The House of Kennedy Read online

  A former LBJ staffer offers the dire prediction, “This is the fall of the House of Kennedy.”

  But Ted’s confidante Helga Wagner, whose connection to Ted and Chappaquiddick is exposed as part of a Scientology investigation, advises, “People have to forgive and forget.”

  Chapter 42

  My uncle stuck to whatever it is that he does,” Patricia Kennedy Lawford’s son, Christopher, writes. “It usually works, especially in Massachusetts.”

  But if Ted’s going to create a lasting legacy—as a sitting senator, or future president—he must expand his vision to a national scale. The issue he chooses in 1970, universal health care, is personal. In his 1972 book, In Critical Condition: The Crisis in America’s Health Care, Ted mentions his sister Rosemary’s “struggles,” his brother Jack’s “many ailments, diseases, and near-death experiences,” not to mention his own experience in 1964, when he spent five months in a Boston hospital recovering from his extensive injuries sustained in the plane crash that killed two others. “I knew the care was expensive, but I didn’t have to worry about that,” Kennedy writes in Newsweek, arguing, “Every American should be able to get the same treatment that U.S. senators are entitled to.”

  For more than four decades, Ted pursues the passage of universal health care, calling it “the cause of my life.”

  The issue turns suddenly and urgently personal again in November 1973, when his son, twelve-year-old Ted Jr., is diagnosed with bone cancer. (Thirty years later, in 2002, his daughter, Kara, will also receive a cancer diagnosis, this time for lung cancer.) Joan “breaks down” when she hears the news while traveling in Europe, and rushes home to help prepare her son for a November 16 surgery at Georgetown University Hospital. To save his life, Ted Jr. must lose his leg, which is amputated above the knee.

  Ted’s twenty-two-year-old niece Kathleen Kennedy, Bobby’s eldest daughter, is to be married that same day, and Ted is supposed to stand in for his brother and escort her down the aisle. On the day of Ted Jr.’s surgery, he rushes from the hospital to Washington’s Holy Trinity Church, walks Kathleen to the altar to where her groom, David Townsend, is waiting, then before he returns to the hospital, closes down the wedding reception to a tearful chorus of his favorite song, “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.”

  Ted Jr.’s surgery is successful, and he later fondly recalls an incident during a snowstorm the winter he was first learning to use his prosthesis. Father and son decide to sled down the driveway on the family’s Flexible Flyer. The conditions are so icy that Ted Jr. slips and falls as he tries to climb back up the hill. “And I started to cry and I said, ‘I can’t do this. I said, I’ll never be able to climb that hill.’

  “And he lifted me up in his strong, gentle arms and said something I will never forget, he said, ‘I know you can do it. There is nothing you can’t do. We’re going to climb that hill together, even if it takes all day.’”

  Ted Jr.’s November 1973 illness coincides with the tenth anniversary of JFK’s assassination. Throughout these ten tumultuous years, all of the Kennedys have been searching for a way to preserve Jack’s—and the family’s—legacy.

  By October 20, 1979, architect I.M. Pei has turned aspiration into a physical repository. Seven thousand invited guests gather to behold the John F. Kennedy Library, a concrete and glass tower standing on Dorchester Bay across from the Boston skyline. Ted dedicates it to the memory of his late brother. “It was all so brief,” he says of the JFK presidency. “Those thousand days are like an evening gone. But they are not forgotten.”

  Ted’s pointed references to time are not lost on President Jimmy Carter, with whom he shares the stage. Though their relations that October day are cordial, the two men are as yet undeclared rivals for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination. After the terrible events on Chappaquiddick and the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, there was no chance of Ted running in 1972, and even 1976 seemed too soon.

  Even so, Carter has had to withstand years of speculation that he only won the Democratic Party’s nomination back in 1976 because Ted chose not to run, and that even now as the incumbent president, he might still be pushed out by Ted in the 1980 election. Carter has already made clear that a Kennedy challenge was call for a fight. “I’ll whip his ass,” Carter predicted with assurance.

