The Kennedy Imprisonment

by Garry Wills

  The caution with which she bore her barely mended pride, during the 1980 campaign, impressed many viewers. But it was miraculous that any mending had occurred. She had been, over the years, systematically broken down and almost discarded in a world of men who shy superstitiously from losers and of women who go with their men no matter what. Myra McPherson, in her book on political wives, interviewed a frequent visitor to Hyannis Port, who told her: “They all really got on Joan, to the point where I felt sorry for her. I remember one day we were all going sailing, and everyone had on old blue jeans and Joan came down in a leopard skin bathing suit. Ethel said, ‘Really, Joan, did you expect the photographer?’ Everyone snickered. Joan was helpless, unable to quip back with some smart crack. That’s what you had to do.”

  The results of this long attritive living with the Kennedys came to frighten Edward Kennedy at last. And no wonder. Burton Hersh’s book contains this searing passage: “A longstanding journalistic friend of the Kennedy family remembers stopping at Kennedy’s house in Hyannis Port a couple of summers ago to talk and have a drink. As he was leaving, Kennedy suggested that the visitor hadn’t had a chance yet to say hello to Joan, and led him around to the back of the house; Joan lay crumpled up, passed out in the back seat of one of the Kennedy cars. ‘She was a rag mop,’ the friend observes. ‘I’ve seen drunks often enough, but what I was looking at there was the result of a two- or three-day bender. I think Kennedy just wanted me to see what he was up against. If something got printed, he was prepared for that.” In a man’s world of winners one must be tough enough to go on, even when the losers can’t.

  4

  The Prisoner of Sex

  By a kind of compensation the source of his power was the cause also of his downfall.

  —WALTER BAGEHOT, of Bolingbroke

  The night after that Pier Four rally where I first noticed how checked are all Edward Kennedy’s public gestures out toward women, there was a little “birthday party” for staff and press in the motel we stayed at. Joan Kennedy was just ahead of me in the buffet line, and I tried to kid her gently about adding a year to her husband’s age in a speech earlier that day. She knitted her brow in an effort to understand, but said nothing. Her husband saw her talking to me and hastened over. “Come join us, Joansy.” She was swept to a small protective table with familiar aides around her.

  Kennedy’s task during the campaign was to produce Joan and protect her at the same time, and these were antithetical aims. Her absence would be an indictment of him as a family man. Yet her presence was an absence even more startling—she was so clearly disoriented by the glare; misread her short, carefully prepared speeches; wore an orange mask of makeup which cracked, on occasion, and let the tears seep through.

  Kennedy’s “Joan problem” was not simply that he had to protect her while producing her, hide and expose simultaneously. The real problem was that he could not protect her. Often as he thanked her, guided her, deferred to her, he touched her as cautiously as he did the women who gushed up to him for handshakes. There was a troubled space between them; each reached across it only rarely, tentatively. During the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Chicago, when security problems were anticipated, she skittered at noises and clutched for him, but he was marching defiantly forward and did not notice. The few times they tried to kiss in public were tense moments for them both. It is hard to put together sundered intimacies with half a nation watching.

  So the imprisonment was complete. Not only could he not reach out in public, even innocently, to women supporters. He could not reach out to his own wife with any confidence of finding her. Once he may have neglected her. Now, try though he would, he could barely locate her.

  The philanderer’s compiling of lists means crossing women off, erasing them. The philanderer’s punishment is the inability to call back the one woman he may want once she has been erased. The very word “conquests,” used of seduction, poses the problem in a military metaphor. It is one thing to conquer a people, quite another to rule it, to win it over. The power to conquer is often a delusion, even at the national level; and almost always at the personal level. Power to destroy hurts the destroyer if there is not a concomitant power to restore. The child, angry at not getting the station he wants on a radio, has the power to smash it; but this is not useful power, the power to make it speak again. It is easy to smash the intricate circuitry of a marriage; but what if one should want to make the other partner speak again some day? Edward Kennedy was trying, all thumbs, to put back the most costly and complicated inner workings of a delicate speaking apparatus, a marriage, in front of the voters of New Hampshire. And he was failing.

