by Edward Klein
Bobby and Ted were dismayed when Joe Kennedy’s reputation came under sustained attack shortly after President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. Starting with Richard J. Whalen’s 1964 The Founding Father, biographers found little to admire about Joe Kennedy. From then on, he was regularly portrayed as a ruthless crook, a stock swindler, and a bootlegger with ties to the Mob. It was said that he cared for his sons as a narcissist cares for others—as an extension of himself. He was the source of his sons’ self-esteem, the one to whom they looked to validate their choices in everything from their life’s work to their marriage partners. If he produced several outstanding offspring, he also set a deplorable example, encouraging his sons to treat women as disposable objects.
Ted did not recognize his father in this scathing portrait. Rather, he remembered his father as a benign but firm parent who displayed a sincere interest in his sons’ welfare. His father made his presence felt with a steady stream of letters. These letters to his sons were full of messages of self-improvement and exhortations “to work on their handwriting, their grades, their attitudes, or their eating habits.”14
“Dear Teddy,” his father wrote to his eleven-year-old son on October 5, 1943, “I … got your report from school and boy: it is the worst one you ever had. In the fifth of your class you didn’t pass in English or Geography and you only got 60 in Spelling and History. That is terrible—you can do better than that. You wouldn’t want to have people say that Joe and Jack Kennedy’s brother was such a bad student, so get on your toes.”15
Again, on May 8, 1945, his father wrote: “Dear Teddy: I received your report for May fourth. You certainly fell down badly from the previous report and dropped to the 4th/fifth rather than the second. You can do better than this. Coming down to the last stages of the lap, a good runner doesn’t quit at the finish—that’s the time he puts on the speed! So get busy.”16
And yet again, on January 31, 1946: “Dear Ted: I am sending $50 up to the school with instructions to let you have what you need. Your letters are coming through all right, but your penmanship hasn’t improved much. You still spell ‘no’ know. Now, know means if you understand something, but if someone says, ’Are you going swimming?’ and you say ‘no’ it is no—not know. Skating is not ‘seating’; it is ’skating, and tomorrow you spell wrong. You spell it ‘tommorow’; it is ‘tomorrow.’ You spell slaughter as slauter. It is ‘slaughter.’ You really ought to do a little more work on the writing and spelling. You are getting pretty old now [he was almost fourteen], and it looks rather babyish…. I am sorry to see that you are starving to death. I can’t imagine that ever happening to you if there was anything at all to eat around, but then you can spare a few pounds….”17
“The seeds of Ted Kennedy’s problems in later life, and they were monumental, were planted in him by his father, who, quite literally, charted the lives and careers of his sons,” wrote Dr. Thomas C. Reeves, reflecting the consensus opinion of historians. “Trying to adapt himself to Joe’s standards, Teddy was thrust into a world he never wanted and couldn’t handle. Raised by a father who drove him to compete and succeed, whatever the cost, Teddy was left in a moral vacuum.”18
THE INFLUENCE OF Joseph and Rose Kennedy, for better or worse, on their youngest son has never been open to debate. But it begs an important question. For if Ted Kennedy was merely the creation of a ruthless father and a cold and callous mother, how did one explain Ted’s exemplary behavior in the United States Senate? How could a man reared by such “bad” parents win such high praise from his colleagues for his warmth, thoughtfulness, and decency?
For a more nuanced understanding of Edward Kennedy, it might be helpful to recognize how Ted saw his father and mother, not only how others saw them. To Ted, his father was a man of “generosity, humor, and heart…. who was maligned … by those who never knew him and made no effort to find out.” Whether this was an accurate assessment of Joe Kennedy, or whether it represented Ted’s idealization of his father, was less important than the fact that Ted clung to this view all his life. He perceived his father as a man who was always ready to give more than was necessary, and this perception helped shape Ted’s approach to public life.
As for his mother, Ted viewed her as a benevolent, warm-hearted, and virtuous woman—not the heartless bullying old harridan portrayed in most of the hundreds of books that have been published about the Kennedy family.
