Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died (10 page)

The 12,500-square-foot house that Warnecke designed at 636 Chain Bridge Road in McLean cost more than $750,000 (nearly $5 million in today’s dollars). It had a thirty-two-foot-high living room with a magnificent view of the Potomac River and the wooded banks on its other side. Approached from the outside, the gray-shingled house with peaked roofs looked like a New England country home. Inside, it was a different story. Joan worked with society decorators Keith Irvine and Thomas Fleming, who furnished the living room with an old English mantel, an antique Turkish rug, and five sofas upholstered in yellow-and-white chintz.

“The master bedroom suite is in a wing all of its own,” reported Dorothy McCardle on the women’s page of the Sunday
Washington Post
. “It includes a paneled den and a very masculine bathroom for Teddy, a very feminine, rose-hued bath-dressing room next door for Joan, and a huge bedroom with its own fireplace. The bedroom walls are covered with white silk moiré.”
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B
Y THE TIME
the house was completed, it was the spring of 1968, and Ted was caught up in a fierce family debate over whether Bobby should follow the lead of Senator Eugene McCarthy, a hero of the anti-Vietnam War movement, and challenge President Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic nomination. Ted was initially opposed to the idea. And he believed that if his father were still at the top of his game, and could communicate, he would advise, “Don’t do it.”
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But once President Johnson took himself out of contention, Ted changed his mind. He tried to talk Eugene McCarthy into withdrawing from the race in favor of Bobby. And when that did not work, Ted joined his brother-in-law Steve Smith as one of Bobby’s campaign managers.

From then on, Ted was absorbed by his brother’s campaign. Bobby won the Indiana primary with 42 percent of the vote to 27 percent for McCarthy. The same day, Bobby beat Vice President Hubert Humphrey, 2 to 1, in the District of Columbia primary. A week later, Bobby won in Nebraska. Then it was on to Oregon, where Bobby suffered a stunning defeat at the hands of McCarthy’s legions of antiwar supporters. Next up was California, a must-win state for Bobby if he was going to convince party leaders that he was a viable candidate in the fall.

Under all this pressure, Ted was drinking heavily again. Stories of his escapades with women on the campaign trail made their way back to his home at 636 Chain Bridge Road and to Joan Kennedy. It turned out that Ted’s near-death experience in the plane crash and his months of painful recuperation had not, as widely advertised, turned him into a new man.

None of this came as a surprise to Joan. Two or three years before, she had read in
Women’s Wear Daily
that Ted was having an affair with Amanda Burden, an ethereal blond socialite, who had recently married Carter Burden, a multimillionaire descendant of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt. “It was quite well known that [Ted] was having an affair with a married woman,” Joan later said. “At that point, Rose Kennedy came up to me [in Palm Beach] and said, ‘My dear, you can’t believe any of these things you are reading. Women chase after politicians.’”
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But Joan found it impossible to take Rose’s advice. In despair, she turned more and more to drink. She had probably inherited a
genetic predisposition to alcoholism from her parents, and people began to notice that she was often unsteady on her feet. Sometimes she stumbled and fell. Her breath often smelled of alcohol. She saw a psychiatrist, who prescribed tranquilizers.
⁶

“It wasn’t my personality to make a lot of noise,” Joan said. “Or to yell or scream or do anything. My personality was more shy and retiring. And so rather than get mad or ask questions concerning the rumors about Ted and his girlfriends, or really stand up for myself at all, 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. I didn’t know how to deal with it. And unfortunately, I found out that alcohol could sedate me. So I didn’t care as much. And things didn’t hurt so much.”
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9

T
HAT WAS A
rough affair, that rally,” said David Burke, Senator Ted Kennedy’s right-hand man, recalling a June 1968 campaign event in San Francisco that featured Ted as the main speaker. “There were a lot of unfamiliar faces, a lot of people who were pushing and shoving…. There was no sense of control. And people kept yelling and screaming things that had nothing to do with Robert Kennedy’s victory [in that day’s California Democratic primary], and I felt frankly uncomfortable for Edward Kennedy. I told him we ought to get out of there, and we did as soon as possible.

“We drove back to the Fairmont [Hotel],” Burke continued, “and went to our suite up there on the fourth floor, and of course the first thing we did was turn on the television set in the living room to get the latest [primary voting] results and see what was happening down there in LA. The instant the set lit up we heard someone say there’s been a shooting at the rally. I assumed, and I think Edward
Kennedy assumed, that the rally they were talking about was the one we had just left….

“As we were listening, we saw Steve Smith on the screen asking people, over and over, to be calm and be quiet and leave the auditorium. We knew, of course, that he hadn’t been at our rally. This was Los Angeles, and there had been a shooting down there.

“And then there was the sudden, horrible dawning realization that Robert Kennedy had been shot.

“The senator didn’t say anything. There was no outcry. The one reaction I remember most vividly was that there was no reaction at all.

“Ted Kennedy stood in the middle of the living room, staring at the screen. I stood beside him, unable to say anything. I heard him say, ‘We have to get down there.’ That was all. We just stood there, the two of us, staring at the screen, watching this thing unfold. I don’t know how long we stood there; it may have been thirty seconds or it could have been three to ten minutes. We were just frozen there, because we were learning things that were more horrible all the time.

“Finally, the senator spoke. ‘I want to go to Los Angeles.’”
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A
T THE HOSPITAL
of the Good Samaritan in Los Angeles, Ted was greeted by the members of his brother’s inner circle—Bobby’s wife, Ethel, who was two months pregnant with her eleventh child; press secretary Pierre Salinger; speechwriter Ted Sorensen; singer Andy Williams; and aide Edwin Guthman. At the end of a long hallway, Ted entered Bobby’s hospital room. His brother lay on the bed, a bullet in his brain. Surgeons had tried to save him, but to no avail. A priest was called to administer the last rites, and then Bobby was gone.

