by Edward Klein
“Tumors in the brain are like real estate,” said Reid Thompson, director of neurosurgical oncology at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. “It’s all location, location, location.”7
“No matter what treatment you use,” said Dr. Henry Brem of Johns Hopkins Hospital, “it tends to be an aggressive, quickly replicating, quickly growing tumor.”8
Nonetheless, Dr. Vivek Deshmukh, director of cerebrovascular and endovascular neurosurgery at George Washington University Medical Center, urged the senator to take his chances with the scalpel. “The treatment that has been shown to make the most difference as far as survival is removal of the tumor,” Dr. Deshmukh said. “Surgical removal carries the greatest benefit in terms of extending his survival.”9
And so, on Friday afternoon, the senator put in a call to Dr. Allan Friedman, codirector of the Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center at Duke University Medical Center. The fifty-nine-year-old doctor was considered by many of his colleagues to be the Mozart of brain surgeons. He was preparing to take off for a long-planned vacation in Canada when his cell phone rang. On the other end of the line was Senator Edward Kennedy, who told the doctor that he had searched the world for the best neurosurgeon to remove his cancerous brain tumor.
“And I want you.”10
· · ·
THERE DAYS LATER, on Monday, June 2, 2008, after nurses had shaved a square patch on the senator’s head, he was wheeled into the icy-cold operating room. There, he was to undergo a procedure, pioneered by Dr. Friedman, called “awake surgery.” The doctor reminded the senator that a neurologist, standing on the other side of the anesthesia curtain, would ask him questions or ask him to perform certain tasks to ensure that Dr. Friedman did not cut into critical parts of the brain responsible for language.
The senator was heavily sedated for the first part of the surgery. Dr. Friedman made an incision and pulled back the scalp to expose the bone. He drilled a dime-sized hole in the skull and then inserted a second, larger drill bit. After opening a three-inch hole, he used a scalpel to cut through the dura, the layer of tissue covering the brain. It was at this point, after the senator’s skull had been opened, that the anesthesiologist awakened him, and Dr. Friedman began to stimulate the brain with an electrode.
“If the stimulation of the electrode causes any changes in task performance, we know that we touched an important part of the brain,” explained Dr. Ania Pollack of the University of Kansas Hospital in Kansas City. “We mark that spot and we know we cannot injure it. That is called cortical mapping.”11
Peering through a high-powered microscope, and using a computer system to help him navigate the brain, Dr. Friedman began to expose the tumor. Then he used high-frequency sound waves and heat to dissolve the cancerous tissue and suction it out. He tried to remove as much of the tumor as possible, but the disease had cells that were well beyond the visibility of the electron microscope, and the doctor could not root out and destroy all the cells.
Nonetheless, Dr. Friedman was pleased with the results, and he announced that the surgery had “accomplished our goals.” Combined with radiation, chemotherapy, and experimental brain-cancer drugs, such as Temodar, Avastin, and a novel vaccine called CDX-110, the senator was expected to survive for several months.
Left unsaid, however, was an inescapable fact: The malignant tumor was already growing back.
22
TED’S FIRST FEW weeks at home in Hyannis Port were a harrowing experience. His doctors started him on chemotherapy treatments, and for a while he was so drained of color and vitality that he looked as though he was at death’s door.
But he was an old hand at wrestling with the Angel of Death. Three of his brothers, a sister, and two nephews had all died violently; he had barely survived a plane crash that took the lives of two people; one of his sons had lost a leg to cancer; his daughter was a lung-cancer survivor; and, of course, Ted bore responsibility for the death of a young woman many years ago.
Despite these dreadful experiences (or perhaps because of them), he refused to succumb to self-pity and despair. As the hellish chemo treatments proceeded, he regained his buoyant and cheerful disposition. To everyone who came to visit him, he had one message: He couldn’t wait to get back to campaigning for Barack Obama.
But there was just one hitch. The inauguration of the next president of the United States was still more than seven months away, and Ted Kennedy had been discharged from the hospital with a grim prognosis. Half of all patients with his form of incurable brain cancer—a malignant glioma—died within a year, and those of his advanced age (he was seventy-six years old) usually went a lot faster.