“[O]nce he was grown, Rose began to favor Teddy,” wrote Barbara Gibson, Rose Kennedy’s personal secretary and close companion for many years. “He was the son most like her father. Tall and fat where John Fitzgerald was short and wiry, Ted nonetheless had the sense of humor her father enjoyed. He was like the stereotypical beloved, drunken Irish uncle who has ale in one hand and a tale of blarney coming from his lips.
“After the deaths of Joe junior, Jack, and Bob,” Gibson continued, “Ted’s importance grew. As Mrs. Kennedy would often say, had she not gone against the ‘wisdom’ of others and let herself get pregnant, she would have had no sons left at all.
“The relationship between mother and son was flirtatious. She always wanted him to see her as being special. The daughters Pat, Jean, and Eunice would come to lunch and were likely to encounter their mother in a dressing gown and pink pajamas on her way to take a nap…. But with Teddy she would not be dressed for the [nap]…. Instead she would put on one of her colorful suits from Courrèges, add a matching wide-brimmed hat, and modify her voice so it was girlish. They were more like close friends who knew how to make each other laugh than mother and son.”19
On November 29, 1967, when Ted was thirty-five years old—a United States senator and a married man with three children—Rose sent him a note that would have been more appropriately addressed to a teenager: “Dear Teddy, Sometimes when I am speaking, people ask me about drinking and smoking. Did you ever get your money for not drinking and did you keep your pledge?”20
On November 4, 1968, Rose wrote: “Dear Teddy, Did you ever think of eating an apple at noontime? I used to send apples to the boys at school. They are very good in New England this time of the year, and much more thinning than other desserts.”21
On January 15, 1969: “Dear Teddy, I watched President Johnson last night on television and there were several shots of you. I suggest that you applaud all the time. If you do not, you appear indifferent and this is plainly captured on camera.”22
May 18, 1969: “Dear Ted, I wish you would check the pronunciation of the word ‘nuclear.’ You pronounce it as though it were spelled ‘nucular,’ but I believe it should be pronounced ‘nu-cle-ar.’”23
Alone among the Kennedy brothers, Ted remained extremely close to his mother all his adult life.
“Every morning [at Hyannis Port],” recalled Douglas Kennedy, the tenth child of Robert and Ethel Kennedy, “[Uncle Teddy] would structure his day around [his mother Rose]. He was constantly talking to her. Tell [ing] her the whole story of the day in a jolly, gregarious way … describing to her what happened….”24
In an interview for this book, one of Ted’s former girlfriends recalled how amazed she was to see the power that Rose still exercised over her youngest son. “In Rose’s declining years, when she was senile,” she said, “Ted went to her room every night that he was in Hyannis Port and spent sometimes hours behind a closed door talking to her, holding her hands, then, after she fell asleep, tiptoeing away.
“At one point,” she continued, “Ted admitted to me that he had tried to win his mother’s approval, but that he never felt he received the praise he so craved. It was, to him, the great failure of his life. It hurt him deeply. It’s a pain he will definitely take to his grave.”25
In the 1990s, shortly after the publication of Nigel Hamilton’s scathing portrayal of Rose Kennedy in his best-selling biography JFK: Reckless Youth, the sixty-year-old senator—along with his sisters Jean Kennedy Smith, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, and Patricia Kennedy Lawford—issued a rare public defense of their mother. Prepared by the senator’
s staff, the letter was printed on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times. “The author’s claim that Mother ‘never kissed or touched and rarely saw’ her children is ridiculous,” the letter stated, adding that Rose was the “glue that held our family together.”26
However, the senator and his sisters agreed with Nigel Hamilton on one essential point—namely, that Rose Kennedy was a far more important figure in her children’s formative years than she was normally given credit for.
TED’S RELATIONSHIP WITH his parents was not an easy one. But then, Joe and Rose Kennedy were not easy, undemanding people. For all their money, they felt beset and assailed by a WASP establishment that looked down on Irish Catholics. Both Joe and Rose harbored a deep resentment of the high and mighty, and urged their sons to go into public life in order to even the score. “To those whom much is given, much is expected,” Ted’s mother used to say. It was one of the great paradoxes of Ted’s life that his millionaire parents taught him to identify with the underdog.
