The House of Kennedy Read online

  Back in Washington, Ted doesn’t have to pretend. He channels his feelings of grief and loss into the words of his first major speech on the Senate floor, in support of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that Jack had originally championed. “My brother was the first President of the United States to state publicly that segregation was morally wrong,” he says on April 9, 1964, with Joan looking on from the gallery. “His heart and his soul are in this bill. If his life and death had a meaning, it was that we should not hate but love one another; we should use our powers not to create conditions of oppression that lead to violence, but conditions of freedom that lead to peace.”

  Ted’s words ring controversial to the powerful contingent of southern senators, who argue and filibuster the measure for longer than two months. On June 19, a final debate lingers into the evening.

  Ted banters with his travel coordinator Ed Moss about making a grand entrance at their next stop, the Massachusetts State Democratic Convention in West Springfield, where the delegates are expected to endorse Ted for his first full term in the Senate. In their one-two patter, Senator Kennedy asks, “What do you want me to do, crack up an airplane?” and his aide answers, “Nope, just parachute out of it into the convention.”

  At 7:40 p.m., the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passes the Senate by a vote of 73–27. Ted and Moss, plus Indiana senator Birch Bayh (at Ted’s invitation, keynote speaker at the West Springfield convention) and Bayh’s wife, Marvella, rush to National Airport.

  At thirty-four years old, Bayh is the next youngest in the Senate. He wins his Indiana seat in the same 1962 midterm special election as Ted, and quickly becomes a close friend. Ted is not only the youngest senator, but the only one whose brothers are the sitting president and attorney general, respectively.

  “It’s bad weather,” Kennedy pilot Howard Baird warns from Hyannis Port. “The fog is really rolling in.” But Moss engages pilot Ed Zimny to fly a chartered Aero Commander 680 twin-engine aircraft to Barnes Airport in Westfield. The flight takes off after 8:00 p.m.

  Minutes before 11:00 p.m., Zimny radios Barnes control tower that he’ll attempt an instrument landing through the zero-visibility conditions. With his trained pilot’s eye, Ted could tell what was going on: “I was watching the altimeter and I saw it drop from eleven hundred to six hundred feet,” Ted recalls. “It was just like a toboggan ride, right along the tops of the trees for a few seconds. Then there was a terrific impact into a tree.”

  Bayh is brought back to consciousness by his wife’s screams. The plane—which “opened as though a kitchen knife sliced through it,” he recalls—has crashed in an apple orchard. He surveys the scene to discover that Zimny and Moss are dead, and that Ted is trapped in the wreckage.

  “We’ve all heard adrenaline stories about how a mother can lift a car off a trapped infant,” Bayh explains. “Well, Kennedy was no small guy, and I was able to lug him out of there like a sack of corn under my arm.”

  On the convention floor, the press surround Kennedy staffer Edward Martin. “There’s a plane down. You don’t think it’s Kennedy?” When he learns it is, Martin has the White House locate a Kennedy, any Kennedy—finally relaying to Sargent Shriver, “Ted is injured in an accident. He’s going to live, but will you notify all the Kennedy family members?”

  “He’s going to be fine,” Joan tells reporters on the way to the emergency room in Northampton’s Cooley Dickinson Hospital, where Ted is undergoing a blood transfusion.

  Despite suffering three crushed vertebrae, a punctured lung, and broken ribs, on the morning of June 21, Ted is able to call his family himself. “Let me talk to Dad,” he instructs cousin Ann Gargan, telling Joe: “You’d better get out here as soon as you can because they’re talking about my back. Nobody knows more about backs than you do.”

  Recalling the grave complications of Jack’s back surgeries, Joe is against the doctors at Boston’s New England Baptist Hospital operating on Ted. “Dad doesn’t think that’s a very good idea,” Ted explains, as he braces himself for a five-month recovery within the rigid confines of a Stryker frame bed.

  “They would turn him upside down and turn him around,” John Tunney recalls. “[But] he was educating himself as he was lying there…He used to get people to come out from Harvard to give him lectures and talk to him about economics and things like that.”

