True Compass (46 page)

PART FOUR

Renewal

Ken Regan/Camera 5

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The Woman Who Changed My Life

1991

I have always believed that there are three stages of enjoying life: looking forward to something; experiencing it; and then having the memory of it.

There came a point in my own life when I had to admit that I'd stopped looking forward to things.

There had been so much loss. I understand that everyone suffers loss; it is hardly unique to me. Yet preparing myself to savor new experiences, and especially experiences that involved new personal commitments--I faced the fact that I no longer wanted to take that risk.

This is not to say I didn't enjoy life during those years. I am an enjoyer. I have enjoyed being a senator; I've enjoyed my children and my close friends; I've enjoyed books and music and well-prepared food, especially with a generous helping of cream sauce on the top. I have enjoyed the company of women. I have enjoyed a stiff drink or two or three, and I've relished the smooth taste of a good wine. At times, I've enjoyed these pleasures too much.

I've heard the tales about my exploits as a hell-raiser--some accurate, some with a wisp of truth to them, and some so outrageous that I can't imagine how anyone could really believe them. But I never tried to correct the record.

I decided long ago never to respond to tabloid gossip. Never. Once you respond to that kind of trash, you elevate it to something worth responding to. And anyway, once you begin refuting, you can never stop. Because then if you fail to deny even one such story, that might be taken as evidence that it is true. (The downside here, of course, is that rumors and fictions frequently enter the public consciousness as settled fact.)

Still, there was enough that I was doing to cause concern to those who cared about me. My friends didn't tell me that my drinking or my private life was getting out of control, but maybe that's because we were all having too much fun at the time. Certainly it didn't affect my Senate work. What was unspoken between me and my friends was my reason for excess. It was all part of my desire to escape, to keep moving, to avoid painful memories. And so I lived this string of years in the present tense, not despondently, because that is not my nature, but certainly with a sense of the void.

All of this began to change when I rang the doorbell of the home in Northwest D.C. where I had been invited to dinner on the evening of June 17, 1991, and found myself looking into the beautiful hazel eyes of Victoria Reggie.

The occasion was a dinner party to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Vicki's parents, Judge Edmund and Doris Reggie. The Reggie and Kennedy families had been friends for many years, beginning with the judge's strong support for Jack as the presidential nominee in 1960. Inviting me had been the elder Reggies' idea, Vicki later told me. They'd said, "Oh, let's invite the Commander"--their nickname for me. Vicki and I were not strangers. Over the years, I'd seen her and her family a fair amount, usually on Nantucket where her family has a summer home, and I'd dined from time to time with them when the Reggies were in Washington. I was aware that Vicki and Grier Raclin had ended their nine-year marriage the previous summer.

When I walked up to Vicki's door that evening, I really wasn't expecting anything other than a pleasant evening with old friends. I got quite a bit more.

As Vicki ushered me into her home, she looked at me quizzically and then leaned over and looked behind me. And with a teasing half smile on her face, my future wife sort of looked me up and down and asked, "What's wrong? Couldn't you get a date?"

"I thought you'd be my date," I fired back. To which she responded, "Dream on, Kennedy."

I learned later that her mother had overheard the exchange and was horrified: "Oh, Vicki! You're just
never
going to find a man if you talk like that!" But I was enjoying the banter. Vicki was quick-witted, playful--and fun.

So, all right, perhaps it wasn't love at first sight. Vicki, in fact, charges me with not even remembering her from those '70s days, when she interned in my Senate office mailroom with her long hair pressed straight down below her shoulders, a charge to which I plead nolo contendere.

But as much as Vicki and I had seen each other at various events over the years, I think that anniversary dinner party night was the first time I really
saw
Vicki. I helped her as she took the place setting away for the date I didn't bring, and I hung out with her in the kitchen as she prepared dinner. We shared easy conversation about issues of the day and spent a lot of the evening laughing. I hadn't felt that relaxed or lighthearted in a long time.

Maybe that was what encouraged me to ask Vicki, as I left her house that night, "Well, can I call you? How about dinner tomorrow night?" Vicki said, "Sure." I've since learned that after the door closed, she went, "Did I just say
yes
? Have I lost my mind?"

Bear in mind that this was a woman who did not exactly have to worry much about whether she would ever "find a man." Vicki was then in the midst of a very fulfilling career in the law. She was a successful partner in a law firm in Washington, and she was rearing two young children. Her life was full and very busy.

