Ted’s pointed references to time are not lost on President Jimmy Carter, with whom he shares the stage. Though their relations that October day are cordial, the two men are as yet undeclared rivals for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination. After the terrible events on Chappaquiddick and the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, there was no chance of Ted running in 1972, and even 1976 seemed too soon.
Even so, Carter has had to withstand years of speculation that he only won the Democratic Party’s nomination back in 1976 because Ted chose not to run, and that even now as the incumbent president, he might still be pushed out by Ted in the 1980 election. Carter has already made clear that a Kennedy challenge was call for a fight. “I’ll whip his ass,” Carter predicted with assurance.
As the 1980 campaign gears up, despite spirited assistance from veteran Kennedy operative Al Lowenstein, assurance is something uncharacteristically lacking in Ted. Roger Mudd of CBS News flies to Cape Cod for a two-part interview with Ted, the first on September 28, 1979, at his home on Squaw Island, not far from the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port; the second, on October 12, in his Senate office. Ted, in his memoir True Compass, calls his participation in the interviews a “personal favor” to Mudd. Mudd calls Ted’s on-camera answer to one now infamous question “a politically embarrassing incident.”
Mudd asks Ted what should be an easy question for him to answer: “Why do you want to be President of the United States?”
Ted is stumped. For the first time in his life, he is unable to come up with a response. He hesitates, stumbles, and stammers, finally managing to cobble together a rambling, unpersuasive answer.
The Boston Globe’s Robert Healy has a theory as to why. “I think he didn’t think about it because it was so obvious to him. ‘I want to promote my brother’s—legacy’…He wanted the legacy.”
Journalist Chris Whipple, then a reporter for Life magazine and a witness to Mudd’s interview, has a different take. “Kennedy had no clue,” he says. “His heart just wasn’t in it,” Whipple speculates, wondering, “Was it consciously or otherwise an act of political destruction?” Author Garry Wills puts it in even more macabre terms, saying of Ted that he “has to keep living three lives at once…[He] has no one but ghosts at his side, and they count more against than for him, eclipse him with bright images from the past,” adding, “Once brother drew on brother for fresh strength; now brother drains brother, all the dead inhabiting the one that has lived on.”
The Mudd interview airs in November, a few days before Ted makes his official announcement. But his bid for nomination may as well be over before it begins. The voting public sees not preservation but panic. Ted’s nonanswer to Mudd’s defining question becomes the symbol of a struggling campaign.
Another blow comes just before 4:00 p.m. on March 14, 1980, when seven shots ring out in New York’s Rockefeller Center. A mentally ill man walks into former New York congressman Al Lowenstein’s law office and shoots him several times, point blank. Lowenstein, whom the Washington Post calls “a Pied Piper to three generations of student activists,” had been a friend to Bobby and an adviser to Ted’s campaign.
His tragic murder sounds a symbolic death knell to the latest Kennedy presidential campaign, though it limps along until the Democratic convention in August 1980, where Senator Kennedy concedes the party’s nomination to President Carter. According to The New Yorker, Ted’s appearance is “solemn and enigmatic.” On the floor of Madison Square Garden, where eighteen years earlier Marilyn Monroe had serenaded Jack, are signs that read, “We Love Ted—But Jimmy’s All Right, Too.”
Asked by the New York Times if she is perhaps relieved that her brother Ted has not won the Democratic presidential nomination, Jean Kennedy Smith replies, “I don’t dwell on the past and I don’t think Ted does. My father always said to worry about the things that you can change, not the things you can’t. Ted lost. And now we move on to the next thing.”
Many expect him to try again in 1984, but by the end of 1982, Ted officially declares that it’s too “soon to ask them [his family] to go through it all again.” Plus, Ted says it’ll be too hard on the kids—twenty-two-year-old Kara, twenty-one-year-old Ted Jr., and fifteen-year-old Patrick—given that he and Joan are finally divorcing after several years of separation. (August 1978 cover stories of McCall’s and People had both touted Joan’s newfound sobriety and independence.)
The question of Ted’s running for president rears up with nearly every election, but he never makes another serious attempt at it. Instead, he focuses his political attention on his Senate career—and the voters in Massachusetts reward him with nine terms, making him the third-longest serving member of the Senate in history, and earning him the moniker “The Liberal Lion of the Senate.”
And while he “picked up the torch of his fallen brothers” and continued to valiantly fight “to advance the civil rights, health, and economic well-being of the American people,” so too was he dogged by stories of his own debauchery, poor personal choices—and ironically, the Kennedy name itself. As political journalist Teddy White puts it, “Ted Kennedy had inherited a legend along with his name and he was almost as much trapped by the legend as he was propelled by it.”
PART SEVEN
The Next Generations
The Kennedy Cousins
Chapter 43
Senator Ted Kennedy wants a nightcap. It’s close to midnight, but not even the soothing sound of ocean waves lapping the shoreline next to the family’s Palm Beach mansion can compel the senator to stay at home tonight, on Good Friday, 1991.
Ted and his youngest child, Patrick—now twenty-three, and already following family tradition into politics as a member of the Rhode Island House of Representatives—are down in Palm Beach for Easter weekend, at the invitation of Ted’s recently widowed sister, Jean Kennedy Smith. Also among the group of family and friends is Jean’s younger son, William “Willie” Kennedy Smith, thirty, a medical student weeks shy of graduating from Georgetown University.
The senator rustles up his son Patrick and his nephew Willie and persuades them to join him for a bachelor boys’ night out.
It’s been twenty-two years since Chappaquiddick. Ted and Joan divorced in 1983, and their oldest son, Ted Jr., now a lawyer, has long since recovered from his childhood diagnosis of bone cancer which resulted in the amputation of his right leg. Their daughter, Kara, is a TV producer working with her aunt Jean, Willie’s mother, at Very Special Arts, the international organization on arts, education, and disability that Jean founded in 1974.
In a matter of twenty-four hours, between now and Easter Sunday, another Kennedy scandal will unfold, one that will dominate national print headlines and television news crawls.
This time, a Kennedy will go on trial for rape.
But for now, the trio hits the town for a late supper, then a few drinks at Au Bar, a trendy Palm Beach watering hole known as a magnet for the nouveau riche and B-list celebrities like Donald Trump’s recent ex-wife, Ivana, or Roxanne Pulitzer, whose scandalous 1980s divorce made the front pages of every tabloid with claims she’d been kinky with a trumpet.