  The failure was not his alone. The entire Kennedy family was too much for Joan (or for most people) to cope with. Nor was Edward the worst husband she might have found in that family. It puzzled me all through the 1980 campaign to hear people say they would vote again for one of the older brothers, but not for Edward; he lacked character. His character flaws, such as an outsider can judge, seemed to me neither as deep nor as crippling as those displayed by other Kennedys, beginning with the father. Then why was the judgment on Edward’s shortcomings so harsh?

  One reason may be that he seems to have got caught more than a reasonably prudent man should. If the others symbolically “got away with murder,” getting away with it took managerial discipline that might be relevant to presidential performance. William Buckley even wrote that what disqualified Edward Kennedy, in the light of Chappaquiddick, was his poor head for cover-ups. It was not important that he was, in Buckley’s words, “drunk and horny” that night (questionable assertions), but that he could not tidy up the mess more deftly.

  The friend of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew may place cover-up skills higher on the list of presidential qualities than others would, but this youngest son does seem to have been caught a good deal—repeatedly caught speeding, caught cheating in college, caught doing God-knows-what at Chappaquiddick. Some amateur psychiatrists put this down to a death wish in the last brother left alive, claim that he may subconsciously desire the comparative immunity that has come to his brothers after death. That kind of speculation is amusing to the speculator but of little use to anyone else. The trouble with it is that Kennedy started getting caught—at Harvard, at the University of Virginia—long before there was any “legacy of death” for the Kennedys.

  One reason for this brother’s public indiscretions may simply be the fact that he is the first Kennedy male in three generations to break the family taboo on drinking. His grandfather kept a tavern, but did not touch his own wares. His father did not drink himself, and strictly rationed the family’s predinner drink to one, even for visitors. Joseph Jr., John, and Robert drank rarely, and very little on the rare occasions. By all accounts, none was seen drunk, in private or in public; which means that when they took risks, they were calculated risks, not the improvisations of befuddlement. Some of Edward’s getting caught may be the result of lowered defenses. When he sped away from police in Charlottesville, then hid in the back seat after parking his car, he may have been avoiding the suspicion of driving while intoxicated. He was hiding the evidence—himself. The late-night session at which a whole group schemed up a solution to Kennedy’s Spanish problem sounds well lubricated. If Kennedy had determined in any cold-headed way to cheat, he would hardly have invited in so many witnesses to the decision. And at Chappaquiddick there was just enough drinking to make the impulse to hide that fact affect the complex of decisions and, mainly, nondecisions that undid Kennedy.

  It may seem no defense to say a man gets himself into trouble by appearing intoxicated in public. But there is a sense in which this gives Joan somewhat less to complain of than Jacqueline had. For Edward, handsome and besieged by beautiful admirers, to slip on occasion out of weakness should be more acceptable to a wife than the calculated regimen of John Kennedy, the daily dose of sex taken, as it were, for muscle tone. One can say, by the standards of cover-up artistry, that John Kennedy showed pol
itical skill in marrying a woman who would not object to this regimen (not terminally, at least); but there is a coldbloodedness to this that seems less admirable in a person, no matter how useful it may be to a leader.

  As for other charges against Edward’s character, I cannot (since I am a teacher) condone cheating on exams. But I do not regard that act as dishonorable as lying about one’s authorship of a book in order to keep the Pulitzer Prize. And if we are to measure public virtue by public service, as the founders of this nation did, Edward Kennedy has served his constituency and the nation in the Senate long after it became clear that such service involved risking his life. He has bent the Kennedy ego to cooperative work among his peers. He has shown legislative concern for refugees, the aged, the ill, by doing the drudgery of his Senate homework. He does not try to take the glamour and leave hard work to others. He labors at being a good Senator—the only Kennedy who has ever done that. This Kennedy has not misused the power of his office as Robert did, wiretapping Martin Luther King. He has not risked the national dignity as John did, taking a “gangster’s moll” into White House bedrooms.