We had dinner the next night, and in the weeks following I did everything I could think of to impress this amazing woman. I sent her bouquets of roses and fresh wildflowers. I telephoned her--a lot. We went out to restaurants. We had dinner at my home. I met her friends. She met mine. And we kept up the fun banter. As strange as it now seems, we didn't discuss any of the difficult things that were going on. One night at dinner, I did make reference to a poll that showed my approval rating plummeting to 48 percent, and Vicki comforted me by cracking, "That's a relief, because I never go out with anyone whose approval is less than 47." I developed instant friendships with her children: Curran, who was eight then, and Caroline, who was five. There is no question that I'd have been good pals with these two even if I hadn't been dating their mother. Curran was seriously into sports, so I found myself following football and baseball even more closely than usual; and I spent a lot of time coloring pictures on the living room rug with Caroline--who has blossomed into a very fine painter, incidentally. At night, I would read them to sleep.

One of our best adventures was trick-or-treating that first Halloween. I really enjoy Halloween with children, and used to make the neighborhood rounds with my own, along with my nieces, every October 31. On this night, Vicki and I walked with Curran and Caroline through their neighborhood. We received a lot of surprised looks from Vicki's neighbors that night, but none more than at the house occupied by the cultural attache of China.

The children rang the doorbell and a gentleman opened the door to give them candy. As he looked up, he saw me and squealed, "Oooooooh, Kennedy!" I put out my hand to shake his and said, "How are you?" He asked us to come in and sit on the sofa. Actually, it was more like he ordered us to come in and sit on the sofa. Vicki and I looked at each other and the children kept asking why we weren't still trick-or-treating.

We could hear the gentleman who opened the door as he ran upstairs and knocked on what we assumed to be the cultural attache's room. We heard them speaking in loud, rapid Chinese, which we could of course not understand, except for the periodic shouting out my name: "Ted Kennedy!" This back-and-forth went on for a few minutes. Vicki and I decided that the gentleman was trying to convince the attache that it really was me and the attache was telling him that it was just some person in a Ted Kennedy mask. Eventually we tiptoed out the door.

Ironically, given that we've spent so many happy hours together at sea, our first little falling-out was over a disagreement about sailing. (Vicki maintains that "falling-out" is too strong a term for it.) In mid-August, I sailed
Mya
over from Hyannis to Nantucket to pay a visit on the judge and Doris and, of course, Vicki, who was visiting them. I invited Vicki to sail back to Hyannis Port with me.

August was the beginning of the Atlantic hurricane season. The opening show, just then spiraling northeastward along the coast, was a doozie. Hurricane Bob had already bumped twice against Rhode Island, and according to news bulletins was now heading straight for Massachusetts. On Cape Cod, its peak winds would later be clocked at 125 miles an hour.

For some reason, Vicki was not terribly interested in sailing back with me. Her exact words, as I recall them, were, "There is no way." This hardly seemed like a flat refusal to me, and so I repeated the offer. "Come on," I said. "We're going to get ahead of the hurricane and sail back." Vicki said, "There is just no way." She was beginning to sound as though she might be serious.

(Full disclosure here: my wish to get
Mya
back to Hyannis Port before the hurricane hit was not frivolous. I knew that if I left her on the Nantucket side, where there was little protection, the high winds and waves would smash her to pieces. This in fact was the fate of many boats caught on that stretch of land. Far better shielding awaited her on the Hyannis side, and I had no doubt that I could beat the big winds--which I did.)

I won't say that I was hurt by Vicki's refusal to trust me at the helm of a fifty-foot boat sailing across open water in the path of a Category 2 hurricane. But I didn't call her for two weeks. I was back in my office after Labor Day thinking of what excuse I was going to come up with to end my radio silence, when the secretary in my Washington office buzzed me with the message that I had a call waiting from Vicki Reggie. I think it was the first time she had ever originated a call to me.

At the end of the conversation--I can't remember the exact topic; she'd called to wish me luck on something or other--I cleared my throat and said, "Well, listen, I was just thinking, uh--I know you don't want to go out a lot because of your children, so, uh--I thought I would come over to your house for dinner."

From then on, I began going to Vicki's house for dinner nearly every night--as often as my schedule would allow. Some evenings I arrived early and had the chance to spend fun time with Curran and Caroline before their mother got home from work. Sometimes I would bring friends of mine along with me, and Vicki would obligingly cook for them as well. She loves to cook. And with her southern roots and Lebanese heritage, she really turns out some delicious meals.

Vicki would put the children to bed around eight, and as she came back down the stairs we would often hear them calling, "Mommy, Mommy, Mommy!" The first time this happened, Vicki began to apologize for it, but I interrupted her. "Oh no," I said. "I think a child calling for his mother is the most beautiful sound in the world."

