The House of Kennedy(57)
“He’s going to be fine,” Joan tells reporters on the way to the emergency room in Northampton’s Cooley Dickinson Hospital, where Ted is undergoing a blood transfusion.
Despite suffering three crushed vertebrae, a punctured lung, and broken ribs, on the morning of June 21, Ted is able to call his family himself. “Let me talk to Dad,” he instructs cousin Ann Gargan, telling Joe: “You’d better get out here as soon as you can because they’re talking about my back. Nobody knows more about backs than you do.”
Recalling the grave complications of Jack’s back surgeries, Joe is against the doctors at Boston’s New England Baptist Hospital operating on Ted. “Dad doesn’t think that’s a very good idea,” Ted explains, as he braces himself for a five-month recovery within the rigid confines of a Stryker frame bed.
“They would turn him upside down and turn him around,” John Tunney recalls. “[But] he was educating himself as he was lying there…He used to get people to come out from Harvard to give him lectures and talk to him about economics and things like that.”
Ted receives a constant stream of visitors from celebrities and politicians, including President Lyndon Johnson, who likes Ted more than his brothers and bestows on the youngest Kennedy a departing kiss on the cheek. Senator Birch Bayh, who walked away from the crash with only minor injuries, remembers bringing Ted his favorite treats, such as “the biggest, nicest strawberries” he could find.
Despite the seriousness of his injuries, Ted continues his campaign. Joan steps up for him. Though she has two young children—Ted Jr. joined Kara in September 1961—and has recently suffered her second miscarriage, Joan shakes off her fragility and resumes the campaigning on her husband’s behalf. “Joan became the candidate herself,” Joe Gargan recalls, “and was willing to go to every village and town in Massachusetts to appear for Ted.” Her work leads to the senator’s overwhelming victory on November 3, 1964, over Republican Howard Whitmore.
Bobby, now New York senator-elect, and Ted, from a wheelchair, give a joint news conference on their respective Senate wins, Ted’s being significantly more substantial at 75 percent of the vote. “He’s getting awful fresh since he’s been in bed and his wife won the campaign for him,” Bobby says.
On December 16, 1964, Ted leaves the hospital under his own power. “Is it ever going to end for you people?” Jimmy Breslin questions Bobby, who gives the reporter a serious answer. “If my mother hadn’t had any more children after her first four she would have nothing now…I guess the only reason we’ve survived is that…there are more of us than there is trouble.”
But there’s more than enough trouble.
“It’s a curse,” Joan tells Jackie. “Look at the things that have happened. Can we just chalk it up to coincidence?”
Chapter 39
Teddy and Bobby”—who call each other “Robbie” and “Eddy”—“were unbelievably close,” John Tunney says. “I think that Bobby was Teddy’s best friend.”
In March 1967, Bobby flies to Boston to meet Ted for the St. Patrick’s Day parade, the day after Bobby’s announced presidential candidacy.
“We don’t have any signs,” Ted says.
“The stores are all closed,” Lester Hyman remembers. “It’s St. Patrick’s Day, and literally, Ted took the paper lining out of drawers in the house, and we sat with crayons, writing up signs, Welcome Bobby!, so there would be some signs available for the parade.”
Ted and Lester Hyman get in the car with the driver Jack Crimmins to pick Bobby up at the airport. “It wouldn’t start. I remember Teddy putting his head down and then up again as he said, ‘The fucking Kennedy machine rides again.’”
When Ted and Joan’s son Patrick Joseph Kennedy II is born on July 14, 1967, Ted and Joan decide they want to live closer to Bobby and Ethel. In 1967, they leave Georgetown for a property in McLean, Virginia, not far from Hickory Hill. Ted hires architect Carl Warnecke, who designed Jack’s grave.
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On the night of the 1968 California Democratic presidential primary, Ted is in San Francisco, where he has been working on Bobby’s campaign. While Joan is in France visiting Ted’s sister Eunice and brother-in-law Sargent Shriver, now ambassador to France (though many believe President Lyndon Johnson appointed him to keep the ambitious politician Shriver out of American politics), Ted has been keeping company with Helga Wagner, the blond, Austrian-born wife of the American shipping heir Robert Wagner. An unnamed source tells the Washington Post of “several days of partying, scheduled around campaign events and a society wedding” as well as a number of dinners out.
At San Francisco’s Fairmont Hotel, Ted’s aide, Dave Burke, watches Bobby deliver his victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel. Ted is returning from a victory party when Bobby is shot, and it falls to Burke to procure an air force plane to get Ted from San Francisco to Los Angeles. San Francisco congressman Phil Burton adds weight. “I am standing here with Senator Edward Kennedy,” Burton says to an air force major, “whose brother has just been shot and who may be the next President of the United States. You are at a point I call a career decision, Major. Either you get that plane, or your career is over.”