  As the 1980 campaign gears up, despite spirited assistance from veteran Kennedy operative Al Lowenstein, assurance is something uncharacteristically lacking in Ted. Roger Mudd of CBS News flies to Cape Cod for a two-part interview with Ted, the first on September 28, 1979, at his home on Squaw Island, not far from the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port; the second, on October 12, in his Senate office. Ted, in his memoir True Compass, calls his participation in the interviews a “personal favor” to Mudd. Mudd calls Ted’s on-camera answer to one now infamous question “a politically embarrassing incident.”

  Mudd asks Ted what should be an easy question for him to answer: “Why do you want to be President of the United States?”

  Ted is stumped. For the first time in his life, he is unable to come up with a response. He hesitates, stumbles, and stammers, finally managing to cobble together a rambling, unpersuasive answer.

  The Boston Globe’s Robert Healy has a theory as to why. “I think he didn’t think about it because it was so obvious to him. ‘I want to promote my brother’s—legacy’…He wanted the legacy.”

  Journalist Chris Whipple, then a reporter for Life magazine and a witness to Mudd’s interview, has a different take. “Kennedy had no clue,” he says. “His heart just wasn’t in it,” Whipple speculates, wondering, “Was it consciously or otherwise an act of political destruction?” Author Garry Wills puts it in even more macabre terms, saying of Ted that he “has to keep living three lives at once…[He] has no one but ghosts at his side, and they count more against than for him, eclipse him with bright images from the past,” adding, “Once brother drew on brother for fresh strength; now brother drains brother, all the dead inhabiting the one that has lived on.”

  The Mudd interview airs in November, a few days before Ted makes his official announcement. But his bid for nomination may as well be over before it begins. The voting public sees not preservation but panic. Ted’s nonanswer to Mudd’s defining question becomes the symbol of a struggling campaign.

  Another blow comes just before 4:00 p.m. on March 14, 1980, when seven shots ring out in New York’s Rockefeller Center. A mentally ill man walks into former New York congressman Al Lowenstein’s law office and shoots him several times, point blank. Lowenstein, whom the Washington Post calls “a Pied Piper to three generations of student activists,” had been a friend to Bobby and an adviser to Ted’s campaign.

  His tragic murder sounds a symbolic death knell to the latest Kennedy presidential campaign, though it limps along until the Democratic convention in August 1980, where Senator Kennedy concedes the party’s nomination to President Carter. According to The New Yorker, Ted’s appearance is “solemn and enigmatic.” On the floor of Madison Square Garden, where eighteen years earlier Marilyn Monroe had serenaded Jack, are signs that read, “We Love Ted—But Jimmy’s All Right, Too.”

  Asked by the New York Times if she is perhaps relieved that her brother Ted has not won the Democratic presidential nomination, Jean Kennedy Smith replies, “I don’t dwell on the past and I don’t think Ted does. My father always said to worry about the things that you can change, not the things you can’t. Ted lost. And now we move on to the next thing.”

  Many expect him to try again in 1984, but by the end of 1982, Ted officially declares that it’s too “soon to ask them [his family] to go through it all again.” Plus, Ted says it’ll be too hard on the kids—twenty-two-year-old Kara, twenty-one-year-old Ted Jr., and fifteen-year-old Patrick—given that he and Joan are finally divorcing after several years of separation. (August 1978 cover stories of McCall’s and People had both touted Joan’s newfound sobriety and independence.)

  The question of Ted’s running for president rears up with n
early every election, but he never makes another serious attempt at it. Instead, he focuses his political attention on his Senate career—and the voters in Massachusetts reward him with nine terms, making him the third-longest serving member of the Senate in history, and earning him the moniker “The Liberal Lion of the Senate.”

  And while he “picked up the torch of his fallen brothers” and continued to valiantly fight “to advance the civil rights, health, and economic well-being of the American people,” so too was he dogged by stories of his own debauchery, poor personal choices—and ironically, the Kennedy name itself. As political journalist Teddy White puts it, “Ted Kennedy had inherited a legend along with his name and he was almost as much trapped by the legend as he was propelled by it.”

  PART SEVEN

  The Next Generations

  The Kennedy Cousins

  Chapter 43

  Senator Ted Kennedy wants a nightcap. It’s close to midnight, but not even the soothing sound of ocean waves lapping the shoreline next to the family’s Palm Beach mansion can compel the senator to stay at home tonight, on Good Friday, 1991.

