by Edward Klein
In the emergency room, the doctors examined the senator for two hours. They were shocked at the sight of his grotesquely deformed back. Only a few people outside the Kennedy family had ever seen the senator’s back. Among those was Tom Harkin, the long-serving Democratic senator from Iowa and a close Kennedy friend.
“I’ll never forget the time I was in the [Senate] steam room with him,” Harkin told Adam Clymer of the New York Times. “Have you ever seen his back? Oh, God, it’s just something that gives me the shivers. His spinal column comes down like this and it literally goes over about three-quarters of an inch and starts down the other way. I don’t know how that son of a bitch stands it…. I asked him, I said, ‘Well, goddamn, doesn’t that hurt?’ He said, ‘Once in a while if I do something funny … it bothers me.’ I had never seen a back like that.”8
After the examination, the doctors at Cape Cod Hospital concluded that the senator had suffered a seizure, a little electrical storm of the brain, rather than a stroke, which kills brain tissue and can lead to permanent paralysis. The senator was put back into the ambulance for the three-minute trip to Barnstable Airport. There, a twin-engine medevac helicopter was standing by, ready to airlift him to Boston.
Despite the doctors’ assurances that the senator was stable enough to make the sixty-mile flight without a hitch, he suffered another, smaller seizure en route to Boston.
“Vicki about flipped out,” recalled a family friend. “Ted tried to play it down and didn’t panic, but Vicki cursed a blue streak, saying the doctors were halfwits and shouldn’t have let him go. She was seriously pissed. Obviously she had been under tremendous strain all morning, and that put her over the edge.”9
In less than an hour, the chopper touched down on the roof of Massachusetts General, where the senator was met by his longtime primary care physician, Dr. Larry Ronan. By now, news of the senator’s hospitalization had spread via the Internet, and the hospital released a statement saying the senator was “undergoing a battery of tests to determine the cause of the seizure.”
By late afternoon, the senator’s condition had stabilized and, with Dr. Ronan’s approval, members of the immediate family began to arrive at the hospital. The senator’s daughter, Kara, who had been battling lung cancer since 2003, flew up from Maryland. His son Teddy Jr., who had lost a leg to cancer as a child, came from Connecticut. His youngest, Patrick, who suffered from a plethora of health problems, ranging from acute asthma to a noncancerous tumor that had been removed in a delicate operation from his spine, flew in from Rhode Island, where he served as a congressman.
Soon, a dozen or so members of the extended Kennedy family—the senator’s friends, aides, political associates, and hangers-on—were all crammed into the hospital room, and the atmosphere in his VIP suite began to resemble that of an Irish wake, or, perhaps more accurately, a scene from one of those medieval paintings that depict the death of a great prince. Should it come now, the senator’s death would not be sudden and violent, like the deaths of his three brothers. Rather, it would be like those “good deaths” during the Age of Chivalry, which were performed, in the words of one historian, “as on a stage before many spectators, many auditors attentive to every gesture, to every word, eager for the dying man to show what he is worth….”10
IN SUCH A solemn setting, the first order of business—and the question on everyone’s mind—was: Who would lead the Kennedy family after the senator was gone? Who could take Edward Kennedy’s place? The Kennedys being the Kennedys—that is, an Irish clan—the senator reserved the right as the chieftain to decide who should succeed him.
None of his children appeared to be up to the job. Kara, whose cancer was in remission, was not interested in politics; she worked for Very Special Arts, an offshoot of the Special Olympics founded by her aunt Eunice Kennedy Shriver. Although Teddy Jr. had talked about running for a congressional seat in Connecticut, he was a sensitive soul who clearly did not have the stomach for the blood sport of politics. As for Patrick, he had inherited many of his father’s less attractive qualities—including a penchant for getting into scrapes while under the influence of alcohol—without having inherited his father’s political genius.
