Kennedy Wives: Triumph and Tragedy in America's Most Public Family (24 page)

“She grew adept in an amazingly short time,” Ted wrote. “We trekked on southeastward to Argentina, traveling by riverboat and in the backs of trucks over bumpy roads, and staying at inns that had no heat.”

Toward the trip’s end, they finally indulged in a beautiful resort in Bariloche, Patagonia. From there, they launched to Buenos Aires before returning home—back to both reality and politics.

As 1959 arrived, plans were under way for Jack’s presidential bid. Bobby would run the overall campaign, and Steve Smith would set up the administrative and financial operations. Ted was tapped to be campaign manager for the western states. It was a grueling job—“every state was critical, because Jack’s nomination was a long shot,” Ted recalled—and so that meant Ted left pregnant Joan alone to stay with her parents in Bronxville.

“Politics took over our lives almost immediately,” Joan later said. And having taken over, politics would be the controlling factor for years to come.

3

Campaigning with the Kennedys

Joan gave birth to the couple’s first child on February 27,
1960—a daughter they named Kara—Gaelic for “dear little one,” which they’d picked out from a book of old Irish names. Ted came home from Wisconsin, a key primary state, and seemed to relish his new role as father. “I have never seen Ted so excited,” the new mother wrote to Lord Beaverbrook. “Ted is away all week traveling around Wisconsin, and now West Virginia, making speeches for Jack. He phones home every night and asks, ‘How is my daughter?’ I love the way he enjoys using those two new words—my daughter!”

Ted made known his dreams of having a big family. By now, Bobby had seven children, and Ted wanted Joan to keep up with Ethel’s baby-a-year schedule. “He wants nine,” Joan once said. “He says if his mother hadn’t had nine, I wouldn’t have him.”

Joan stayed home with Kara for just six weeks before joining her husband on the campaign trail. Ted was overseeing eleven western states, and Joan was quickly learning that when one Kennedy was campaigning, all Kennedys were expected to join. There were coffee parties, Rotary club lunches, radio interviews, and rallies. Joan later described it as a whirl, rushing from one event to the next and eating whenever food was offered, because they could never be sure when the next offer would come.

“I felt rather like a tourist,” Joan said, “entertained, but as though none of what was going on really had anything to do with me. After all,
there had never been any talk of Ted going into politics himself. He was still planning on private practice after his graduation from law school.”

Since their wedding and Ted’s graduation, the couple had largely lived with Joan’s in-laws in Hyannis Port and Palm Beach when they weren’t staying in hotels and living out of suitcases on the campaign trail. Despite the chaos, Joan was easing into her life as a Kennedy, and she loved her new family. She didn’t always feel like she fit in—they were far more competitive than she, and try as she might, she never could get herself too worked up about politics—but she admired Rose and quickly bonded with her sisters-in-law, Ethel and Jackie.

“I never felt any anger of being swallowed up by such a large family, because I saw immediately all the in-laws were individuals in their own right and were respected as such,” Joan told a reporter in 1962. “They all have their own interests and social life, and when we all come together, this gives us a lot to talk about.”

Joan, nicknamed “Joansie” by the family, was especially embraced by the Kennedy women: “I felt accepted as a little sister almost at once,” she said. “When I first learned I was expected to make some public appearances during the president’s campaign, I felt totally unprepared. Jackie, who was pregnant, heard me say I didn’t have the proper clothes for campaigning, and she insisted on lending me so many of hers. I think that for a girl to lend her clothes to another girl is one of the greatest signs of friendliness there is.”

In the spring after Kara’s birth, Jackie stepped in to help Joan by renting a house for her and Ted in Georgetown, about two blocks away from Jackie and Jack; Jackie also hired an Irish nanny to help Joan with Kara. Having Jackie keep watch over her made Joan feel like she had an older sister, someone who understood her and helped keep her safe. When Joan went to Washington with her baby, Jackie took them through the house and even stocked it with groceries.

Jack tapped Joan to escort him on one campaign trip to West Virginia, so Jackie lent her clothes and offered suggestions about the role she was to play. “We’d chat, talk about campaigning, and I’d ask her questions and she’d say, ‘Seems to me you’re doing the right thing,’ or she’d make suggestions about how to work the room.” Jackie also had an ulterior
motive: She wanted to keep Joan close to her husband so that when a photographer inevitably snapped a picture of him alongside an attractive woman, the odds were heightened that the attractive woman was a family member rather than a stranger who could fuel the rumor mill. It was in keeping with the role Joan had been assigned within the family: As the pretty one, most of the jobs she got had more to do with her appearance than her ability.

