A Common Struggle: A Personal Journey Through the Past and Future of Mental Illness and Addiction

by Patrick J. Kennedy

  —

  I WAS BORN IN JULY OF 1967; before me, my mother had my sister, Kara, in early 1960; my brother, Ted Jr., in the fall of 1961; and then two miscarriages. I was at the tail end of the kids born to my father’s generation of Kennedys—just as he was the youngest of his siblings. My birth was the reason my parents decided to leave their house in Georgetown and build a larger one on a six-acre tract along the Potomac River in McLean, Virginia, not far from where my Uncle Bobby’s family lived at Hickory Hill. The house had wonderful views and a separate wing for my brother, sister, and me, and the governess who helped take care of us. The new house was seen as a fresh start for the family.

  In Kennedy history, I was born several months after my uncle, then a Senator from New York, came out against the war in Vietnam, and eight months before he declared his candidacy for President. He was assassinated in June of 1968, just weeks before my first birthday. In the aftermath, during our regular summer family time in Hyannis, my mother says my father, then in his mid-thirties, would often privately burst into tears. He needed help but didn’t get it.

  That fall and winter in McLean, and then the next spring at Cape Cod, the family had a new dynamic. Instead of he and his brother Bobby trying to be father figures to Jack and Jackie’s two kids, my father was now on his own trying to be a father figure not only to Caroline and John Jr. but also to Bobby and Ethel’s eleven children—which he had to balance with taking care of Kara, Teddy, and me.

  By the summer of 1969, my mom was also pregnant again and on strict bed rest because of her previous miscarriages. Four days after my second birthday that July, my father attended the annual summer reunion in Martha’s Vineyard of the “Boiler Room Girls,” who helped run my Uncle Bobby’s campaign. That was the night my father accidentally drove off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, killing his passenger, a young woman named Mary Jo Kopechne. Her funeral was four days later. Even though my mother was terrified to lose another baby by leaving her bed, she joined my father at the funeral, because it was felt it would look bad if she wasn’t at his side. She miscarried not long after that.

  And then, just a few months later, my father lost his own father.

  It has taken me a long time to even begin to understand how we were affected by all of this. I knew there was huge suffering going on in my family. But it was never spoken of when I was growing up. My mom discussed it some much later, during her periods of sobriety. But my father went on in silent desperation for much of his life, self-medicating and unwittingly passing his unprocessed trauma on to my sister, brother, and me. My dad never stopped working for others who were suffering, and he experienced a great many moments of joy and triumph. But his own anguish was palpable and unspoken.

  And since he was the more emotionally available of my parents, I derived most of my emotional foundation from his strength and his turmoil.

  I knew I was born a fragile person. I wasn’t strong, I had severe asthma. I remember feeling awkward, anxious, separate, like a loser. In my family, however, “asthmatic” became a catchall phrase for all the other aspects of my emotional fragility, because there wasn’t any other way to put your finger on it.

  Oh, he’s asthmatic. Oh, okay, sure.

  Not only did my asthma reflect my emotional turbulence, but my asthma attacks were the one time I could get the nurturing and undivided attention I craved from the person who was most important to me: my dad. Asthma attacks were my safe zone, because the only thing that would make him drop everything—and he had a lot of everything—was if one of us was sick. And the very minute we were no longer sick, he was sucked back into being a senator.

  I later came to understand my asthma as an illness that was exacerbated by stress, and there were also mood swings because I was taking large amounts of prednisone, the steroid people were prescribed back then. But, at the time, I just thought of myself as scrawny, scared of my own shadow. And nobody said anything about it because, in my family, that’s how we were taught to cope.

  —

  THERE WERE, OF COURSE, many wonderful things about growing up in my family. When I was very little, I would hang around my father’s dressing room in the morning as he got ready to go to the Senate, and we’d argue over what to watch on TV, the Today show or my favorite morning cartoons, especially Deputy Dawg—which is why he gave me the nickname “Dippity Dog.” Many evenings after dinner he would invite me up on his lap and I would lay my head on his chest while he held me tight. And then, with me still there—I seemed to fit perfectly—he would finish his dessert and his Sanka.

  Like most people, my childhood memories revolve around summer vacations and winter holidays. Summers were spent in and around Hyannis Port, where many family members had homes close to what I always called “Gramma’s house.” Having a summer birthday was especially great, because so many family members would be around in July, and everyone would head to Gramma’s house, tanned and windswept, walking down side streets and through openings in the trees and shrubs between the houses, gathering for any celebration. For my birthday parties, though, my dad sometimes arranged for a professional fireworks display that lit up Hyannis Harbor.

  The family summers were all organized around sailing, swimming, and fishing, which began on weekends as early in the spring as possible and continued as deep into the fall as was reasonable. (My wife, who grew up at the Jersey Shore, is constantly amazed that I’m still swimming in the cold ocean in October, since she grew up rarely going into the ocean after Labor Day.) There were still football games on the big lawn that Americans had grown up watching in the sixties, but that wasn’t my best event. I tried playing in those games, but I was not only the smallest in my family but the one most likely to have to stop early in the game and catch his breath.