Still, there were days when he felt well enough to be wheeled down the wooden pier of the Hyannis Port Yacht Club for a look at his beloved two-masted schooner, the Mya. Ninety-four-year-old Benedict Fitzgerald, who had served as Rose Kennedy’s personal attorney until her death, happened to be on the pier that day, and he reeled back in shock when he recognized the frail figure in the wheelchair.
“It was clearly going badly for Ted,” Fitzgerald said in an interview for this book. “I have a lot of happy memories of that beach. Many happy days with members of the Kennedy family over the years, dating back to when Joe Kennedy [the family patriarch] bought the place in the nineteen-twenties. But this was one of the saddest days.
“I remember Joe landing in a seaplane when Ted was just a baby,” he continued. “Joe had Gloria Swanson with him and a film can under his arm. Joe had had a movie theater built in the basement of the house. They said it was the only private movie theater in New England, and I suspect it was. He had a projectionist and everything.
“Joe invited us all to come and watch his latest movie. Gloria stayed at the house, and Rose was perfectly welcoming. She didn’t seem to know or care that this movie star was Joe’s mistress.
“When Ted is gone,” Fitzgerald added, “the house and all those memories will be history. Rose wanted to turn the place over to the Benedictine monks before she died. I drew up the legal papers for her on my front porch. But when Ted found out about it, he ripped the thing in half. There was no way he was going to have the place turned into a monastery.”1
ON SUNDAY, JULY 6, 2008, Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, phoned Vicki Kennedy in Hyannis Port to ask if her cancer-stricken husband was well enough to travel to Washington and make an appearance on the floor of the United States Senate. Just days before, a vote on a critical Medicare bill had fallen one shy of the sixty needed to break a Republican filibuster. Ted’s “aye” vote would tip the balance and break the filibuster.
“But,” Reid quickly added, “I’m not pushing, just asking.”2
No one in Hyannis Port wanted Ted to go, not his children, not his doctors, and not the person who ultimately decided such matters—Victoria Reggie Kennedy.3 But as he gained strength, Ted decided to overrule his wife, children, and doctors and fly to Washington to break the Republican filibuster. On Wednesday, July 9, he traveled to Washington in virtual secrecy; few of his colleagues outside the Democratic leadership knew of his plan to make a surprise appearance on the Senate floor. He did not want to give the Republicans time to plot a counterstrategy.4
Just after four o’clock in the afternoon, he showed up at the north wing of the Capitol with Sunny and Splash, his Portuguese water dogs. The guards and the few Senate aides who happened to be passing by were thunderstruck by his appearance. Word quickly spread, and the hall began to fill with photographers and reporters.
For years, reporters assigned to cover Ted Kennedy had carried advance copies of his obituary with them, figuring that if his compulsive eating and drinking did not get him first, some nut with a gun might.5 But he had defied the odds. Of all the Kennedy brothers, only he had lived long enough, in the words of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, “to comb grey hair.”
And now, like some apparition, he had come back to the Senate, where he had managed to accomplish more than either of his two brothers, John and R
obert Kennedy. At present, he was the second-longest-serving member in the United States Senate, after Robert Byrd of West Virginia, and the third-longest-serving since the inaugural session of the Senate back in 1789. His colleagues on Capitol Hill—even those who heaped scorn on his liberal agenda—referred to him as the “Lion of the Senate.” They predicted he would go down in history as one of the chamber’s greats, up there with Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John Calhoun.6
He was proud of his mastery of the Senate, and no longer regarded himself as a runner-up in history because of his failed attempts to win the White House.
“I feel the Senate is where the action is,” he once explained, “where the great issues of war and peace, the issues of human rights and the problems of poverty are being debated. And, with certain important exceptions, you really can get a vote there on important matters. I would say the Senate is the greatest forum for change in our country and in the system. It’s the forum that I very much want to be part of and have some influence with.”7
There were those who would deny him that role. They still viewed him as a relic of the past, a tax-and-spend liberal, an overweight, debauched politician who had left Mary Jo Kopechne for dead at Chappaquiddick; who had been caught making love to a beautiful luncheon companion on the floor of La Brasserie restaurant in Washington, D.C.; who was complicit in a lurid rape case in Palm Beach—who, in short, was beyond the hope of salvation.
