Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died (7 page)

Ted and Joan moved to San Francisco with their infant daughter, Kara, who was born on February 27, 1960.
²
After Joan recovered from giving birth, the couple traveled together on the campaign trail, but it soon became apparent that by splitting up they could draw twice the audience and become twice as effective.
³

When Ted showed up at a ski-jump contest in Wisconsin, he
asked for permission to address the crowd often thousand people. One of the officials, displaying a bizarre sense of humor, agreed that Ted could use the public-address system, but only if he made the hundred-and-eighty-foot Olympic ski jump himself. “I wanted to get off the jump, take off my skis, or even go down the side,” Ted said. “But if I did, I was afraid my brother would hear of it. And if he heard of it, I knew I would be back in Washington licking stamps and addressing envelopes for the rest of the campaign.”
⁴

While Ted barely survived such challenges, Joan was involved in her own risky adventures. “I remember going down into a coal mine with Jack,” she said. “I’m from Bronxville. This is like another world. At the coal mines, they were very sweet about it, but they whistled. I had very good legs and lots of blonde hair…. I got more attention than [Jack] did.”
⁵

That didn’t sit well with the candidate, who was less than thrilled about being upstaged by his sister-in-law. Jack issued orders that Joan was to be barred from all blue-collar events; she could appear at women’s teas. (After the election, JFK presented his family and staff with engraved silver cigarette cases. Joan’s was inscribed “To Joan Kennedy/Too Beautiful to Use.”
⁶
)

In the course of their travels, Ted and Joan talked about moving to Arizona after the election. Above all, Ted wanted to put some distance between himself and his overbearing father. “His main reason,” said Joan, “was that in a new state, among new people, he would have to succeed or fail on his own.”
⁷
But shortly after Jack won the election, Joe Kennedy summoned Ted and Joan to a meeting. “Jack is president,” he said. “Bob is going to be attorney general. Teddy and Joansie, it’s your turn. Get your fat asses up to Boston. You are going to run for the Senate.”

· · ·

T
ED TRIED TO
argue with his father. To begin with, he said, he had no interest in running for the Senate seat Jack had just vacated. Ted was approaching his twenty-ninth birthday, which meant he was still a year shy of being eligible to occupy a seat in the Senate. What’s more, he did not feel qualified for such high office.
⁸
But Joe Kennedy brushed aside his son’s misgivings and expressed contempt for his scruples. “Look,” he said, “I paid for it [the Senate seat from Massachusetts]. It belongs to the family.”
⁹

The brief clash of wills between father and son represented one of several important turning points in Ted’s life, for it would be the last time he ever attempted to overrule his father and assert his independence. He and Joan gave up their dream of moving to Arizona. Instead, Ted went to Africa with a group of U.S. senators to gain some foreign-policy experience and to add a bit of gravitas to his featherlight résumé.

“In the meantime,” said Joan, “I’m sent up to Boston [to] rent a place.” While the new apartment was being decorated, Ted, Joan, and Kara lived in an unheated, dingy loft. “It was a garret,” Joan said. “We felt like we were part of
La Bohème
.”
¹⁰

Ted’s likely opponent in the Democratic primary was Massachusetts attorney general Edward McCormack, a well-respected prosecutor and nephew of the Speaker of the House of Representatives. “Gee, I don’t want to run against Eddie,” Ted told Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, a congressman from the nth District, which Jack had once represented in the House. “You know, it’s not good for the party, it’s not good for the relationships in Washington…. I’ll pay—we understand Eddie owes a hundred thousand dollars. We’ll take care of his expenses…. Anything that he’s interested in … he can have…. My brother can make him an ambassador.”
¹¹

When McCormack spurned Ted’s proposal (which also included a lucrative offer to become the lawyer for several Kennedy family business enterprises), the Kennedys took off the gloves. “With Robert Kennedy’s approval, Justice Department records were searched for anything detrimental about McCormack,” wrote Ralph G. Martin, “and there was a similar search in the Pentagon files for anything useful in McCormack’s service record.”
¹²

If Joe Kennedy could not bribe or intimidate McCormack, he was determined to outspend him. Ted was given an unlimited campaign budget, and he hired six private secretaries, two part-time office assistants, and delegates to represent him with all twenty-six nationalities and ethnic groups in the Boston area.
¹³
Joe persuaded his son-in-law Steve Smith, who had run Jack’s successful presidential campaign, to get back in harness and run Ted’s campaign. Within a few weeks, Smith had two hundred and forty workers on Ted’s campaign payroll.

“Teddy and his brothers considered a political campaign an athletic competition by another name,” said speechwriter Milton Gwirtzman. “Teddy wanted to get in as many campaign stops as possible, just as he wanted to get in as many downhill ski runs, to get in that nineteenth run even though it was getting dark and sometimes dangerous…. Teddy got down to an absolute minimum the time it took to get up in the morning, shower, shave, get dressed, and be ready to go out campaigning. He got it down to five minutes so he could be down on the wharf at six thirty in the morning shaking hands with fishermen.”
¹⁴

Joan was pregnant during the early stages of the political race; she gave birth to her second child, Edward M. Kennedy Jr., on September 26, 1961. By late that year, she was ready to join Ted on the campaign trail.

“Saddle up, Joansie!” Ted would tell his wife. “We’ve got a ten
o’clock tea at Lowell, then another one at four. There’s a banquet tonight in Boston, and after that a coffee in Lawrence. We should be back [home] tonight. Did I tell you six are coming for lunch tomorrow? Could you get lobster?”
¹⁵

“It was so much fun,” Joan recalled. “It was just a bunch of us kids. Those were the good years of our marriage…. It was so wonderful to feel like I was important and needed and wanted, and all those wonderful words that never quite happened again.”
¹⁶

T
HE FORMAL ANNOUNCEMENT
of Ted’s candidacy, on March 14, 1962, was greeted by hoots of derision from the press and the political establishment. He was widely viewed as a lightweight who was riding on the president’s coattails. James Reston, the
New York Times
’ respected Washington bureau chief, wrote: “One Kennedy is a triumph, two Kennedys at the same time is a miracle, but three could easily be regarded by many voters as an invasion.” “Before you know it,” declared an editorial in the
Chicago Tribune
, “we are in 1964 with Caroline coming up fast and John F. Jr. just behind her.” Not to be outdone, the
Washington Post’s
editorialists described Ted as a modest man “with much to be modest about.”
¹⁷

According to rumors that were making the rounds, Ted also had much to hide, especially the cheating episode that got him kicked out of Harvard. “I had [the story],” said Robert L. Healy, Washington bureau chief of the
Boston Globe
, “but there was a stumbling block. Harvard had a firm policy of not revealing any of its records. In today’s world of journalistic leaks, the story would have been printed immediately, but back then we required documentation before publishing. I had to get the okay or forget about it. I asked the White House to open the Harvard record and was summoned down to the Oval Office. I had three meetings there with the
president…Jack was pretty shrewd. He would have liked the story included in some kind of profile of Ted, which would have buried it, and I said ‘no soap.’”
¹⁸

Eventually, however, the editors of the
Globe
agreed to a compromise. They ran a story with a headline—TED KENNEDY TELLS ABOUT HARVARD EXAMINATION INCIDENT—that did not mention the word “cheating.” And as far as the “incident” in the headline was concerned, that was not described until the fifth paragraph. Years later, Healy explained to the
New York Times
’ Adam Clymer that the publisher of the
Globe
had softened the story because he “believed in not hurting the presidency.”
¹⁹

In the first of two debates between Ted and his Democratic primary opponent, McCormack got off the best line of the campaign: “If his name was Edward Moore, with his qualifications, with your qualifications, Teddy, your candidacy would be a joke, but nobody’s laughing because his name is not Edward Moore. It’s Edward Moore Kennedy.”

After the debate, Milton Gwirtzman took a call from the president, who was eager to hear how his brother had performed. “On points, McCormack probably won,” said Gwirtzman. “He made a lot of the people take the things he said about Ted and think about them, and he might have made some points. But on impression, on the general impression people get on television, Ted won, he was the good guy.” To which the president replied, “None of this on the one hand, on the other hand! He’s the candidate. He has to get up in the morning and go out and campaign. Tell him that he did great. None of this objective shit, not with somebody who’s running.”
²⁰

In the end, McCormack’s harsh attacks backfired, creating more sympathy for Ted Kennedy than disapproval. As a result, McCormack lost the Democratic primary to Ted, who then went on to win the general election on November 6, 1962, by a landslide. But
the architect of Ted’s victory, his father, could not savor the triumph; three months before the launch of the campaign, seventy-three-year-old Joe Kennedy had suffered a stroke, and lost the power of speech.

W
HEN EDWARD MOORE KENNEDY
was sworn in as a United States senator, he joined one of democracy’s oldest—and oddest—deliberative bodies. In the Senate, any piece of legislation that really matters is subject to a filibuster, which allows the minority to thwart the will of the majority. As a result, a senator frequently needs to round up a
supermajority
of sixty votes—the number required to invoke Rule 22, or cloture, in order to set a time limit on debate and clear the way for a vote.

The cloture rule places a premium on a certain kind of personality. You can’t be an effective senator without being a compromiser, a coalition-builder, and one of the boys. From day one, it was clear that Ted Kennedy had all these talents in spades, and that he therefore had the makings of a great senator.

In the eyes of his fellow senators, Ted was an amiable, warmhearted, unassuming fellow with a great sense of humor. “Robust humor is both salient in Kennedy’s character and a secret to his political success,” noted the
Washington Post’s
Rick Atkinson. “He is a gifted mimic, whether imitating Italian ward heelers in New England [or] his grandfather’s singsong Boston brogue…. He often lampoons himself, particularly his girth…. His puckish streak plays well on the Hill, where humor can heal even the most jagged political wounds. Two years ago, Kennedy and Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) fell into a heated Labor Committee argument…. But as the two senators left the room for a meeting of the Judiciary Committee, Kennedy threw an arm around his colleague’s shoulder. ‘C’mon, Strom,’ he urged, ‘let’s go upstairs and I’ll give you a few judges.’”
²¹

As the youngest of nine children, Ted found it natural to defer to his elders, an essential trait in a legislative body built on the foundation of seniority. In his early days, he fell under the spell of Michigan’s charismatic liberal senator, Philip Aloysius Hart, who was nicknamed “the Conscience of the Senate.”

“You can accomplish anything in Washington if you give others the credit,” Phil Hart wisely counseled Ted. It was a piece of advice that Ted would follow for the rest of his career.

Another significant figure in the young senator’s life was Walter Reuther, the head of the United Auto Workers. Reuther was a champion of a national health-care insurance system, and he used his considerable influence among Democrats on Capitol Hill to secure a seat for Ted on a health subcommittee. There, Ted launched what would become a half-century crusade for a national health-care bill.

Ted shared Reuther’s political philosophy. “There is no greater calling than to serve your fellow men,” Reuther was fond of saying. “There is no greater contribution than to help the weak. There is no greater satisfaction than to have done it well.”
²²

Ted’s deference to his elders and gracious self-effacement was all the more impressive because of his personal pipeline to the ultimate source of power in Washington—his brother, the president. When the handsome thirty-year-old freshman senator from Massachusetts stood on the floor of the Senate, he didn’t have to utter a word; he just naturally emanated the aura of political power.

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