On Wednesday, November 7, 1979, at Faneuil Hall in Boston, Ted Kennedy officially announced his intention to challenge and overthrow the incumbent president, Jimmy Carter. Yes, he would seek his party’s nomination, and his chances seemed quite good: In fact, every poll showed him with a two-to-one lead over Carter among Democrats and independents. Ted recalled, “As I stood quietly behind the lectern in Faneuil Hall, I was enveloped in the moment. My personal past, my family’s past, the Boston past, the American past—it had all coalesced in this room, where patriots had once gathered before the Revolutionary War to shape the American future. Jack had made his final 1960 campaign speech here. I was forty-seven years old, one year older than Jack when he died. Jackie smiled at me from the audience of 350 friends and relatives—and half again as many reporters.”
Next to Jackie sat Eunice and Sargent Shriver. If anyone thought the two of them held any kind of grudge against Ted for his woeful and continual lack of support where Sargent’s political ambitions were concerned, he would be wrong. “They could compartmentalize it all in a way that I found fascinating,” said Hugh Sidey. “At the end of the day, Eunice was still a Kennedy and she would be there for Ted, no matter how slighted she may have felt by the way he had handled Sarge over the years,” he added. “That always astonished me and I think said a lot about her as a woman, and about Sarge, too, who was also present for Ted.” Eunice also made sure her children would be available to Ted. She sent her son Bobby a telegram at this time, which author Edward Shorter quoted in his definitive volume The Kennedy Family and the Story of Mental Retardation:
“Ted’s career as politician at absolutely crucial stage next two weeks. Friends prove their friendship by helping out now. Everybody making sacrifices. Some of time, others money, jobs, careers, even family, Ted’s record of helping Dad [Sargent] politically is inadequate but in other ways very good…. Consider all this in planning your vacation. One year from now I don’t want you to look back and say, I wish I had done something at the crucial period. Churchill said, ‘These are the years—nineteen to twenty-six.’ You can change things! Love, Mother.”
Jean and Stephen Smith, Pat and Ethel Kennedy, and even Rose were also present when Ted formally announced his candidacy. Kennedy’s announcement speech took just fifteen minutes to deliver, and during it he made it clear that America was no place for President Carter’s sad-sack brand of pessimism. Kennedy said that he stood for a hopeful and ambitious future and he asked people not to buy into Carter’s “myth that we cannot move.” After exuberant applause, Ted then took questions, as expected. However, one of the first questions was directed at Joan and concerned her feelings about Ted’s presidential ambitions. She answered by saying she was enthusiastic about the prospects and eager to one day soon meet with the press to answer in greater detail any other questions they might have of her. She seemed at ease. In about a month’s time, she would host the promised press conference at her home in Boston, and during it she answered as many questions as she could about Chappaquiddick, her alcoholism, and her marriage. It was definitely true that most of the media felt Joan had no choice but to be as open as possible about the most personal matters, and she played along gamely.
In many respects, Joan Kennedy felt a new life in the offing for her as First Lady. She thought the important national position might give her structure and purpose, and the more she thought about it the more appealing the idea became to her. She also still loved her husband very much. No matter what he had done, she couldn’t help herself—as she so aptly put it at the time, “I guess it’s true that the heart wants what it wants.” They had a history together, he was the father of her children and still very much a part her life. If she could acquit herself in his eyes, she would definitely not turn down the opportunity. If in the process he should decide he wanted to give their marriage another chance, she would not turn him away.
For Ted, the bar was raised to perhaps unreachable heights by a constituency intent on having another Jack or Bobby leading the party. True, when Ted announced his intention to run, he was ahead in the polls. But with the passing of time he began to lag behind Carter—and he never regained his footing, even though his message certainly had value. After Carter’s “malaise” speech, Ted stayed on point against it. “At other times in our history when we were facing problems, we didn’t throw up our hands in despair,” he said in Philadelphia. “We didn’t talk about malaise in the American spirit. We rolled up our sleeves and set out on the job to be done. And we can do it again.” He voiced his disdain for Carter’s leadership. He charged that Carter should have expected the hostage situation presently unfolding in Iran and accused the president of not paying attention to warning signs indicating that trouble was imminent. He felt strongly that a good solid debate with Carter about important and obvious issues such as foreign policy, health care, and the economy would win him solid approval by Americans, but Carter was against it.