  Ah, but this Kennedy was involved in a woman’s death on Chappaquiddick Island. Much as there is to criticize in Kennedy’s behavior that night—and the thing most to the criticized is that we still know so little of that behavior—the narrowly sexual charges leveled at Kennedy seem, in this case, a bum rap. It is the irony of Don Juan’s life to get caught on a night when he is not prowling for women. There were many knowing winks about the idea of six married men getting six single “girls” together in an isolated spot—as if Edward Kennedy needed this elaborate arrangement to find female companionship. The irony is completed when we learn that, though Kennedy has a hard time showing respect for women, he did respect the six assembled at Chappaquiddick. For that we have the best pre-Chappaquiddick evidence, that of the women themselves.

  One of the most touching transcripts in the Kennedy Library’s oral history project comes from Esther Newberg and Rosemary Keough, and was made on May 22, 1969, a year after Robert Kennedy’s murder, not long before their own attendance at the Chappaquiddick party. They were asked to speak about Robert Kennedy’s last campaign, for which they ran the nerve center of information called “the boiler room.” They admit they had trouble impressing old political types with the importance of clearing all information through them; but they said that one exception to this was the candidate’s younger brother, who did look to them for information, on a professional basis. Esther Newberg said: “He really knew that even if we didn’t have it written down in books, we had it in our heads. He didn’t look down on us, as you might expect, as a group of pool secretaries for instance. I think he respected what some of us knew.”

  Much that has been written about Chappaquiddick either asserts or implies that the party was based on a lack of respect, was an “office party” in the stereotypical sense. Yet Kennedy’s respect was shown not only during the campaign, but afterward, well before Chappaquiddick. In the summer of 1968, after the murder of Robert Kennedy, Joseph Gargan arranged the first party for the boiler room girls at Cape Cod. This was to thank them for their work in Robert’s ill-fated campaign. Edward and Joan Kennedy threw a cocktail party for them. The women were put up at various Kennedy homes—Mary Jo Kopechne stayed with the Shrivers. The Chappaquiddick party was to be a repetition of that innocent first gathering. Since it was to be held at the Edgartown races, there were no Kennedy homes to put them in—the women stayed at a motel. The Hyannis Port compound could not be used to entertain them, so Gargan rented a cottage. Kennedy’s attitude toward this party, as to the first one, was dutiful; he was discharging a debt for his brother, not arranging an orgy. I delay discussion of his later conduct for a later page, since my topic here is sex. Chappaquiddick is discussed in a haze of innuendo, typified by a 1980 bumper sticker in New Hampshire: “Ted Kennedy drives women to the drink.” Yet sex was the least important aspect of the Chappaquiddick tragedy.

  It may seem Kennedy has such a genius for getting caught that he is caught even when there is nothing to catch him out in. Well, not quite. But he does receive a kind and intensity of criticism he has not earned all by himself. His father and brother were more single-minded philanderers than he, but their activity was kept away from the mass of the electorate. Now that their record is better known, Edward alone survives to take the brunt of moral dismay these revelations caused in naive admirers. A nun who taught my daughter in parochial school kept a picture of President Kennedy in her classroom and spoke of him as a saint. It is fairly certain she will not look at Edward Kennedy through the same haze of hagiography. Even those who claim that their opinion of the dead President has not been altered are ready to look with sharper eyes of suspicion on his brother—and would have done so at the President if they had known then what they do now.

  But a deeper cultural reason for Edward Kennedy’s difficulties comes from the vitality of modern feminism. John Kennedy was the beneficiary of a first sexual revolution, the one proclaimed in Norman Mailer’s gushy welcome to Superman at the Supermarket. But Mailer and Hugh Hefner—and Edward Kennedy—are the victims of a counterrevolution, one that says woman’s highest destiny is not to become another notch on some hero’s gun. Joan Kennedy, a victim in so many ways, is the beneficiary of this counterrevolution; she says the liberation movement helped get her out on her own, continue her education and her music, without looking to her husband’s family for applause that never came. And if she is to be the beneficiary, her husband must be the victim. The graduate student of my era, who rejoiced in John Kennedy’s sexual reputation, has been replaced by “sisters” on campus, twenty years later, who think of such “chauvinism” as a political issue, just as the earlier liberal had—but one, now, that works against the Kennedys, not for them.

