Another moment stands out in the minds of many who were intimately involved in the case. While the defendant’s attorneys were going over his testimony with him and his mother, Willie explained that at one point during his time with Patricia Bowman, his accuser had, as he put it, “masturbated me to ejaculation.” It was an uncomfortable moment, especially given that his mother was sitting right there next to him.
“Well, I certainly don’t like the way that sounds,” Jean noted of the word “masturbated.” According to witnesses, William was visibly embarrassed. Noting as much, Jean glanced at her son, shook her head, and put her hand on his shoulder as if to put him at ease. “I am just saying that there must be a better word,” she continued. A few alternate phrases were put forth by those in the meeting, each one sounding worse than the other. Finally, Jean decided, ‘We shall use the word ‘massage.’ I think that sounds better.”
It was as if Jean Kennedy Smith had resolved to not be the least bit flustered by the testimony, no matter how embarrassing. And, by God, she wasn’t.
Victoria Reggie
In the fall of 1991, Ted Kennedy was a year from turning sixty. It was as dark a time for him as he’d ever known, and that was saying a lot. A recent Boston Herald –WCVB survey showed that 62 percent of those who had responded felt that he should not run for reelection in 1994, that’s how much damage had been done in Palm Beach. At about this time it was announced that Richard Burke, a former aide to Kennedy, was planning a tell-all book about Ted that would include stories of the senator allegedly doing drugs with his children and having sex with young interns. The allegations made headline news, even though they had not been proven, and later even Burke’s own credibility would come into question.
Meanwhile, Joan Kennedy—who was now fifty-five—found herself in trouble once again. On May 14, 1991, she was arrested for driving under the influence. Two weeks later she would plead guilty, receive a suspended ninety-day sentence, and be ordered to spend two weeks in an alcohol treatment center. This was not the first time she’d been arrested for drunken driving, but because of what was going on with Ted and Patrick in Palm Beach, it generated a great deal of media coverage. Poor Joan was so humiliated, she didn’t even want any family members with her when she appeared before the judge. It was just her and her lawyer. When her son Ted Jr.—who had just graduated from Yale—also checked into a drug and alcohol program in Hartford, it seemed like the entire family was in turmoil. He had been arrested in 1980 for pot possession, and over the years unfortunately became an alcoholic. (To his credit, though, this stint in rehab for Ted Jr. would be his one and only; he remains sober to this day.) Luckily, Ted’s daughter, Kara, was spared any headlines. It was as if Eunice’s prediction had manifested itself not only in another jam for Ted, but also one for William, Jean, Joan, and Ted Jr.
That Ted had been present in the club on the fateful night in question, that he had taken his son and nephew there for drinks and had later showed up in just a nightshirt when his son was alone with Cassone, did not bode well. He might as well have been charged with a crime, that’s how bad the press was for him. “The living symbol of family flaws,” Newsweek dubbed him.
Ted maintained he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, and expressed as much in his memoir, True Compass, by writing, “I could have avoided any involvement in the trial if I’d simply taken a walk on the beach by myself that night instead of asking my son and nephew to accompany me to the bar.” That doesn’t take into account, though, the fact that he had been courting this kind of disaster with his bad behavior for many years. It also bears mentioning that he allotted no more than five brief paragraphs in his book to the entire William Kennedy Smith ordeal.
If ever it could be said that a turning point needed to happen in the life of Ted Kennedy—a time when he would finally take stock and decide to change it—it would have to be now. At the same time, he began dating a woman who would help to trigger just such a change—in fact, in True Compass, Ted titled the chapter about this person “The Woman Who Changed My Life.”
