Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died (27 page)

He was proud of his mastery of the Senate, and no longer regarded himself as a runner-up in history because of his failed attempts to win the White House.

“I feel the Senate is where the action is,” he once explained, “where the great issues of war and peace, the issues of human rights and the problems of poverty are being debated. And, with certain important exceptions, you really
can
get a vote there on important matters. I would say the Senate is the greatest forum for change in our country and in the system. It’s the forum that I very much want to be part of and have some influence with.”
⁷

There were those who would deny him that role. They still viewed him as a relic of the past, a tax-and-spend liberal, an overweight, debauched politician who had left Mary Jo Kopechne for dead at Chappaquiddick; who had been caught making love to a beautiful luncheon companion on the floor of La Brasserie restaurant in Washington, D.C.; who was complicit in a lurid rape case in Palm Beach—who, in short, was beyond the hope of salvation.

However, this caricature was woefully out of date. It had been fifteen years or more since his name had been linked with any scandal.
And it had been even longer since he had given serious thought to running for the White House. As a result, he had ceased being a paramount threat to the Republicans. He was no longer the politician so memorably described by the late Republican Party chairman Lee Atwater as “the man in American politics Republicans love to hate.”
⁸
His name was no longer used by conservative political action committees to raise millions in direct-mail advertising.
⁹
In recent years, the senator’s most clamorous critics had fallen silent, or been drowned out by those who believed that Ted Kennedy had atoned for his sins.

The person who best captured this merciful view of the senator was the writer Murray Kempton. “In the arrogance of our conviction that we would have done better than he did in a single case [i.e., Chappaquiddick],” wrote Kempton, “we exempt ourselves from any duty to pay attention to the many cases where he shows himself better than us.”
¹⁰

A
ND SO, ON
this fine summer’s day, it was fair to say that Ted Kennedy had not merely survived long enough “to comb grey hair,” he had prevailed. He was the greatest lawmaker of his age, a trusted member of that small fraternity of men and women who have guided the course of America’s destiny.

As his wife and his niece Caroline Kennedy watched from the packed Visitors Gallery, Ted Kennedy was escorted onto the floor of the Senate by his younger son, Congressman Patrick Kennedy, and his friends Senators Barack Obama, John Kerry, and Christopher Dodd. His unheralded appearance caused an instant sensation. Dozens of his colleagues rose to their feet and let out whoops of delight.

He “stirred the normally staid chamber to a rousing ovation and moved many colleagues to tears,” reported the
New York Times
.
“Looking steady but flushed … Mr. Kennedy was quickly surrounded by Senators who could barely keep from overwhelming him despite cautions to keep their distance because his treatments have weakened his immune system.”
¹¹

The
Jewish Daily Forward
could not contain itself. “There may be no better example than [Ted Kennedy] of how complicated human beings can be,” wrote the
Forward’s
Leonard Fein. “Ted Kennedy is very far from sainthood. There have been times when his life has seemed a shambles, earning disgrace. Yet even then, in the summer of his life, as surely now, in its winter, he was a lion. It was Martin Luther King who asked to be remembered as a drum major for justice, for peace, for righteousness. If that were so, he added, ‘all the other shallow things will not matter.’

“Ted Kennedy: A drum major for righteous indignation.”
¹²

Epilogue

A
HARD FROST set in early on the Cape in the fall of 2008, and Vicki Kennedy feared that the bitter cold would hasten the demise of her desperately sick husband.

“A number of things were going wrong,” said a family friend. “Ted was determined to get in every last sail on the
Mya
, but even he had to admit that the weather was foul. The nasty weather depressed him, because he considered every day that he was forced to stare at the sea from his porch to be a bad day, and his days were dwindling quickly.”
¹

Ted went back to drinking heavily. Although Vicki tried to keep him away from the hard liquor in the Big House, he had many friends in Hyannis Port who felt sorry for him and who saw no harm in sneaking him a bottle or two. Vicki’s father, Judge Edmund Reggie, suggested that they ship the
Mya
to South Florida and move there for the winter. The judge had a friend who owned an estate on Biscayne Bay in the Miami area, which he had been trying to sell but was having trouble unloading in the depressed real-estate market.

The move was quickly arranged. The
Mya
was shipped south on a flatbed truck. Several boxes of photographs and Kennedy memorabilia followed. Office space was rented near the Biscayne Bay estate so that the senator could set up quarters for a small working staff. Ted’s primary care physician, Dr. Larry Ronan, promised to make frequent trips from Mass General in Boston to check in on his famous patient. While Ted was wintering in Florida, the University of Miami’s Leonard Miller School of Medicine, which had a world-class center for treating malignant gliomas, agreed to provide any therapy or specialized treatment that Ted might require.

In the days leading up to Ted and Vicki’s departure, Ted wandered around the Big House, gesturing at photos of family members, most of them long dead. “It was as though he was familiarizing himself with the faces of those he’d soon be rejoining,” said a family friend.
²
Ted also made a point of saying good-bye to everyone who worked in the Kennedy Compound. A lot of these people had been with the Kennedys for years, and he wanted to say his farewells in case he didn’t get another chance.

“I’ll be back in the spring,” he told them, but there wasn’t a great deal of conviction in his voice.
³

From Vicki’s point of view, the move to Florida served a dual purpose. Not only would the Florida weather be easier on Ted’s delicate health, but the relatively isolated location of the estate also meant that only a handful of people would have access to Ted’s address and phone numbers. In Florida, Vicki was able to keep Ted under far tighter control than she could in Hyannis Port.

