Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died (28 page)

“Jack is actually the most emotional of the kids, and he was the most upset. This was totally uncharted territory for them. Mom had always been in charge. Their family is very matrilineal. Caroline calls the shots. Rebellion is not something that happens. For that reason Caroline was stunned. She stopped what she was doing and gave them 100 percent attention, shushing and waving Ed out of the room when he ducked in and pointed to his watch to indicate that they were running late.

“Rose pleaded, saying, ‘Mom, you are above this.’ That was a wake-up call. It jerked Caroline back to reality. What would
her
mother [Jackie] think of all this tabloid attention she was getting? Her mother wouldn’t have liked it. It was Caroline’s conversation with her children that tipped the balance. If Paterson had called and offered her the job an hour
earlier
, she would have accepted. But after that conversation, she wouldn’t have taken the job if Paterson had come
begging
on his hands and knees. That’s when Caroline called Paterson and told him she was withdrawing her name.”
⁹

C
AROLINE’S DECISION CAME as a crushing blow to Ted. And it was quickly followed by several other setbacks.

On January 20, 2009, at a celebratory luncheon on Capitol Hill after the inauguration of Barack Obama, Ted collapsed and had to be rushed by ambulance to a nearby hospital. Doctors attributed his seizure to fatigue, but according to members of his family, he had been drinking heavily the night before. Though Ted seemed to bounce back from the episode, the seizure was a dramatic reminder that, ultimately, he was locked in a losing battle with cancer.

But he was desperate to keep the battle going for as long as possible, and shortly after his collapse in the Capitol, he submitted to experimental medical treatments. Using cells from his brain tumor, doctors created a vaccine that was meant to stimulate his immune system and help him fight the cancer. While he was undergoing these treatments in Florida, researchers in Europe were using other cell samples from Ted’s cancer to come up with an alternative vaccine to suppress or shrink the tumor. Such pioneering methods were generally used when all conventional approaches had been exhausted.
¹⁰

The news from Capitol Hill was equally grim. Tom Daschle, President Obama’s choice for secretary of health and human services, was forced to withdraw his name after it was learned that he had failed to pay $128,000 in taxes on a car and driver lent to him by a big Democratic donor. The withdrawal of Daschle, who was also set to head a newly created office on White House health reform, devastated Ted Kennedy. He had quit the Judiciary Committee to focus exclusively on his life’s great dream—comprehensive health-care reform. His staff had been working round-the-clock to create legislation for passage during the first one hundred days of the new administration. Now, as President Obama set about searching for Daschle’s replacement, everything was put on hold, and it was anybody’s guess whether Ted would still be around to lead the debate when the bill finally reached the floor of the Senate.
¹¹

On Monday evening, February 9, 2009, Ted returned to Washington for the first time since Inauguration Day. He went there to cast his vote on President Obama’s $838 billion economic recovery package. As he entered the Senate chamber, his colleagues were taken aback by his appearance. His once-luxurious head of snow-white hair had thinned considerably, and his hand trembled when he greeted Senator Max Baucus, the chairman of the Finance Committee, who managed the debate on the stimulus bill.
¹²

Ted left immediately after the vote and made his way, with the aid of a cane, to a room where Vicki was waiting for him. In the past several weeks, Vicki’s constant presence at Ted’s side had added to the speculation that she might succeed her husband in the Senate. If that’s what Vicki had in mind, she was in for some stiff competition, for back in Massachusetts, Joe Kennedy was already running a thinly disguised campaign for his uncle’s seat via a blitz of TV commercials touting his efforts to deliver low-cost heating oil to the poor.

Vicki helped Ted on with his coat and looped a long blue scarf around his neck. Ted picked up a soft felt fedora hat and squashed it down on his head.

Since the days of JFK, Kennedy men had never liked to wear hats. They thought hats made them look silly. Hats were for sissies. But Ted obviously didn’t care anymore about such things. He just wanted to stay warm—and alive. In fact, he’d agreed to submit to another brain operation. “I hope to put it off as long as possible,” he told a family friend in late March, “but I’m sure I’ll have to go back in for surgery at some point.”

As he stepped into the elevator, someone called after him, “Senator, how are you feeling?”

