The House of Kennedy(52)

Juan Romero receives letters addressed to “the busboy” at the Ambassador Hotel. One writer accuses Romero of “being so selfish,” maintaining, “If he hadn’t stopped to shake your hand, the senator would have been alive.”

On Bobby’s funeral train, Coretta Scott King paid tribute to Ethel by saying, “I don’t see how she has been able to go through this awful experience with such dignity,” but Jackie sees a different side to her sister-in-law. Over lunch when talk turns to Ethel, Jackie tells Jean, speaking as someone who’s endured similar tragedy, “I’m telling you here and now, she’s in trouble.”

The suddenly widowed mother of ten, soon to be eleven, children was four months pregnant when Bobby was killed. Although Ethel’s spent around eight years of her life pregnant, she’s never done so under circumstances like these before. “I don’t know what will happen to Ethel if anything happens to this baby,” Ted frets. As her final pregnancy progresses, she becomes increasingly reliant on Ted and his wife, Joan.

On December 12, 1968, Ethel safely delivers her and Bobby’s eleventh child, whom she names Rory Elizabeth Catherine Kennedy. At a press conference at Georgetown Hospital, Ethel calls out her newfound closeness with Ted and Joan, saying, “With an aunt and uncle like these two, this new Kennedy can’t miss.”

The week before Christmas, on the way home to Hickory Hill, Ethel, Ted, and baby Rory share a poignant, private moment. They take the newborn to Arlington National Cemetery, where Ethel carries her to the lonely gravesite, the only place where Rory can meet her father.





PART SIX





The Senator


Edward Moore Kennedy





Chapter 35



Now that Bobby’s gone, you’re all we’ve got. You’ve got to take the leadership,” Al Lowenstein says to Ted Kennedy, in the elevator down to the morgue at Good Samaritan Hospital, where Bobby lies dead.

Barely a day earlier, Bobby had asked Lowenstein to defect from the McCarthy camp to Kennedy’s. He agreed. Now Lowenstein’s audaciously suggesting that Ted Kennedy take his late brother’s place in the 1968 presidential campaign.

“Uh, uh,” says civil rights leader Charles Evers, “you’re not going to do it to that family a third time.”

Ted declines, anticipating a three-pronged attack from Richard Nixon—“that I was too young, that I had no record in public life strong enough to recommend me for the high office of President, that perhaps I was trying to trade on my brothers’ names.” He will not resume Bobby’s candidacy.

*



Rose is forty-two when her youngest child, Edward Moore Kennedy, is born on February 22, 1932, exactly two hundred years after George Washington. Fitting, in a family where Rose states, “My babies were rocked to political lullabies,” but while fourteen-year-old Jack’s request to be his baby brother’s godfather is granted, his other wish—that they name him George Washington Kennedy—is not.

Ted’s education on world issues starts early. He’s only six when his father is appointed ambassador to Great Britain in 1938, and in the fall of 1940, Joe Sr. writes to eight-year-old Ted of the nightly German bombing raids on London, “I am sure, of course, you wouldn’t be scared, but if you heard all these guns firing every night and the bombs bursting you might get a little fidgety…I hope when you grow up you will dedicate your life to trying to work out plans to make people happy instead of making people miserable, as war does today.”

“We were serious about serious things,” Rose says of the Kennedy family, “but we liked laughing at things that weren’t, including sometimes, some of our own foibles.”

“I think that [Jack] really liked Teddy a lot, he really did, because he loved his sense of humor and he loved his esprit, the fact that he had such a good sense of humor about things and could laugh and joke,” Ted’s friend John Tunney remembers of the brothers’ adult relationship.

“And the last shall be first,” reads the Gospel of Matthew. Ted treasures these words Jack later inscribes on a silver cigarette case for his youngest brother. But first Ted must live the teaching, growing up with scant Kennedy allies.

Ted, whom The New Yorker later describes as “the youngest and reputedly stupidest of Joseph P. Kennedy’s nine children,” is teased incessantly about his mediocre schoolwork and his weight.

During Ted’s time at the Fessenden School, a private academy in Newton, Massachusetts, Rose writes to Joe Sr., “Teddy really is such a fatty.” His sister Eunice agrees, telling Joe, “He looks like two boys instead of one.” And of his grades, Joe Sr. writes his eleven-year-old son, “You didn’t pass in English or Geography and you only got a 60 in Spelling and History. That is terrible…You wouldn’t want to have people say that Joe and Jack Kennedy’s brother was such a bad student, so get on your toes.”

Looking back, Ted puts a humorous spin on what must have been a terrible, even terrifying, stint: “The school had sent a notice to all the fathers of the entering boys for permission to paddle their sons, and my father was the first one to send it back, approved. In four years there I was paddled thirteen times. (This may not be good campaign material for a US Senator, but there it is, thirteen.)”