  Ted receives a constant stream of visitors from celebrities and politicians, including President Lyndon Johnson, who likes Ted more than his brothers and bestows on the youngest Kennedy a departing kiss on the cheek. Senator Birch Bayh, who walked away from the crash with only minor injuries, remembers bringing Ted his favorite treats, such as “the biggest, nicest strawberries” he could find.

  Despite the seriousness of his injuries, Ted continues his campaign. Joan steps up for him. Though she has two young children—Ted Jr. joined Kara in September 1961—and has recently suffered her second miscarriage, Joan shakes off her fragility and resumes the campaigning on her husband’s behalf. “Joan became the candidate herself,” Joe Gargan recalls, “and was willing to go to every village and town in Massachusetts to appear for Ted.” Her work leads to the senator’s overwhelming victory on November 3, 1964, over Republican Howard Whitmore.

  Bobby, now New York senator-elect, and Ted, from a wheelchair, give a joint news conference on their respective Senate wins, Ted’s being significantly more substantial at 75 percent of the vote. “He’s getting awful fresh since he’s been in bed and his wife won the campaign for him,” Bobby says.

  On December 16, 1964, Ted leaves the hospital under his own power. “Is it ever going to end for you people?” Jimmy Breslin questions Bobby, who gives the reporter a serious answer. “If my mother hadn’t had any more children after her first four she would have nothing now…I guess the only reason we’ve survived is that…there are more of us than there is trouble.”

  But there’s more than enough trouble.

  “It’s a curse,” Joan tells Jackie. “Look at the things that have happened. Can we just chalk it up to coincidence?”

  Chapter 39

  Teddy and Bobby”—who call each other “Robbie” and “Eddy”—“were unbelievably close,” John Tunney says. “I think that Bobby was Teddy’s best friend.”

  In March 1967, Bobby flies to Boston to meet Ted for the St. Patrick’s Day parade, the day after Bobby’s announced presidential candidacy.

  “We don’t have any signs,” Ted says.

  “The stores are all closed,” Lester Hyman remembers. “It’s St. Patrick’s Day, and literally, Ted took the paper lining out of drawers in the house, and we sat with crayons, writing up signs, Welcome Bobby!, so there would be some signs available for the parade.”

  Ted and Lester Hyman get in the car with the driver Jack Crimmins to pick Bobby up at the airport. “It wouldn’t start. I remember Teddy putting his head down and then up again as he said, ‘The fucking Kennedy machine rides again.’”

  When Ted and Joan’s son Patrick Joseph Kennedy II is born on July 14, 1967, Ted and Joan decide they want to live closer to Bobby and Ethel. In 1967, they leave Georgetown for a property in McLean, Virginia, not far from Hickory Hill. Ted hires architect Carl Warnecke, who designed Jack’s grave.

  * * *

  On the night of the 1968 California Democratic presidential primary, Ted is in San Francisco, where he has been working on Bobby’s campaign. While Joan is in France visiting Ted’s sister Eunice and brother-in-law Sargent Shriver, now ambassador to France (though many believe President Lyndon Johnson appointed him to keep the ambitious politician Shriver out of American politics), Ted has been keeping company with Helga Wagner, the blond, Austrian-born wife of the American shipping heir Robert Wagner. An unnamed source tells the Washington Post of “several days of partying, scheduled around campaign events and a society wedding” as well as a number of dinners out.

  At San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel, Ted’s aide, Dave Burke, watches Bobby deliver his victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel. Ted
is returning from a victory party when Bobby is shot, and it falls to Burke to procure an air force plane to get Ted from San Francisco to Los Angeles. San Francisco congressman Phil Burton adds weight. “I am standing here with Senator Edward Kennedy,” Burton says to an air force major, “whose brother has just been shot and who may be the next President of the United States. You are at a point I call a career decision, Major. Either you get that plane, or your career is over.”

  Burton’s bravado is enough to get Ted to Bobby’s bedside, but no one can save the stricken candidate. Ted is devastated. As Ted tells his close friend Tunney, he fears that he, too, might disappear. “Teddy, you know, he was not able to function effectively for a while. Part of his brain was not working, and it was because of this extraordinary grief that he felt, and almost to the degree that was fatalistic, that he was going to be gone, he was dead, he was going to kill himself, he wouldn’t be around much longer,” Tunney says. “In the early days, after Jack was killed and after Bobby was assassinated, I think he was getting all kinds of death threats all the time. I think that he thought his days were numbered, too, that he probably was going to be assassinated, that somebody was going to go for the third one and knock them all off.”