“I remember [Jackie] saying to me, ‘Stay very close to Jack. Just glue yourself to him,” Joan recalled. “‘Don’t let anybody else wiggle in, especially when they’re taking those pictures. . . . They’ll love meeting you because your name is Kennedy, whereas Jean Smith is Jean Smith even though she’s his sister.’”

No one was staying very close to Ted at this time, however. During the campaign, he once flew to Hawaii to meet Peter Lawford and Frank Sinatra for a fund-raiser. Someone spotted him leaving his first-class seat and talking to a European beauty queen who was sitting farther back. Lawford got word and contacted campaign worker Dick Livingston, who was dispatched to meet Ted at the airport. Livingston quietly registered the woman at a hotel away from Ted. “That night Frank is having a dinner party and Teddy hasn’t shown up, and Frank is getting pissed,” Livingston later recalled. “And finally Teddy arrives with this beauty queen on his arm. I thought Frank was going to get up and whack him, he was so pissed off.”

While the press in those days never reported on the Kennedy men’s roving ways, rumors inevitably reached the wives. Joan, at least ostensibly, refused to believe them. “She acted like Rose,” Chellis recalled. In a sense, Chellis was right: Like Rose, Joan came to some psychological accommodation that allowed her to go on. And like Rose, the exact nature of that accommodation, whether it consisted of denying the truth even to herself or simply deciding to contain it, was not something she revealed to anyone. The difference was that, for Rose, the denial proved sustainable. Joan would not be so lucky.

Just as it’s tough to imagine a time of chaste, chaperoned courtship, it seems dated to ponder a political campaign without a professional
campaign manager. But in 1960, that was the norm, so the large Kennedy family was dispersed across the country to convince voters that Jack was neither too young nor too Catholic to become president. Joan’s first primary state was West Virginia, which was important because it was just 1 percent Catholic. “If Jack could win there, or do well, it would augur well for a national race,” Joan said. Joan’s job was to “look nice and be friendly,” which she seems to have pulled off without much effort. In fact, when she went down to the West Virginia mines with brother-in-law Jack, she “got whistled at by the miners.” In the sexism-drenched backdrop of the era, Joan considered it a compliment, and Jack’s handlers thought it was great. But, as entertained as Jack was, he didn’t like Joan being a distraction, so he became more cautious in his use of her. Joan wrote:

It turned into a bit of a joke: when Jack’s campaign people sat around talking about “Where can we use the mother?” or “Where do we pull the sister in?” and my name came up, invariably someone would answer with “Joan? She’s too beautiful to use.” Jack thought it was great, and when he gave everybody souvenirs at the end of the campaign, mine was a cigarette box with those words engraved on it.

Not that Joan was off the campaigning hook. Gerard Doherty, a thirty-three-year-old state lawmaker who’d become one of Ted’s primary political advisers, had seen how quickly voters warmed up to Joan. She was down-to-earth, surprisingly relatable, and candid—sometimes too much so for the Kennedy family. She revealed to a journalist that Jackie wore wigs and that Jack’s bad back kept him from lifting his children. The family was upset enough that they asked “Joansie” to backtrack, which she dutifully did. Despite the Kennedys’ displeasure with Joan’s openness, voters reacted well to her candor, so Doherty put her in heavy rotation.

Joan once joined Ethel on a trip to Chicago where the two spent three days attending a dozen teas, rallies, and meetings, mostly with female voters. Joan was even asked to represent the Kennedy women on a televised program that would have sat her alongside other prominent political women, including Lady Bird Johnson, the wife of Jack’s vice presidential nominee, and Muriel Humphrey, wife of perennial Democratic
frontrunner Hubert Humphrey. Joan’s nerves wouldn’t allow it: “I don’t know if I’ll know what to say,” she said, rejecting the request.

When Jack learned he’d won the presidency, Joan and Ted were at his side, along with a big gathering of family and friends who’d converged on the Cape house on November 8, 1960. By the morning after the election, the votes had been tallied. Soon after, Ted and Joan joined Bobby and Ethel for a few days of relaxation in Acapulco. During that trip, Bobby confided in Ted that he wasn’t going to seek Jack’s vacated Senate seat when it became available in 1962. This put some pressure on Ted to go for the seat. It was important to their father, Joe, to keep it in the family. Jack had been allowed to choose a temporary successor in Benjamin Smith, a Kennedy family friend, and when the special election came in 1962, Ted would have just turned thirty years old—the minimum age to serve as a senator.

With Bobby out—and, in fact, about to be tapped by his president brother to become the US attorney general—that left Ted as the only Kennedy man available to run. Trouble was, Ted didn’t know if he wanted to enter into politics. His wife certainly thought his plan was to stick with lawyering. Before Ted lay two distinct paths, and so much of Joan’s future would be determined by what he chose. Whereas Ethel and Bobby were a partnership, Joan’s role in her marriage was much more passive: Ted made the decisions, and she could only wait and see.