  Ted and his youngest child, Patrick—now twenty-three, and already following family tradition into politics as a member of the Rhode Island House of Representatives—are down in Palm Beach for Easter weekend, at the invitation of Ted’s recently widowed sister, Jean Kennedy Smith. Also among the group of family and friends is Jean’s younger son, William “Willie” Kennedy Smith, thirty, a medical student weeks shy of graduating from Georgetown University.

  The senator rustles up his son Patrick and his nephew Willie and persuades them to join him for a bachelor boys’ night out.

  It’s been twenty-two years since Chappaquiddick. Ted and Joan divorced in 1983, and their oldest son, Ted Jr., now a lawyer, has long since recovered from his childhood diagnosis of bone cancer which resulted in the amputation of his right leg. Their daughter, Kara, is a TV producer working with her aunt Jean, Willie’s mother, at Very Special Arts, the international organization on arts, education, and disability that Jean founded in 1974.

  In a matter of twenty-four hours, between now and Easter Sunday, another Kennedy scandal will unfold, one that will dominate national print headlines and television news crawls.

  This time, a Kennedy will go on trial for rape.

  But for now, the trio hits the town for a late supper, then a few drinks at Au Bar, a trendy Palm Beach watering hole known as a magnet for the nouveau riche and B-list celebrities like Donald Trump’s recent ex-wife, Ivana, or Roxanne Pulitzer, whose scandalous 1980s divorce made the front pages of every tabloid with claims she’d been kinky with a trumpet.

  The fifty-nine-year-old senator orders his usual double Chivas Regal on the rocks, while Patrick chats with twenty-seven-year-old Michele Cassone, and Willie meets a twenty-nine-year-old single mother named Patricia Bowman. Willie tells her he’s about to become a doctor, and Bowman tells him about her two-year-old daughter’s health problems.

  “I really felt like I could trust him. He seemed to be an intelligent man, a likable man,” Bowman says of Willie. “During our dancing he’d never laid one hand on me. He had never done anything suggestive at all.”

  The Kennedys join Bowman’s friend Anne Mercer and Mercer’s boyfriend, Chuck Desiderio, at their table. The conversation is barely audible above the pulsing music, but at some point, Mercer starts arguing politics with the senator. Ted decides to leave with Patrick, who invites Michele Cassone back to the Kennedy mansion for a drink and a million-dollar view of the Atlantic. She accepts, following Patrick and his father’s white convertible in her own car.

  The Kennedy mansion at 1095 North Ocean Boulevard is a Mediterranean-style home designed by architect Addison Mizner in 1923, and has been in the Kennedy family since 1933, when Joe Sr. bought it during the Depression for a steal at a hundred and twenty thousand dollars. JFK wrote Profiles in Courage while vacationing there, as well as his inaugural address. The mansion is known as “La Guerida” but has been nicknamed the “Kennedy Winter White House” ever since Jack began using it as a presidential retreat. Despite the home’s fashionable pedigree, however, most first-time visitors in the 1990s are surprised at its shabby-chic décor. “It was dark, dingy, and smelly,” recalls Michele Cassone, cracking, “If it was my house, I’d have it exterminated.”

  Ted, Patrick, and Cassone chat in the living room, where Cassone switches from flutes of nightclub bubbly to glasses of white wine. Everyone else in the house is apparently asleep.

  “Ted was very drunk, and Patrick and I had a nice buzz on,” she recalls.

  The senator disappears from the room. Patrick and Cassone head into a bedroom the cousins are sharing for the weekend and start making out.

  Then Ted comes into his son’s room to say good night. But he’s not wearing any pants, only underwear and his long-tailed shirt.

  “I got totally weirded out,” Cassone recalls. “I said, ‘I’m outta here.’”

  Patrick escorts Michele Cassone to her car and politely says good night.

  Farther down the beach, things are unfolding differently.

  Left without a ride when his uncle and cousin took off earlier, Willie asks Patricia Bowman for a lift home when Au Bar closes at 3:00 a.m. She’s happy to oblige, and when they arrive, the two of them go for a walk on the sand, despite a brisk breeze.