She was Victoria Anne Reggie, known as Vicki, a dark-haired, hazel-eyed thirty-eight-year-old beauty with the most dazzling of smiles. She’d long been a friend of the family’s, her father, retired judge Edmund Reggie, also having known the Kennedys for many years. He’d run the Louisiana campaign for JFK in 1960 and had also organized Bobby’s and Ted’s primary campaigns in that state. A recently divorced mother of two small children—a boy, Curran, who was eight and a girl, Caroline, six—Vicki worked as a partner in a Washington corporate law firm. She’d been raised in Crowley, Louisiana, and was of Lebanese Catholic descent. She had attended New Orleans’s Tulane University and Tulane Law School. She was a strong, determined woman—a tough and aggressive lawyer—nothing like some of the women Ted had been seeing since his divorce from Joan. She was also very funny, with a ribald sense of humor.
Ted had known Vicki casually for many years. She’d even interned for him in 1975, though he would have to admit to having no memory of her whatsoever. However, when he saw her at a party he attended celebrating her parents’ fortieth anniversary on June 17, 1991, he realized that he had a connection to her that was strong and powerful. “What’s the matter?” she said when he showed up at the party alone. “Couldn’t get a date?” He laughed. “Well, I was thinking you would be my date,” he said. Feigning disbelief, she shot back, “Dream on, Kennedy!” From that moment on, their rapport was immediate—playful and even flirty. “I hadn’t felt that relaxed or lighthearted in a long time,” Ted would recall. Before the night was over, he asked if he could call her again for a date. When she said yes, that was just the beginning for them. Within months, they were very much in love.
“I was this little shy five-year-old, and I didn’t quite know what to make of this man who, as Mom said, came to dinner every night and was this amazing presence,” Vicki’s daughter, Caroline, recalled in 2009. Curran added, “He just really made an effort to connect individually with me. In addition to being this father figure that was always there and always so supportive, he was just such a great friend. He and I shared a love of sports, which he kind of spent a lot of time to get to know well, to have that bond with me.”
Vicki recalled, “It was such a surprise to me. When we were still dating he said, ‘Well, it’s Halloween. I’ll be there to take the children trick-or-treating.’ ” She added, “My neighbors were in shock. It was the talk of my street. He loved those kid things so much. I think his life was defined by family.”
From the outset, Ted seemed to understand that Vicki would not tolerate bad behavior from him, and that included any unreasonable outbursts. She wasn’t fragile or starstruck as had been some of his earlier conquests; rather she had high expectations of him and made as much clear. “I believe you can be a better man than what most people expect you to be,” she had told him. She wasn’t referring to his work in the Senate, either. For years he had been acquitting himself nicely in that venue. She was talking about his personal life.
After a few dates with Ted, Vicki sensed not only his kindness and need to be of service, but also his abject loneliness. Following his divorce from Joan, he had moved into the Big House at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, which had been his mother and father’s home and where Rose still lived. He would spend his weekends there, flying from his home in Virginia to Connecticut with a posse of single male friends, such as Senator Chris Dodd, with whom Ted often got into high-profile trouble regarding their relationships with women ranging from very famous and wealthy socialites to unknown exotic dancers and waitresses. Once at the compound, Ted and his buddies would behave as if they were overgrown frat boys, sailing on his boat, the Mya, drinking lots of Irish whiskey, eating copious amounts of seafood, and carousing with women, all while Rose Kennedy was upstairs in her bedroom suite being tended to by nurses and aides.
It’s interesting to note that throughout his life, no matter how bad his behavior, Ted was always devoutly
religious, his Catholic faith of the utmost importance to him. Critical observers have often wondered how someone who cheated on his wife and drank to excess could also be a man of such great faith. “What’s to rationalize?” his nephew Timothy Shriver asked Lisa Miller of Newsweek in an article she wrote about Ted’s faith in 1999 titled “The Believer.” “You mean you shouldn’t pray if you haven’t got your s—t together? This is another fairly common misconception of faith, which is that people who go to church, or people who pray, or people who talk about their faith or religion must be, somehow, more pious or ethically rigorous or have more morally cleansed lifestyles. The high correlation is supposed to be between faith and your search, the depth of your search, your willingness to try, your willingness to admit error, your hope and belief in the ultimate meaning and value of that search.”