After several minutes alone with his dead brother, Ted opened the door, and orderlies came in and lifted the corpse onto a stretcher and began strapping it down. As they finished their task, Ted went into the bathroom.

“Ted leaning over the washbasin, his hands clutching the sides, his head bowed,” recalled one of Bobby’s aides. “I never expect, for the rest of my life, to see more agony on anyone’s face. There are no English words to describe it.”
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Ted and his best friend, John Tunney, who was now a congressman from California, accompanied the gurney to an elevator for the ride down to the hospital’s autopsy room. The elevator stopped at a lower floor, and Allard Lowenstein, a liberal activist who had initially backed Eugene McCarthy against Robert Kennedy in the primaries, got on.

“I felt I shouldn’t be there,” recalled Lowenstein, who had stuck with Eugene McCarthy even though his sympathies were with Bobby. “But there was no way I could get off, nothing I could do.” As the elevator reached the basement and Bobby’s body was wheeled off, Lowenstein turned to Ted Kennedy and said, “Now that Bobby’s gone, you’re all we’ve got…. Take the leadership.”
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S
EVERAL DAYS LATER
, Ted found himself standing in front of an overflow crowd in New York City’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, delivering his brother’s eulogy: “My brother need not be idealized, nor enlarged beyond what he was in life. He should be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it. Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today pray that what he was to us, and what he wished for others, will someday come to pass for all the world.”
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Ted was inconsolable. Now he was truly alone, the last surviving son of his father’s dynastic schemes, the last surviving father of his brothers’ children, the last surviving hope of many who were knocking insistently on the door of Opportunity—the blacks, the poor, the women, and the young.

W
HEN HE BURIED
his brother under a Japanese magnolia tree in Lot 45-A, Section 30 of Arlington Cemetery, not far from the grave of President Kennedy, Ted Kennedy was thirty-six years old, just one year over the constitutionally imposed age for the presidency. The White House had been his father’s dream and his brothers’ dream, but it had never been
his
dream.

“Never, never did Teddy want the job [of president], no matter what he said publicly,” insisted his friend Senator George Smathers of Florida. “Some politicians need recognition, some thrive on being in a more important position. It’s food for them. Ted Kennedy grew up with power all around him…. He didn’t need more power. He didn’t need to be a bigger shot than what he already was.”
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Nonetheless, his father had once told him, “If there is a piece of cake on the plate, take it! Eat it.” And so, despite all his reservations, Ted began his long, uncertain, conflicted journey in pursuit of the presidency—a pursuit that would last for the next twenty years.

A draft-Ted movement began immediately. Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley, who controlled the powerful Illinois delegation, and who intended to play the role of kingmaker at the Democratic National Convention that summer in the Windy City, launched a campaign to draft Ted for the number-two spot on Hubert Humphrey’s presidential ticket. Ted told Mayor Daley that he had no interest in the vice presidency. Next, Larry O’Brien—Jack’s old campaign manager,
who was now working for Humphrey—called Ted. “Are you available to run with Hubert?” he asked. “No” came the answer from Ted, who said he was busy sailing.

But then Ted said something that threw the Democratic Party into a state of confusion. In his first public appearance since Bobby’s assassination, he gave a speech at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, that was covered by all the major television networks. “There is no safety in hiding,” he declared. “Not for me; not for any of us here today; and not for our children, who will inherit the world we make for them…. Like my brothers before me, I pick up the fallen standard….”
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The speech was a bombshell. “Lyndon Johnson heard it, and decided Ted was planning a coup [at the convention],” wrote the
Times
’ Adam Clymer. “Daley heard it, and called to raise the idea of Ted running for President, not Vice President as he had urged before.”
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In late August, Steve Smith—the tough-minded Kennedy brother-in-law who ran the family’s finances and its political campaigns—told R. W. “Johnny” Apple of the
New York Times
, “No one is going to find a shred of evidence that the senator is working for the nomination.” At the same time, however, Smith confided to friends that Ted did not have to work for the nomination; it was his for the asking. And Smith was not alone in that view. The California delegation was ready to bolt for Ted. Senator Russell Long had lined up the Louisiana delegation behind Ted. And William vanden Heuvel, who had been Bobby’s assistant at the Justice Department, was so sure that Ted could win the nomination that he phoned him in Hyannis Port and urged him to declare his availability.

“You know,” vanden Heuvel said, “this is a long hill, the presidency. It’s a hard hill to climb, and all I’m saying to you, and I’m not
trying to persuade you, is that the nomination in my judgment is yours, if you’re willing to be available to it. And I’m not pressuring you in any way, but it will probably be a long time before we’re ever this far up the hill again.”
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But again, the answer from Ted was the same firm “No.” His friends and political associates were confused. Ted was not talking like a Kennedy. Had he forgotten Joe Kennedy’s First Commandment: “If there’s a piece of cake on the table, take it!”?

Ted had his reasons for not wanting to run. Chief among them, he said, was that “this was Bobby’s year.”
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“The remark,” wrote the
New York Times
’ William Honan, “alludes to an interesting fact about the relationships in the Kennedy family; namely, that although his brothers were competitive with each other, they also accepted their places in a rigid hierarchy. The elder’s ‘rightful’ place always was on top. This meant Ted could compete against Bobby vigorously, but he could not triumph over his older brother without feeling guilt for having upset the hierarchy, and when this situation arose Ted would immediately set about to restore Bobby’s position of supremacy by making disparaging jokes about himself or otherwise permitting Bobby to get on top again.