Ted’s façade of strength is as insubstantial as the late Judy Garland’s rainbow. True to Kennedy form, he deals with his own grief by pushing himself physically. Richard Goodwin, speechwriter and adviser to both Jack and Bobby, recalls, “He was really terribly shaken up by Bobby’s death. He used to sail all night long by himself in the days and weeks after that happened, just sailing.”
In August 1968, at College of the Holy Cross, Ted makes his first public speech since Bobby’s funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. “There is no safety in hiding,” he states to the crowd assembled in Worcester, Massachusetts. “Like my brothers before me, I pick up a fallen standard. Sustained by memory of our priceless years together, I shall try to carry forward that special commitment to justice, excellence, and courage that distinguished their lives.”
Teddy had always leaned on the influence and support of his older brothers, but now he had to stand alone. “You’ve got to learn to fight your own battles,” sixteen-year-old Bobby had once told nine-year-old Ted, as a new boarding student at Portsmouth Priory in Rhode Island.
On his way to being a contender for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination, Ted’s passion for Bobby’s social causes also burns brightly. Now Bobby’s prophetic words stand in stark relief.
Ted makes a renewed commitment to his legislative role, embarking on a vigorous—and ultimately victorious—contest against the Senate veteran Russell B. Long of Louisiana to become the youngest man, at age thirty-six, ever elected majority whip, also known as the assistant leader of the Senate.
And Ted, now the de facto Kennedy family spokesman, is also thrust into the role of father figure, not only to his own three children but also to Jack’s two and Bobby’s eleven. Ethel in particular needs all the help she can summon. But Ted’s family devotion too often skips over his immediate family with Joan, including Kara, Ted Jr., and Patrick. By spring 1969, Joan is pregnant again, though for years she has battled her own perceived inadequacies, reinforced by Ted’s infidelities. “It was difficult to hear all the rumors,” she once explained. “And I began thinking, well, maybe I’m just not attractive enough.”
Joan was “so fragile,” Lester Hyman recalls, though Joan bristles at the characterization. “They would all write how vulnerable I was, and everybody felt sorry for me,” she retorts. “If only they knew that I was so strong, I was stronger than anyone else just to be able to survive. It was very hard.” Not even their shared family traumas warmed the strained relationship between Joan and Ted. “Rather than get mad or ask about rumors of Ted and his girlfriends, it was easier for me to just go and have a few drinks and calm myself down. As if I weren’t hurt or angry,” Joan explains many years later. This was a dangerous tactic given her family history of alcoholism.
Hyman remembers a distressing encounter during a party at Ted and Joan’s home in McLean. “Joan came over to me, and she had a water glass, and she said, ‘Could you do me a favor?’ I said, ‘What’s that?’ And she said, ‘Take this water glass and just fill it with vodka, please.’ I said, ‘Joan, do you think you should?’ She said, ‘Please, just do this for me, and don’t tell Ted.’”
Ted is struggling with his own drinking. In April 1969, the senator embarks on a visit to Alaska and the native people of that state in his brother Bobby’s honor. But on the return flight to Washington, his travel companions catch a rough glimpse of the usually jovial senator. “Teddy used to be so much fun,” a close friend tells the Vanity Fair reporter Dominick Dunne. “He kept the whole family laughing. After the deaths of Jack and Bobby, his dark side appeared, which can only be described as melancholy. That was when the indiscretions started.”
Aides and reporters watch in shock as a drunken Ted stalks the aisles of the commercial jet, pelting them with airline pillows and repeating “Es-ki-mo power” amid ramblings about his potentially enduring a fate similar to his brother’s: “They’re going to shoot my ass off the way they shot Bobby…”
After witnessing the spectacle, at once poignant and alarming, John J. Lindsay of Newsweek attempts to sound the alarm about what he assesses as Ted’s deteriorating mental state.
Lester Hyman recalls receiving a call from Lindsay directly following the Alaska trip. “I want to tell you that your friend Ted Kennedy is in deep psychological trouble,” Lindsay tells Hyman. “Everybody else is just saying, ‘Ah, he just had a few drinks.’ This is a guy who is suffering, and if you guys don’t do something soon, something terrible will happen. And by God, it did.”
Chapter 40
Friday, July 18, 1969, marks a hard stop in Ted’s packed Washington calendar. He catches a flight north to Boston, telling his seatmate, Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, a fellow Massachusetts native, “I’ve never been so tired in my life.”
As Ted is sharing that confidence, Apollo 11 is orbiting the moon. NASA astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are two days from realizing Jack’s space-race vision of Americans making the first lunar landing.
Thirty-seven-year-old Ted has a mission of his own—a return to the Edgartown Yacht Club regatta on the eastern shore of Martha’s Vineyard. He was too deep in grief for Bobby to attend in the summer of 1968, but this year Ted, along with cousin Joe Gargan and a crew, will race Victura, a twenty-five-foot wooden sailboat the Kennedys acquired in 1932, the year Ted was born. Their boat places ninth.
On the small island of Chappaquiddick, reachable from Edgartown only by car ferry across a narrow channel, Joe Gargan has rented a cottage. After the regatta, a party of twelve—six men Ted’s age or older, five of them married; six single women all under thirty—gathers to enjoy steaks and drinks, and to reminisce about the women’s days as “Boiler Room Girls,” who’d done tireless liaison work for Bobby’s presidential campaign from a top-secret central room in his headquarters in Washington. The women have asked Ted and Joe Gargan to “take us sailing again” as they did in Hyannis Port the previous summer.
Twenty-eight-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne currently works in DC at the political consulting firm Matt Reese Associates. She holds a two-year business-secretarial degree from New Jersey’s Catholic Caldwell College for Women and had volunteered on JFK’s 1960 presidential campaign. In March 1968 she distinguishes herself by assisting with Bobby’s presidential announcement.
Her Caldwell College classmate and Washington friend Elly Gardner calls Mary Jo the kind of party guest who’s “always the first to leave and never had more than one drink.” Owen Lopez, a lawyer who dated Mary Jo in Washington, agrees, noting that she “wasn’t the life of the party by any means. She tended to be subdued and measured in her speech. In fact, that’s why I think she was so trusted by the Kennedy staff. They looked for unconditional loyalty and discretion in the people they hired.”
Loyal and discreet would also describe Ted’s driver, sixty-three-year-old Jack Crimmins, a South Boston native who, according to Senate staffer Edward Martin, is not only “a real character” but “an invaluable asset to the senator, not only his driving but humor.” He’s been with the senator since Ted’s 1961 days as a Boston assistant district attorney and looks after the senator’s 1967 black four-door Oldsmobile Delmont 88 (“Don’t ride around in new cars,” Joe Sr. insists). Tonight, Crimmins is one of Ted’s five male guests, and brings to the party gallons of alcohol, including vodka, Scotch, and beer.