  According to Bowman’s version of what happens next, Willie then asks her if she’d like to go skinny dipping. She declines. But he goes ahead, stripping off his clothes and wading into the cold surf.

  Bowman turns to go up to the house and to her car. “I’ve had a nice night with a nice guy,” she later recalls thinking as she left. “It would be nice if he called again, but hey, let’s be realistic, he’s a Kennedy.”

  But as she reaches the concrete steps, she claims, she feels a hand grab her bare ankle from behind. She trips and falls. It’s Willie, who she says has suddenly undergone a “surreal” aggressive transformation. She breaks free and starts “running, to get away,” but Willie, who is six-two and around two hundred pounds, tackles her on the lawn by the pool.

  “I tried to arch my back to get him off me,” five-six, 130-pound Bowman will later testify, “and he slammed me back into the ground. I was yelling, ‘No!’ and then ‘Stop!’”

  But Willie won’t stop. “I was struggling, and he told me to ‘Stop it, Bitch,’” she alleges. “Then he pushed my dress up and he raped me. I thought he was going to kill me.”

  Per her police report, Bowman “remembers hearing herself screaming and wondering why no one in the house would come out and help her, especially since she knew that Senator Kennedy was in the house.”

  Yet Ted and Patrick will swear in court they never heard any screams—nor did the other dozen or so people staying in the house. Willie’s mother, Jean Kennedy Smith, was sleeping at the Palm Beach estate that night, but says she didn’t hear anyone crying for help, or any other noises. Other houseguests, including William Barry (the former FBI agent who wrested the gun from Sirhan Sirhan after he shot Bobby Kennedy) and two prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney’s office (friends of John Kennedy Jr.’s) also assert it was a peaceful night.

  Nevertheless, Patricia Bowman says she finally manages to escape from Willie and runs into the house, where she hides in the kitchen. When she spots a phone on the counter, she uses it to call her friend Anne Mercer.

  “I wanted somebody to come and help me feel safe. And I didn’t know that the police would care or would come,” Bowman says, explaining why she calls Mercer instead of 911. “I had just been raped by a Kennedy. And I didn’t know what power they held,” she says. “These are political people and…maybe they owned the police.”

  As soon as she hangs up, Bowman says, she hears Willie calling for her. He finds her hiding in the kitchen and pulls her into another room. But this time Bowman confronts him.

  “I told him that he raped me, and he looked at me, the calmest, smuggest, most arr
ogant man, and he said, ‘No one will believe you.’”

  Chapter 44

  Anne Mercer and her boyfriend, Chuck Desiderio, arrive at the Kennedy estate about fifteen minutes after getting the call from Patricia Bowman. “She was literally shaking and she looked messed up, her hair and makeup was running,” Mercer recalls. Willie, on the other hand, looks “disheveled” but calm.

  Mercer and Desiderio take Bowman back to Mercer’s house, but before leaving the house on North Ocean Boulevard, they swipe a few small items—a framed photo, a notepad, a decorative urn—as proof they have indeed all been there.

  Mercer gives Bowman a change of clothes.

  Nine hours later, Patricia Bowman is at the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s office to file a report of rape—and to name her attacker. The Kennedy name drops with a thud.

  Later that afternoon, Bowman is at Humana Hospital, where she undergoes forensic tests and is treated for minor back injuries. “I felt all this fear and this dirtiness,” she says. “I was just so afraid and confused by everything that had happened to me. I was a mess.”

  The attending physician, Dr. Rebecca Prostko, is convinced “there was a traumatic event of some sort.” She later testifies, “Regressive behavior is a little hard to fake.”

  While Bowman is being examined at the hospital that Saturday afternoon, Ted hosts a luncheon at the mansion. At the quiet gathering, there is no mention of the previous night’s “incident,” though there is talk between the cousins. As per the police investigation, Patrick recalls Willie telling him Bowman was “really whacked out,” and that they’d had sex without protection, later adding, “This is really a setup, isn’t it?” Another witness statement notes an overheard conversation at Chuck & Harold’s, a Palm Beach celebrity hangout, where a nearby patron hears the senator say to Willie, “And she will say it is rape.”