Two years later, Joseph became involved with a former staff member named Anne Elizabeth Kelly, known as Beth. Earlier, in 1986, when Joe won his first election to Congress, succeeding former House Speaker Tip O’Neill in Massachusetts’s 8th Congressional District, Beth had gone to Washington with him to work for him there. They soon fell in love, and now he wished to marry her in the Roman Catholic Church. However, he couldn’t, because the church doesn’t recognize divorce. Like his uncle Ted and his aunt Pat before him—both of whom were divorced—he was also unable to partake in the sacraments of the church, such as Holy Communion or Confession. For Ted, this had been an issue ever since his divorce from Joan. He was deeply religious, his faith handed down to him by his parents. “The most important element in human life is faith,” Rose Kennedy has said. “If God were to take away all His blessings, health, physical fitness, wealth, intelligence, and leave me with but one gift, I would ask for faith, for with faith in Him and His goodness, mercy, and love for me, and belief in everlasting life, I believe I could suffer the loss of my other gifts and be happy.”
“I am an American and a Catholic,” Ted said in 1983 in a speech he gave at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. “I love my country and treasure my faith.” As much as he loved his religion, Ted defied the church on issues such as abortion and later gay marriage, believing that the Catholic faith was too restrictive and exclusive. Privately, he thought some of the church’s laws were unfair, but it was the Catholic Church’s rules that governed him. Other than making his opinions known and continuing his work in the Senate for change in certain laws, there seemed nothing more he could do. Or was there? After all, Kennedy was a lawmaker himself, and in a sense he was used to making changes to rules and regulations. Why should this matter be any different?
In discussing the situation with lawyers and family priests, Ted wondered what the chances might be of having his marriage to Joan annulled. An annulment would signify that the marriage was not really recognized in the Catholic Church, and it was usually granted very soon after a marriage had taken place (because a marriage was materially flawed in some way, by fraud, for instance, or lack of judgment, or some other misunderstanding, such as claim from one of the spouses that he or she had been mentally incapable of entering into the union). But there were cases, the Kennedys learned as they looked into it, of annulments being granted years after the fact. Indeed, they were stunned to learn just how many annulments were granted every year—as many as sixty thousand. Most of them were to eradicate short-term mistakes, but quite a lot were to rid people of marriages that had lasted for decades.
Once he realized that an annulment might be an option, Ted Kennedy decided he wanted to pursue it, and in fact he couldn’t believe that it had never before occurred to him. One thing he knew for certain was that he could usually convince Joan to acquiesce to his wishes, and it would be fair to say that he’d taken advantage of that from time to time. But this was really pushing it, and he knew it. “Do you think we can get Joan to agree to such a thing?” he asked one of his attorneys in a meeting.
“Gosh, Ted, I don’t see how,” the attorney answered, according to his memory of the conversation.
“I know,” Ted allowed. “I’ve been such a prick to her over the years. Why the hell would she?”
The two men stared at each other for a moment.
“I have to try, though,” Ted decided. “Joansie knows how much my faith means to me. Maybe she’ll cut me some slack.”
“Maybe,” said the attorney.
At just about the same time that Ted Kennedy was trying to figure out how to proceed with Joan, Joe Kennedy decided to move ahead with an annulment from his own ex-wife, Sheila. He asked for the annulment and filed the appropriate papers with the Boston Archdiocese in 1993. Sheila immediately opposed the idea. Then, when the Boston Archdiocese seemed to drag its feet on the issue, Joseph went ahead and married Anne in a civil ceremony at his home in Brighton, Massachusetts.
Meanwhile, Ted also went forth with his own annulment from Joan. When he asked Joan for it, she agreed to it, much to everyone’s surprise. Perhaps it was because of the way Ted had appealed to her, sitting down with her and apologizing for the many years of torment he had caused her. This was certainly a new Ted, the Ted that seemed to have manifested itself from his new relationship with Vicki. The old Ted would have just stated his case and walked out the door. But the new Ted atoned for his sins and tried to make things right with Joan. He said he was sorry for everything that had ever happened between them, that he loved her and wished her well, that he wanted nothing more than to commit himself to his spirituality, and that he couldn’t do so without an annulment. It had nothing to do with his feelings for her, he told her, or his memories of their marriage, but only to do with the Catholic Church’s laws, which, he had to admit, he viewed as archaic. Touched by him—as she always had been—and even more so by his honesty and kindness toward her, Joan simply could not turn him down. Thus she agreed to the annulment on the admittedly unusual grounds that Ted’s marriage vows to be faithful to her had not been honestly made. In time, the Catholic Church granted the annulment. It was all done quickly and also, maybe more importantly, quietly. There was no mention of it in the media.
