Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died

Also by Edward Klein

NONFICTION

All Too Human

The Love Story of Jack and Jackie Kennedy

Just Jackie

Her Private Years

The Kennedy Curse

Farewell, Jackie

The Truth About Hillary

Katie

The Real Story

NOVELS

If Israel Lost the War

(with coauthors Robert Littell and Richard Z. Chesnoff)

The Parachutists

For Dolores

This time for providing the missing chip

F
OR ALL THOSE whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.

—EDWARD M. KENNEDY
¹

Contents

Author’s Note: Metamorphosis

PART ONE
“There Are More of Us Than Trouble”

PART TWO
“Something Terrible Is Going to Happen”

PART THREE
“A Second Chappaquiddick”

PART FOUR
“Victory out of Failure”

PART FIVE
“A Master Legislator”

Epilogue

Acknowledgments
/
Sources
Notes

Author’s Note
METAMORPHOSIS

Let others delight in the good old days
;
I am delighted to be alive right now
.
This age is suited to my way of life
.

—OVID
¹

O
N A FINE summer’s day in 1970, Ted Kennedy skippered his sailboat from Hyannis Port over to Monhegan Island, an unspoiled, rocky outcropping ten miles off the coast of Maine, where I customarily spent the month of August with my children. He’d come to visit our mutual friend, the artist Jamie Wyeth, who’d painted a portrait of Ted’s brother Jack not long after the president’s assassination. Jamie always worked from live subjects, and while making his preliminary sketches of JFK, he’d asked Ted to sit in, as it were, for the dead president. As the portrait took shape, Ted had assumed the identity of his martyred brother, and in that guise, he and Jamie had become fast friends.

Ted and Joan Kennedy were staying with Jamie and his wife, Phyllis, who owned the most beautiful home on the island. It had once belonged to the famous illustrator Rockwell Kent, and it overlooked a boulder-strewn beach called Lobster Cove, where a picturesque old shipwreck lay rusting on its side.

Automobiles weren’t permitted on Monhegan Island, and I ran into the Kennedys and Wyeths as they were coming down the footpath from Lobster Cove on their way to the general store. Phyllis Wyeth, who’d been left paralyzed from the waist down as the result of an accident, was in a wheelchair. She introduced me to her weekend guests: Joan, thirty-three, blond and willowy, at the height of her mature beauty; and Ted, thirty-eight, in robust good health. It was easy to see why Ted had been called the handsomest of the handsome Kennedy brothers.

“How are you, Senator,” I said, shaking his hand.

My commonplace greeting seemed to perturb him, perhaps because Phyllis had mentioned that I was a journalist with
Newsweek
, and Ted Kennedy, at that time, was a fugitive from the media. Recently, Massachusetts had released the official transcript of the inquest into the 1969 death of Mary Jo Kopechne on Chappaquiddick Island. The judge presiding over the inquest strongly implied that a drunken Ted Kennedy had been driving Mary Jo to a sexual tryst when his car plunged off a bridge and into a body of water, where Mary Jo died.

I couldn’t tell whether Ted had a sailor’s sunburn, or whether his face was scarlet with shame. His edgy defensiveness was underscored by his stumbling syntax—a stammer that at times made him sound slow-witted and even a bit dumb.

“Well, um, yes, ah, glorious day …” he said. “Beautiful here, isn’t it? … Sailing, um…. Good day … er, for that…. Wind….”

Someone once referred to Ted Kennedy’s off-the-cuff speaking style—as opposed to his superbly crafted speeches—as a “parody of [Yankees manager] Casey Stengel: nouns in search of verbs.”
²
I later learned that the senator was aware of his tendency to speak in cryptic fragments, joking that as the youngest of nine children, he’d never had a chance to complete a sentence.
³
To correct the problem, he’d consulted a psychologist, who prescribed a daily therapeutic regimen to make him sound more intelligible when he wasn’t using a prepared text. But he quickly lost interest in the therapy, and kept on
uh
-ing and
ah
-ing with no noticeable improvement.
⁴

As we talked, I was struck by the fact that Ted didn’t look at Joan. Their eyes never met. Indeed, they didn’t even bother with the casual intimacies that are common between husband and wife.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, Joan was well on her way to becoming a full-blown alcoholic. If Ted had once counted on Joan to turn a blind eye to his infidelities, her alcoholism had changed all that. Instead of tranquilizing her and making her more submissive, drink had freed Joan to speak her mind.

She had recently given an indiscreet interview to the
Ladies’ Home Journal
. She and Ted, she said, “know our good and bad traits, we have seen one another at rock bottom….”
⁵
It was clear that Joan’s tendency to talk about Ted in less than glowing terms had put a strain on their marriage. The tragedy of Chappaquiddick had only made matters worse.

A
FTER OUR BRIEF chat on Monhegan Island, ten years passed before I ran into Ted Kennedy again. This time, it was at a Christmas party given by his sister-in-law Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis at her Fifth Avenue penthouse apartment. Ted was still recovering from his ill-fated primary race against President Jimmy Carter. A month or so before Jackie’s cocktail reception, Carter had been soundly defeated by Ronald Reagan in the general election, which must have given Ted Kennedy a feeling of schadenfreude. It also might have accounted for the high spirits he displayed that December evening at Jackie’s.

Ted had gained a good deal of weight, and there were strands of gray in his thick mass of disordered hair. I had heard rumors that he and Joan were living apart, and in fact he’d come to the party without her. Joan’s absence was particularly conspicuous because other members of Jackie’s extended family—including her mother, her stepbrother, and assorted Kennedys, Shrivers, Lawfords, and Smiths—were present. So were a few favored writers and journalists who, like me, had been befriended by Jackie.

“Teddy,” Jackie said as she introduced us, “this is Ed Klein. He used to be at
Newsweek
, and now he’s the editor of the
New York Times Magazine
.”