The first person who had to be considered a serious candidate for family leadership was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a well-known conservationist and the third of eleven children born to Ethel and Robert Kennedy. Bobby Jr. suffered from a nonfatal vocal disorder called spasmodic dysphonia, which is caused by the involuntary movement of the larynx. It gave his words a high-pitched, strangled sound, and might hinder his effectiveness as a family spokesperson. More important, Bobby Jr. had devoted his life to the environmental group Riverkeeper and had displayed little interest in other political causes.
Bobby Jr.’s eldest sister, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, once described by Time magazine as “the most promising of the next wave of political Kennedys,”11 had fumbled her big chance by losing her 2004 bid for governor of Maryland. (Kathleen was not the only Kennedy to lose a political race. In 2002, Mark Shriver, son of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, was defeated in a Democratic primary for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.) What’s more, it was hard to imagine Kathleen as head of the most prominent Catholic family in America after she had publicly lashed the Catholic Church for being out of touch and “on the wrong track.”12
That left three Kennedys from three different branches of the family as the most likely heirs apparent: Robert Kennedy’s oldest boy, Joseph Kennedy II; the senator’s wife, Vicki; and John and Jacqueline Kennedy’s daughter, Caroline, the last living member of the Camelot family.
The senator was particularly fond of Caroline. With her thick reddish hair, uninflected speaking voice, and tomboy manners, Caroline resembled Ted’s sisters more than she did her own mother, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. And Caroline’s biting wit and cool demeanor reminded Ted of his brother Jack. Now fifty-one years old, Caroline was at loose ends. Her children—Rose Kennedy Schlossberg, age twenty; Tatiana Celia Kennedy Schlossberg, eighteen; and John Bouvier Kennedy Schlossberg, fifteen—no longer required her constant attention. There were rumors that her marriage to Edwin Schlossberg, an interactive media designer, was strained, but friends said that Caroline and Ed were more or less contented with their marital arrangement.
Since the death of her brother, JFK Jr., Caroline had become a more visible public presence. She’d helped raise tens of millions of dollars for the New York City public schools. She’d recently made a joint appearance with her Uncle Teddy at the annual Profiles in Courage award ceremony at the Kennedy Library, where her mere presence was enough to stir nostalgia for Camelot. An intensely private person, Caroline once suffered from a severe case of stage fright, but she’d largely overcome that affliction during her many campaign appearances for Barack Obama. Many people thought Caroline was deeply ambivalent about politics. And perhaps she was. However, she was also devoted to her family’s tradition of public service—a devotion that would grow stronger in the coming months with the encouragement of her Uncle Teddy.
Political ambivalence hardly described the attitude of Victoria Reggie Kennedy, who was only four years older than Caroline and was the second serious contender for family leadership. Indeed, Vicki’s marriage to the senator sixteen years ago had been a political statement in itself.
“When Ted married Vicki, everything changed in his personal and political life,” said a Kennedy family lawyer. “She gave him purpose and focus. He has said many times that she saved his life, and he means it quite literally.”13
The senator was unaccustomedly introspective when it came to his feelings about Vicki. So many people in his family had been taken from him, he said, that he wondered “whether I’d ever really become as attached and committed as I have to Vicki….” And then he added: “She has made an enormous difference in terms of my own happiness.”
Ted’s view of Vicki bore a striking resemblance to his idealized version of his mother, who also came from a political family. And, i
ndeed, in many ways Vicki filled the role of the all-controlling Rose Kennedy. Not only had Vicki helped the senator clean up his image when she married him, she had been on his case ever since.
Vicki was the key to the mystery of Ted Kennedy’s dramatic metamorphosis, which I had noticed at the long-ago dinner at the “21” Club. It was Vicki who had helped transform Ted from an agitated, fretful, fugitive figure with so much to hide to a more fully developed human being.
“[Vicki] helps him prep for talk shows, works on his speeches and played a pivotal role in his decision to endorse Barack Obama, whom she’s been helping court Catholic votes,” wrote Lois Romano of the Washington Post. “Her political skills and grace are such that there has been quiet speculation that she could succeed her husband in the Senate one day.”14
THE HOSPITAL ROOM throbbed with undisguised rivalry between Vicki and Joe Kennedy II, the third serious contender for the mantle of family leader.