“He still calls on the holidays,” said one of his oldest New York City friends. “I can still make him laugh. But I speak more to Vicki than to him, because it’s too difficult. She’s cut off most of his historical contacts, people who’ve been his political supporters for the past forty years, including Jewish supporters in the financial community. She’s even regulated his contacts with his immediate family, and his closest friend, John Tunney. I don’t think Ted wanted that. But sometimes in a marriage you have to pay a price.”
⁴

The weather that winter in Florida turned out to be wretched—cold and gloomy—which meant that Ted couldn’t go sailing as often as he wanted. When he was trapped indoors, he stayed in touch with John McDonaugh, his chief health care policy adviser, who was aiming to get a Kennedy-crafted health care bill on the floor of the Senate before the July 4 recess. Ted also worked on a long-standing oral history project that would eventually be housed in a wing of the John F. Kennedy Library. He was a first-class anecdotalist, and when a particular story out of his past caught his fancy, he made three copies of the audiotape and sent them to his children.

T
HERE HAS BEEN a Kennedy in the Senate for more than fifty years—ever since John F. Kennedy’s first term—and Ted wanted to extend that run for another fifty years,” said a longtime Kennedy family adviser. “He felt it was very important to have a Kennedy in the Senate after he was gone, and when Hillary [Clinton] announced she was leaving the Senate to become secretary of state, Ted thought that Caroline should take her seat. He put it to Caroline almost like a last wish, and Caroline felt that she couldn’t let her Uncle Teddy down.”
⁵

The family adviser who provided this insight into Ted and Caroline’s thinking had a unique set of credentials that allowed him to speak with authority about private Kennedy matters. He had been an intimate of the Kennedys since the early days, when Joe and Rose first arrived in Hyannis Port, and he was still in touch with members of several generations of the family, including Ted and Caroline, as well as Caroline’s three children, Rose, Tatiana, and Jack.

As might be expected from someone this close to the family, he was delighted at the prospect of a new Kennedy face in the Senate. In early December 2008, Caroline phoned David Paterson, who had replaced the disgraced Eliot Spitzer as governor of New York State, and expressed her interest in the Senate seat vacated by Hillary Clinton. Paterson had the sole authority to name Hillary’s successor, but since everyone from New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg to President-elect Barack Obama supported Caroline’s bid, she was considered to be a shoo-in for the post.

However, the new governor didn’t seem as impressed by the magical Kennedy name as everyone else, and he let Caroline twist slowly in the wind. While he dithered over his selection, Caroline launched a listening tour of upstate New York that turned into a political disaster of major proportions.

“During a series of meetings with the New York press, one of which was recorded and is now being admired on YouTube in all its ineloquent awkwardness, the daughter of President Kennedy was vague, unconvincing and displayed a potentially ruinous verbal tic,” reported the correspondent of
The Times
of London, who, like most of the world press, was covering Caroline’s every move. “In one sequence, lasting two minutes and twenty-seven seconds, Ms. Kennedy, fifty-one, revealed that she had inherited none of the eloquence, energy or charisma associated with other members of America’s foremost political dynasty: she used the phrase ‘you know’ no fewer than thirty times.”
⁶

In early January 2009, Caroline was finally granted a face-to-face interview with David Paterson. But by that time, the New York media (aided and abetted by leaks from Paterson’s office) were speculating that the governor might not choose Caroline for the job because she lacked “electoral experience.” Worse yet, New York City’s competing tabloids, the
Daily News
and the
Post
, were having a field day poking fun at Caroline for the inept rollout of her candidacy, and for her stuttering interjections of “you knows.”
⁷

“Caroline was humiliated; she had expected that the appointment would automatically be hers,” said the Kennedy family adviser. “In her mind, it wasn’t just that it had been her uncle Robert’s Senate seat, or any other aspect of her legacy; it was that she is a constitutional lawyer who has helped secure funding for the New York City school system, that she’s acted as an adviser to her uncle, and that she’s a star of the Democratic Party. It honestly never occurred to her that the seat wouldn’t be given to her immediately. When Governor Paterson failed to react, and made her wait, she seethed.”
⁸

Caroline called a number of Democratic power brokers in Washington and Albany, and during those calls, she vented her rage. This was a side of Caroline that few people had ever seen, or even suspected. According to several veteran politicians who took her calls, Caroline sounded like the old Bobby Kennedy—loud, harsh, and grating.

“In the end, her daughters, her son, and her husband, Ed, sat down with her at their New York apartment and gave her something of an ultimatum,” said the Kennedy family adviser. “Her children felt that she was becoming a different person—one that they didn’t much like. They had never seen her so angry or heard her talk so tough. They told her that if she was getting this worked up just getting the job, they didn’t want to see what she would be like in the trenches of a political campaign or a fight in Washington.

“One night, Caroline and Ed Schlossberg were dressing to go out to a dinner party when her daughters, Rose and Tatiana, came into her bedroom to confront her about the situation. Caroline was putting on her makeup and was a few minutes from leaving when they sat down on her bed and told her what they were thinking. When they knew they had her attention, Rose, the eldest, ran out and got her little brother, Jack, to join them so that their mother would know they were unanimous.