The House of Kennedy

by James Patterson

  In 1953, Ted is readmitted to Harvard, now six-two, two hundred pounds—and two academic years behind his entering class. “He learned a lesson,” his teammate Claude Hooton says of the cheating scandal that nearly derailed his chances at Harvard, especially his chances at becoming only the second Kennedy man to win a coveted varsity letter.

  The first was Bobby, who played in jersey number 86, and Ted is proud to wear Harvard number 88. He’s a strong player, and following the 1955 season, receives a scouting letter from Green Bay Packers head coach Lisle Blackbourn. “You have been very highly recommended to us by a number of coaches in your area and also by our talent scouts as a possible Pro Prospect.” But when Joe Sr. arranges a session in a Chicago Bears practice uniform, Ted’s dreams of professional football dim. “He put on the pads, took two or three hits, and said he’d never been so frightened in his life,” remembers his roommate Ted Carey. “He got out of there.”

  Had he pursued a rookie bid and made the Green Bay Packers team, Ted would have encountered Bart Starr and Forrest Gregg as first-years on their way to the Hall of Fame. Instead, Ted famously informs Coach Blackbourn that instead of football, he’s chosen “another contact sport.”

  Politics.

  Chapter 36

  In the fall of 1956, Ted enrolls at the University of Virginia Law School, from which Bobby had graduated in 1951. The class of 1959 has 150 members, and Ted makes a fast friend in John Tunney, whose father, former heavyweight champ Gene Tunney, owns a summer house near the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. The classmates partner for the prestigious multiyear elective moot-court competition (winning in their third year, where Bobby had not). They also rent an off-campus house together on Barracks Road, where their lavish parties are catered by a cook named Carmen, formerly employed by Jackie.

  At one white-tie affair, which Ted’s brother Bobby also attends, Mortimer Caplin compares the demeanor of the two Kennedy UVA alums. “The contrast was so dramatic. I mean Ted was the life of the party—singing, being the leader—and Bob was sitting there—thoughtful, quiet—and it stuck with me for a long time.”

  When Ted invites Bobby to speak on the Charlottesville, Virginia, campus, Bobby first asks (allegedly on behalf of Rose), “what side of the court my brother is going to appear on when he gets out of law school, attorney or defendant.”

  Bobby is referring to the speeding tickets—five of them—Ted has racked up during his time in Charlottesville. The most serious incident occurred in March 1958, when Ted was a twenty-six-year-old second-year student. That night Sheriff T. M. Whitten pursued a speeding car from the intersection of US 29 and US 250. “He cut his lights out on me and tried to outrun me,” Whitten recalls, before pulling into a driveway and “[getting] down in the front seat” to hide from the officer. Whitten arrests the man, who identifies himself as Edward M. Kennedy, and Ted is ultimately convicted of reckless driving and fined thirty-five dollars.

  Ted can’t stay away from speed—or danger. Ted Sorensen recalls driving with then-undergraduate Ted from Cape Cod to Boston. “It was the first time in my young life that I realized when cars coming from the other direction blink their lights at you, it means there’s a trooper up ahead and you ought to slow down.”

  During law school, Ted also earns his license to pilot single-engine airplanes. It’s a two-hour drive on US 29 from Charlottesville to Bobby’s Hickory Hill estate in McLean—and an even faster trip by air. John Tunney recalls Ted turning what should have been a routine flight into a wild ride. “I’ve never been more terrified in my life as when we came into [Washington] National Airport and they told us to follow a Colonial airplane into the airport landing strip. I point up at the plane and said, ‘Ted, is that the one up there?’ He said, ‘I think that’s it.’ So that plane goes in and we start coming in after that plane. The ground controller said—I think we were in a Cessna, ‘Cessna, Cessna, get out of there, get out of there! Hard left!’ And so we take a hard left turn and I look behind me and there is a four-engine plane coming in. There was a United plane on our tail…We got out of the way, we landed, and then we flew back the next day.”

  Though Ted laughs off the near crash, Tunney makes a plan and sticks to it. “I wasn’t going to tell him I was afraid to fly with him. I just studiously avoided it.”