We really had an old-fashioned courtship, and I loved it that way. During those autumn evenings, Vicki and I would talk as she cooked. We talked during dinner. And then, after dinner, we'd talk some more. I usually headed back to my house by 10:30 or so--we both had work the next day and Vicki had to get the children off to school in the morning as well--but I knew we'd be together the next evening anyway.

We really took the time to know each other and we grew very close. As the months went on, I realized that I loved this woman very deeply and that my love for her was overcoming all the defenses I'd built up in myself against the potential heartbreak of marrying again. One night, as Vicki and I were listening to
La Boheme
--we both love opera--I asked whether she wanted to go to New York to hear it performed. She quickly agreed. But the date for the performance was two months away. I had decided to propose to Vicki at the opera, but I wanted to surprise her. So I waited--for two months. And in the meantime, I made sure that we spent more time with my children and my sisters and sisters-in-law.

I asked Vicki to marry me--and she said yes--during the performance of
La Boheme
at the Metropolitan Opera in New York on January 14, 1992. We decided to keep our engagement quiet for a while, while we worked out the plans for our wedding. In mid-March, I felt the time had come to tell Kara, Teddy, and Patrick, and Vicki felt she should tell Curran and Caroline too. Everyone was asked to keep the wonderful news to themselves, but secrecy was too much to ask of then six-year-old Caroline. She told only "one person" in her kindergarten class, and he told his parents, who apparently worked for the
Washington Post
!

We announced our engagement in March and I gave Vicki an engagement ring in April when we were visiting my sister Pat, who had rented a house for Easter in St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. We were snorkeling at Buck Island Reef--named by President Kennedy to be part of the National Park system in 1961--where I had placed the ring for Vicki to find near a coral head. I'm just thankful that a big grouper didn't swim away with the ring before she saw it.

Our wedding, a private ceremony with our immediate families, took place at my McLean house on July 3, 1992. As a wedding gift to my bride, I did an oil painting of daffodils. The two of us had been reading William Wordsworth's poem "Daffodils" together several weeks earlier, and it was one of the readings we chose for our wedding. The poem begins, "I wander'd lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o'er vales and hills / When all at once I saw a crowd, / A host, of golden daffodils." The wildflowers lift the poet's spirits, and charm him by the way they seem to dance in the wind in a long line beside a bay. When later he lies in solitude on his couch, the image of the flowers returns to him: "And then my heart with pleasure fills / And dances with the daffodils."

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Campaigning for Political Survival

1994

In 1994, after thirty-two years in the Senate, I found myself campaigning for my political survival.

I knew that this election was going to be more challenging than usual, so I had been laying the groundwork for more than two years, actively campaigning around the state for other candidates in the 1992 elections and reconnecting with voters who had not seen me for a while. After those elections, I continued to return to the Commonwealth as much as the Senate schedule allowed to meet with various constituency groups and visit more cities and towns.

But despite our hard work, there were red flags. When campaign workers were gathering signatures to qualify me for the ballot, they found the electorate to be less receptive than in other years. A changing world had transformed Massachusetts into a quite different state from the one I'd known as a boy, or even as a young senator.

Textiles and shoes had been the twin anchors of the Commonwealth's economic stability and working-class hopes back in Honey Fitz's day. But the redbrick factories and mills that once seemed as natural to the landscape as cranberry bogs had been declining even before World War II, and now were shuttered, losers to outsourcing and overseas competition. Mass production of shoes in America had begun in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1885, but Ronald Reagan's favorite, the Bostonian, was being made in China and India now. Massachusetts textile mills had virtually ushered in the American industrial age, but Asian imports were rendering this industry uncompetitive as well.

As with any shrinkage of a job base, decline built on decline. Machine shops, mold makers, and electricians were drawn down into the spiral. Lower wages, unemployment, a shrinking tax base that supported fewer social services and funding for schools--it was enough to turn good people angry and cynical. And it had.

Massachusetts is a resilient state, and it wheeled about to stem the flow of lost jobs and revenues. Its network of higher learning centers began to draw in a new kind of worker, the white-collar professional in information,finance, biotech, and other high-tech jobs. Yet as welcome as they were, these "new economy" specialists could not fully compensate for the losses. New anxieties arose in the streets and neighborhoods, and were augmented by the rise of welfare and its perceived abuses. "What is Senator Kennedy doing about it?" ran the question in those neighborhoods. "Where is he? Why isn't he around here?" Reasonable questions, all of them; and to some, there were reasonable answers. But as Vicki and members of my staff tried to remind me from time to time, I was not in the habit of touting my accomplishments. (As a woman legislator urged Vicki during the campaign, "Honey, you've just got to tell him what my mama told me: 'If you don't toot your horn, nobody's gonna hear your tune.'") Well, I was taught not to toot my own horn. The last time I'd tried it, I'd gotten a letter from Dad telling me to stop mooing. But eventually I had to face up to the larger point in that criticism: I could no longer assume that the voters were closely monitoring my hard work on their behalf.

