After Camelot: A Personal History of the Kennedy Family--1968 to the Present

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  “You had a great father and you have a great mother,” the judge told him. “Use your illustrious name as an asset instead of coming into court like this.” There was a strong sense that the Kennedy name had leveraged Joe out of a tight scrape, a theory strengthened when it was learned that the judge had been a friend of his grandfather Joseph’s.

  By autumn, David Kennedy and Pam Kelley had ended their relationship.

  Today, Pam Kelley is a divorced mother who works as executive director of the Cape Organization for Rights of the Disabled (CORD) earning $57,000 a year. Though there would always be stories of a huge settlement with her from the Kennedys, in fact not a lot of money was offered, or taken. When she received $688,000 from Joe Kennedy’s insurance policy back in the 1970s, she was satisfied with the sum and told a reporter, “There’s no way I’d be able to spend that money if I lived to be 102.” But of course, that wasn’t the case. Years later, her brother, Jim, explained, “Since she was a minor, her father became trustee of the small fortune. Within about four years he had managed to turn it to zero dollars. She was broke.

  “During the first couple years following her accident, Pam fought with depression, drugs, and alcohol,” Jim Kelley, said. “Through her own tenacity and force of will she overcame those demons and worked her way to become director of CORD. She was married for a while and out of that she has a daughter. She has had to work hard for everything she had accomplished and then work even harder to retain it. If I had to pick a person I most admire for their courage in the face of adversity, I would certainly pick Pam.”

  Over the years, Pam Kelley would continue a friendly relationship with Joe Kennedy, who would sometimes call to see if she needed anything; if so, he would do what he could to provide it to her. She’s said that he’s given her about $50,000 over a thirty-year period.* Sometimes the two would be on good terms, other times not as much. “I feel like he thinks I’m a piece of trash sitting in a wheelchair,” Kelley told the Boston Herald in 2005, obviously during a period when she was not happy with him. In response, Joe said, “I have a very strong sense of responsibility for Pam and her circumstances. I have helped Pam many, many times over the years, and Pam knows I will continue to do so in the future.”

  David Kennedy was in the hospital for just eight days, but those would be days that would change him forever. During that time, he was treated with morphine, which, as it would turn out, was the worst possible drug for him. David’s hospitalization after the accident would mark the beginning of a slow and terrible decline for him into serious drug abuse. “Taking morphine, that’s when I really felt for the first time that things were okay in my life,” he would recall years later. “The morphine, man, it was the thing that made me forget how miserable I had been since Dad died. It was the thing that made me forget my pain.” In the weeks to come, when David would visit Pam in the hospital, he would fake back seizures just so that he could get another dose of morphine.

  “This was the beginning of the end for David Kennedy,” Christopher Lawford would say many years later. “I don’t think he was ever the same after the accident. Things would go from bad to very bad to worse in a very short time. The years after the accident were the worst years, by far.”

  November 1973: Ten Years

  It’s all just so unfair,” Ethel Kennedy said to Jackie Kennedy Onassis while holding both of her hands.

  It was November 1973, ten years since the assassination of President Kennedy. Tributes and other memorials to the president had come in across all the media, forcing the Kennedys to once again relive one of the family’s most catastrophic days. To commemorate the sad anniversary, Ethel hosted a memorial Mass in the large Pool House at Hickory Hill, attended by most of the Kennedys, including, of course, Jackie.

  Ethel and Jackie usually didn’t spend a lot of time commiserating about their sadness. They had both tried to move on with their lives, Jackie being more successful at it than Ethel. However, gatherings for the anniversaries of Jack’s and Bobby’s deaths couldn’t help but bring to the fore the widows’ mutual anguish.

  “Just look at us,” Ethel said, weeping. “We’re all wrecks, Jackie, and we’ll never get over it.” She and the former First Lady were in the company of Ethel’s personal assistant, Noelle Bombardier, who’d just recently been hired, and a host of Kennedy relatives.

  “Oh God,” Jackie exclaimed, now swept away by emotion and also crying. “Nothing could be worse than this, could it? Could it get any worse?”

