Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died (4 page)

In an Irish American family, there was no greater punishment than that. “[C]lan relationships—and Irish society was built upon the clans—were the binding cement that meant survival,” wrote George Reedy in
From the Ward to the White House: The Irish in
American Politics
. “The most despised figure in all Irish literature is The Informer, the monster who betrays his fellow countrymen to the oppressor. There were no binding contracts enforceable in a court of law to hold together men and women scheming to circumvent power. That left only one instrument available for the enforcement of discipline—social ostracism. In a society organized along the lines of family ties, it was a potent instrument indeed. To be isolated from one’s family was a one-way ticket to Hell.”
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None of the Kennedy children felt this menace more keenly than Teddy, the youngest of nine. A sunny child with “a choirboy smile,” Teddy seemed to lack the killer instinct of his older brothers. “Teddy bends over backwards to be fair when he’s playing tennis,” a friend once noted. “He’s scrupulous about the calls, always giving the advantage to his opponent—and I haven’t seen that in any other Kennedy.”
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Though he was fat and awkward as a child, Ted tried to keep up with his brothers, especially with the eldest, Joe Jr., whom everyone in the family idolized. In 1944, Joe Jr.’s bomb-laden airplane exploded over the English coast, killing him instantly. Teddy was twelve years old at the time, and he retained a memory of two priests visiting his father at Hyannis Port to offer their comfort and consolation.

“Then [my father] came out of the sunporch,” Teddy recalled, “and said, ‘Children, your brother Joe has been lost. He died flying a volunteer mission. I want you to be particularly good to your Mother.’”
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Years later, after John Kennedy became president, he ruminated on how Ted’s life had been influenced by Joe Jr.

“So if you say what was Joe’s influence,” JFK said, “it was pressure to do your best. Then the example that Joe and I had set put pressure on Bobby to do his best. The pressure of all the others
on Teddy came to bear so that he had to do his best. It was a chain reaction started by Joe, that touched me, and all my brothers and sisters.”
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The family tragedies didn’t end there. In May 1948, while sixteen-year-old Ted was attending Milton Academy, south of Boston, he received word that his favorite sister, Kathleen, the widow of William John Robert Cavendish, the heir of the 10th duke of Devonshire, had died in another plane accident. And so Ted came of age at a time when three of his siblings were enshrined in the family pantheon as iconic figures. Rosemary was a martyr; Joe Jr., a hero; and Kathleen, a victim. It was hard enough to compete with your siblings as the youngest of nine; it was impossible to compete with the idealized memories of Rosemary, Joe Jr., and Kathleen. Surely Ted must have wondered why the last and the least had been spared while the best and the brightest had been cut off in the flower of youth.

“When you have older [children],” Rose Kennedy said, “they’re the ones that seem more important. When the ninth comes along you have to make more of an effort to tell bedtime stories and be interested in swimming matches. There were seventeen years between my oldest and my youngest child and I had been telling bedtime stories for twenty years.”
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If Teddy could claim any distinction at all, it was as the family clown. His nickname was “Fat Stuff,”
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and, according to one family biographer, he was “so slow of foot that Bobby or even Jack could dance around him and run down the expanse of lawn for a touchdown.”
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Not surprisingly, he was the target of merciless teasing, even by his own mother. “I think [Teddy] has put on ten pounds …,” his mother wrote in a round-robin letter to her children in 1942, when Ted was ten years old. “He dances very well, has remarkable rhythm,
and shakes his head like a veteran when he does the conga. He only fell down once last week, so he is improving….”
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Rose was still making fun of her son nearly twenty years later. “Jack gets a great kick out of seeing Ted dance,” she wrote in November 1961, “as Ted has [a] great sense of rhythm but he is big & has such a big derriere it is funny to see him throw himself around….”
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Many chroniclers of the Kennedy family have noted that Joe Kennedy was away from home for long stretches during the time his youngest son was growing up. One of Ted’s classmates at Fessenden, a prep school in West Newton, Massachusetts, recalled that Joe and Rose Kennedy never once visited their son during his two years at the school.
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Rose was away a lot of the time, too; she took more than a dozen trips to Europe in the first five years of Teddy’s life. However, in the absence of Teddy’s father, Rose ruled (in person or through surrogates) with absolute authority. For instance, although Joe Kennedy boasted that he gave each of his children a thousand dollars for not smoking or drinking—and put them on the honor system—it was actually Rose who was the enforcer. “I got the idea from the Rockefellers,” she said, “and I told Joe.”
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It was she, not their father, who meted out discipline and punishment.

J
OSEPH PATRICK KENNEDY
was one of those odd historic figures who are showered with tributes and honors during most of their lifetime and then heaped with abuse in their final years. Throughout the 1920s and ‘30s, while he was amassing one of the great American fortunes, he was hailed as a brilliant businessman and financier, a valued adviser to presidents, and, for a brief moment, a presidential contender himself. As ambassador to Great Britain during the years
before World War II, he seriously misjudged Adolf Hitler’s murderous intentions and became a leading advocate of appeasing Nazi Germany. But even then—after he had been rebuffed by President Franklin Roosevelt and recalled home—he continued to wield considerable political influence. The high-water mark of his career came late in life, when he was seventy-two years old and helped engineer the election of his son as president of the United States. For the next eleven months—from Inauguration Day in January 1961 until he suffered a major stroke on December 19 of that year—he was, after President John Kennedy, the second most powerful man in America.

Joe’s sons grew up idolizing their father; they could not imagine him doing anything wrong. They came of age when he was still a revered figure in business and political circles, and although they eventually acknowledged some of his shortcomings, they never seriously challenged his preeminence or thought of him without deep affection.

