The House of Kennedy(55)
Jack makes Ted a dare that he should, by FAA regulations, have refused. Though Ted is licensed to fly only single-engine planes, during a swing through Nevada, Jack convinces his youngest brother to pilot the Kennedys’ twin-engine campaign plane, the Caroline. Ted does, and brings the aircraft in for a rough landing.
There is more turbulence on election night, when the votes promised to Ted in the field don’t appear in the election returns. Ten of the thirteen states under Ted’s watch land in Nixon’s column. Jack’s victory, though narrow, should be a triumph for all Kennedys. To lessen the sting of his father and brothers’ disappointment in him, Ted sends a humorous telegram from Africa, where Jack had exiled him on a press junket: “Can I come back if I promise to carry the Western States in 1964?”
On February 7, 1961, less than a month after Jack is inaugurated president, Ted also takes a new job, for the standard Kennedy public-service salary of a dollar per year, assisting Suffolk County district attorney Garrett Byrne. The Boston location is decidedly not in any of the western states where Ted and Joan have privately discussed moving. Regarding the change of heart, “All I remember,” Joan says, “is that Ted told me his father wanted him to run for United States Senate.”
It is to be the patriarch’s last major political power play. The week before Christmas, 1961, Joe Sr. loses consciousness on a golf course near the Kennedy mansion in Palm Beach. He is rushed by ambulance to St. Mary’s Hospital, where the Kennedys have been generous donors, previously dedicating a room in memory of Joe Jr. In the room next door, doctors determine that Joe has suffered a stroke, and a priest performs last rites. When he stabilizes, he’s found to have lost his speech and mobility on the right side of his body.
“The stroke was devastating,” Robert Healy explains. Previously, Joe “would call all of them [including Teddy] every day…and then when he had the stroke, you know, he couldn’t talk but he still called them.”
Out of the whole family, Ted is the one who can best understand and communicate with his father. But Ted’s devotion—he alone stays by his father’s hospital bed for three days—is mixed with devilish merriment.
Rita Dallas, newly hired as a live-in caregiver for Joe, is caught completely off guard when Rose asks her to carry a stack of towels to the sauna in Hyannis Port and comes “face to face with Teddy and his friends, milling around, stark naked.” Ted addresses Rita by name, though they have never met before, as he “was dancing around jovially full of fun and laughter. Draping his arm around my shoulder, which was stiff with shock, he made a flamboyant point of introducing me to his friends. Never before, or ever since, have I been introduced to a naked man.”
With Joe incapacitated, the responsibility of convincing voters of Ted’s worthiness for a Senate seat now falls to President Kennedy.
Though Ted’s 1951 withdrawal from Harvard for cheating on his Spanish exam did not make headlines at the time, the Kennedys are well aware that the eleven-year-old tidbit will feel fresh once Ted—finally eligible to run for Senate now that his thirtieth birthday has passed in February 1962—will be up against Eddie McCormack, state attorney general and favorite nephew of John W. McCormack, Speaker of the House of Representatives, in the Democratic state primary contest.
JFK chooses Robert Healy to break the story for the Boston Globe, after a protracted negotiation over where to bury the lede. “He [the president] wants it in a biographical sketch of Teddy,” Healy recalls. “I’d write that story, put it in the tenth paragraph and the AP [Associated Press] would lead with it all over the country that Teddy got caught cheating at Harvard. No way am I going to do that.”
They agree on an interview-style headline—“Ted Kennedy Tells About Harvard Examination Incident”—and that the contents of the article will not identify the student who took the Spanish exam in Ted’s place.
“Jack could swear like a pirate,” Healy says, recalling the president’s next words. “I’m having more fucking trouble with this [Harvard cheating story] than I did with the Bay of Pigs.”
McGeorge Bundy, a former Harvard dean of arts and sciences who is also on the call with Healy, agrees. “And with about the same results.”
The scandal successfully contained, the campaign confronts the next challenge, the “Teddy-Eddie” debate to be televised on August 27, 1962, from South Boston High School. McCormack is circulating a campaign brochure listing his numerous achievements against Ted’s sole qualification (“Brother of the President”), and on debate night builds that theme into a personal attack. “If his name was Edward Moore, with his qualifications, with your qualifications, Teddy, your candidacy would be a joke,” McCormack sneers. “But nobody’s laughing because his name is not Edward Moore. It’s Edward Moore Kennedy.”
“Ted almost fell apart at that point,” Lester Hyman says, and remembers bracing for McCormack to surge at the polls. “But it was just the opposite, particularly the women. You know, you don’t do that to a Kennedy. Kennedys can do no wrong, and it just turned the other way around. And that’s how Teddy won the nomination.”
In the statewide general election on November 6, 1962, Ted faces yet another political heir—Republican George Cabot Lodge, son of Henry Cabot Lodge, whom Jack had defeated to win his first Senate seat in 1952. History repeats itself as another Kennedy bests another Cabot Lodge.