Notorious for his “boiling temper and quick anger,” Joe descended on the hospital wearing his signature custom-made cowboy boots. As the first-born son of Robert and Ethel Kennedy, Joe was the oldest male Kennedy of his generation, a birthright he never let his siblings and cousins forget. Years ago, when Teddy Jr. contemplated running for the seat in the 8th Congressional District of Massachusetts once held by his Uncle Jack, Joe Kennedy II was “pissed” that his younger cousin even considered running without first consulting him.15
In the end, Joe claimed the congressional seat as his own. He held it for several terms, and might have gone on to become governor of Massachusetts if he hadn’t been sidelined by personal scandal. First, his former wife, Sheila Rauch Kennedy, wrote a book accusing Joe of trying to bully her into having their twelve-year marriage annulled by the Roman Catholic Church. Then it was revealed that his brother Michael, his campaign manager, was having an affair with his family’s teenage babysitter. Joe withdrew from the race and, for the time being at least, from active politics. Since then, he had kept his name politically alive in Massachusetts by running the Citizens Energy Corporation, a company that delivers low-cost heating oil to the poor.
Of all the members of the extended family, Joe had been the most vocal in his opposition to his Uncle Ted’s marriage to Vicki. “As the eldest of his generation, Joe led the campaign against Vicki, openly mocking her Louisiana drawl and generally acting as though she was little more than a servant,” said a friend of the Kennedy family who was present in the senator’s hospital room. “Everybody else took their cues from Joe. He was always the ringleader who decided who was good enough and who wasn’t. It had been that way since they were all kids.
“Joe vied with Vicki over who was in charge,” this person continued. “He ordered a larger flat-screen television be delivered so they could watch the Red Sox game, and called out to [the restaurant] Legal Seafood, ordering a feast of lobster, clams, and shrimp. Mass General is used to the Kennedys’ bluster, but this got over the top. The senator has a very serious, probably life-threatening condition, and his family is throwing a Super Bowl party. The combination of so many famous faces and all the merrymaking disrupted the entire floor. Patients as well as staff were crowding around trying to get a glimpse. One of the head nurses stepped in and spoke with Joe, who told her in no uncertain terms to mind her own business. Then one of his assistants called an administrator of the hospital, who said, basically, that they could do whatever they wanted.”16
THE COMMOTION GREW louder as more Kennedy family retainers squeezed into the already overcrowded hospital suite to pay their respects to the ailing senator.
“The elephant in the room was the notion of succession,” recalled one. “The question was, who was in line to take over for Ted, not just, or necessarily, in his Senate seat but as head of the family? There were a lot of very strong characters in that hospital suite and they are all fiercely competitive. Vicki is seen by all as an interloper and she is deeply resented by Ted’s children and many of the nephews. Joe, who sees himself the only serious heir apparent, particularly loathes her control over his uncle and hence the family. Joe inherited his father’s ruthless gene. He is nothing if not aggressive. And anybody who tries to get between him and Ted’s Senate chair is in for a fight.
“In addition, Joe has long resented Caroline, whom he views as haughty and un-Kennedy-like. Caroline is far and away the richest member of the Kennedy clan. After all, she inherited money from her grandfather, her father, her mother, and her brother. Her fortune is a source of unbridled envy and a favorite subject of teasing by Joe and his brothers—a mild annoyance that Caroline sloughs off with an arch half smile.
“But against the backdrop of Ted’s sudden deterioration, Caroline’s cousins are suddenly looking at her askance, apparently wondering if she is considering declaring herself the heir to Ted’s throne. And Joe is suspicious and envious of the way Ted fawns over Caroline. He, doubtless, worries how much influence she has over him. The strangest thing was how Caroline, Joe, and Vicki avoided making eye contact with each other, as though the flying daggers would wound.
“There is no doubt that what Joe fears most is Ted surviving but being physically and mentally incapacitated. That would let Vicki rule in his name for God knows how long.”17
* Ted rented the house he had purchased from Caroline to his sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver and her family.