One of the reasons Joan agreed, say those who knew her well, was because she was worried about the divisiveness Ted’s marriage had caused within the family. She wished to set an example to her children that if she could put her personal feelings aside for the sake of Ted’s happiness, perhaps they could as well. “It was a difficult decision for her to make,’ said Joan’s former personal assistant, Marcia Chellis. “After all she had been through with him and their marriage, to then say, okay, the union was never legitimate was, well… it was gut-wrenching. But it was Joan’s decision, just the same.”
Unfortunately for Joe Kennedy II, Sheila Rauch was no Joan Kennedy.
In 1996, a couple years after he married his new wife, the Catholic Church surprised him and Sheila with the news that it had granted him his annulment—this despite the fact that Sheila had opposed it. Sheila Rauch, an Episcopalian, decided not to just go quietly into the night. She had always been a very determined person. When she had gotten married to Joe, she’d had her own minister standing right next to the Catholic priest as she and Joe took their vows—and she did not promise to obey. She was a smart woman with a degree from the Harvard School of Design, who had worked as a city planner until the birth of her children, at which time she gave up her career for her family.
The result of her unhappiness can be found in a book she wrote called Shattered Faith: A Woman’s Struggle to Stop the Catholic Church from Annulling Her Marriage. In it, she explained that she opposed annulment because it would have meant that her twelve-year marriage following a nine-year courtship had never actually occurred. She suggested that the Kennedys were using their power and influence to eradicate, effectively, twelve years of her life. In a sense, that was true. Generally, the Kennedys, when faced with an obstacle preventing them from doing what they wanted, would find a way around it. But Joseph and his lawyers weren’t really trying to deny Sheila her marriage memories or her principles. In fact, Joe looked at the whole thing as “Catholic gobbledygook,” or at least that’s what he told Sheila. He and his team simply had their eye on the prize—an annulment so that he could marry in the Catholic Church. In their view, it had nothing to do with Sheila. Why, they asked themselves, was she being so incredibly vindictive? Of course, a better question might have been, why was he being so incredibly narcissistic? When it came to Kennedy men, though, it wasn’t news that they could be maddeningly self-serving in their relationships with women.
In the end, Sheila’s book wasn’t as much about herself and Joe as it was about the subject of annulments in the Catholic Church, and how they ran counter to the church’s own teachings. “When you go to get forgiveness for murder, the priest doesn’t try to convince you that you didn’t kill someone. If you had an abortion and try
to get forgiveness, you’re not told you were never pregnant,” she wrote. Still, the book generated a great deal of international attention and did Joseph a lot of political damage. Thus the family was furious with her. It seemed that every time Ethel Kennedy turned around, she would later confide to a friend, she would see her former daughter-in-law on television lambasting Joseph and, it seemed, the entire Kennedy ethos. (Joe was the second of her children to have a failed marriage, Mary Courtney being the first.) She found it all very upsetting and couldn’t understand why Sheila felt the need to expose the private details of her life. Joe seemed set to become the next governor of Massachusetts, but after his ex-wife’s story became public knowledge—and at the same time as the story of his brother Michael’s relationship with a sixteen-year-old babysitter—he was forced to withdraw from the race. It was a shame, said his supporters, because he had been such a devoted public servant and exceptional congressman. He was invested in many human rights causes, such as the development of low-income housing, and of programs to encourage banks to subsidize the renovation of poor neighborhoods. But the American press, in particular, came down hard on Joe, helping to shape (and even reflect) opinion against him. It was as if the public had finally had enough of the Kennedy men’s apparent mistreatment of women, and people weren’t going to tolerate it anymore. Within the family, though, Ethel—and many other Kennedys joined her in this feeling—just felt that Sheila was being selfish, that she was putting her own concerns before the greater good. For goodness’ sake, why couldn’t she be more like Joan?
“Ted was particularly unhappy about it,” said one Kennedy family adviser. “I was in his office when Joe came in for a meeting of strategists to figure out how to handle the Sheila matter.”
“It’s way out of control,” Ted told his nephew Joe, according to the source. “You gotta shut her up, Joe. Shut her up!”
“I can’t shut her up,” Joe told his uncle. “What the hell am I supposed to do, Uncle Teddy?”
“You just call her and tell her to shut up,” Ted said, raising his voice. “I don’t see what the problem is.” He may have been the new and improved Ted in a lot of ways, but there was still a male chauvinist in him who from time to time would make an appearance.
“You don’t understand women,” Joe said. “They don’t just do what you tell them to do anymore. This isn’t the 1950s.” The last thing Ted needed to do was try to incite Joe, though. Joe’s anger issues were always a matter of concern, and had certainly contributed to the end of his marriage to Sheila.
“Well, your wife has done a shitload of damage,” Ted said. “This is a disaster.”
Joe had to agree.
In truth, Sheila Rauch was just telling her story, which it could be argued she had every right to do and there was nothing the Kennedys could do about it. She and Joan were very different kinds of women from two very different generations. Joan was used to being discreet, to keeping the family’s secrets. She was from the golden age of Camelot, when every time she opened her mouth and revealed something she shouldn’t have—such as when she mentioned to reporters that Jackie wore wigs or that JFK’s back was so bad he couldn’t even pick up his children—she felt terrible about it. She loved the Kennedys and would always put their needs above her own. That was just her personality, her character. Even when she gave interviews to women’s magazine’s about her sobriety, she never trashed Ted. However, Sheila was a modern-day woman with strong convictions that had very little to do with what might have been in the Kennedys’ best interests, and everything to do with what she felt was right and fair to her and to her children. Whereas Joan could be counted on to be a model of Camelot discretion, Sheila could not.
“There was a whole conspiracy of silence,” Sheila Rauch recalled. “I was being told, ‘Kennedy wives don’t talk,’ but they were having it both ways. First Joe’s saying we were never married, and then he’s saying I’m supposed to be quiet because I was once a Kennedy wife! So I had to speak. I wasn’t going to tell all, but I was going to speak in an appropriate and responsible way.” Two different women, two different approaches to the same problem—one whom the family had a great deal of respect for, and the other about whom the family couldn’t have been more unhappy. The one thing they had in common, though, was that their marriages to Kennedy men were anything but easy. Joan’s problems were well known by all. And Sheila had her own set of private issues with Joe (many of them very familiar to Joan), most of which remain unknown to the world because Sheila chose not to reveal them in her book.
In the end, Sheila Rauch proved herself to be every bit as formidable as the Kennedys and their team of lawyers and priests, because she managed to get the annulment overturned by the highest appellate tribunal of the Roman Catholic Church, the Roma Rota, in 2005. Joseph could appeal the decision, but the story had already done so much damage to him personally and politically that he decided to just leave well enough alone.
The New Wife
The new wife likes things done a certain way,” Joan Kennedy told one of her sons in the summer of 1992, “and I guess that’s her prerogative. Still, it can be hard.”
The new wife—that would be Vicki—certainly did make a big impression as soon as she and Ted Kennedy married, and it wasn’t always a good one. The first thing she did was have “No Trespassing” signs posted on the beach in front of the Big House in Hyannis Port. For decades, the Kennedys had allowed their neighbors to cross the beach in front of their home as a shortcut, or even just to take a nice walk. No one ever bothered the family. It just had always been that way—that is, until Vicki moved into the Big House. Suddenly signs went up to prevent access, and most people didn’t take it well. It was as if she were sending a bigger message—no interference in her marriage—no trespassing there, as well as on the beach.