“Ted Kennedy never held himself up as a paragon of good behavior,” added Rose Kennedy’s former secretary, Barbara Gibson. “I think, deep down, he was always very self-critical. ‘I keep trying,’ he once told me. ‘I go to church in the hope that it will sustain me. But I don’t pretend to think that I am not a flawed man.’ ”
Even so, Ted’s freewheeling lifestyle made no sense to Victoria. As she would later tell it, she believed that one of the reasons he had been behaving so badly in recent years was that, despite all of his female company, he was very much alone. The reason he was so self-involved, she believed, was because he was a man who had no romance in his life, no one to really care about other than his brothers’ children and his mom. He had his religion, true. But there was no intimacy for him, no real sharing. She hoped to change that.
Maybe Ted said it best when, in speaking of Vicki to his old friend Senator George Smathers, he said, “She did something no one else ever did. She read my heart.”
“Mad as Hell”
One story about Ted Kennedy and Victoria Reggie and the way they trafficked in the early days of their relationship is very telling. The couple was at Baxter’s Fish ’n’ Chips and Boathouse, one of the oldest of Cape Cod restaurants, on Pleasant Street on Hyannis Port, sharing a seafood platter of whole clams, scallops, gulf shrimp, and haddock. It was a warm afternoon in August 1991 and Ted, according to witnesses, seemed quite angry. Perhaps it was because the couple was so accustomed to being in the restaurant that they didn’t seem to care who could overhear their conversation. They made no effort to be discreet. There were at least a dozen witnesses to their heated exchange that day.
“That girl is lying,” Ted said, perhaps referring to Patricia Bowman, though it’s not known for certain. “I know she’s lying. She knows she’s lying. And Willie knows it, too. Everybody involved knows it, so I don’t understand how this thing has gone this far.” His face was getting red, a sure sign that he was becoming infuriated.
“Calm down,” Vicki said. “I’m sure she is lying, too. But you can’t blow up like this, Ted. Not in public.”
“Why not?” Ted asked. “I am entitled to be angry,” he added, now raising his voice to a rolling thunder. “I’m mad as hell,” he roared. “That’s just who I am. And you just have to put up with it.”
“And why is that?” Vicki asked, her voice now also rising, ignoring the startled stares of other diners in the establishment. Incidentally, in years to come, Vicki would become much more discreet and even protective of Ted. For instance, if he was drinking in a restaurant and she saw a photographer lurking nearby, she would make an effort to cover the drink with a napkin, or even move it so that it would appear to be hers. But in the early days of their relationship, things were different.
“Because this is what you’ve signed up for,” Ted said, answering Vicki’s question, “if you want to be with Edward Kennedy. That’s why.”
“Is that so?” Victoria said as she gathered her things. “I remember negotiating no such agreement. But I’ll try to refresh my memory. Elsewhere!” With that, she got up and left the restaurant in what can only be described as a huff. Ted’s lack of self-control and sense of entitlement would usually be in evidence when he was drinking heavily, and it soon became clear that Vicki would be having none of his bombastic outbursts.
Ted then ordered his meal—lobster salad with a side of clam chowder—and sat alone eating it for about a half hour, looking sad and dejected with a wool cap pulled over his head. Finally, Victoria returned. As soon as he saw her, his spirits seemed to lift. With a boyish grin, he rose, kissed her tenderly on the cheek, and whispered what appeared to be an apology in her ear. Looking at him warily, she sat back down. The two then spoke quietly, holding hands across the table for another hour before finally leaving together, arm in arm.
Ted Recognizes His Shortcomings
In the fall of 1991, Ted Kennedy decided it was time to come clean about some of his behavior and also to make amends for it. With his career in the Senate hanging in the balance, he really had no choice. He received a pitiful 22 percent approval rating in a national Gallup poll after the recent Clarence Thomas hearings adjourned—the lowest rating of any senator on the committee. Things had never been so bad. The only strategy that made sense at this juncture was for Ted finally to take full responsibility for his actions. He had done as much after Chappaquiddick in his televised address to the nation, and even though a lot of people in the country didn’t buy his explanation of events, his coming forward did ingratiate him with his constituency and went a long way toward ensuring his enviable place in the Senate. And now—a week before jury selection was to begin in the trial—it was time to take similar action. “He knew people had concerns and he felt it was important to address these concerns,” said Paul Donovan, a Kennedy spokesman. “He felt he owed it to the people of Massachusetts.”
Did he also owe it to his family? Perhaps. He definitely felt that he had let them down. There was a telling moment at his home on the Cape in the summer of 1991 when the Kennedys convened for a holiday. When some members of the third generation—two of Ethel’s children and one of the Shrivers—commented that they viewed Ted as a huge disappointment, Ethel, who had overheard the conversation, lit into them. “How dare you say that about your uncle Teddy!” she demanded to know. He had always been present and available to them throughout their lives, Ethel reminded them, and, as she put it, “It’s your duty now to be there for him. So don’t you ever say one bad word against him,” she warned them, “or so help me God, I’ll kick you all right out of here,” adding, “and you know I will.” Most certainly, Ted would have been proud of his “Ethie” that day.
The venue chosen for Ted’s speech was Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in front of an audience of eight hundred, and many millions more by virtue of its televised broadcast. The date was October 25, 1991. In what would amount to an extraordinary thirty-minute speech by the senator, who was dressed in a conservative navy blue suit, he said, “I am painfully aware that the criticism directed at me in recent months involves far more than honest disagreements with my positions, or the usual criticism from the far right.” Looking up from his prepared text, he continued, “It also involves the disappointment of friends and many others who rely on me to fight the good fight. To them I say: I recognize my own shortcomings—the faults in the conduct of my private life. I realize that I alone am responsible for them, and I am the one who must confront them.” He added, “I believe that each of us as individuals must not only struggle to make a better world, but to make ourselves better, too, and in this life those endeavors are never finished.”
Ted also referred to the Clarence Thomas hearings, but in a way that some thought might suggest a personal awakening and maybe an end to his high-profile womanizing ways, especially considering his new relationship with Victoria Reggie. It was speculated, incidentally, that she helped him write the speech, but Ted later said this was not the case. She didn’t know what he was going to say, he would recall, until he was onstage saying it. “Some of the anger of recent days,” he said, “reflects the pain of a new idea still being born—the
idea of a society where sex discrimination is ended and sexual harassment is unacceptable—the idea of an America where the majority who are women are truly and finally equal citizens.
“Unlike my brothers,” Ted Kennedy intoned, “I have been given length of years and time, and as I approach my sixtieth birthday, I am determined to give all that I have to advance the causes for which I have stood for almost a quarter of a century.”
The William Kennedy Smith Trial
The William Kennedy Smith trial, which began on December 2, 1991, was as sensational as one might have expected given the high-profile nature of the case and the appearance of various Kennedys coming and going from the courthouse, all under the microscope of intense curiosity. In fact, it’s safe to say that this was one of the most heavily scrutinized and widely publicized rape trials in history, right alongside those of Fatty Arbuckle, Charlie Chaplin, and Errol Flynn in Hollywood’s halcyon days of the 1930s. Along with the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas, the Persian Gulf War, and the resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev as Russia’s premier, it was the biggest story of the year. Part of the reason for the huge exposure of the case was the growing tabloid influence on news reporting. Suddenly, sleazy stories about the Kennedys were being picked up from gossip newspapers and disseminated all over the world by mainstream media; in the process, the National Enquirer had somehow become the go-to place for up-to-date Kennedy news.
William Kennedy Smith was represented by Roy E. Black—viewed by many as one of the finest legal minds in the country—Mark Schnapp, and Mark Seiden. The prosecutors were Moira K. Lasch and Ellen Roberts.
After Camelot: A Personal History of the Kennedy Family--1968 to the Present Page 41