Ted Kennedy’s idealism has been much commented upon by sympathetic journalists. For instance, the late columnist Jack Newfield traced the senator’s liberal politics, which were far more left-leaning than those of his brother Jack, to Ted’s tragic sense of life. “He identifies with hurt and loss,” Newfield wrote. “And he is able to translate his empathy into public remedies and reforms.”27
For most of his life, until he married Victoria Reggie in 1992, Ted Kennedy’s behavior oscillated between the constructive lawmaker and the destructive libertine, the devoted father and the shamelessly unfaithful husband. Naturally, no single psychological explanation could ever account for this ever-changing, kaleidoscopic behavior.
However, there was one factor that brought everything into focus: Ted’s particular form of alcoholism. There are many kinds of alcoholics—from falling-down drunks to recovering alcoholics who white-knuckle their way through sobriety. Ted Kennedy fell into the category of binge drinker—someone who could go for days, even sometimes for weeks, without alcohol but who, once he took a drink, was instantly out of control and could not stop drinking. When he was sober, Ted was a person of integrity and honor. Drunk, he became someone else. Alcohol made him reckless; it unleashed his destructive demons.
3
AFTER LUNCH AT Union Station—“the only place in town serving genuine New England clam chowder and oyster stew,” according to Jack Kennedy1—the new senator offered to show his brother around the Senate. They climbed into a wicker coach on the Senate monorail and headed toward the chamber.
Despite its broad, gleaming halls, heroic statuary, and grandiose architecture, the Senate was an intimate institution. It venerated custom and tradition and had not changed much in the past several decades. Most of its members lived full-time in Washington or its suburbs and returned to their home states only for holidays, vacations, and reelection campaigns. No one, except the majority and minority leaders of the two parties, had large staffs. That meant each member had to do a lot of his own research and spend a good deal of time with his fellow senators. As a result, senators got to know each other well, which helped them become effective deal cutters. Unlike the institution of the presidency, where one man made decisions, the Senate required coalition building in order to get things done.
The Kennedy brothers arrived at the dimly lit Senate chamber. Television lights had not yet been introduced. In the fading afternoon light, Jack pointed out several senators, including Everett Dirksen, the conservative Republican from Illinois, who was napping at his desk.
The Senate, Jack told Ted, was still ruled by members of The Club, mostly Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans, who were bound by their common distaste for Negro civil rights, government regulation, and social change.2 Young members were expected to defer to their elders, to seek their counsel, and to go along to get along. The virtues most admired were the three “C’s”—courtesy, congeniality, and cooperation.
Each day after the Senate adjourned, its members put aside their political differences and renewed their personal friendships. James Eastland, the rabid segregationist from Mississippi, would sit down and have a few drinks with Paul Douglas, the ultraliberal Democrat from Illinois. Alcohol greased the political skids, and there was a lot of hard drinking and womanizing. Even senators with the most unblemished reputations, such as Tennessee’s crusading, crime-busting Estes Kefauver, carried on extramarital affairs.
In the Kennedy household, alcohol—the scourge of the Irish—had been discouraged; Joe Kennedy rationed his guests to one drink before dinner.3 Jack and Bobby drank moderately. But Ted was a budding alcoholic, and like most alcoholics, he felt comfortable around other heavy drinkers. It may not have been lost on him that the boozy Senate men’s club provided an ideal setting for someone who enjoyed drinking to excess without the guilt that usually went along with it.
But alcohol, though important, was by no means the only thing that attracted Ted to the Senate. As the youngest child in a big family, he had grown up learning to pay respect to his father and brothers, and for the rest of his life he instinctively deferred to his seniors. He never tried to triumph over his brothers, easily accepting his place in a hierarchy. And since he did not share his brother Jack’s irresistible compulsion to become president, the Senate seemed a far more appealing home to him than it did to Jack.