For one thing, I was not even especially well known to the newer, younger electorate, which had little investment in Boston's or the state's past. The name "Ted Kennedy" conveyed less information and less political connection to them than perhaps I would like to have thought.

For another, even my older base was perhaps starting to take me for granted. Or, if Vicki was to be believed, taking me for granite. "You've become like a building to them," she told me one day.

I soon grasped that my wife was handing me a hard and urgent truth. Her own conversations with people around the state had convinced her that to many, I'd become less a human being than a kind of monument. And that among those who did have strong opinions was a sizable percentage that didn't think I understood the problems and concerns of people like them.

I had also contributed to my political problems by persistent questions about my personal behavior, which were raised by the media during the Senate's confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas and, more notoriously, in coverage of allegations of a date rape in Palm Beach. On March 30, 1991, my nephew William Smith was accused of the crime and I was named in tabloid stories because I had been with him earlier that evening. The episode interrupted what I'd hoped would be a quiet getaway from my Senate duties, a weekend at the house my father had purchased in 1933. My son Patrick and I joined my sister Jean, her four children, and other friends in Palm Beach for Easter.

William was thirty that spring, and a medical student at Georgetown University School of Medicine. He would go on to a productive career as an activist in the worldwide cause of finding and disabling military land mines. He founded the Center for International Rehabilitation, a network for supporting the disabled.

William, Patrick, and I had left the house and gone out for a lateevening drink at a popular Palm Beach watering hole. As I later told a jury, we had all spent much of the day and evening reminiscing about Steve Smith, who had recently died of cancer shortly before his sixty-third birthday. Steve had managed or helped manage the presidential campaigns of Jack, Bobby, and me. He had taken over the family finances after my father died, becoming chairman of our family business office in New York. He spearheaded the fund-raising for the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, of which the Stephen E. Smith Center became a part. Beyond his accomplishments in the world, Steve was a gentle and humorous man beneath his facade of intensity. He was a good soul and I loved him very much.

My memories of Steve and other lost family members overwhelmed me as I tried to fall asleep. I invited Patrick and William to come with me to the club. William struck up a conversation with a woman, and he and she left the establishment. Out of that encounter came the woman's charge against William. Her claim, of course, made headlines and news broadcasts around the world. Ultimately, the jury wound up deliberating for only seventy-seven minutes before delivering a verdict of not guilty.

I could have avoided any involvement in the trial if I'd simply taken a walk on the beach by myself that night, instead of asking my son and nephew to accompany me to a bar.

Clarence Thomas, however, was another matter entirely. That was a controversy I could not avoid.

On July 1, 1991, President Bush nominated Thomas, a federal judge, to the Supreme Court to fill the seat of the great Thurgood Marshall. Marshall had been the first African American to serve as a Supreme Court justice. It seemed generally obvious that the president had been determined to select a black jurist to succeed Marshall, and a conservative black jurist at that.

The National Organization for Women objected to his nomination immediately. They focused on indications that he might vote to overturn
Roe v. Wade
, thus criminalizing abortion and denying women the right to make their own reproductive decisions. The NAACP and the Urban League objected sometime later. They pinpointed critical statements Thomas had made about affirmative action.

Worst of all, however, was Thomas's rating by the American Bar Association's fifteen-member evaluation committee for appointees. No member gave him the highest rating of "well-qualified." Two of them even pronounced him "unqualified." In stark contrast, every other sitting member of the Supreme Court has been determined to be "well-qualified" by the ABA. President Bush's earlier assertion that Thomas was the "best-qualified" nominee available hardly seemed credible.

I was a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Joe Biden, which began hearings on Thomas's appointment on September 10. The questioning went on for eight sessions spanning seventeen days, focusing on the nominee's opinions about issues such as the right to privacy, civil and minority rights, and his record as Equal Employment Opportunity Commission chairman, among other topics.

On September 27, the Judiciary Committee was evenly split on whether to recommend his confirmation: seven votes for his confirmation and seven against. In voting against confirmation, I said that "when ideology is the paramount consideration of the president in nominating a justice to the Supreme Court, the Senate is entitled to take that ideology into account in the confirmation process and to reject any nominee whose views are so extreme that they place him outside the mainstream." We sent the nomination to the Senate floor without a recommendation.

