Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died (24 page)

Remarkably, the senator’s oratorical style had not changed over all these years. It was still a throwback to the Honey Fitz era of torch-lit parades and grandiloquent speeches. He spoke to crowds as though the microphone had not yet been invented, as though he needed to project his unaided voice to the farthest reaches of the auditorium, and even beyond, into the future itself.

His unmodulated “bellowing,” wrote journalist Ron Rosenbaum, “was not Teddy at his best; it was loud, graceless, crude and bombastic, as if he was substituting sheer volume for the kind of charisma and charm his brothers had…. Still, when he was speaking—or bellowing—to packed halls filled with partisans, whipping up the faithful even if it seemed over-the-top,
it didn’t come across as weird, and in its own way it worked
[italics added].”
¹⁴

And so, whatever one thought of the senator’s ideas, and the way he expressed them, he could always be counted on to provide exciting political theater. Shortly after his carotid-artery operation in October 2007, he appeared at a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park.
¹⁵
According to those who saw him, he looked better than he had in years.
¹⁶

“His weight was down,” wrote
Boston Globe
columnist Kevin Cullen. “He had a bounce in his step, even if he still had that limp…. He was energized by the prospect of Barack Obama becoming the Democratic presidential nominee.”
¹⁷

20

Hyannis Port, Saturday, May 17, 2008

A
T FIRST LIGHT
, Sunny and Splash bounced into the senator’s bedroom and woke him by licking his fingers. Groggy but obliging, the senator swung his legs over the side of the bed, and, struggling against age and gravity, lifted himself to an erect position—or as nearly erect as his old bones would allow. He threw on some warm clothing, then headed out the door into the chill, salty air for a stroll on the beach with his Portuguese water dogs, who loved to go down to the sea as much as he did.
¹

Early risers among the senator’s Cape Cod neighbors watched as he shambled off toward the beach. He was carrying a tennis racket and lobbing balls over the heads of his dogs. Splash easily outran Sunny and won the game of fetch every time.

“Now whaddaya want, now whaddaya want?” The senator was
speaking to Splash. “Good boy, yes, yes—g’boy, g’boy. Gimme the boooll now, gimme the boooll now.”

Sunny and Splash were spooked by all the noise at the Kennedy Compound. This morning, workmen were unloading crates of iced clams and setting up a huge party tent and sound equipment for the rock band The B-52S. A couple of hundred guests were expected later in the day for a concert to raise money for Best Buddies International, a charity founded by Anthony Kennedy Shriver, the senator’s nephew, to help people with intellectual disabilities. Like the Special Olympics, another Kennedy charity, Best Buddies was dedicated to the memory of Rosemary Kennedy, the senator’s mentally disabled eldest sister, who had been lobotomized when Ted was nine years old.

Rosemary’s ghost was not the only specter wandering the Kennedy Compound, six acres of lawns that sloped gently down to the sea. Here, many years ago, in the cold waters of Nantucket Sound, the senator’s eldest brother, Joe, threw young Teddy overboard for failing to heed a command during a sailing race. Here, on the broad green lawn, John-John and Caroline ran to greet their father as he stepped off the presidential helicopter. Here, on the beach, Bobby walked alone, weighed by grief and guilt, after his brother’s assassination. Here, on the verandah of the Big House, Ted’s father spent his last years, mute and paralyzed by a stroke—a manifestation of bad karma, and a terrifying example to the senator of how he might end his own days.

“John, campaigning, had Robert to work for him,” wrote the historian Garry Wills. “Robert had Edward to advise [him] and be his surrogate. Edward has no one but ghosts at his side….”
²

The senator lived in the house that his father purchased in 1928 when Hyannis Port was still an out-of-the-way fishermen’s
village.
^*
Joe and Rose Kennedy gutted the house that first winter, expanding it into fourteen rooms and nine bathrooms to accommodate the eight children they already had plus one more, who would be named after Joe’s best friend, Edward Moore. The town remained much as it was in the early years. Towering white clapboard houses clung to the hillocks; privet-lined streets beckoned the town’s many children to ride their bikes and play. Most of the eight hundred families had views of the teeming harbor.

Nowadays, the senator slept in his father’s old bedroom. He ate in his father’s dining room. He entertained in his father’s living room, which was dominated by a glass display case containing his parents’ collection of two hundred costumed dolls from all over the world and a large oil painting of the destroyer USS
Joseph P. Kennedy Jr
. His father’s plan to make young Joe president of the United States perished along with Joe in a plane explosion over the English Channel during World War II. Ted was twelve when Joe Jr. died.

Framed photographs of other young lives cut off at the promise covered the walls, the tables, and the piano. There was a picture of Kathleen Kennedy, the senator’s sister, who married the future duke of Devonshire, and who also died in a plane crash. She was twenty-eight at the time; Ted was sixteen. There was a photo of Bobby, who was assassinated when he was forty-two and Ted was thirty-six. There was a portrait of John F. Kennedy Jr., the senator’s nephew, whose plane went down in the Atlantic Ocean, claiming the lives of three people—JFK Jr., who was thirty-eight, and his wife and sister-in-law. There were photos of Bobby’s sons David and Michael, the
first dead of a drug overdose at twenty-eight, the other as a result of a reckless skiing accident at thirty-nine….

The ghosts of Kennedys Past refused to be still. They roamed the winding lanes of Hyannis Port. They lingered in the village News Shop, which opened on Memorial Day weekend and closed after Labor Day. They floated in the sparkling harbor, which was crammed with a forest of masts, including those of the senator’s fifty-foot schooner
Mya
.

“Most of the families in Hyannis Port have had homes here for years and have known the Kennedys, for better or worse, through four generations,” said a longtime friend of family matriarch Rose Kennedy, who died in 1995 at the age of one hundred and four. “The Kennedys have influenced nearly every life in Hyannis Port in one way or another. They have had affairs with countless women in the town, both married and single. Some women have had affairs with several members of the clan. There are three women who live within a few blocks of the Compound who have had long-term affairs with Ted. There are families where mothers have had affairs with Kennedy men of their generation and their daughters have been involved with Kennedys of the succeeding generation.

“And all of these multigenerational affairs have made for complicated relations. You have to be careful what you say because you never know who has deep, intimate ties to whom. Just as complicated are men and women who have had business or political relations with the Kennedys. Some people know one set of secrets, others another.

“Nobody who gets into the Kennedys’ circle and has entrée to the Compound wants to lose it. So there is a constant jockeying for position. It’s like a royal court, replete with intrigue, backstabbing, and toadying. Nobody trusts anybody.”
³

· · ·

T
HIS SATURDAY MORNING
, as the fog rolled out to sea, the senator and his dogs headed onto the beach. About a mile away, dimly visible through the drifting mist, he could make out the shape of the cottage he had purchased on Squaw Island shortly after he married Joan Bennett in 1958.

The senator had once been greatly fond of that rambling, gray-shingled house called Brambletyde, which sat high atop a hill overlooking Nantucket Sound on one side and a salt marsh on the other. The house had a long history in Ted’s family: his brother Jack first leased it in the spring of 1963, because the Secret Service thought the president and his family would be safer there than at the Compound. Joan had loved it, too, and called it “a forever house, a home we bought to live in our entire lives.”
⁴

The cottage was now host to its own phantoms. For the house that Ted and Joan had fought so hard over during their divorce was now owned by total strangers.

The senator lobbed a tennis ball into the water, and Sunny dove in after it, easily outswimming Splash. With the ball in his mouth, Sunny made his way back to shore, shook himself dry, and ran up to the senator.

“G’boy, g’boy,” the senator said. “Gimme the boooll now.”

Suddenly, the senator felt his jaw tighten, and then he noticed his left arm becoming numb.

“Dear God, don’t let me go like Pop,” he later recalled thinking. He had a horror of having to spend his last years in the same condition as his paralyzed father—fully conscious, but imprisoned in a useless body.
⁵

He fell to the sand. Staring straight up at the high thin clouds
scudding across the New England sky, he realized he could not move. His worst fear had come true: he was paralyzed like his father.

Sunny and Splash reacted to their master’s collapse with frenzied yelps and barks. Several workmen heard the commotion and came running to the senator’s aid. They carried him back to the house and summoned Victoria Reggie Kennedy. When she saw her husband’s condition, Vicki let out a scream. Then she grabbed her cell phone and dialed 911.

A
T
8:19
A.M
., Barnstable County paramedics received an emergency call from 50 Marchant Avenue in Hyannis Port. The famous Kennedy address set off frantic alarms. A patrol car on nearby Scudder Avenue got the first call and arrived at the Kennedy Compound within a few minutes. Many other emergency vehicles, including an ambulance and a car carrying the Barnstable fire chief, quickly followed. The street in front of the Kennedy Compound became so congested that more police had to be called in to direct the emergency traffic.
⁶

With great effort, paramedics lifted the three-hundred-ten-pound senator onto a gurney, hooked him up to oxygen, and slid him into the back of the ambulance. Vicki remained by his side, refusing to let go of his hand. She whispered encouraging words to the senator as the motorcade of police cars and emergency vehicles (by now nearly all that were available in Barnstable County) raced down narrow, winding Ocean Avenue, hugging the coast and passing through tourist-clogged Hyannis to Cape Cod Hospital.

“Vicki Kennedy knew in a split second that whatever was happening was grave,” reported Lois Romano of the
Washington Post
. “As the wife of one of the most iconic and admired politicians in modern history, she also knew it would play out in public. Knowing
the media would be tipped off in minutes because of [her] 911 call, Vicki Kennedy worked her cell phone at her husband’s side. Before the ambulance pulled up, she had arranged for the senator to be transported from the Cape to Massachusetts General Hospital, called his senate staff to put in place a crisis-management team, summoned family members, and notified his closest friends.”
⁷

In the emergency room, the doctors examined the senator for two hours. They were shocked at the sight of his grotesquely deformed back. Only a few people outside the Kennedy family had ever seen the senator’s back. Among those was Tom Harkin, the long-serving Democratic senator from Iowa and a close Kennedy friend.

“I’ll never forget the time I was in the [Senate] steam room with him,” Harkin told Adam Clymer of the
New York Times
. “Have you ever seen his back? Oh, God, it’s just something that gives me the shivers. His spinal column comes down like this and it literally goes over about three-quarters of an inch and starts down the other way. I don’t know how that son of a bitch stands it…. I asked him, I said, ‘Well, goddamn, doesn’t that hurt?’ He said, ‘Once in a while if I do something funny … it bothers me.’ I had never seen a back like that.”
⁸

After the examination, the doctors at Cape Cod Hospital concluded that the senator had suffered a seizure, a little electrical storm of the brain, rather than a stroke, which kills brain tissue and can lead to permanent paralysis. The senator was put back into the ambulance for the three-minute trip to Barnstable Airport. There, a twin-engine medevac helicopter was standing by, ready to airlift him to Boston.