  One (unsubstantiated) threat logged in Ted’s FBI file comes from none other than Bobby’s convicted killer, Sirhan Sirhan. A fellow prison inmate claims Sirhan “offered him one million dollars and a car in exchange for killing Senator Kennedy,” the file records.

  Ted was not alone in his suffering. On June 22, 1969, Judy Garland, a longtime Kennedy family friend, dies in London of barbiturate poisoning. She’d been close with many of the Kennedys, especially Pat Kennedy Lawford, a California neighbor, and had vacationed with them all in Hyannis Port (Judy’s daughter Lorna Luft recalls “so many Kennedys, they just seemed to multiply as you watched,” so eventually she and her brother “just sort of blended in with the crowd of kids and enjoyed ourselves”). Judy had often visited Bobby and Ethel in Hickory Hill, and after Ted’s 1964 plane crash, had sent him a telegram wishing him a speedy recovery that said “We need you so much.”

  Her relationship with Jack had been especially warm, and multiple sources recall how he’d never let her off the phone without singing at least a few bars of “Over the Rainbow,” one of his favorite songs. As she later wrote in a letter to Harold Arlen, composer of The Wizard of Oz, that song transcended the film. “It’s become part of my life. It is so symbolic of all my dreams and wishes that I’m sure that’s why people sometimes get tears in their eyes when they hear it.”

  Ted’s façade of strength is as insubstantial as the late Judy Garland’s rainbow. True to Kennedy form, he deals with his own grief by pushing himself physically. Richard Goodwin, speechwriter and adviser to both Jack and Bobby, recalls, “He was really terribly shaken up by Bobby’s death. He used to sail all night long by himself in the days and weeks after that happened, just sailing.”

  In August 1968, at College of the Holy Cross, Ted makes his first public speech since Bobby’s funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. “There is no safety in hiding,” he states to the crowd assembled in Worcester, Massachusetts. “Like my brothers before me, I pick up a fallen standard. Sustained by memory of our priceless years together, I shall try to carry forward that special commitment to justice, excellence, and courage that distinguished their lives.”

  Teddy had always leaned on the influence and support of his older brothers, but now he had to stand alone. “You’ve got to learn to fight your own battles,” sixteen-year-old Bobby had once told nine-year-old Ted, as a new boarding student at Portsmouth Priory in Rhode Island.

  On his way to being a contender for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination, Ted’s passion for Bobby’s social causes also burns brightly. Now Bobby’s prophetic words stand in stark relief.

  Ted makes a renewed commitment to his legislative role, embarking on a vigorous—and ultimately victorious—contest against the Senate veteran Russell B. Long of Louisiana to become the youngest man, at age thirty-six, ever elected majority whip, also known as the assistant leader of the Senate.

  And Ted, now the de facto Kennedy family spokesman, is also thrust into the role of father figure, not only to his own three children but also to Jack’s two and Bobby’s eleven. Ethel in particular needs all the help she can summon. But Ted’s family devotion too often skips over his immediate family with Joan, including Kara, Ted Jr., and Patrick. By spring 1969, Joan is pregnant again, though for years she has battled her own perceived inadequacies, reinforced by Ted’s infidelities. “It was difficult to hear all the rumors,” she once explained. “And I began thinking, well, maybe I’m just not attractive enough.”

  Joan was “so fragile,” Lester Hyman recalls, though Joan bristles at the characterization. “They would all write how vulnerable I was, and everybody felt sorry for me,” she retorts. “If only they knew that I was so strong, I was stronger than anyone else just to be able to survive. It was very hard.” Not even their shared family traumas warmed the strained relationship between Joan and Ted. “Rather than get mad or ask about rumors of Ted and his girlfriends, it was easier for me to just go and have a few drinks and calm myself down. As if I weren’t hurt or angry,” Joan explains many years later. This was a dangerous tactic given her family history of alcoholism.

