Ted Kennedy

by Edward Klein

  Joe Kennedy had donated a great deal of money for the building in memory of one of its most famous alumnae, his daughter Kathleen, and the Manhattanville nuns had made it abundantly clear that all seniors were required to attend the event. However, one of the seniors, twenty-one-year-old Joan Bennett, had chosen to skip the ceremony because she thought it would be just “another boring event … with the nuns.”3 Suddenly, her roommate, Margot Murray, burst into the room, where Joan was working on a term paper, and declared breathlessly that Joan was in trouble. Her absence had been noticed by the nuns, which would automatically result in demerits.4

  “Maybe if you come down real fast,” Margot suggested, “the student government girl who gives out the demerits will see you and assume you’ve been there through the whole ceremony.”

  “So,” Joan recalled, “I got out of my old bathrobe, jumped into something appropriate, and ran over. The next thing I knew I was standing with Margot, and Jean Smith, Ted’s sister, came up to me and said, ‘Aren’t you Joan Bennett? Remember we met last August?’

  “Well, when she spotted me at this reception and came over to talk to me, I didn’t know Jean Smith was one of the Kennedys. I had never even heard of the Kennedys! I just took no interest in current events; my lowest grade in college was in current events. Jean said she’d like me to meet her little brother or her younger brother, and I’d almost expected to meet someone knee-high….”5

  · · ·

  JOAN BENNETT WAS a five-foot-eight-inch blonde who did not need any makeup to enhance her natural beauty. She was named after her mother, Virginia Joan Bennett, but her parents called her Joan so as not to have two Ginnys in the house.6 Coming of age in the prosperous 1950s, Joan appeared to lead a charmed life. Her father was a successful advertising executive and an avid amateur actor who took his two girls, Joan and her younger sister, Candace, to practically every musical that opened on Broadway.7 Her mother was a stay-at-home mom. Her sister, Candy, was a popular high-school cheerleader who helped Joan master the piano. The family belonged to the Siwanoy Country Club and had a summer home in Alstead, New Hampshire.8 And their major residence—a pink-and-gray four-bedroom house in Bronxville, an affluent suburb of New York City—was filled with sunshine and music.

  And yet, her close friends would remember Joan as a young woman riddled with self-doubt. For instance, she had perfect pitch and loved to receive praise for her performances on the piano, but she suffered from stage fright and did not enjoy giving recitals.9 She was self-conscious about her looks, but she forced herself to show up at auditions for TV commercials, and she became the Revlon Hairspray girl for a while on The $64,000 Question. She adored her mother, but she was secretly ashamed that Ginny (as she called her) was an alcoholic.10 She had many boyfriends, but none of them ever lived up to her idealized image of her father, who was also an alcoholic.

  “When Joan talked about her father,” wrote Marcia Chellis, who in later years was her administrative assistant and biographer, “he reminded me in some ways of the man [Ted Kennedy] she would eventually marry. Harry Bennett was tall, handsome, charming, an actor in neighborhood theatrical productions. Joan described herself as a compliant, sweet, shy little girl who obediently accomplished all that was expected of her…. To me it seemed that she had tried very hard to please her father, as she would later try so hard to please her husband.”11 (In this regard, Joan resembled another Kennedy wife—Jacqueline Bouvier.)

  When Joan was seventeen years old—just as her braces came off, her figure filled out, and boys started taking notice—her father (whom she called Harry, not Dad) took her with him on a business trip to Florida.12

  “I was working like crazy,” Harry Bennett said. “Ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day. I knew that I didn’t give my family enough attention, but I was so busy earning a living. I missed having time with my family, and I thought it might be fun to take my little girl [Joan] away with me and have her all to myself, just for a week.

  “I decided from the moment we left the front door of our house she would no longer be my daughter, but my date,” he continued. “And I wooed her all that week, and took her out, not as my daughter, but as my sweetheart, if you want to call it that.

  “Joan stayed up all night with me at nightclubs for the first time in her life, and we drank champagne together for the first time. We saw everything there was to be seen in Saint Petersburg, Tampa, and Gainesville. We went fishing, we went swimming, we did everything.