4

Catching Up

Ted’s decision to run for Jack’s former Senate seat in 1962 did
not come easily. If he ran, he’d be vying first against Edward McCormack Jr., the popular attorney general of Massachusetts, who also happened to be the nephew of the Speaker of the US House, John McCormack. And if he bested McCormack, he’d still have to face Republican George C.Lodge, a former political reporter who had just been reappointed by President Kennedy as assistant secretary of labor for international affairs. Lodge was from a prominent political family in New England with a long history of battling the Kennedys in elections. In 1916, George Lodge’s grandfather, Henry Cabot Lodge, defeated John F. Fitzgerald for the Massachusetts Senate seat. Thirty-six years later, Henry C. Lodge Jr. was edged out by Jack for the seat. Now, Henry Jr.’s son would try to win it back. Ted knew that both of his opponents would attack his lack of experience and accuse him of coasting on the Kennedy name. If he were to run, he’d need to steel himself for that.

Then there was another matter: the plans he’d made with Joan. While campaigning in the west, the couple had fallen in love with the region. They had briefly moved to San Francisco with Kara and had set their sights on Arizona as a possible home. But with the Massachusetts Senate seat there for the taking, Joe insisted that it was “their turn.” And Ted, for all of his dreams of independence, like his brothers before him had trouble turning his back on his father’s wishes. Later, he recalled pondering words he’d heard his family say to him when he was a boy:

You can have a serious life or a nonserious life, Teddy. I’ll still love you whichever choice you make. But if you decide to have a nonserious life, I won’t have much time for you. You make up your own mind. There are too many children here who are doing things that are interesting for me to do much with you.

Ted struggled mightily with the decision. “I’d worshipped my father as a young boy,” Ted confided. What son doesn’t want to make his father proud? And then there were Ted’s brothers, whom he idolized. They were war heroes and public servants—serious-minded winners who didn’t seem enticed by the frivolity that often tempted Ted. They certainly had their father’s attention, and his respect. Ted wanted those things for himself.

I had been swept up by the dash and nobility of Joe Jr., and admired his wartime self-sacrifice even as I wept over it. Jack and Bobby had been godlike figures to me and my sisters. Now Jack was about to be installed as a world leader, and Bobby had already earned national recognition. . . . I was ready to step into the public arena alongside these men who were my father and brothers. To be of use. And to catch up.

Joan could hardly compete with the lifelong aspirations embedded into a man who, at heart, was in many ways still a boy wanting to please his father. “Ted was the obvious choice [for the Senate seat]” Joan recalled, “so all thoughts of private practice were put on hold—permanently, as it turned out.”

As soon as Ted decided to run, their lives seemed to hurtle down this new course. Ted, now twenty-eight years old, felt too green for the seat, so he asked Jack for a role in the administration, padding his resume until the 1962 elections. Cold War tensions were at their highest and Ted claimed he was “passionately . . . interested in arms control.” But Jack shrugged off the suggestion, telling Ted he’d do more good working his tail off in Massachusetts. But first—the president announced as though a light bulb went off in his head—Ted should go to Africa.

“Yes. Go [to Africa] and see what’s going on over there. That’s a continent that’s going to be enormously important,” Jack said. “There are
all kinds of things happening down in the Congo. This Tshombe’s on the loose. And there’s this East-West struggle going on in these countries. The Belgian Congo has just obtained its independence from Belgium.” Ted remembered stammering a response. There was no time to put together such a trip! But the president had his ways. After making a few phone calls, he found that a group of senators had just two days earlier gone on a fact-finding tour of West Africa. If Ted left that night, he could catch up with them. So just like that, Ted packed his bags and left his wife and daughter for a four-week trip, on the advice of his brother, meant to shore up his credentials.

Within a week, Joan was house hunting in Boston alone so that she, Ted, and Kara could move there, as the president had suggested. Joan found the family a small apartment on a top floor in Louisburg Square on Beacon Hill, in one of the city’s most elite neighborhoods. It was a gorgeous brick building, built in the 1830s, which had served as home to such famous names as William Dean Howells, the former editor of the
Atlantic
, and
Little Women
author Louisa May Alcott. The private square was historically significant to the Kennedys, too: Decades earlier, citizens of Irish descent had protested Ted’s grandfather for appointing an Italian American to a post. The mob had shouted, “Remember your own, Honey Fitz. Remember your own!”

Joan, who soon learned she was pregnant with her second child, settled back in Boston and began readying for the race. “This time, we were on our own,” Joan said. “Everybody else was down in Washington running the country, so Ted and I started the grassroots round ourselves.”