  In 1958, Ted is appointed as “manager” of Jack’s 1958 campaign for reelection to the US Senate during his third year of law school. Lester S. Hyman, a Washington lawyer and political mentor to the Kennedys, recalls, “I really got to see Ted in action. He was very helpful in the campaign, but he clearly wasn’t running it.”

  James Sterling Young, the director of a Kennedy Oral History Project at the University of Virginia, identifies a 1960s saying: “Most people grow up and go into politics. The Kennedys go into politics and then they grow up.”

  “He was the show horse,” John Tunney says of the decision to hand such responsibility to a young man with no political experience. “But Teddy learned fast and everybody adored him. It was clear that he had a magic with crowds; the way he spoke, the way he looked, he was very handsome…He [Ted] was a great politician. He just had it, and his family used to say that he was the most natural politician in the family.”

  In her 1998 biography of aide Kenny O’Donnell and his life with the Kennedys, his daughter Helen O’Donnell asked each of her interview subjects the same question: “Compare John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Edward Kennedy.” “John Kennedy was the ultimate pragmatist, [while] Bob Kennedy, when he changed, became the ultimate man of passion,” Lester Hyman responds, adding, “Ted Kennedy is the perfect amalgam of the two of them, the pragmatic side and the passionate side.” In his interview with the Miller Center, which specializes in presidential scholarship, the Boston Globe’s Robert Healy identifies a similar alchemy. “Jack was all head. Ted’s all heart.”

  On November 4, 1958, Jack regains his seat in the Senate, and the moment sparks Ted’s own political ambitions. “The day that John Kennedy was elected,” John Tunney remembers, “Teddy made a decision that he was going to run for the Senate,” though he would not be eligible until after his thirtieth birthday in 1962.

  That night, after the victory party, the brothers make a private toast to their respective political ambitions. Ted begins, “Here’s to 1960, Mr. President—if you can make it.” And Jack replies, “Here’s to 1962, Senator Kennedy, if you can make it.”

  Chapter 37

  On October 28, 1957, the Kennedy family is dedicating a sports complex at Manhattanville College in memory of Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy, who attended the Catholic women’s school. Ted’s sister Jean, also an alumna, introduces her classmate Joan Bennett, a Bronxville local, to her twenty-five-year-old brother. “He was tall and he was gorgeous,” Joan remembers. Joan is herself twenty-one and has modeled for Revlon and Coca-Cola. The Kennedys approve of the blond beauty, whom Jack nicknames “the Dish,” and Secret Service agent Larry Newman later describes as “the kind of girl anyone would want to date, the kind who would never take a drink, never be anything but cheerful and sunny.”

  Only married men succeed in politics, Joe and Rose insist. So in late summer 1958, Ted fumbles his proposal to Joan, barely managing, “What do you think about our getting married?” and failing to present her with a ring. She accepts, though acknowledges to herself that Ted is a man she barely knows. Joe purchases the ring Ted finally gives to Joan when he arrives late to their engagement party.

  Despite Joan’s misgivings, the wedding is announced, an ivory bridal gown is chosen, and several hundred guests are invited to witness the ceremony set for November 29, 1958, at St. Joseph’s Church in Bronxville, New York. Still, according to Kennedy cousin Mary Lou McCarthy, “From the beginning, she was in trouble, and she seemed to know.”

  Harry Bennett, a Republican and father of the bride, arranges that the wedding be filmed. But when newlywed Joan watches the footage, she receives not the wedding gift her father intended but the shock of her life. Jack, forget
ting that he was miked, can be heard reassuring Joan’s new husband, “Being married doesn’t really mean you have to be faithful to your wife.”

  He isn’t.

  Although Kennedy biographer Barbara Leaming calls Joan “the perfect polished wife” and notes that she and Ted “were a couple of such attractiveness that they seemed to belie all the laws of time and nature,” early in the marriage, Joan finds in her bed a gold necklace that doesn’t belong to her. When, over lunch in Washington, she asks Jackie’s advice, her sister-in-law is blunt. “No woman is ever enough for a guy in that family,” she says, then insists, “Make sure Ted knows you found that necklace.”