Vicki also did a massive remodeling of the Big House. Barnstable County official James Cummings, who attended many Thanksgiving parties hosted by Ted and Vicki at the compound (and was often one, if not the only, Republican present), recalled, “[When they moved in] the house was kind of like a museum, photographs all over the place. You would look at the photos and the one thing you noticed was that everyone in them was dead! So that was a little tough to take, you know? I mean, in terms of having a good time there. It was a little… depressing. But when he married Vicki, she got rid of most of the pictures, just keeping the ones up that she thought mattered. Ted would take you around and stand in front of each picture and have a little story to tell about it. The house didn’t look like it had been modernized in quite a long time. It was almost looking dilapidated before Ted married Vicki. But she took care of that as well, just really giving it an overhaul. To a certain extent, I just think she made it a happier place, not so much a place that just housed old history, but a real home.”
When Ted’s three children and their own families showed up at the house unannounced, it bothered Vicki. She therefore asked that they call first as a courtesy. She also had locks installed in the pantry to keep them and others from raiding the refrigerator. Vicki also fired the longtime cook at the house and hired someone new who specialized in healthier gourmet cooking. Needless to say, it became quite contentious between Ted’s children and his new wife. Ted tried to stay out of it by saying that he trusted his new wife’s judgment, which didn’t make matters any easier for his children.
“My impression of it,” said a longtime friend of Victoria’s, “was that Vicki had heard all of the stories of the way the family ran roughshod over Joan, and she wasn’t going to let it happen to her. Maybe she went a little overboard, but she was trying to make a point early on, which was that she had her boundaries and she wasn’t about to let anyone cross them. To say that some of her decisions created uneasy situations would be putting it mildly.”
Vicki had even managed to cow some of the Kennedys of the second generation. Ethel, for instance, just wanted to keep the peace and didn’t want to cross Vicki if she could help it. She wasn’t happy abo
ut some of the new regulations, but because she wanted to respect Ted’s wife, she tried to be agreeable.
For instance, the pool at Rose and Joseph’s home had always been open to all of the Kennedys. It only made sense. It was the Kennedy compound, after all. However, when Victoria moved in, she quickly became tired of having her pool filled with noisy Kennedys and their children and grandchildren. “Enough is enough,” she decided. “There’s a whole ocean out there, why is everyone in our pool?” She had little signs put up around the pool indicating quite clearly that the pool area was reserved for Ted Kennedy’s immediate family. One can only imagine the reaction these signs generated from the other Kennedys. One day, Ethel walked out of her home and over to the Big House and, much to her astonishment, found Joan in the pool with her daughter, Kara (now Kennedy Allen), and her children. This was a direct violation of the new rules! After all, Joan was no longer “immediate family.” Such family drama had put Ethel in a bad position in any case. Her first loyalty was always to Ted, everyone knew that. But still, she loved Joan too. In the end, she just didn’t want any trouble. As she comically put it at the time, “I am way too old for trouble.”
“Joansie,” Ethel called out to her former sister-in-law. “What are you doing in the pool?”
Joan didn’t hesitate. “I’m babysitting Ted’s grandchildren,” she said.
Ethel laughed. “Good answer, Joansie,” she said. “Good answer!”
In all fairness to Vicki, there was no way she would have evicted Joan from the pool anyway. To hear Joan tell it, the two women actually met on an airplane flying over Nantucket shortly after Vicki started dating Ted. “I didn’t know her at the time but she came over, introduced herself, and said she’d had the occasion to meet all three of my children,” Joan recalled. “She said they were wonderful people, so unspoiled. I was very flattered. It was like mother-to-mother.” Vicki then reached out to Joan shortly after marrying Ted to see if there was some way the two could work together to achieve harmony. They liked each other; there was no bitterness between them. In fact, one story has it that Vicki was sitting out on the veranda of the Big House one day when she saw a lone figure walking on the beach, all bundled up in a coat and scarf. “Who is that?” she asked the maid. “I don’t know,” the maid replied, then asked, “Shall I tell her she is trespassing?” No, Vicki decided, she wanted to check it out for herself. When she got out onto the beach, she realized it was Joan. The two women greeted each other and spoke for a few moments—it’s not known what they said. Then they continued walking down the beach, talking to each other as they made their way.
After Camelot: A Personal History of the Kennedy Family--1968 to the Present Page 44