  For a skinny kid with severe asthma, family football on the lawn was primarily a spectator sport. The ocean, however, was something quite different. I was on and in the ocean as early as I can remember. On a wall in my study, I have one of the framed pictures of my dad on his boat that he signed to me when I was still a baby, saying that he couldn’t wait to go sailing with me. For many of the regattas he sailed in with family members, the rule was four to a boat. But, just as he often did in the Senate, he studied the rules until he found a loophole that allowed me to join in as a fifth because I was under twelve. He refused to leave me behind. When we raced in foul weather, there was lots of salt water and salty language. Those experiences not only broadened my vocabulary, but they also built my self-confidence.

  Although I didn’t realize it then, he was teaching me a lot of his political philosophy in those boat races. On a boat, as in a country, there was a role for everybody, a way for everyone to contribute, and no place for those who didn’t try their best. And in a regatta, as in life, it didn’t matter how strong the forces against you were. As long as you kept driving forward, there was nothing to lose—and it was also the only chance you had of coming out a winner.

  Dad bought me a little Boston Whaler fishing boat with an outboard when I was sixteen, but my real joy was to be out with him on his big sailboat, along with as few other people as possible. And since this was all before cell phones, sailing was actually the only real escape for my father—and for us—from the rest of the world.

  Besides the group sailing, when I was eight, my dad started taking me on his boat the Victura for three-or-four-day adventures, just the two of us. We’d leave with nothing but a bag of Kingsford charcoal and a little lighter fluid, a cooler full of steaks and cold cuts and condiments and soft drinks, sleeping bags, and a couple fishing poles to sail around the islands near Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. Those were magical times.

  All the Kennedys, Shrivers, Smiths, and Lawfords were together in the summer—my Aunt Ethel’s house was next door to Gramma’s; our house and Aunt Eunice and Uncle Sarge’s house were down the street. And during the school year, I went to the same school, the Potomac School, with
a lot of my Robert Kennedy and Shriver cousins, who lived close by and also gathered for each other’s birthdays. We generally did Thanksgiving just at our house with my parents and siblings, but then during the winter holiday break we would often take skiing trips together as one big family. And during spring breaks we would take turns visiting Gramma’s Palm Beach house.

  While some of our trips were the height of personal, private time, I look back on some of the bigger, more involved family trips now with a little more of an eye for everything that was going on. These were joyous journeys for our family, but some of them were also being shared with the public. My childhood photo albums are crammed with the blurry, rounded-edged snapshots everyone has, along with gorgeous, sharp images done by the late photographer Ken Regan of Camera 5. He was close to the family, a very good guy, and had been given “exclusive” access to us. Which is why I have wonderful professional shots of us at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, on an amazing rafting trip my dad organized for the family.

  Whenever the family was together, in groups large or small, there was usually singing. We sang wherever there was a piano and a bench full of old sheet music, belting out “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” and “You Are My Sunshine” and many beloved show tunes. At Gramma’s house, the room between the dining room and the sunroom was called “the piano room” and we often sang there. But there were also pianos in our living room in McLean and on Squaw Island. When my mother was well, she would play the piano. She would accompany us or, since she was classically trained, would play pieces by Chopin or Mozart.

  On summer evenings, the family sometimes watched movies together. My grandfather had, during his years in film production, outfitted his basement with a full professional projection room and several rows of movie-theater seats. There was a decent-sized stage, which could accommodate a screen that lowered from the ceiling—and we watched a lot of movies there. It was also a great place to put on skits and play charades.

  To get down to the basement theater, we had to walk through a narrow hallway where my grandmother’s international doll collection was stored—all those glass or button, unblinking eyes staring out at us from floor-to-ceiling cases. I would never tell my Gramma how many nightmares I had about those dolls or how, when I was in uncomfortable social settings and felt disconnected or judged, I was reminded of their stares.

  —

  UNDER THE SURFACE, I grew up with a lot of tension and unprocessed trauma. And while I felt judged and stared at, the truth was I was capable of being as judgmental and unsympathetic as everyone else. I saw my mom’s alcoholism and depression through the lens of my father’s old-school attitude that she just couldn’t keep it together. I can still hear him: “Here she goes again . . . oh my god . . . I can’t believe it!”

  I got the message early on: I didn’t want people saying, “Oh, we need to take care of Patrick,” the way they dismissed my mom: “Oh, we need to take care of Joan.” I realized pretty young that this was less about anyone actually needing help than it was about making sure we avoided a public relations crisis.

  I’m not proud of how I viewed my mom then. But I didn’t know any better.

  It’s ironic that the politician who, from the early 1970s on, was probably the nation’s leading voice on healthcare reform and its loudest advocate for universal national health insurance had blind spots on some mental health and addiction issues. My dad wrote in his memoir, “I grew up in a family of people who didn’t want to hear you complain and, quite frankly, I don’t have a lot of respect for people who whine or go around feeling sorry for themselves.” But I doubt he was out of step with most of his voters. I suspect his “snap out of it” attitude was how most people viewed these illnesses then. And too many still do.

  Interestingly, during these years, my Aunt Rosemary was back with the family more often and I recall seeing her at many Kennedy events. I recall her acting in a way that today we might describe as a form of Tourette’s, where she would sometimes say a bunch of random words or yell them. As a kid, this scared me a little, mostly because nobody explained anything about it. No one said, “Hey, your Aunt Rosemary’s coming, and you know she suffers from a disability, and don’t worry when she yells these things, it’s just part of her condition.” I really would have appreciated a conversation like that.

  Yet I did perceive through the silence that my family embraced Rosemary much more than my mom, even though they both had what Uncle Jack had called a “mental affliction.”

  In June 1972, in a cover story in Good Housekeeping magazine, my mom became the first family member—and, honestly, one of the first Americans—to speak openly about her “long emotional struggle that led her to turn to psychiatry.” Alcoholism was never directly mentioned in the long story, which was otherwise surprisingly revealing—especially considering that it was based on an interview arranged through my father’s office. While it discussed psychiatry, there wasn’t a word in the piece that made it sound like she had a medical illness—it mostly said that she was unable to handle the pressure of all the traumas, and of course “the other Kennedy women” to whom she was supposedly comparing herself constantly, “inwardly certain that she didn’t measure up.” So the piece seemed completely judgmental, unlikely to encourage anyone else to get help.

  When I talked to my mom about this story recently, she said she viewed her being open as something she did for my father. But she was proud if it made a difference to destigmatize mental health and addiction care.

  In fact, within weeks of the cover story’s coming out, it was clear just how bad the stigma still was.

  A new Kennedy book was published, timed for the upcoming Democratic convention—for which my father was considered a possible presidential or VP candidate—and it included bold and painfully unsympathetic assertions about my mother’s alcoholism. And then, later in July, Senator Thomas Eagleton, just selected as Democratic candidate for Vice President, was hounded off the national ticket by cruel coverage of his previous psychiatric treatment.

  After all that, my mom’s challenges were hardly a secret. It was fair game in the media to make light of her drinking and psychiatric care—just as it was to question my dad’s faithfulness to his marriage, especially every year at the Chappaquiddick anniversary.

  I sometimes learned more about my family from the press coverage of Kennedy books than I did from any Kennedys. The books were often riddled with inaccuracies, but also riddled with facts that probably would have been much easier to hear first from close family members, and perhaps with some context.

  For example, the only time my father ever talked to me about Chappaquiddick was when he said he wanted me to come take a walk with him on the beach one July when the anniversary was approaching. I remember wanting the conversation to end before it even started because it was obviously so painful for him. His face was just pure anguish.

  And all he said was, “You’re going to be hearing a lot of people talking about what happened at Chappaquiddick, and I just want you to know how bad I feel about everything, and I’m really sorry you have to hear about it.” That was it. Then we just walked in silence.

  But, with my dad, silence was never silent. He had a way of gazing slightly away and I could see from the expression on his face how much he was still saying to himself—loudly.

  —

  IN THE FALL OF 1973, when I was six, my brother, Ted, who was twelve, said he felt a strange pain in his right leg. It developed into a welt and then one day he was taken to the hospital. When my parents came back, my father called Kara and me to their bedroom. It was the longest walk ever down that hallway, past Dad’s bathroom and changing room, then Mom’s, both on the right, until we got to their room. My father did all the talking. He said, “Your brother is going to need an operation, he has cancer and we’re going to have to remove his leg.” And Kara and I were just standing there, silent, with no real way to comprehend what was going on or how to
react.

  Looking back, I think it’s significant how important it was for him to talk, very straightforwardly, about my brother’s rare malignant bone cancer, about “physical” health. But we never said a word about Aunt Rosemary, and we never talked about the fact that my mom was walking through the house like a shadow in the middle of the day. Those things were never discussed.

  A few days after we were told about this, Teddy’s right leg was amputated just above the knee. It was a scary and surreal experience, during which we received an outpouring of support and love, all partisanship put aside. While we were accustomed to notable adults coming in and out of our house and lives, I can still vividly remember Muhammad Ali sitting on my brother’s bed telling him he would fight through this.

  Given the age difference between me and my brother and sister, I had always looked up to them. After my brother’s brave recovery from the amputation the feeling was just that much stronger.

  His illness, treatment, and recovery put amazing pressure on my parents. They disagreed about how Teddy should be treated: my father wanted a lot of celebrated, encouraging people around him all the time pumping him up, and my mom thought things should be quieter, more private. Every few weeks for a year and a half, Teddy flew back to Boston so he could get an experimental chemotherapy, after which he got violently ill.

  When Teddy did recover, he was fitted with a prosthesis, and my father quickly pushed for him to become active again. He was outfitted with outriggers so he could ski on one leg. Dad also had the idea that riding go-karts was something Teddy could do competitively—and something I could do with him without much threat of an asthma attack. So he had a special go-kart made to accommodate Teddy’s leg. The two of us became so obsessed with go-karts that we even started attending some of the pro racing events for which go-karts were the opening act. These creative accommodations raised my brother’s consciousness of the needs of others with disabilities, which became a big part of his life’s work (and Dad’s, leading to the landmark protections of the Americans with Disabilities Act).