However, this caricature was woefully out of date. It had been fifteen years or more since his name had been linked with any scandal. And it had been even longer since he had given serious thought to running for the White House. As a result, he had ceased being a paramount threat to the Republicans. He was no longer the politician so memorably described by the late Republican Party chairman Lee Atwater as “the man in American politics Republicans love to hate.”8 His name was no longer used by conservative political action committees to raise millions in direct-mail advertising.9 In recent years, the senator’s most clamorous critics had fallen silent, or been drowned out by those who believed that Ted Kennedy had atoned for his sins.
The person who best captured this merciful view of the senator was the writer Murray Kempton. “In the arrogance of our conviction that we would have done better than he did in a single case [i.e., Chappaquiddick],” wrote Kempton, “we exempt ourselves from any duty to pay attention to the many cases where he shows himself better than us.”10
AND SO, ON this fine summer’s day, it was fair to say that Ted Kennedy had not merely survived long enough “to comb grey hair,” he had prevailed. He was the greatest lawmaker of his age, a trusted member of that small fraternity of men and women who have guided the course of America’s destiny.
As his wife and his niece Caroline Kennedy watched from the packed Visitors Gallery, Ted Kennedy was escorted onto the floor of the Senate by his younger son, Congressman Patrick Kennedy, and his friends Senators Barack Obama, John Kerry, and Christopher Dodd. His unheralded appearance caused an instant sensation. Dozens of his colleagues rose to their feet and let out whoops of delight.
He “stirred the normally staid chamber to a rousing ovation and moved many colleagues to tears,” reported the New York Times. “Looking steady but flushed … Mr. Kennedy was quickly surrounded by Senators who could barely keep from overwhelming him despite cautions to keep their distance because his treatments have weakened his immune system.”11
The Jewish Daily Forward could not contain itself. “There may be no better example than [Ted Kennedy] of how complicated human beings can be,” wrote the Forward’s Leonard Fein. “Ted Kennedy is very far from sainthood. There have been times when his life has seemed a shambles, earning disgrace. Yet even then, in the summer of his life, as surely now, in its winter, he was a lion. It was Martin Luther King who asked to be remembered as a drum major for justice, for peace, for righteousness. If that were so, he added, ‘all the other shallow things will not matter.’
“Ted Kennedy: A drum major for righteous indignation.”12
Epilogue
A HARD FROST set in early on the Cape in the fall of 2008, and Vicki Kennedy feared that the bitter cold would hasten the demise of her desperately sick husband.
“A number of things were going wrong,” said a family friend. “Ted was determined to get in every last sail on the Mya, but even he had to admit that the weather was foul. The nasty weather depressed him, because he considered every day that he was forced to stare at the sea from his porch to be a bad day, and his days were dwindling quickly.”1
Ted went back to drinking heavily. Although Vicki tried to keep him away from the hard liquor in the Big House, he had many friends in Hyannis Port who felt sorry for him and who saw no harm in sneaking him a bottle or two. Vicki’s father, Judge Edmund Reggie, suggested that they ship the Mya to South Florida and move there for the winter. The judge had a friend who owned an estate on Biscayne Bay in the Miami area, which he had been trying to sell but was having trouble unloading in the depressed real-estate market.
The move was quickly arranged. The Mya was shipped south on a flatbed truck. Several boxes of photographs and Kennedy memorabilia followed. Office space was rented near the Biscayne Bay estate so that the senator could set up quarters for a small working staff. Ted’s primary care physician, Dr. Larry Ronan, promised to make frequent trips from Mass General in Boston to check in on his famous patient. While Ted was wintering in Florida, the University of Miami’s Leonard Miller School of Medicine, which had a world-class center for treating malignant gliomas, agreed to provide any therapy or specialized treatment that Ted might require.