  “She had the time of her life. And when we were on the plane coming home, she looked at me and said, ‘I never knew adults could be so much fun.’”13

  SHORTLY AFTER TED met Joan on the Manhattanville campus, he called her for a date.

  “I had to be chaperoned everywhere,” Joan remembered. “Nobody slept together. Nobody spent time alone. You were always in groups—at least if you were a Manhattanville girl.”14

  One time, she and Ted went skiing in Stowe, Vermont, with Margot Murray, Joan’s roommate, and Margot’s boyfriend, who had gone to Harvard with Ted. Another time, Joan invited Ted to the Bennetts’ summer home in New Hampshire, where they went to a square dance and, she recalled, Ted “gave me a glimpse of how much fun he was…. Ted Kennedy was up there doing the calling…. Everybody loved him.”15

  During that same visit, Joan’s mother bought paints, canvases, and easels for her guests and sent them out to paint the view from the top of a nearby mountain.

  “I remember Ted Kennedy painting the best paintings of anybody there,” Joan said. “There was a contest and he won.”16

  In the summer of 1958, Ted invited Joan to Hyannis Port to meet his family. By then, Rose Kennedy had done a background check on Joan with Mother Elizabeth O’Byrne, the president of Manhattanville College, who had nothing but good things to say about Joan and her family.

  “I spent a whole week with Rose and Ted,” Joan said. “I remember we played the piano together a lot. I remember walking on the beach with Ted a lot. Ted would play eighteen holes. It was very cozy, I thought.”17

  That Ted was less than enthusiastic about getting married was a gross understatement. He did not want to give up his life of sexual adventurism—the only area of his life that was not under his mother and father’s control. However, his father made it clear that Ted was expected to get married. Dutiful son that he was, Ted waited until the next time he and Joan were alone on the beach, then turned to her and said:

  “What do you think about getting married?”

  “Well,” Joan replied to this not-quite-lavish offer of marriage, “I guess it’s not such a bad idea.”

  “What do we do next?” Ted asked.18

  The next thing was for Joan to meet Ted’s father, who had just arrived home from his annual summer vacation in the south of France.19 Laurence Learner, author of The Kennedy Men, has given us one version of that meeting.

  “The sixty-nine-year-old patriarch sat in his great wing chair in the far end of the living room, looking at Joan like a monarch holding court,” Learner wrote. “Joan walked tentatively into the room and sat at Joe’s feet on an ottoman. ‘Do you love my son?’ Joe asked. It was the crucial question, but it was rarely asked so boldly. This was no social chitchat but an intense interview. Joe had been home only a few hours, but he seemed to know everything about Joan and her family….”20

  The scene rang true, except for one thing: Joan disputed the accuracy of Learner’s account. In an interview with the New York Times’ Adam Clymer, Joan cast her meeting with Joe Kennedy in far more positive terms. Joe “was a charmer,” she said, and she had not felt the least bit intimidated by his blunt “Do you love my son?” question. It wasn’t asked in a stern way. “Right from the beginning,” said Joan, “I didn’t think he was a scary guy.”21

  In fact, Joe Kennedy turned out to be a vitally important surrogate suitor in Ted’s courtship of Joan. Joe wooed Joan on Ted’s behalf just as he had wooed Jackie for Jack. It would be no exaggeration to say that Joan agreed to marry Ted
at least in part because of Joe. He, rather than Ted, made her feel wanted.

  But despite Joe’s intervention, there was still a major obstacle to a wedding—namely, Ted’s reservations about getting married. “I was young and naive then,” Joan said, “but looking back, there were warning signals. We didn’t see each other from the time of [Ted’s] proposal until the engagement party.”22

  Ted was late for his own engagement party, which was held at the Bennetts’ home in Bronxville. “So he wouldn’t embarrass my mother, he chose to come in the back way, through the maid’s quarters,” Joan said.23 Ted had not even bothered to buy an engagement ring; he had left that task to his father, who sent a huge emerald-cut diamond engagement ring over to Harry Bennett’s office.24 Harry slipped the unopened ring box into Ted’s hand at the appropriate moment.