  “It’s all so senseless,” Ethel agreed. “It didn’t have to happen, Jackie. It just didn’t have to happen.”

  As the two women embraced, everyone around them stared, moved and speechless.

  What could anyone say?

  Ted Jr.’s Cancer

  At the time of the ten-year anniversary of President Kennedy’s death, the country was being shaken to its core by Watergate, which would result in the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon. Soon, Nixon would refuse to hand over tape recordings and documents subpoenaed by the Senate Watergate Committee. Then an Advisory Panel on White House Tapes would determine that an eighteen-minute gap in Watergate tape was due to erasure and of no consequence. Later, in March 1974, a grand jury in Washington, D.C., would conclude that Nixon had indeed been involved in the Watergate cover-up. Seven people, including former Nixon White House aides H. R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman, former attorney general John Mitchell, and former assistant attorney general Robert Mardian would be indicted on charges of conspiring to obstruct justice in connection with the Watergate break-in. They would be convicted the following January, although Mardian’s conviction would later be reversed. (In 2005, Vanity Fair revealed that W. Mark Felt, ninety-one, a former FBI official, was the Watergate whistle-blower Deep Throat who helped bring down President Nixon.)

  In Ted and Joan Kennedy’s home in McLean, Virginia, a more personal emotional drama was unfolding. On November 6, Ted noticed a reddened and painful-looking lump on his son’s knee. Though Ted Jr. had complained about it in the past, saying it had prevented him from playing football, his dad wasn’t immediately concerned. After all, if Kennedy men worried every time they had a sports-related injury, there wouldn’t have been time for much else in their lives—they were often hobbling around with one injury or another. Therefore, Ted let it go for a few days. However, when it seemed to be getting worse, he summoned a physician to his home. It was quickly decided that a battery of tests should be conducted at Georgetown University Hospital.

  On November 9, Dr. S. Phillip Caper met Ted at the Boston airport upon his arrival from a business trip to Washington. “I’m afraid your boy has a tumor in his leg,” he told him as a stunned Ted stood in the airport. “It doesn’t look good, my friend,” said the doctor. His ominous words hit Ted like a freight train. “Are you saying he has cancer?” Ted wanted to know. The doctor nodded. “But he’s just twelve!” Ted said in disbelief.

  That weekend, Ted played a game of father-son touch football with his boy, fearing that it could be the last time he would ever see him run freely. There would be some sort of surgery, he knew, and it would probably involve the amputation of his son’s leg. This emotional upheaval took Ted right out of his usual self-absorption, which wasn’t surprising to those who knew him well. “When his children [Kara, thirteen at the time, Patrick, six, and Ted Jr.] faced a real crisis, he would always be there for them, there was no doubt about it,” recalled his friend Senator John Tunney, Ted Jr.’s godfather. “Obviously, the same was true of Ethel’s kids, and of Jackie’s. He loved them all and only wanted the best for them, felt a responsibility to them. He was never too busy for them. If they were sick, he would do the most amazing things to cheer them up. For instance, I recall once that when Douglas [Ethel’s son] was sick, he invited the entire Washington Redskins team to Hickory Hill to cheer him up. That was certainly going the extra mile! When it came to that third generation, they could always count on Ted.”

  While Tunney makes a good po
int about Ted as a father, it should also be noted that he was at the same time very tough on his boys, usually not willing to allow them any moment of apparent weakness. He and Joan fought a great deal, for instance, about how to treat Patrick’s asthma. Though it was a serious medical concern, Ted saw it as something that needed to be overcome, not treated. Nothing annoyed him more than seeing the boy with an inhaler, for instance, or seeing Joan trying to soothe him after an attack. “You have to stop coddling the boy,” Ted would tell her. As far as Ted was concerned, Joan overreacted when it came to problems with their children. She happened to be vacationing in Switzerland at the time of Ted Jr.’s diagnosis, and the last thing Ted wanted to do was call her and give her the news. He would later say he just didn’t have the energy to deal with her. He waited as long as he could until finally, at the end of the weekend, he felt he had no choice but to telephone Joan. Of course, she was frantic with worry about Ted Jr. when her husband told her the news.

  At this time, Ted Jr. was in the seventh grade at the St. Albans School in Washington. Like all of the Kennedys, he was athletic and, though slight in build, a proud player on his school’s football team. He was also a good student. His parents expected a lot of him scholastically, and he generally delivered. He was also a little defiant—which Ted Sr. actually admired about him. For instance, when he was eight years old and tired of his dad’s hammering away at him over his homework, Ted Jr. angrily penned a note to his dad: “You are not ascing [asking] me questions about the five papers. You are not creting [correcting] my homework. It is a free world.” Ted thought the letter was so spirited, he called it “The Ted Rebellion,” framed it, and hung it in his office.

  After a biopsy was taken on November 13 and examined, it became evident that the initial prognosis had been accurate. Moreover, Ted Jr.’s leg would have to be amputated above the knee, and immediately, before the cancer could spread. There seemed to be some good news, though. Apparently, he had chondrosarcoma, a cancer of the ligaments, as opposed to the more deadly osteosarcoma, bone cancer. Still, the survival rate was just 25 percent and death could come within eighteen months. The operation was scheduled for Friday, November 16.

  How do you tell your twelve-year-old son that he has cancer and will have to lose one of his legs? Ted was at a loss. Not knowing how to proceed, he needed time to think. In private, with his friend Senator John Tunney, he had to wonder, once again, about the so-called Kennedy curse. “ ‘Maybe my generation, my brothers, we aimed too high,” he told Tunney. “And we achieved it, we got what we set out to get. And you know, I have to wonder, if maybe there’s a price to pay for wanting too much.’’

  The evening before Ted Jr.’s scheduled surgery, Joan returned to the States. Later that same night, Ted and the doctor sat down with Ted Jr.—without Joan—to give him the devastating news. “I’d heard and delivered more than my share of bad news in my life, but this was the worst of the worst,” Ted would later recall. He further remembered that Ted Jr. “started crying and I was fighting back emotion with every ounce of my being. I held Ted in my arms and told him that I’d be there with him, that we’d face this problem together. It was the battle for his life, and I wanted to be on the front line.”

  It was during the time of his son’s medical crisis that Senator Ted Kennedy began to more fully understand the serious problems most Americans faced when it came to health care. “I guess you could call it the silver lining of what was going on at the time,” Ted would later say, “that I developed a deeper understanding of something that would become one of the biggest interests of my life and career.” Most of the parents Ted met at the hospital in the months and years after his son’s surgery (as his treatment continued) were simply unable to afford the kind of continuous treatment of their children that had been afforded Ted Jr. Their insurance coverage wouldn’t allow for the treatment for one reason or another, and some cases the parents didn’t even have coverage and would soon have to take their children elsewhere for treatment. “Ted was astonished and saddened to find that some of the people he met at the hospital had no choice but to negotiate their way out of their financial predicament by trying to figure how much treatment they actually could afford—and how much their child’s life would then be compromised as a result,” recalled Tunney. “He began to recognize how fortunate the Kennedys were and began to fully grasp the fact that had it not been for the family’s wealth, power, and prestige, they very well could have lost Ted Jr.” It was true. After all, Ted, Sr. had the resources to fly doctors into Boston from all over the country to discuss various treatments and then to settle on one. He was able to see to it that the best doctors treated his son at the best hospitals. Certainly money would never be an issue for the Kennedy family when it came to treating Ted Jr. Ted had all the money, all the insurance advantages, and all of the other resources necessary—including the kinds of connections most people would never dream of—to take care of his son.

  In speaking to other concerned families at the hospital, the senator heard the stories of those who had borrowed as much as banks would allow in order to pay for treatment, of those who had refinanced their homes in order to borrow against them, and others who had no choice but to declare bankruptcy. In most cases, there wasn’t even a guarantee that the treatment—whichever one they had settled on—would work, as there rarely is in cases of cancer. “He realized that there needed to be more much more funding for cancer research so that perhaps a cure could actually one day be found,” added Tunney. “Indeed, during the time that his son was sick, Ted came face-to-face with real Americans in crisis—both insured and uninsured, as well as the underinsured—and he would never forget the stories he heard and the friends he made during this time. He knew now more than ever that he had to devote himself fully to health care reform in America and also to better funding for not only cancer research but the research of all illnesses. From this time onward, Ted Kennedy would steer his Senate health committee’s work in that direction.”

  Because Ted Jr. had a cold on the day scheduled for his surgery, the operation had to be delayed until November 18. This caused a bit of a scheduling conflict because Ted’s niece, twenty-two-year-old Kathleen—Ethel and Bobby’s eldest daughter—happened to be getting married on that day to twenty-six-year-old David Townsend. As father figure for the Kennedy clan, Ted had already agreed to give her away. He certainly didn’t want to let her down, but he had to wonder if he was emotionally equipped to juggle such a joyous moment with the devastating one that was also scheduled to occur on that same day. He knew it would take everything he had to get through it, and he did.

  Very early on the morning of the eighteenth, Ted Sr. spent time with Ted Jr. at the hospital as he was awaiting surgery. He then left his son with Joan for several hours to perform his role at the wedding. He knew that he would return to the hospital as quickly as possible after the ceremony. He drove a few blocks down the street to Holy Trinity and gave Kathleen away, as promised. Singer Andy Williams was at the ceremony, and as he recalled, “I sang ‘Ave Maria,’ just as I had at Bobby’s funeral five years earlier. Of course, it was a beautiful, traditional wedding. Rory—who I think was about four—and Douglas—about six—were ring bearers. The church was full of Kennedy friends and relatives—Sargent and Eunice, Jackie, Pat, Jean and Stephen, and the whole gang. Kathleen was in a classic long and flowing wedding gown picked out for her by her mother. Teddy was there, very distracted but with his game face on. I recall that Joan stayed at the hospital with little Ted. Everyone was aware of the ordeal going on.” Before Ted Sr. went back to the hospital, he made sure everyone would remember to sing the family’s favorite song, “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.”

  By the time his father returned to the hospital, Ted Jr.’s surgery had been completed and he seemed to have come through it well.

  Just when Ted Jr.’s family had begun to relax a bit after his ordeal, doctors conducted more tests and concluded that he did have bone cancer after all, and that it had spread
to the remainder of his leg. Now it was time to fight, and fight harder than ever before, his father decided. As part of his quest to help his son, Ted summoned doctors from all over the country to meetings at his home to discuss new and maybe even experimental treatments to deal with cancer before finally settling on Dr. Edward Frei III of Boston Children’s Hospital. It was decided to treat Ted Jr. with an experimental drug called methotrexate, which was quickly becoming known for effectively destroying cancer cells. This chemotherapy treatment would begin on February 1, 1974, and would continue for the next two years. It was especially grueling, lasting for three days every three weeks and involving hospital stays, intravenous drips, and the emotional tumult one might expect of such an ordeal. “Helping Ted recover took precedence over every other activity in my life,” Ted Sr. would recall, “including my duties in the Senate. I slept beside him in his hospital room. I would hold his head against my chest when the nausea overcame him. In time, I learned the technique of injecting him myself.”

  In the years to come, to his great credit, Ted Jr. would use his frightening teenage ordeal as the catalyst for his life’s work as a health care attorney. As an adult, he would dedicate himself to advocating for cancer patients, first with the Wellness Community, as well as with his own health care advisory and financial services firm, the Marwood Group. “I remember the emotional isolation I experienced, losing my hair, and dealing with that as a seventh grader,” Ted Kennedy Jr. would recall. “No one ever asked me how I was doing, or thought that my mental attitude would have an impact on how I approached the challenges I faced. Even though my parents found the best, most brilliant doctors that existed at the time to treat the cancer in my body, no one really ever addressed how I was doing emotionally.