  Ted does share one secret with his new wife: his longing to leave the Kennedy East Coast strongholds. He tells John Tunney that “he was thinking of going west, going out to maybe California and putting his roots down. He even talked about having part ownership of a football team, an NFL team.”

  Ted does go west, but only on sanctioned Kennedy business. He’s the manager of thirteen western states in Jack’s 1960 presidential campaign. Tirelessly canvassing for signatures, organizing field staff, and subsisting on a diet of fast food, Ted steadily gains weight. (“He was terrible with candy and ice cream,” Lester Hyman explains, but “when he runs for election he drops twenty pounds.”)

  Ted excels in finding daring, newsworthy ways to bring in pledged votes for Jack—riding a bucking bronco in Miles City, Montana, and landing a 180-foot ski jump outside of Madison, Wisconsin. In the weeks leading up to the New Hampshire primary—during which his and Joan’s first child, Kara Anne Kennedy, is born on February 27, 1960—he even climbs into strangers’ cars to affix campaign stickers to interior windows until an unseen dog attacks him. “Yes, he went west and he delivered Wyoming,” Robert Healy recalls.

  Jack makes Ted a dare that he should, by FAA regulations, have refused. Though Ted is licensed to fly only single-engine planes, during a swing through Nevada, Jack convinces his youngest brother to pilot the Kennedys’ twin-engine campaign plane, the Caroline. Ted does, and brings the aircraft in for a rough landing.

  There is more turbulence on election night, when the votes promised to Ted in the field don’t appear in the election returns. Ten of the thirteen states under Ted’s watch land in Nixon’s column. Jack’s victory, though narrow, should be a triumph for all Kennedys. To lessen the sting of his father and brothers’ disappointment in him, Ted sends a humorous telegram from Africa, where Jack had exiled him on a press junket: “Can I come back if I promise to carry the Western States in 1964?”

  On February 7, 1961, less than a month after Jack is inaugurated president, Ted also takes a new job, for the standard Kennedy public-service salary of a dollar per year, assisting Suffolk County district attorney Garrett Byrne. The Boston location is decidedly not in any of the western states where Ted and Joan have privately discussed moving. Regarding the change of heart, “All I remember,” Joan says, “is that Ted told me his father wanted him to run for United States Senate.”

  It is to be the patriarch’s last major political power play. The week before Christmas, 1961, Joe Sr. loses consciousness on a golf course near the Kennedy mansion in Palm Beach. He is rushed by ambulance to St. Mary’s Hospital, where the Kennedys have been generous donors, previously dedicating a room in memory of Joe Jr. In the room next door, doctors determine that Joe has suffered a stroke, and a priest performs last rites. When he stabilizes, he’s found to have lost his speech and mobility on the right side of his body.

  “The stroke was devastating,” Robert Healy explains. Previously, Joe “would call all of them [including Teddy] every day…and then when he had the stroke, you know, he couldn’t talk but he still called them.”

  Out of the whole family, Ted is the one who can best understand and communicate with his father. But Ted’s devotion—he alone stays by his father’s hospital bed for three days—is mixed with devilish merriment.

  Rita Dallas, newly hired as a live-in caregiver for Joe, is caught completely off guard when Rose asks her to carry a stack of towels to the sauna in Hyannis Port and comes “face to face with Teddy and his friends, milling around, stark naked.” Ted addresses Rita by name, though they have never met before, as he “was dancing around jovially full of fun and laughter. Draping his arm around my shoulder, which was stiff with shock, he made a flamboyant point of introducing me to his friends. Never before, or ever since, have I been introduced to a naked man.”

  With Joe incapacitated, the responsibility of convincing voters of Ted’s worthiness for a Senate seat now falls to President Kennedy.

  Though Ted’s 1951 withdrawal from Harvard for cheating on his Spanish exam did not make headlines at the time, the Kennedys are well aware that the eleven-year-old tidbit will feel fresh once Ted—finally eligible to run for Senate now that his thirtieth birthday has passed in February 1962—will be up against Eddie McCormack, state attorney general and favorite nephew of John W. McCormack, Speaker of the House of Representatives, in the Democratic state primary contest.