  This criticism of Kennedy macho was first mounted in a massive and rather clumsy way by Nancy Gager Clinch, in her book The Kennedy Neurosis (1973), which had all the faults of “psychobiography” at its worst. But by the time Edward actually ran for President, the criticism had become more refined. Suzannah Lessard’s article “Kennedy’s Woman Problem, Women’s Kennedy Problem” was rejected by The New Republic, which had commissioned it; but the piece ran (to an audience made more attentive by the rejection), in The Washington Monthly, and some at The New Republic felt embarrassed by the rejection. Lessard admitted: “In the Bible Belt, it would take courage to say that philandering is of no importance. But in New York the danger lies in saying that it matters.” Yet she found Kennedy’s pattern of “semi-covert, just barely personal and ultimately discardable encounters” degrading to women and revelatory of the Kennedy attitude toward power.

  Kennedy’s voting record on “women’s issues” like the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion has been praised by the National Organization for Women. But people notice that he has few women in high positions on his staff, and those few are not among the most intimate or powerful. Here his imprisonment takes on its exquisite, its cruel thoroughness. Just when it is important for him to show a greater trust in and reliance on women, his reputation makes him hold them off in public. He cannot win. Some ask him to take women into his political apparatus; but a suspicious public whispers about any women who get near him. He suffered for trying to honor Robert’s boiler room workers. Even innocent meetings have been given tabloid treatment. Burnt so often, how can he work intimately with a woman, keep her late at the office, thank her fondly for good work done?

  The moralizers at the end of Don Giovanni lay it on rather thick for most of us; but it is true, in quite specific ways, that licentiousness throws chains around itself. Earlier Kennedys were more subtly bound—the father’s mistreatment of his wife was more obvious than the callousness he formed around himself. But Edward inherits the handiwork of his elders as well as the links he has added on his own, and by now he is so heavily chained he can hardly move naturally in the presence of women.

  It may seem unfair for the in
heritor of all that libidinous imperialism to live in the postcolonial era of sexual reations. The power over women that was promised him, almost as his birthright, has turned on him, has tripped him up. Power has a way of doing that.

  II

  FAMILY

  You will hear everlastingly, in all discussions about newspapers, companies, aristocracies, or party politics, this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man.

  —GILBERT CHESTERTON

  5

  Semi-Irish

  We have again been cheated of the prospect of a Catholic President.

  —MURRAY KEMPTON, 1961

  It is the old story: for “one of your own” to get elected, he must go out of his way to prove he is not just one of your own. The first Catholic President had to be secular to the point (as we used to say in Catholic schools) of supererogation. And John Kennedy had the right credentials. Theodore Sorensen vouched for the fact that “he cared not a whit for theology.” Jacqueline Kennedy told Arthur Krock: “I think it is unfair for Jack to be opposed because he is a Catholic. After all, he’s such a poor Catholic. Now if it were Bobby: he never misses mass and prays all the time.” Herbert Parmet quotes a close friend’s judgment that Kennedy had “no sense of piety as an internal characteristic.” As Charles Kinsella puts it in Edwin O’Connor’s novel: “I got the Catholic vote because everybody knows I am one. I got the non-Catholic vote because the others don’t think I’m a very good one. Or, as they’d put it, I’m not ‘typical.’”

  But one must quote O’Connor with care. The Kennedy legend makes much of the Boston Irish background on both sides of John Kennedy’s family. It sees him growing up in a world of bowler-hatted Boston pols with outlandish nicknames like Knocko and Onions, where Honey Fitz is always singing “Sweet Adeline.” But Murray Kempton saw through it all during the 1960 campaign: