by Edward Klein
In December 1970, clandestine photos, taken in Paris and showing Ted carrying on with an “Italian princess,” were sent by the White House to Edmund Muskie to be used against Ted in the 1972 Democratic primary.
In June 1971, according to Haldeman’s notes, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger reported to Nixon that
Teddy Kennedy is now in the position of practically being a total animal. At the opening of the Kennedy Center, he went to work on Christina Ford, whom he had also propositioned at the Carlyle…. He walked up to her door, said he wanted to screw her, and she said that they couldn’t because of the press, and he said the press will never touch me. He pulled the same thing on Edgar Bergen’s daughter [Candice]…. So we need to take advantage of this opportunity and get him in a compromising situation if we can.9
ON MAY 15, 1972, while campaigning in Laurel, Maryland, for the Democratic presidential nomination, George Wallace, the governor of Alabama, was shot by a would-be assassin. The near-fatal attack convinced many people that all presidential contenders—even those who had not yet won their party’s nomination—should be given Secret Service protection, and Nixon immediately seized on this idea as a way to plant spies on Ted Kennedy.
“Is there anyone [in the Secret Service] we can rely upon?” Nixon asked Erlichman at a meeting in the Oval Office.
“Yeah, yeah,” Erlichman replied. “We got several.”
“Plant one, plant two guys on [Kennedy],” Nixon said. “This would be very useful.”
Later, Nixon added: “We just might get lucky and catch this son of a bitch. Ruin him…. It’s going to be fun.”
And so, Nixon assigned a Secret Service detail to Ted Kennedy, even though Ted hadn’t declared his candidacy for the nomination and hadn’t asked for protection. Perhaps smelling a rat, Ted called off the protection after a few weeks.
IN THE END, Ted Kennedy decided not to run in 1972, and Nixon scored a landslide victory over his ineffectual Democratic opponent, George McGovern. Several months after the election, James McCord, one of the burglars convicted of breaking into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate office building in Washington, D.C., wrote a letter to U.S. District Court Judge John J. Sirica. In his letter, McCord charged the Nixon administration with covering up the Watergate conspiracy. His letter helped set off the Watergate investigation that consumed the country for the next two years.
On March 13, 1973, Nixon met in his office with John Dean, the White House counsel. During their long, rambling conversation, which was secretly tape-recorded by the president, Dean and Nixon discussed a strategy to counter the Watergate investigation being conducted by his Democratic adversaries in Congress.
Dean informed the president that William Sullivan, the former head of the FBI’s domestic intelligence operations who had been fired for insubordination by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, had come forward with an offer of help. Sullivan was prepared to blow the whistle on Nixon’s Democratic predecessors—Presidents Kennedy and Johnson—for using illegal means to spy on American citizens. For instance, Sullivan could testify that he had personally mailed tapes in 1964 to Coretta Scott King containing secret recordings of her husband, Martin Luther King Jr., with other women.
Nixon was curious to know what Sullivan wanted as a quid pro quo for his cooperation.
“He wants back in the Bureau very badly,” Dean said.
“That’s easy,” Nixon replied.
However, for reasons that have never been explained, Nixon did not give Dean permission to unleash William Sullivan against Nixon’s enemies. Instead, Dean and Nixon got sidetracked on a different subject—the illegal $100,000 slush fund from CREEP that had been used to pay for the dirty-tricks campaign against Ted Kennedy.
Dean: There is a certain domino situation here. If some things start going, a lot of other things are going to start going, and there are going to be a lot of problems if everything starts falling. So there are dangers, Mr. President. I’d be less than candid if I didn’t tell you the—there are …
President: I see …
Dean: [Y]ou’ll recall that sometime … right after Chappaquiddick, somebody was put up there [on Martha’s Vineyard] to start observing. Within six hours.
President: Did we?
Dean: That’s right.
President: I didn’t know that.
Dean: That man watched that—he was there for every second of Chappaquiddick, uh, for a year, and almost two years he worked for, uh, he worked for Jack Caulfield …
President: Oh, I heard of Caulfield, yeah.
Dean: … when I came over here [to the White House], I inherited Caulfield …
President: Yeah.
Dean: Well, if they get to those bank records … and they say, “What are these about? Who is this fellow … that you paid?” There comes Chappaquiddick with a vengeance. This guy is a, is a twenty-year detective on the, uh, New York City Police Department.
President: In other words, we—… [unintelligible] consider that wrong, do we?
Dean: Well … it’s going to come out and the whole thing is going to turn around on that one. I mean, if Kennedy knew the bear trap he was walking into…. [The detective] talked to everybody in [Edgartown]. He’s the one who caused a lot of embarrassment for Kennedy already…. He went up there as a newspaperman. “Why aren’t you checking into this? Why aren’t you looking there?”—bringing the press’s attention to things. The guy did a masterful job.
President: … why didn’t we get it [the damaging information on Ted Kennedy] out anyway?
Dean: Well, we sort of saved it. [laughs]10
BUT IT WAS no laughing matter. For by now, Ted Kennedy had become aware of Nixon’s machinations. To save his foundering presidency, Nixon was prepared to resort to what some were calling a “doomsday scenario.” He threatened to disclose the most damaging secrets of the Kennedy administration—namely, that President John Kennedy had secretly plotted to assassinate foreign leaders and had illegally wiretapped the telephone conversations of American citizens.
Nixon had two goals in mind. First, he wanted to show that his abuses of power, which were known collectively as “Watergate,” were no worse than those that had been committed by John Kennedy. And second, by discrediting the record of the Kennedy administration, Nixon hoped to eliminate the Kennedy mystique and undermine Ted’s claim to the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976.
This time, Nixon had it right: Ted had his sights set on 1976. And Ted was under no illusions; he understood that Nixon would stop at nothing to discredit him. That left Ted with little choice: if he wanted to keep his 1976 hopes alive, he had to take on Richard Nixon.
Ted had an unusually able man to assist him in the largely subrosa campaign that he waged against Richard Nixon. The man’s name was Jim Flug, and he was the chief counsel on Ted’s Administrative Practices and Procedures Subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee. Working closely with Ted Kennedy, Jim Flug gathered a mountain of incriminating information against the Nixon administration, which was used later in the Watergate investigation.
Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield went along with the Kennedy-Flug probe, but Mansfield ruled that, when the time came, no Democrats with presidential ambitions could sit on the committee investigating the Nixon administration. Mansfield wanted to avoid the appearance of a partisan witch hunt. And that automatically eliminated Ted Kennedy from the public fray.
Nonetheless, Ted managed to play a vitally important, if unheralded, role in the Watergate proceedings. He made sure that Sam Ervin’s Senate Select Committee to Investigate Campaign Practices, which investigated Watergate, was invested with the necessary power to do its job. He brought in his old friend Burke Marshall to monitor the House of Representatives’ impeachment inquiry. Marshall in turn recommended his protégé, John Doar, to become the special counsel of the impeachment inquiry. Ted and Jim Flug rewrote key sections of the charter under which Harvard professor Archibald Cox would function as the independe
nt Watergate special prosecutor. Cox was a fierce Kennedy partisan who had served as solicitor general in John Kennedy’s administration.
And so, by 1973, the impeachment juggernaut was in the hands of many people loyal to Ted Kennedy. When President Nixon subsequently ordered Cox to be fired, Ted Kennedy called the firing “a reckless act of desperation by a president who is afraid of the Supreme Court, who has no respect for law and no regard for men of conscience.” The next day, Ted put his staff to work researching the historical precedents for a Senate impeachment trial of Richard Milhous Nixon.
The embattled president never resorted to the “doomsday scenario.”
14
IN NOVEMBER 1973, as the tenth anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination approached, tragedy struck the Kennedy family yet again. It began when Ted Kennedy’s middle child, Teddy Jr., who had just turned twelve, complained of a pain in his right leg that wouldn’t go away.
The boy didn’t take his complaint to his father, who was absorbed by the Watergate investigation. He didn’t tell his mother, either, because Joan was thousands of miles away in Europe, where, according to Washington Post gossip columnist Maxine Cheshire, she was “leading a life of her own.” Instead, Teddy Jr. went to Theresa Fitzpatrick, his governess, who passed on the boy’s concerns to Ted.
“Say what you will about Ted being self-absorbed, he was a devoted father,” remarked a longtime family friend and political supporter who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Ted told me later that he felt a chill when the governess told him that Teddy had a pain that wouldn’t go away. It wasn’t like Teddy to complain. Ted looked at his son’s leg as he lay stretched out on his bed, and discovered a rather large, hard lump on the underside near his knee. It was unlike anything he had seen, and it set off alarms.”1
Ted took his son to Georgetown University Hospital for X-rays. They showed that the boy had a tumor in the bone of his right leg. A biopsy was performed, and, according to one of the doctors, it revealed that the tumor was a chondrosarcoma, a cancer of the ligament, which was less deadly than an osteosarcoma, or primary bone cancer. Nonetheless, Teddy’s doctors were concerned that the cancer might have spread, and they recommended that his leg be immediately amputated above the knee joint.
Ted called Joan, who flew back from Switzerland. Husband and wife were together when they broke the news to young Teddy that his right leg would have to come off. In tears, Teddy wanted to know whether he was going to die. No, no, his father assured him. With an artificial leg, Teddy would be as good as ever. He’d be able to sail and ski.
“Ted was shattered,” said a friend. “Teddy Junior was actually comforting his father. The day after the surgery I came by Georgetown Hospital and gave Teddy an astronomy game from FAO Schwarz. It was about ten o’clock in the morning when Ted and Joan arrived. She had a scarf over her head but looked disheveled, which I at first thought part of her grief. But when I greeted them it was obvious she was very drunk. Her words were slurred and she couldn’t walk straight without Ted’s assistance. [Joan may have been on tranquilizers, which would have also explained her slurred speech and unsteady gait.]
“Obviously it added to Ted’s concern. But mostly I felt the boy would feel very bad seeing his mother in that condition. Nevertheless she went in and visited him. Rose was pacing back and forth outside his room, praying out loud, and fortunately didn’t appear to notice Joan’s condition.”
FACED WITH THE responsibility of caring for a desperately sick son, and consoling two other children, Joan tried to pull herself together and stop drinking. She was only partly successful.
“I would get [to the hospital] at nine in the morning,” she said. “Ted would come later. Little Teddy had to prepare for big Ted, to be on stage. He had to be strong for his father. He had to be a man for his father. He had to be a Kennedy. The whole Kennedy philosophy is not to dwell on your pain, and for God’s sake don’t be introspective, don’t feel sorry for yourself. Ted would bring in the whole front line of the Washington Redskins and they would slap little Teddy on the shoulders and say, ‘Tough guy, you’re going to be fine.’ And in the afternoon big Ted would parade all these dignitaries and nurses and this stream of people through the room to meet little Teddy. Ted really believed that we [couldn’t] let the kid have one moment to himself to rest. He should be kept entertained. And this went on until finally about five or six days later little Ted said, ‘I’m so tired but I can’t tell Dad.’ And so I had to do it.
“My whole marriage I was put in the position of being the spoilsport, but I did it for my children,” Joan continued. “I promised [Teddy] I wouldn’t tell Ted that his son was tired, that he just wanted to watch TV. Ted got mad at me and said I was no fun, that I didn’t want my son to have a good time. I had to take it. I guarded the door and I was the traffic cop.”
Though Teddy’s operation was declared a success, further pathological studies revealed that the original diagnosis of ligament cancer had been misleading. In fact, Teddy Jr.’s cancer was far more serious than that. He did have osteosarcoma, primary bone cancer.
Over the winter of 1973–74, Senator Kennedy visited several cancer research centers and spoke to experts from all over the world. In March, he convened a brainstorming session of experts at his home in McLean, Virginia.