“We went to every little town in Massachusetts. We would go together or we would go separately,” Joan said. Ted would hit the big cities, and Joan would go to the smaller towns. “If Ted was in Boston, then I tried to be in Springfield. I met with women’s groups and went to many small towns my husband couldn’t get to. I used to be at three coffees and three teas in one day.” Ted seemed pleased with his popular wife, whose looks were so fetching that the president had nicknamed her “The Dish.” Ted told her once that “everyone is curious about what the sister-in-law of the
President looks like and what she wears.” About the campaign events, he would proudly announce, “Joansie, you got a crowd.”

“It was just a bunch of us kids,” she later recalled. “We felt it was us against the world.”

Joan’s long legs and enticing smile proved useful as always, but so did her piano playing. She and Ted would gather with voters for the typical candidate events—morning coffees, afternoon teas, often attended by one ethnicity at a time—and after the hand shaking and back patting, Ted would give a little pep talk, and Joan would take her place at the piano. “I’d get the hostess to tell me what her favorite songs were . . .they often turned out to be some of those show tunes that came in handy at parties when I was a teenager—and, if I was lucky, everyone would sing along.”

Sometimes the crowds were not so adoring, and the ugly side of political life surfaced. Joan, optimistic and trusting to a fault, had to steel herself with her husband now in the public eye. She had of course witnessed Nixon’s attacks on her brother-in-law during the presidential campaign, but those lobbed at her husband were just as harsh and hit closer to home. Ted was mostly attacked for his inexperience, as highlighted in particularly vicious language by McCormack during one of two televised debates between the candidates. McCormack said: “I say we need a senator with a conscience, not connections. We need a senator with experience, not arrogance. The office of a United States senator should be merited and not inherited.” Joan admitted the insults stung. “Yes, I minded . . . but I tried not to let it upset me, and I tried not to let it show,” she said. Getting upset and losing her composure would have put her out of step with the family, so she adopted the same approach that had worked for Rose and Jackie: She ignored the lobs, held her tongue, smiled, and said only the most genteel and quotable things. Sometimes, she would wash those quotes down with a drink.

With one brother-in-law in the Oval Office, another in the cabinet, and her husband vying for the Senate, Joan increasingly found herself the focus of newspaper stories. Invariably focusing first on her looks, the articles usually included staged and smiling photographs of the young mother with her family, which now included a second child, Edward Jr.
Her words were always upbeat, and her interests summed up in good-little-girl sound bites. When a photograph was included of her and Ted together, she often was smiling at him in clearly visible, utter adoration. One AP profile of Joan circulated to newspapers nationwide highlighted several interests that Joan adopted to be closer to Ted: politics, of course, and skiing, and going for long walks outdoors. The article focused on the many hobbies Joan could return to once the election was over: visiting her sister in Texas, scrapbooking, and preparing for Thanksgiving. They were the safe and predictable activities expected of a wholesome, all-American, stand-by-your-man kind of wife.

But Joan’s contributions to the campaign were in reality more substantive than that. Each night she’d do her “homework,” as she called it, and learned more about local and national politics than she ever thought she could stomach. She rounded up delegates to the Democratic State Convention, and, after a few trial runs alongside Ted, began accepting invitations to speak on her own in public. In fall of 1962, she spoke to a meeting of women at Ohabei Shalom Temple in Brookline with the wives of Ted’s rivals. “All the way to Brookline, I practiced saying the name of the temple,” Joan told a reporter soon after. “Then at the last minute, I lost my nerve. I skipped the name. I was afraid I’d mispronounce it.”

Joan didn’t see much of her husband that summer—in mid-July 1961, he left for a month to tour several Latin American countries—but he was home in time for the birth of their first son, Edward Moore Kennedy Jr., in September. Joan told the magazine
Redbook
that she tried to set limits on Ted’s time away. She admitted that she didn’t see her husband until eleven o’clock most nights but that they put Saturday aside as a day for each other.

If Joan had any misgivings about the part she was to play, she certainly didn’t share them with the press.

“My role, as I see it, is to be ready to go anywhere and to accommodate myself to Ted’s schedule,” she once said, as though relinquishing her personal interests and individuality weren’t a surefire way to slowly erode her young marriage. “It’s not a difficult role, frankly, because I learned to love campaigning in 1960. I think I’ve learned a lot about the country, and about politics too.” To another reporter, her words rang equally hollow:
“Really, I’m quite fortunate. Most women have no opportunity to learn about their husband’s working lives. But when you’re in public life, it’s not a 9 to 5 job. You bring it home with you.”

And in November 1962, Ted brought home a victory.