Ted Kennedy even broke new ground by openly campaigning for gay rights at a time when the idea was, to say the least, novel. However, a big problem for him was that he often seemed long on rhetoric and short on specificity. Yes, he gave rip-roaring speeches in the great Ted Kennedy tradition, but it was as if he hoped his power as an orator might mask the fact that he didn’t have much of a plan. Moreover, he was a liberal, and as such was viewed by some critics as an impractical spendthrift, someone out of place during economically depressed times. He never quite found his stride. He seemed ill-prepared, troubled, and distracted, causing some people to wonder why he was even in the game. “Why is Kennedy even running?” California governor Jerry Brown asked. “What is his debate with Carter? The only issue is career advancement.”
There were other reasons Senator Kennedy’s campaign for his party’s nomination was troubled, starting with the huge hit his campaign funding took by his loss of the all-important Iowa caucuses in January. Further complicating things, Stephen Smith, who was orchestrating the campaign, felt constricted by safety concerns. Because of fear that Ted was a marked man, there were Secret Service everywhere, which many people found off-putting. Even trotting out the Camelot mythology didn’t help relax people. After some of his speeches, a six-piece band would play the music from Camelot while Kennedy took his bows. However, by the end of 1980, it seemed, at least according to most tallies, that most Democrats would not vote for Ted under any circumstance, Camelot or no Camelot.
Looking back on it now so many years later, it’s clear that the biggest stumbling block Ted Kennedy faced during this campaign had to do with the all-important question of character. Ted believed that his personal life shouldn’t have been an issue for the public when evaluating him for high office, that his record in the Senate—and it was a very good one—should have been enough for voters to understand that he deserved to be president. Perhaps with some politicians that would have been the case, and it may even be the case with some today. However, in 1980, Senator Edward Kennedy came with too much baggage to ignore. After what he’d done at Chappaquiddick and after what Nixon had done with Watergate, the media was looking for any flaws it could find, and Ted didn’t work very hard to camouflage his.
For instance, Ted seemed not to want to make an effort with Joan on the campaign trail, so much so that he sometimes acted as if he were annoyed by her presence. “Her success in front of a critical audience seemed to vex him, not fill him with pride,” is how Marcia Chellis put it. Did he feel that her alcoholism was a factor in keeping him from the White House? If so, perhaps he got the idea from Time, which had recently published a very unflattering piece on Joan. “Public life has not been kind to Joan Kennedy,” reported the magazine. “Its wounds can be seen in the puffy eyes, the exaggerated makeup, the tales of alcoholism. Today she is a sadly vulnerable soul and an unknown factor in her husband’s electoral campaign.” The writer—no byline was given—further stated, “She sometimes seems unnerved by her infrequent reunions with Ted. One woman friend recalls a scene a few months ago
when the Senator’s car pulled up in front of Joan’s apartment as she stood nearby. ‘Oh Christ,’ said Joan. ‘Here he comes. I’m getting out of here,’ and she strode rapidly away.”
One wonders how Ted and Joan Kennedy hoped to deal in the future with their fractured marriage if in fact they actually ended up president and First Lady. “They intended to just move into the White House together,” Richard Burke later said, “and have separate rooms like Jack and Jackie did, and that would be the end of it. He would do his thing and she would do hers. But what they didn’t get is that Joan was never able to operate like that, which is one of the reasons she became an alcoholic. She had never been happy as the wife of a senator who had girlfriends, so what made them think she could be happy as the wife of an unfaithful president? There were a lot of unrealistic propositions on the table at the time, not the least of which was the question of how the public would accept this kind of marriage between the president and First Lady. The girlfriends were bound to come out. In JFK’s day, no. The media was different and not as likely to turn on the president, thus no one knew about him and Marilyn Monroe, for instance. But in 1980? Forget it. You couldn’t have those kinds of secrets after Nixon.”