  That night, when their engagement became official, Joan was still a virgin. “The only reason he wanted to marry me,” Joan said years later, “was because he couldn’t get me any other way.”25

  HOWEVER, IT WAS Joan, not Ted, who got cold feet at the last moment. She went to her father and pleaded with him to postpone the wedding. But when Harry Bennett traveled to Hyannis Port and raised the subject of a postponement with Ted and Joe Kennedy, Joe blew his stack.

  “He said they’re not going to put in the papers that my son is being tossed over,” according to Mary Lou McCarthy, Joe’s niece. “He forced the issue. He was God. The wedding was going to happen whether Ted or Joan liked it or not. I told Joan, ‘You can’t cure the addicted woman chaser.’ And she said, ‘I have no choice but to try, do I? What else can I do?’ From the beginning, she was in trouble, and she seemed to know [it].”26

  The wedding was held on a frigid day in November 1958, at St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church in Bronxville. At Joe Kennedy’s insistence, his friend Francis Cardinal Spellman, the spiritual leader of the New York archdiocese, officiated at the ceremony. As a wedding gift, a friend hired a photographer to film the wedding, and Joan’s ad-man father had microphones placed around the altar.

  “Later,” said Joan, “when Ted told Jack about the ‘bug,’ Jack was really embarrassed because when they were behind the altar, he was giving Ted a big-brother-to-little-brother talk about marriage!”27 Jack’s advice, Joan noted, consisted of assuring Ted that, wedding vows or no wedding vows, Ted could continue to sleep with as many women as he pleased.28

  After a brief honeymoon, Joan moved into Ted’s rented off-campus house in Charlottesville, where he had one more year at the University of Virginia Law School. “I do remember,” said Joan, “that when I moved into the house, Ted dismissed the maid! I had to clean, cook, do the laundry, and I really learned a lot. It was fun—for a while!”29

  When it came time for Ted to cram for the bar exam, he told Joan that he did not want her around. “He said I would be a distraction,” Joan recalled.30 Joe Kennedy offered to take Joan off his son’s hands; he invited her to go with him to his favorite getaway, the Hôtel du Cap Eden-Roc in the south of France.

  Given Joe Kennedy’s well-known penchant for making passes at his son’s girlfriends, Joan might well have had some reservations about traveling with him to Europe. But if she did, she didn’t express them to anyone. Of her time alone with Joe at the Hotel du Cap Eden-Roc, Joan had little to say.

  “We would sit out under the stars,” she recalled, “and listen to the BBC concerts.”31

  5

  DURING JOHN KENNEDY’S campaign for the White House in 1959 and 1960, he assigned Ted, who was fresh out of law school, to manage his operations in eleven western states plus Alaska and Hawaii. It was a huge expanse of territory and a daunting political task, since most of the states Ted was responsible for were rock-solid Republican. “All they gave me was a two-page memorandum with about ten different names on it, plus a speech my brother made in Montana in 1957,” Ted recalled. “The rest was up to me. Lucky I learned how to fly a plane when I went to law school.”1

  Ted and Joan moved to San Francisco with their infant daughter, Kara, who was born on February 27, 1960.2 After Joan recovered from giving birth, the couple traveled together on the campaign trail, but it soon became apparent that by splitting up they could draw twice the audience and become twice as effective.3

  When Ted showed up at a ski-jump contest in Wisconsin, he asked for permission to address the crowd often thousand people. One of the officials, displaying a bizarre sense of humor, agreed that Ted could use the public-address system, but only if he made the hundred-and-eighty-foot Olympic ski jump himself. “I wanted to get off the jump, take off my skis, or even go down the side,” Ted said. “But if I did, I was afraid my brother would hear of it. And if he heard of it, I knew I would be back in Washington licking stamps and addressing envelopes for the rest of the campaign.”4

  While Ted barely survived such challenges, Joan was involved in her own risky adventures. “I remember going down into a coal mine with Jack,” she said. “I’m from Bronxville. This is like another world. At the coal mines, they were very sweet about it, but they whistled. I had very good legs and lots of blonde hair…. I got more attention than [Jack] did.”5

  That didn’t sit well with the candidate, who was less than thrilled about being upstaged by his sister-in-law. Jack issued orders that Joan was to be barred from all blue-collar events; she could appear at women’s teas. (After the election, JFK presented his family and staff with engraved silver cigarette cases. Joan’s was inscribed “To Joan Kennedy/Too Beautiful to Use.”6)