21
WITHIN DAY OF the senator’s seizure, dozens of TV satellite trucks were staked out in front of Massachusetts General Hospital. There, the senator’s spokeswoman, Stephanie Cutter, announced to the assembled reporters that doctors had found a tumor on the senator’s left parietal lobe, a section of the brain that controls speech and the ability to understand language. A preliminary biopsy identified the tumor as a malignant glioma, or incurable brain cancer, and further tests showed that the senator had the most aggressive form of the disease—one that had an average survival rate of only 14.5 months.
“It’s in a bad site in his brain,” said a New York neurosurgeon who had treated many similar cases. “In the senator’s age group, it’s an incurable lesion. I’m not aware of anyone over the age of sixty-five who has survived. I’d give him no more than six months to a year to live.”1
Doctors’ predictions about such matters are notoriously inaccurate. In any case, the senator was determined to soldier on. Upon his release from the hospital, he told a group of waiting reporters that he intended to race his fifty-foot Concordia schooner Mya in Cape Cod’s annual Figawi competition on Memorial Day weekend. Vicki, who was standing by his side when he made this statement, visibly blanched.
“No way, his wife thought, was he going to get stuck out in the bay, with no wind, after undergoing a brain biopsy,” reported the Washington Post’s Lois Romano. “The forecast called for flat seas and not a whisper of a breeze. Vicki Kennedy wouldn’t budge. And then … a gust! ‘So did you see the wind reports?’ he asked her hopefully [on] Saturday morning [May 24]. ‘Southwest winds up to twenty-five miles per hour.’ She threw up her hands. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘let’s do it.’”2
As things turned out, the senator was not up to making the first leg of the race on Saturday. However, on Sunday, May 25, he revived and took the 6:30 A.M. high-speed ferry to Nantucket. That night, he sailed the Mya in the final leg of the regatta, making the twenty-mile voyage in two hours and twenty-eight minutes, and coming in second in his division.
“It couldn’t be a more beautiful day,” he said upon arriving at the dock, wearing a blue windbreaker and a Red Sox cap.
“He was bellowing and screaming on the water,” said his friend Senator Chris Dodd. “He was really in his form. We had a lot of fun…. It couldn’t have been a better day to sail.”
“It felt great to be out there today,” Senator Kennedy added. “It’s always a good day to go sailing.”3
· · ·
AT FIRST, BRAIN surgery did not appear to be a viable option.
“The tumors have these tentacles,” explained
Dr. Julian Wu, a neurosurgeon at Tufts New England Medical Center in Boston. “It’s kind of like an octopus. You might be able to take out the body [of the] octopus, but there might be little tentacles that grow back.”4
The senator had a good deal of experience dealing with cancer. When his twelve-year-old son, Teddy Jr., was diagnosed with bone cancer in his right leg, the senator consulted a group of specialists on the boy’s treatment. After Teddy Jr.’s leg was amputated, he received two years of an experimental form of chemotherapy. When the senator’s daughter, Kara, had what some surgeons deemed inoperable lung cancer, he invited a group of experts to discuss her case. They advised surgery, and Kara was still in remission five years later. And so once again, the senator convened a meeting of experts, a “tumor board.”
“The meeting on [Friday] May 30 was extraordinary in at least two ways,” wrote Lawrence K. Altman, M.D., the chief medical correspondent at the New York Times. “One was the ability of a powerful patient—in this case, a scion of a legendary political family and the chairman of the Senate’s health committee—to summon noted consultants to learn about the latest therapy and research findings.
“The second was his efficiency in quickly convening more than a dozen experts from at least six academic centers. Some flew to Boston. Others participated by telephone after receiving pertinent test results and other medical records.”5
At the May 30 meeting, opinions were divided over the benefit of surgery. According to Dr. Altman, “Some neurosurgeons strongly favored it; two did not.”6 Among those opposing surgery was Dr. Raymond Sawaya, chairman of neurosurgery at Baylor College of Medicine and the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Dr. Sawaya believed that the cancer had spread over a large area and, therefore, that most of it could not be eradicated.