  Hyman remembers a distressing encounter during a party at Ted and Joan’s home in McLean. “Joan came over to me, and she had a water glass, and she said, ‘Could you do me a favor?’ I said, ‘What’s that?’ And she said, ‘Take this water glass and just fill it with vodka, please.’ I said, ‘Joan, do you think you should?’ She said, ‘Please, just do this for me, and don’t tell Ted.’”

  Ted is struggling with his own drinking. In April 1969, the senator embarks on a visit to Alaska and the native people of that state in his brother Bobby’s honor. But on the return flight to Washington, his travel companions catch a rough glimpse of the usually jovial senator. “Teddy used to be so much fun,” a close friend tells the Vanity Fair reporter Dominick Dunne. “He kept the whole family laughing. After the deaths of Jack and Bobby, his dark side appeared, which can only be described as melancholy. That was when the indiscretions started.”

  Aides and reporters watch in shock as a drunken Ted stalks the aisles of the commercial jet, pelting them with airline pillows and repeating “Es-ki-mo power” amid ramblings about his potentially enduring a fate similar to his brother’s: “They’re going to shoot my ass off the way they shot Bobby…”

  After witnessing the spectacle, at once poignant and alarming, John J. Lindsay of Newsweek attempts to sound the alarm about what he assesses as Ted’s deteriorating mental state.

  Lester Hyman recalls receiving a call from Lindsay directly following the Alaska trip. “I want to tell you that your friend Ted Kennedy is in deep psychological trouble,” Lindsay tells Hyman. “Everybody else is just saying, ‘Ah, he just had a few drinks.’ This is a guy who is suffering, and if you guys don’t do something soon, something terrible will happen. And by God, it did.”

  Chapter 40

  Friday, July 18, 1969, marks a hard stop in Ted’s packed Washington calendar. He catches a flight north to Boston, telling his seatmate, Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, a fellow Massachusetts native, “I’ve never been so tired in my life.”

  As Ted is sharing that confidence, Apollo 11 is orbiting the moon. NASA astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are two days from realizing Jack’s space-race vision of Americans making the first lunar landing.

  Thirty-seven-year-old Ted has a mission of his own—a return to the Edgartown Yacht Club regatta on the eastern shore of Martha’s Vineyard. He was too deep in grief for Bobby to attend in the summer of 1968, but this year Ted, along with cousin Joe Gargan and a crew, will race Victura, a twenty-five-foot wooden sailboat the Kennedys acquired in 1932, the year Ted was born. Their boat places ninth.

  On the small island of Chappaquiddick, reachable from Edgartown only by car
ferry across a narrow channel, Joe Gargan has rented a cottage. After the regatta, a party of twelve—six men Ted’s age or older, five of them married; six single women all under thirty—gathers to enjoy steaks and drinks, and to reminisce about the women’s days as “Boiler Room Girls,” who’d done tireless liaison work for Bobby’s presidential campaign from a top-secret central room in his headquarters in Washington. The women have asked Ted and Joe Gargan to “take us sailing again” as they did in Hyannis Port the previous summer.

  Twenty-eight-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne currently works in DC at the political consulting firm Matt Reese Associates. She holds a two-year business-secretarial degree from New Jersey’s Catholic Caldwell College for Women and had volunteered on JFK’s 1960 presidential campaign. In March 1968 she distinguishes herself by assisting with Bobby’s presidential announcement.

  Her Caldwell College classmate and Washington friend Elly Gardner calls Mary Jo the kind of party guest who’s “always the first to leave and never had more than one drink.” Owen Lopez, a lawyer who dated Mary Jo in Washington, agrees, noting that she “wasn’t the life of the party by any means. She tended to be subdued and measured in her speech. In fact, that’s why I think she was so trusted by the Kennedy staff. They looked for unconditional loyalty and discretion in the people they hired.”

  Loyal and discreet would also describe Ted’s driver, sixty-three-year-old Jack Crimmins, a South Boston native who, according to Senate staffer Edward Martin, is not only “a real character” but “an invaluable asset to the senator, not only his driving but humor.” He’s been with the senator since Ted’s 1961 days as a Boston assistant district attorney and looks after the senator’s 1967 black four-door Oldsmobile Delmont 88 (“Don’t ride around in new cars,” Joe Sr. insists). Tonight, Crimmins is one of Ted’s five male guests, and brings to the party gallons of alcohol, including vodka, Scotch, and beer.