“After the four-hour meeting,” recalled Richard Burke, the senator’s assistant, “the consensus was that Teddy should participate in a new, still-experimental course of chemotherapy to attack any remnants of the malignancy. Every third Friday, I drove the senator to National Airport, where [he met] Teddy. No matter what the senator’s mood, he was always upbeat in Teddy’s presence, for he knew that the boy would already be dreading the ordeal. Father and son flew to Boston to spend the weekend at Children’s Hospital Medical Center, where Teddy endured injections of methotrexate—a drug so toxic that additional shots of antidote were needed. The senator slept on a chair in Teddy’s hospital room and did all he could to help…. The side effects of chemotherapy were severe, including nausea and hair loss. The senator made occasional remarks to me about how strong Teddy’s spirit was, but I knew that the boy wavered between periods of optimism and gloom.”
Watching his son suffer was more than Ted Kennedy could bear. “Sometimes I hear him crying,” Ted said in April 1974. “We try to make out as though we have not noticed his sadness, but it tears the heart out of me. Now [that] the days are getting longer, he often sits at the window watching the children outside, and he cannot play with them because he is too exhausted.”
TEDDY JR.’S ILLNESS put an enormous strain on a family that was already rent by deep fissures. Not for the first time, Kara, the oldest child, ran away from home, and she began experimenting with drugs. Teddy, the middle child, was still far from a full recovery. Patrick, the youngest, suffered from life-threatening attacks of asthma. Doctors put him on heavy doses of cortisone and ordered him to stay within a short driving distance of the nearest hospital emergency room.2
Meanwhile, Joan took the first important step toward admitting that she was powerless over alcohol. She checked herself into Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan, Connecticut, where Jackie’s late father, Blackjack Bouvier, had frequently gone to dry out. However, Joan’s treatments at Silver Hill were not effective, and she then spent some time at a rehab in San Juan Capistrano, California.
When the media got wind of Joan’s ordeal, they turned it into a soap opera. Her photo was on the front page of the tabloids when she fell off the wagon and was arrested for drunk driving. She became, in the words of Marcia Chellis, her personal assistant, “the butt of countless jokes inside the Beltway.”
“What happens to the human spirit is like what happens to a high cliff when the waves are too strong and too high and too constant,” said Muffy Brandon, one of Joan’s best friends. “The cliff erodes and the underpinnings get shaky. That’s what happened to Joan.”
IN AUGUST 1974, faced with certain impeachment, Richard Nixon resigned f
rom office, and Vice President Gerald Ford succeeded him as president. A month later, the early polls showed that Ted Kennedy led all the likely Democratic and Republican candidates for president in 1976.
Ted felt that 1976 was his year. He was confident that he could beat Gerry Ford. But Ted was also worried about what the pressures of a presidential campaign would do to his family. Several of his nephews, for whom he had assumed responsibility after Bobby’s death, were in trouble with drugs. Bobby Jr. was arrested for possession of marijuana; he fled to the Berkeley campus in California, where he was spotted living on the street and begging for handouts. And Bobby Jr.’s brother David was seriously addicted to cocaine and heroin.
Closer to home, Ted’s children were having nightmares about his running for president; they feared he would be shot dead like their uncles Jack and Bobby. Ted took to telephoning Teddy Jr. every day just so the boy could hear his reassuring voice.
“Do you think Teddy is strong enough?” Ted asked his aides, knowing that the answer was no. He had even greater reservations about Joan’s ability to withstand the pressures of a campaign.
“By sheer coincidence,” recalled John Lindsay of Newsweek, “I was on an airplane with Joan. She had been in a drying-out tank in Point David, which was just four or five miles up the coast from San Clemente [California]. She was coming back and was in a really awful condition. Whatever she’d been out there to have done had not been done. She was vague and she was on tranquilizers. We got down to Dulles terminal that Saturday night. It was raining and miserable. All the kids were there. But Ted wasn’t. I went home and said to my wife, ‘If this guy takes this family through a presidential campaign, there is no pain in hell that is enough for him.’”
In September 1974, while he still enjoyed a comfortable lead in the polls, Ted Kennedy announced that he would not be a candidate for president in 1976. He cited family responsibilities. When he heard the news, Newsweek’s John Lindsay said: “This is the best thing this man has ever done in his life, as a human being.”