The House of Kennedy(56)
Ted’s victory, with 54 percent of the votes, at once cements the Kennedy dynasty and launches what will become the third-longest career in the Senate.
Chapter 38
Mississippi senator James O. Eastland, head of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, initiates the freshman senator Ted Kennedy into rarified, competitive congressional culture.
As Ted tells the story, he arrives in Eastland’s office for an early-morning meeting where the only choice of refreshment is bourbon or Scotch. After three stiff drinks, Ted finds himself named to the Immigration, Constitution, and Civil Rights subcommittees.
“So of course I go back to my office, and the sitting room is filled with people—the 9:00 meeting, the 9:30 meeting, the 10 o’clock meeting—and I walk in there smelling like a brewery. Here’s our little Senator, thirty years old; he’s been down here two weeks, and he’s stiff as a billy goat at ten in the morning.”
In an April 1963 interview with Newsweek’s James M. Cannon, President Kennedy dissects his family dynamic. “The pressure of all the others on Teddy came to bear so that he had to do his best,” the president says. “It was a chain reaction started by Joe, that touched me, and all my brothers and sisters.”
“What an extraordinary family man he [Ted] was,” says John Tunney. “I can tell you from the inside, it was that way. They were just bound to each other.”
Lester Hyman recalls flying as Ted’s passenger in a two-seater plane to Hyannis Port so that Ted could visit his father. “I always remember Ted being so patient and just talking at him, telling him everything that had happened and telling him stories. I was told later that of all the children in the family, he was the one who most came to see the father, over and over again.”
That November, it falls to Ted to break the news of Jack’s death to Joe. He shares the family’s fear that the patriarch, who has never fully recovered from his 1961 stroke, will not survive news of the loss. The next day, Ted takes Joe for a car ride. They set out, along with nurse Rita Dallas, for a seemingly aimless trip along the roads of Cape Cod. Determined to keep his father away from news of preparations for the national day of mourning in Jack’s honor, Ted stretches the drive for hours, pretending to be lost so that Joe can point out the turns back home.
Back in Washington, Ted doesn’t have to pretend. He channels his feelings of grief and loss into the words of his first major speech on the Senate floor, in support of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that Jack had originally championed. “My brother was the first President of the United States to state publicly that segregation was morally wrong,” he says on April 9, 1964, with Joan looking on from the gallery. “His heart and his soul are in this bill. If his life and death had a meaning, it was that we should not hate but love one another; we should use our powers not to create conditions of oppression that lead to violence, but conditions of freedom that lead to peace.”
Ted’s words ring controversial to the powerful contingent of southern senators, who argue and filibuster the measure for longer than two months. On June 19, a final debate lingers into the evening.
Ted banters with his travel coordinator Ed Moss about making a grand entrance at their next stop, the Massachusetts State Democratic Convention in West Springfield, where the delegates are expected to endorse Ted for his first full term in the Senate. In their one-two patter, Senator Kennedy asks, “What do you want me to do, crack up an airplane?” and his aide answers, “Nope, just parachute out of it into the convention.”
At 7:40 p.m., the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passes the Senate by a vote of 73–27. Ted and Moss, plus Indiana senator Birch Bayh (at Ted’s invitation, keynote speaker at the West Springfield convention) and Bayh’s wife, Marvella, rush to National Airport.
At thirty-four years old, Bayh is the next youngest in the Senate. He wins his Indiana seat in the same 1962 midterm special election as Ted, and quickly becomes a close friend. Ted is not only the youngest senator, but the only one whose brothers are the sitting president and attorney general, respectively.
“It’s bad weather,” Kennedy pilot Howard Baird warns from Hyannis Port. “The fog is really rolling in.” But Moss engages pilot Ed Zimny to fly a chartered Aero Commander 680 twin-engine aircraft to Barnes Airport in Westfield. The flight takes off after 8:00 p.m.
Minutes before 11:00 p.m., Zimny radios Barnes control tower that he’ll attempt an instrument landing through the zero-visibility conditions. With his trained pilot’s eye, Ted could tell what was going on: “I was watching the altimeter and I saw it drop from eleven hundred to six hundred feet,” Ted recalls. “It was just like a toboggan ride, right along the tops of the trees for a few seconds. Then there was a terrific impact into a tree.”
Bayh is brought back to consciousness by his wife’s screams. The plane—which “opened as though a kitchen knife sliced through it,” he recalls—has crashed in an apple orchard. He surveys the scene to discover that Zimny and Moss are dead, and that Ted is trapped in the wreckage.
“We’ve all heard adrenaline stories about how a mother can lift a car off a trapped infant,” Bayh explains. “Well, Kennedy was no small guy, and I was able to lug him out of there like a sack of corn under my arm.”
On the convention floor, the press surround Kennedy staffer Edward Martin. “There’s a plane down. You don’t think it’s Kennedy?” When he learns it is, Martin has the White House locate a Kennedy, any Kennedy—finally relaying to Sargent Shriver, “Ted is injured in an accident. He’s going to live, but will you notify all the Kennedy family members?”