Bobby and Ted were dismayed when Joe Kennedy’s reputation came under sustained attack shortly after President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. Starting with Richard J. Whalen’s 1964
The Founding Father
, biographers found little to admire about Joe Kennedy. From then on, he was regularly portrayed as a ruthless crook, a stock swindler, and a bootlegger with ties to the Mob. It was said that he cared for his sons as a narcissist cares for others—as an extension of himself. He was the source of his sons’ self-esteem, the one to whom they looked to validate their choices in everything from their life’s work to their marriage partners. If he produced several outstanding offspring, he also set a deplorable example, encouraging his sons to treat women as disposable objects.

Ted did not recognize his father in this scathing portrait. Rather, he remembered his father as a benign but firm parent who
displayed a sincere interest in his sons’ welfare. His father made his presence felt with a steady stream of letters. These letters to his sons were full of messages of self-improvement and exhortations “to work on their handwriting, their grades, their attitudes, or their eating habits.”
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“Dear Teddy,” his father wrote to his eleven-year-old son on October 5, 1943, “I … got your report from school and boy: it is the worst one you ever had. In the fifth of your class you didn’t pass in English or Geography and you only got 60 in Spelling and History. That is terrible—you can do better than that. You wouldn’t want to have people say that Joe and Jack Kennedy’s brother was such a bad student, so get on your toes.”
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Again, on May 8, 1945, his father wrote: “Dear Teddy: I received your report for May fourth. You certainly fell down badly from the previous report and dropped to the 4th/fifth rather than the second. You can do better than this. Coming down to the last stages of the lap, a good runner doesn’t quit at the finish—that’s the time he puts on the speed! So get busy.”
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And yet again, on January 31, 1946: “Dear Ted: I am sending $50 up to the school with instructions to let you have what you need. Your letters are coming through all right, but your penmanship hasn’t improved much. You still spell ‘no’ know. Now, know means if you understand something, but if someone says, ’Are you going swimming?’ and you say ‘no’ it is
no
—not know. Skating is not ‘seating’; it is ’
skating
, and tomorrow you spell wrong. You spell it ‘tommorow’; it is ‘
tomorrow
.’ You spell slaughter as slauter. It is ‘
slaughter
.’ You really ought to do a little more work on the writing and spelling. You are getting pretty old now [he was almost fourteen], and it looks rather babyish…. I am sorry to see that you are starving to death. I can’t imagine that ever happening to you if there
was anything at all to eat around, but then you can spare a few pounds….”
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“The seeds of Ted Kennedy’s problems in later life, and they were monumental, were planted in him by his father, who, quite literally, charted the lives and careers of his sons,” wrote Dr. Thomas C. Reeves, reflecting the consensus opinion of historians. “Trying to adapt himself to Joe’s standards, Teddy was thrust into a world he never wanted and couldn’t handle. Raised by a father who drove him to compete and succeed, whatever the cost, Teddy was left in a moral vacuum.”
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T
HE INFLUENCE OF
Joseph and Rose Kennedy, for better or worse, on their youngest son has never been open to debate. But it begs an important question. For if Ted Kennedy was merely the creation of a ruthless father and a cold and callous mother, how did one explain Ted’s exemplary behavior in the United States Senate? How could a man reared by such “bad” parents win such high praise from his colleagues for his warmth, thoughtfulness, and decency?

For a more nuanced understanding of Edward Kennedy, it might be helpful to recognize how
Ted
saw his father and mother, not only how
others
saw them. To Ted, his father was a man of “generosity, humor, and heart…. who was maligned … by those who never knew him and made no effort to find out.” Whether this was an accurate assessment of Joe Kennedy, or whether it represented Ted’s idealization of his father, was less important than the fact that Ted clung to this view all his life. He
perceived
his father as a man who was always ready to give more than was necessary, and this
perception
helped shape Ted’s approach to public life.

As for his mother, Ted viewed her as a benevolent, warm-hearted,
and virtuous woman—not the heartless bullying old harridan portrayed in most of the hundreds of books that have been published about the Kennedy family.

“[O]nce he was grown, Rose began to favor Teddy,” wrote Barbara Gibson, Rose Kennedy’s personal secretary and close companion for many years. “He was the son most like her father. Tall and fat where John Fitzgerald was short and wiry, Ted nonetheless had the sense of humor her father enjoyed. He was like the stereotypical beloved, drunken Irish uncle who has ale in one hand and a tale of blarney coming from his lips.

“After the deaths of Joe junior, Jack, and Bob,” Gibson continued, “Ted’s importance grew. As Mrs. Kennedy would often say, had she not gone against the ‘wisdom’ of others and let herself get pregnant, she would have had no sons left at all.

“The relationship between mother and son was flirtatious. She always wanted him to see her as being special. The daughters Pat, Jean, and Eunice would come to lunch and were likely to encounter their mother in a dressing gown and pink pajamas on her way to take a nap…. But with Teddy she would not be dressed for the [nap]…. Instead she would put on one of her colorful suits from Courrèges, add a matching wide-brimmed hat, and modify her voice so it was girlish. They were more like close friends who knew how to make each other laugh than mother and son.”
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On November 29, 1967, when Ted was thirty-five years old—a United States senator and a married man with three children—Rose sent him a note that would have been more appropriately addressed to a teenager: “Dear Teddy, Sometimes when I am speaking, people ask me about drinking and smoking. Did you ever get your money for not drinking and did you keep your pledge?”
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On November 4, 1968, Rose wrote: “Dear Teddy, Did you ever
think of eating an apple at noontime? I used to send apples to the boys at school. They are very good in New England this time of the year, and much more thinning than other desserts.”
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On January 15, 1969: “Dear Teddy, I watched President Johnson last night on television and there were several shots of you. I suggest that you applaud all the time. If you do not, you appear indifferent and this is plainly captured on camera.”
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