  JFK chooses Robert Healy to break the story for the Boston Globe, after a protracted negotiation over where to bury the lede. “He [the president] wants it in a biographical sketch of Teddy,” Healy recalls. “I’d write that story, put it in the tenth paragraph and the AP [Associated Press] would lead with it all over the country that Teddy got caught cheating at Harvard. No way am I going to do that.”

  They agree on an interview-style headline—“Ted Kennedy Tells About Harvard Examination Incident”—and that the contents of the article will not identify the student who took the Spanish exam in Ted’s place.

  “Jack could swear like a pirate,” Healy says, recalling the president’s next words. “I’m having more fucking trouble with this [Harvard cheating story] than I did with the Bay of Pigs.”

  McGeorge Bundy, a former Harvard dean of arts and sciences who is also on the call with Healy, agrees. “And with about the same results.”

  The scandal successfully contained, the campaign confronts the next challenge, the “Teddy-Eddie” debate to be televised on August 27, 1962, from South Boston High School. McCormack is circulating a campaign brochure listing his numerous achievements against Ted’s sole qualification (“Brother of the President”), and on debate night builds that theme into a personal attack. “If his name was Edward Moore, with his qualifications, with your qualifications, Teddy, your candidacy would be a joke,” McCormack sneers. “But nobody’s laughing because his name is not Edward Moore. It’s Edward Moore Kennedy.”

  “Ted almost fell apart at that point,” Lester Hyman says, and remembers bracing for McCormack to surge at the polls. “But it was just the opposite, particularly the women. You know, you don’t do that to a Kennedy. Kennedys can do no wrong, and it just turned the other way around. And that’s how Teddy won the nomination.”

  In the statewide general election on November 6, 1962, Ted faces yet another political heir—Republican George Cabot Lodge, son of Henry Cabot Lodge, whom Jack had defeated to win his first Senate seat in 1952. History repeats itself as another Kennedy bests another Cabot Lodge.

  Ted’s victory, with 54 percent of the votes, at once cements the Kennedy dynasty and launches what will become the third-longest career in the Senate.

  Chapter 38

  Mississippi senator James O. Eastland, head of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, initiates the freshman senator Ted Kennedy into rarified, competitive congressional culture.

  As Ted tells the story, he arrives in Eastland’s office for an early-morning meeting where the only choice of refreshment is bourbon or Scotch. After three stiff drinks, Ted finds himself named to the Immigration, Constitution, and Civil Rights subcommittees.

  “So of course I go back to my office, and the sitting room is filled with people—the 9:00 meeting, the 9:30 meeting, the 10 o’clock meeting—and I walk in there smelling like a brewery. Here’s our little Senator, thirty years old; he’s been down here two weeks, and he’s
stiff as a billy goat at ten in the morning.”

  In an April 1963 interview with Newsweek’s James M. Cannon, President Kennedy dissects his family dynamic. “The pressure of all the others on Teddy came to bear so that he had to do his best,” the president says. “It was a chain reaction started by Joe, that touched me, and all my brothers and sisters.”

  “What an extraordinary family man he [Ted] was,” says John Tunney. “I can tell you from the inside, it was that way. They were just bound to each other.”

  Lester Hyman recalls flying as Ted’s passenger in a two-seater plane to Hyannis Port so that Ted could visit his father. “I always remember Ted being so patient and just talking at him, telling him everything that had happened and telling him stories. I was told later that of all the children in the family, he was the one who most came to see the father, over and over again.”

  That November, it falls to Ted to break the news of Jack’s death to Joe. He shares the family’s fear that the patriarch, who has never fully recovered from his 1961 stroke, will not survive news of the loss. The next day, Ted takes Joe for a car ride. They set out, along with nurse Rita Dallas, for a seemingly aimless trip along the roads of Cape Cod. Determined to keep his father away from news of preparations for the national day of mourning in Jack’s honor, Ted stretches the drive for hours, pretending to be lost so that Joe can point out the turns back home.