On October 6, as the full Senate body neared the end of its deliberations, two news outlets broke a story that threw the proceedings, and the nation, into an uproar: a tenured professor at the University of Oklahoma Law Center, Anita Hill, had submitted to our committee in September an affidavit stating that Thomas had sexually harassed her ten years earlier while she was employed as his personal assistant at the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education, which he then headed. Specifically, Ms. Hill charged, Thomas had discussed pornographic movies with her and had asked her several times for a date, even after she'd told him she did not wish to go out with him.

The Judiciary Committee reopened its hearings on October 11, and that is when the media and much of America suddenly developed a consuming interest in our deliberations. In defending himself, Thomas famously and furiously described his questioning as a circus and a national disgrace, "a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves."

On October 15, the full Senate confirmed Clarence Thomas as an associate justice of the Supreme Court by a vote of fifty-two to forty-eight, mostly but not entirely along party lines.

A sort of "urban legend" built up around my participation, or lack of participation, in the questioning of Clarence Thomas during the Anita Hill portion of the hearings. The idea took hold that I remained mostly silent--"muzzled myself," in the words of at least one journalist--because I was reluctant to interrogate the nominee on the question of his alleged sexual harassment of Hill: it would draw attention to my private life, especially in the wake of the Palm Beach incident.

The true reason why I did not ask many questions is less melodramatic and more procedural. Joe Biden had appointed Howell Heflin of Alabama and Patrick Leahy of Vermont, a former prosecutor, as the lead questioners of Thomas for this added-on stage of the hearings, which were out of the ordinary and subject to different rules. I had been a regular questioner in the main part of the hearings, and I don't think anyone doubted my performance then.

I was not at all reluctant to raise my voice. On day three of this phase, I angrily spoke up in protest of what I called the "character assassination" of Anita Hill. I made a strong statement at the end, as I voted in opposition to Thomas's confirmation. I worked to garner votes to turn down his nomination. I let it be known that I thought he was the wrong man for the job because of his narrow view of the Constitution and his judicial philosophy. But I also knew--and know--that perception is reality in politics. I had
appeared
to be silenced, and no amount of rational explanation about procedural mechanics was going to change that "reality." I also understood another hard truth: with all of the background noise about Palm Beach and my bachelor lifestyle, I would have been the wrong person to lead the questioning in the second phase of the Thomas hearing. And I know that many people were disappointed that I was unable to succeed in making a persuasive case against Thomas's confirmation.

That autumn was a time of soul-searching for me. The Palm Beach incident and the Clarence Thomas hearings, each in its own way, but really together, had stirred up public doubts about my past and my judgment. For the first time, my private life was viewed as impacting my public life. The high stakes of the Clarence Thomas nomination and the salacious allegations about
his
private life and its impact on his professional life certainly did not help that perception. My habitual reluctance to speak publicly about my personal life had intensified the doubting of many, and had allowed the latest tabloid frenzy to roll on unabated with rumor and innuendo.

I needed to reestablish good faith with my constituents. I began work on a speech to address the issues in a way I had never done before. It was not an easy one to write or give. I asked Vicki to accompany me to the speech and then to join me and my family at the Cape for the rest of the weekend. I told her that I was giving an important speech at Harvard, but I didn't tell her what I would say or why I wanted her to be there. Her presence was all I needed.

On October 25, with Vicki sitting amid the capacity audience, I took the microphone at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Television cameras focused their lenses on me from behind the packed auditorium. Late arrivals milled outside, unable to find seats. Many, I later gathered, had come because they expected me to announce a decision not to seek another term in the Senate.

I spoke of the nation's pressing policy issues for several minutes--national health insurance, gun control, civil rights. I alluded to the outrage of many progressive Americans at the confirmation of Thomas to the Supreme Court:

"Some of the anger of recent days reflects the pain of a new idea still being born--the idea of a society where sex discrimination is ended and sexual harassment is unacceptable--the idea of an America where the majority who are women are truly and finally equal citizens."

Then, shifting my focus to another source of recent public anger, I turned to the heart of what I'd come to say.

"I am painfully aware," I told my audience, "that the criticism directed at me in recent months involves far more than honest disagreements with my positions, or the usual criticism from the far right. It also involves the disappointment of friends and many others who rely on me to fight the good fight."

I looked around the auditorium and continued, in matter-of-fact tones:

"To them I say: I recognize my own shortcomings--the faults in the conduct of my private life. I realize that I alone am responsible for them, and I am the one who must confront them. I believe that each of us as individuals must not only struggle to make a better world, but to make ourselves better, too, and in this life those endeavors are never finished."