And so, after his brother’s tour, Ted applied for a summer internship in the Senate. “I talked with him,” said Carl Marcy, an aide on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “and explained we didn’t take interns at that time because by the time they were properly cleared and knew their way around, the summer was over…. The fellow was very polite, and stood up to leave. And his name was Kennedy. On the way out I said, ‘Are you by any chance related to Jack Kennedy—Senator Kennedy on the committee?’ He said, ‘Yes, I’m his brother Teddy.’ So he turned and left. No, he hadn’t mentioned it till I asked.”
“Yes, that’s the way it happened,” Ted said later, “and that’s the last time I ever applied for a job without using my brother’s name!”4
TED HAD BEEN away from Harvard for nearly two and a half years, and upon his readmission in the fall of 1953, he began to drink more heavily and display signs of a dangerous self-destructive streak. It was hard to explain the eruption of this negative behavior. Perhaps, after his stint as a military policeman, he bridled at the constraints of being an underclassman. Or perhaps he thought that having a famous father and brother entitled him to do whatever he pleased. Whatever the cause, the most affable of Joe Kennedy’s sons revealed a newly aggressive side to his personality.
He was ejected by a referee from a rugby match after getting into three fistfights with opposing players. “I’ve thought a lot about that game since,” the referee said. “Rugby is a character-building sport. Players learn how to conduct themselves on the field with the idea that they will learn how to conduct themselves in life. Knocks are given and taken, but you must play by the rules. When a player loses control of himself three times in a single afternoon, to my mind that is a sign that, in a crisis, the man is not capable of thinking clearly and acting rationally. Such a man will panic under pressure.”5
Ted displayed another outburst of temper during a sailing vacation off the coast of Maine. While rowing a dinghy ashore, he and a friend were heckled by a passenger aboard a large yacht. According to his friend, Ted “spun the dinghy around so fast I almost fell out of it. The next thing I knew, he was on the yacht and the man was being thrown overboard and all the women were screaming and running below to hide in their cabins…. In no time, all of the men—there were about eight of them—were in the water. I never saw anything like it.”6
One of his early biographers, James MacGregor Burns, referred to Ted’s “volcanic physical energy”—a trait fueled by his Brobdingnagian consumption of alcohol. Ted, said his Harvard roommate John Varick Tunney, son of the famous heavyweight-boxing champion, “turns into quite a different person when he isn’t working.”
7
After Harvard, Ted was admitted to the University of Virginia Law School, where his drunken exploits in his broken-down convertible earned him the nickname “Cadillac Eddie.” On one occasion, a deputy sheriff pursued Ted in a high-speed car chase—lights flashing, sirens roaring—that ended in a suburban driveway, with Ted cowering on the floor under the steering wheel. He was cited for so many traffic violations while at the University of Virginia that his brother Bobby said: “My mother wants to know on what side of the court my brother is going to appear when he gets out of law school, attorney or defendant.”8
4
JOE THOUGHT THE children would never get married because they all enjoyed going out together so much,” Rose Kennedy once said.1
To ward off such a possibility, Joe had personally picked out wives for Bobby and Jack—the wealthy Ethel Skakel for Bobby, the socially prominent Jacqueline Bouvier for Jack. Now all of his children, except the hapless Rosemary and Ted, were married. But Joe already had his eye on a suitable Catholic girl for his youngest son. She was Jackie’s stepsister, Nina Auchincloss, an attractive young woman with an upper-class accent who, like Jackie, had her heart set on becoming a journalist. However, Nina had other ideas. She ended up marrying a rich Republican instead of a rich Kennedy Democrat.2
And so, it fell to Ted’s shy, reserved sister, Jean Kennedy Smith, the second youngest of Joe and Rose’s nine children, to act as matchmaker. In the fall of 1957, at the start of his second year in law school, twenty-five-year-old Ted Kennedy traveled to Purchase, New York, to help dedicate the new Kennedy Physical Education Building at Manhattanville College, an all-girls Catholic school. As Ted rose to speak, four Kennedy women who had attended Manhattanville were in the audience—his mother, his sisters Jean and Eunice, and his sister-in-law Ethel.