Ted’s troubled marriage aside, the events of Chappaquiddick were constantly being brought into question by the press, and often by the public—which Ted had certainly expected but was upsetting just the same. While he was campaigning in Louisville, detractors showed up with placards bearing Mary Jo’s name as well as a dummy of a female corpse and a sign that said “Killer.” In Alabama, Ted was confronted by someone holding a placard that posed the question, “How Can You Rescue the Country When You Couldn’t Even Rescue Mary Jo?” At another stop, a group of detractors played the song “Bridge over Troubled Water” over a sound system just as Ted’s caravan pulled into town. After Jackie appeared at a fund-raiser at Regis College in Weston, Massachusetts, she told Joan Braden, “I could see the whole Chappaquiddick question on their faces. It’s on people’s minds.” Ted certainly didn’t help matters when Time quoted him as having said, “The essence of the event for me is that the girl is dead. There is nothing else for me to say.” Did he really feel that way? No, of course not. In truth, he was racked with guilt about what happened to Mary Jo Kopechne, at least according to those who knew him best. But he wasn’t going to go that far with the media about it. He wanted to appear done with the matter so that the rest of the country would join him there. However, he wasn’t going about it very well in terms of his public statements regarding Mary Jo, which just made him sound callous and uncaring.
A press conference at the airport in Sioux City, Iowa, stands out in the minds of those involved in the Kennedy campaign, mostly because of its brevity. Ted stood at the mic ready to answer questions with Joan standing behind him. But the first question was to Joan. “Mrs. Kennedy, do you believe your husband’s version of what happened at Chappaquiddick?” For a moment, Joan looked stricken. She seemed blindsided by the question. Two articles about Chappaquiddick had just been published the week of the press conference and she had been quite upset by them. It was doubtless the last thing she wanted to talk about, but she knew she had no choice. As she approached the microphone Ted moved aside. She stood at the podium for a long moment. “Yes,” she finally said. “I believe my husband’s story, which he told me right after the incident. And I don’t believe that these stories in the last few days are going to come up with anything new.” In a small, shaky voice, she continued, “It’s just such a shame…” With tears in her eyes, she concluded, “I mean, it’s such a shame that all of this has to come out again. I don’t know what else to say… I just don’t.”
“It wasn’t what Joan had said that day as much as it was how she said it,” recalled Richard Burke. “She looked so sad and unhappy—and so immensely vulnerable—the hardened press corps was actually stunned by her appearance. There was a long pause in the proceedings as Joan went back to her position behind Ted. And then, surprisingly enough, there were no more questions. The reporters just quietly dispersed without words of explanation.” Indeed, it had been a one-question press conference, the first of its kind in the campaign and—who knows?—maybe the first of its kind ever in any campaign. According to Burke, Ted turned to Joan, his voice still audible on the live mic feed, and said, “Good. That was good, Joan.” But he didn’t reach for her, try to embrace her or show her any warmth at all. Even the most hardened reporter might have, in that moment, wanted to give Joan Kennedy a hug, but her husband seemed indifferent, even cold to her. It was hard to overlook, and even more so when Ted repeatedly spoke of Joan’s personal issues as “her” problems rather than “our” problems. “He was such a lousy husband,” Marcia Chellis observed, “you had to wonder what kind of president he’d be. Of course, one has nothing to do with the other, but still, at least if you were a woman, you had to wonder.”
In the end, Ted’s inadequacies, not only in regard to the relationship with his wife but also as they related to the pertinent campaign issues, were too much to overcome. Thus the decision was made by the end of the summer of 1980 that he would withdraw his challenge to Carter’s presidency. The presidency was not to be for him and—at least judging by the way he had stumbled through much of the campaign—perhaps he knew it all along. “He had to know it,” observed Richard Burke, “because I had never known a workhorse like Ted Kennedy. No matter how much you threw at him, he would tackle it and know what he was talking about. But throughout this time, he was just not on his game. It wasn’t like him at all. His heart wasn’t in it.”