  In the course of their travels, Ted and Joan talked about moving to Arizona after the election. Above all, Ted wanted to put some distance between himself and his overbearing father. “His main reason,” said Joan, “was that in a new state, among new people, he would have to succeed or fail on his own.”7 But shortly after Jack won the election, Joe Kennedy summoned Ted and Joan to a meeting. “Jack is president,” he said. “Bob is going to be attorney general. Teddy and Joansie, it’s your turn. Get your fat asses up to Boston. You are going to run for the Senate.”

  · · ·

  TED TRIED TO argue with his father. To begin with, he said, he had no interest in running for the Senate seat Jack had just vacated. Ted was approaching his twenty-ninth birthday, which meant he was still a year shy of being eligible to occupy a seat in the Senate. What’s more, he did not feel qualified for such high office.8 But Joe Kennedy brushed aside his son’s misgivings and expressed contempt for his scruples. “Look,” he said, “I paid for it [the Senate seat from Massachusetts]. It belongs to the family.”9

  The brief clash of wills between father and son represented one of several important turning points in Ted’s life, for it would be the last time he ever attempted to overrule his father and assert his independence. He and Joan gave up their dream of moving to Arizona. Instead, Ted went to Africa with a group of U.S. senators to gain some foreign-policy experience and to add a bit of gravitas to his featherlight résumé.

  “In the meantime,” said Joan, “I’m sent up to Boston [to] rent a place.” While the new apartment was being decorated, Ted, Joan, and Kara lived in an unheated, dingy loft. “It was a garret,” Joan said. “We felt like we were part of La Bohème.”10

  Ted’s likely opponent in the Democratic primary was Massachusetts attorney general Edward McCormack, a well-respected prosecutor and nephew of the Speaker of the House of Representatives. “Gee, I don’t want to run against Eddie,” Ted told Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, a congressman from the nth District, which Jack had once represented in the House. “You know, it’s not good for the party, it’s not good for the relationships in Washington…. I’ll pay—we understand Eddie owes a hundred thousand dollars. We’ll take care of his expenses…. Anything that he’s interested in … he can have…. My brother can make him an ambassador.”11

  When McCormack spurned Ted’s proposal (which also included a lucrative offer to become the lawyer for several Kennedy family business enterprises), the Kennedys took off the gloves. “W
ith Robert Kennedy’s approval, Justice Department records were searched for anything detrimental about McCormack,” wrote Ralph G. Martin, “and there was a similar search in the Pentagon files for anything useful in McCormack’s service record.”12

  If Joe Kennedy could not bribe or intimidate McCormack, he was determined to outspend him. Ted was given an unlimited campaign budget, and he hired six private secretaries, two part-time office assistants, and delegates to represent him with all twenty-six nationalities and ethnic groups in the Boston area.13 Joe persuaded his son-in-law Steve Smith, who had run Jack’s successful presidential campaign, to get back in harness and run Ted’s campaign. Within a few weeks, Smith had two hundred and forty workers on Ted’s campaign payroll.

  “Teddy and his brothers considered a political campaign an athletic competition by another name,” said speechwriter Milton Gwirtzman. “Teddy wanted to get in as many campaign stops as possible, just as he wanted to get in as many downhill ski runs, to get in that nineteenth run even though it was getting dark and sometimes dangerous…. Teddy got down to an absolute minimum the time it took to get up in the morning, shower, shave, get dressed, and be ready to go out campaigning. He got it down to five minutes so he could be down on the wharf at six thirty in the morning shaking hands with fishermen.”14

  Joan was pregnant during the early stages of the political race; she gave birth to her second child, Edward M. Kennedy Jr., on September 26, 1961. By late that year, she was ready to join Ted on the campaign trail.

  “Saddle up, Joansie!” Ted would tell his wife. “We’ve got a ten o’clock tea at Lowell, then another one at four. There’s a banquet tonight in Boston, and after that a coffee in Lawrence. We should be back [home] tonight. Did I tell you six are coming for lunch tomorrow? Could you get lobster?”15