Ted looked up. A small crowd had gathered at the elevator to bid him farewell.

“How are you feeling?” someone in the crowd repeated.

“Some days are better than others,” Ted Kennedy replied as he disappeared behind the sliding doors.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T
HE FOUNDERS OF our country believed that a virtuous nation requires virtuous people to run it. But history has taught us otherwise. In actual practice, virtue has always been in short supply among the world’s leaders. Two of the greatest figures from the past were France’s Charles de Talleyrand-Périgord and Britain’s King Edward VII. Now universally regarded as among the most accomplished statesmen of their time, these men were also devoted to lives of lechery, fornication, and self-gratification. The same can be said of two of America’s great nineteenth-century parliamentarians: Kentucky’s Henry Clay and Massachusetts’s Daniel Webster. As one of their contemporaries, an American politician and wealthy plantation owner by the name of James Hammond, noted, “[T]he very greatest men that have lived have been addicted to loose indulgences with women. It is the besetting sin of the strong, and of the weak also, of our race. Among us now Webster and Clay are notorious for it.”
¹

More recently, journalists, historians, and biographers have substituted the psychological notion of “character” for “virtue.” They argue that it is necessary to unearth intimate details of a person’s life in order to decide whether that person has the “character” to be our leader. But in their search for leaders of character, they have only proved what most of us already knew: that all men (and women, for that matter) are sinners.

These thoughts come to mind when one tries to describe the tangled task of writing a biography of Edward Moore Kennedy, a figure who equals Talleyrand, Edward VII, Webster, and Clay as both public giant and private rogue. How does one explain that despite Chappaquiddick, despite Palm Beach, despite a dozen other lesser transgressions, Ted Kennedy ranks as one of the two or three greatest senators in American history?

One cannot rely on Ted Kennedy to solve the riddle. Following his diagnosis of a malignant brain tumor in May 2008, he stopped giving interviews. Not that it would have made much difference if he had made himself available. Although Ted Kennedy has uttered hundreds of thousands of words during a career that has spanned nearly half a century, he has never spoken candidly about matters close to his heart.

For such insights, a biographer must turn to the senator’s friends, associates, and family members, who, if they are willing to talk at all, will do so only on the condition of anonymity. As a result, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to more than a score of people whom I cannot thank by name. It takes a great deal of courage to speak out of school about a Kennedy, for if you are caught, you will most surely be expelled.

As for those names I can name, let me begin with my longtime research associate Leon Wagener. Many of the gems in this book were unearthed by Leon in his visits to presidential libraries. He also gained the trust of several of Ted’s intimate friends, who provided unprecedented fly-on-the-wall scenes of private Kennedy gatherings.

I must thank another longtime associate, Melissa Goldstein, who was the photo editor of this book, as she has been on several other Kennedy books that I have written. By now, Melissa and I have become so familiar with each other’s photographic sensibilities that we communicate almost telepathically.

This is the second book of mine that has been edited by Rick Horgan of Crown. Rick shapes a manuscript the way a potter shapes a clay vase—hands-on. For all those who complain that editing is a lost art in the book publishing business, Rick is the artist who disproves the rule. He saved me more than once by helping me rethink the structure of the book, and by guiding me to place greater emphasis on areas of Ted Kennedy’s life that might otherwise have been slighted.

Over the course of many proposals, contracts, manuscripts, and finished books, Dan Strone of Trident Media Group has been my constant guide and mentor. He is my agent in the largest sense of that word—a person who acts on my behalf. No more can be asked of a friend.

Many friends provided moral support. Two who deserve special mention are Ronald Kessler and James Abernathy.

Finally, since words won’t suffice to thank my wife, I must resort to a simile and compare her to Penelope, the faithful companion of Odysseus, who displayed such patience while her husband was away on a journey. Writing a book is like a long and hazardous journey. It is good to come home again to the woman I love.

SOURCES

A
BBREVIATIONS

N
IXON
T
APES

The following tapes were used in the course of research:

February 1971–July 1971

August 1971–December 1971

January 1972–June 1972

July 1972–October 1972

November 1972–July 1973

Part I
: tapes 33, 388, and 813, November 1972