At the Democratic convention in August 1980, Ted Kennedy officially withdrew his intention to seek his party’s nomination, and ironically enough, the sad occasion would afford him one of his most shining moments. Truly, the Senator Kennedy who walked onto the stage that night was finally the man his supporters had always believed him to be—eloquent, thoughtful, and powerful in every way. “May it be said of our party in 1980 that we found our faith again,” Ted said from the stage. “And may it be said of us both in dark passages and bright days, in the words of Tennyson that my brothers quoted and loved, and that have special meaning for me now: ‘I am a part of all that I have met, too much is taken, much abides, that which we are, we are. One equal temper of heroic hearts, strong will, to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.’ ” With Joan and his children—Kara, Ted Jr., and Patrick—surrounding him, Ted concluded, “For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end. For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream never dies.”
Much was made of the fact that Ted seemed to refuse to join and then elevate the hand of the incumbent Carter. It was viewed as a sign that Kennedy didn’t really support Carter. In his memoir, True Compass, though, Ted made it clear that Carter didn’t seem to want to elevate his hand either—that there was no effort on the part of either of them. (Of course, it would be argued that Carter had no reason to do so.)
President Jimmy Carter still believes today—and many historians agree—that a consequence of Ted Kennedy’s efforts to assume the presidency was a divisiveness in the Democratic Party that would ultimately lead to the election of Republican Ronald Reagan. “However, Ted never subscribed to such thinking,” said Senator John Tunney. “He always maintained that Carter’s popularity had already been on the wane. Had that not been the case, he said, he would not have sought his party’s nomination in the first place.”
The question remains, though: If Ted had won the nomination of his party and had run against Reagan, would he have won? Reagan was incredibly popular partly because of his unflagging optimism during a time many Americans felt especially disenfranchised, so it’s difficult to imagine that he could have been defeated. Perhaps a more interesting question has to do with what sort of damage it would have done to Kennedy’s political career had he actually lost a presidential election. There was already great concern that he was risking much of
his Massachusetts constituency by attempting to overthrow Carter, and that if he didn’t bow out when he did he might also risk an erosion of his influence in the Senate. If he were to ever have lost a presidential election, it’s likely that Ted Kennedy would not have become the great power in the Senate that he did, which would arguably have been a real loss to this country. Or as Rose Kennedy so aptly put it at the time, “We Kennedys believe that things work out the way they’re supposed to work out. God sees to it.”
“It was okay, the way it turned out. In fact, I think it was better than okay for Ted because, at long last, he was finished with the notion of being president of the United States,” observed Richard Burke. “The responsibility to at least try for highest office had been weighing on him for so long, he now felt a great sense of relief that it was ‘over and done with,’ as he put it.” Had he ever really wanted it? Or was it just something he felt he had to do for his family, for his country—for his brothers? Only he would know for sure, but most people who knew him well felt he was quite satisfied with and proud of his work in the Senate—as well he should have been—and that he would be very happy to continue to serve in that way. Indeed, now that the presidential weight had finally been lifted from Ted Kennedy, the senator from Massachusetts could begin to enjoy the second act of his life of service, and never look back.
End of a Marriage
The statement of January 21, 1981, was short and concise:
“With regret, yet respect and consideration for each other, we have agreed to terminate our marriage.” It was decided that Patrick, who was thirteen, would live with his father at the Kennedys’ home in McLean Virginia. Kara, twenty, and Edward Jr., nineteen, were in college. Joan would continue to live alone in Boston. It would be two years before the divorce would be final. Alexander Forger would negotiate a lump sum for Joan of about $5 million from Ted, as well as monthly alimony; she would also receive the condominium in which she had lived since 1977, and the house she and Ted had shared on Squaw Island, near the Kennedy compound.
After Camelot: A Personal History of the Kennedy Family--1968 to the Present Page 30