous intentions and became a leading advocate of appeasing Nazi Germany. But even then—after he had been rebuffed by President Franklin Roosevelt and recalled home—he continued to wield considerable political influence. The high-water mark of his career came late in life, when he was seventy-two years old and helped engineer the election of his son as president of the United States. For the next eleven months—from Inauguration Day in January 1961 until he suffered a major stroke on December 19 of that year—he was, after President John Kennedy, the second most powerful man in America.

  Joe’s sons grew up idolizing their father; they could not imagine him doing anything wrong. They came of age when he was still a revered figure in business and political circles, and although they eventually acknowledged some of his shortcomings, they never seriously challenged his preeminence or thought of him without deep affection.