In the days leading up to Ted and Vicki’s departure, Ted wandered around the Big House, gesturing at photos of family members, most of them long dead. “It was as though he was familiarizing himself with the faces of those he’d soon be rejoining,” said a family friend.2 Ted also made a point of saying good-bye to everyone who worked in the Kennedy Compound. A lot of these people had been with the Kennedys for years, and he wanted to say his farewells in case he didn’t get another chance.
“I’ll be back in the spring,” he told them, but there wasn’t a great deal of conviction in his voice.3
From Vicki’s point of view, the move to Florida served a dual purpose. Not only would the Florida weather be easier on Ted’s delicate health, but the relatively isolated location of the estate also meant that only a handful of people would have access to Ted’s address and phone numbers. In Florida, Vicki was able to keep Ted under far tighter control than she could in Hyannis Port.
“He still calls on the holidays,” said one of his oldest New York City friends. “I can still make him laugh. But I speak more to Vicki than to him, because it’s too difficult. She’s cut off most of his historical contacts, people who’ve been his political supporters for the past forty years, including Jewish supporters in the financial community. She’s even regulated his contacts with his immediate family, and his closest friend, John Tunney. I don’t think Ted wanted that. But sometimes in a marriage you have to pay a price.”4
The weather that winter in Florida turned out to be wretched—cold and gloomy—which meant that Ted couldn’t go sailing as often as he wanted. When he was trapped indoors, he stayed in touch with John McDonaugh, his chief health care policy adviser, who was aiming to get a Kennedy-crafted health care bill on the floor of the Senate before the July 4 recess. Ted also worked on a long-standing oral history project that would eventually be housed in a wing of the John F. Kennedy Library. He was a first-class anecdotalist, and when a particular story out of his past caught his fancy, he made three copies of the audiotape and sent them to his children.
THERE HAS BEEN a Kennedy in the Senate for more than fifty years—ever since John F. Kennedy’s first term—and Ted wanted to extend that run for another fifty years,” said a longtime Kennedy family adviser. “He felt it was very important to have a Kennedy in the Senate after he was gone, and when Hillary [Clinton] announced she was leaving the
Senate to become secretary of state, Ted thought that Caroline should take her seat. He put it to Caroline almost like a last wish, and Caroline felt that she couldn’t let her Uncle Teddy down.”5
The family adviser who provided this insight into Ted and Caroline’s thinking had a unique set of credentials that allowed him to speak with authority about private Kennedy matters. He had been an intimate of the Kennedys since the early days, when Joe and Rose first arrived in Hyannis Port, and he was still in touch with members of several generations of the family, including Ted and Caroline, as well as Caroline’s three children, Rose, Tatiana, and Jack.
As might be expected from someone this close to the family, he was delighted at the prospect of a new Kennedy face in the Senate. In early December 2008, Caroline phoned David Paterson, who had replaced the disgraced Eliot Spitzer as governor of New York State, and expressed her interest in the Senate seat vacated by Hillary Clinton. Paterson had the sole authority to name Hillary’s successor, but since everyone from New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg to President-elect Barack Obama supported Caroline’s bid, she was considered to be a shoo-in for the post.
However, the new governor didn’t seem as impressed by the magical Kennedy name as everyone else, and he let Caroline twist slowly in the wind. While he dithered over his selection, Caroline launched a listening tour of upstate New York that turned into a political disaster of major proportions.
“During a series of meetings with the New York press, one of which was recorded and is now being admired on YouTube in all its ineloquent awkwardness, the daughter of President Kennedy was vague, unconvincing and displayed a potentially ruinous verbal tic,” reported the correspondent of The Times of London, who, like most of the world press, was covering Caroline’s every move. “In one sequence, lasting two minutes and twenty-seven seconds, Ms. Kennedy, fifty-one, revealed that she had inherited none of the eloquence, energy or charisma associated with other members of America’s foremost political dynasty: she used the phrase ‘you know’ no fewer than thirty times.”6