The House of Kennedy(58)
Burton’s bravado is enough to get Ted to Bobby’s bedside, but no one can save the stricken candidate. Ted is devastated. As Ted tells his close friend Tunney, he fears that he, too, might disappear. “Teddy, you know, he was not able to function effectively for a while. Part of his brain was not working, and it was because of this extraordinary grief that he felt, and almost to the degree that was fatalistic, that he was going to be gone, he was dead, he was going to kill himself, he wouldn’t be around much longer,” Tunney says. “In the early days, after Jack was killed and after Bobby was assassinated, I think he was getting all kinds of death threats all the time. I think that he thought his days were numbered, too, that he probably was going to be assassinated, that somebody was going to go for the third one and knock them all off.”
One (unsubstantiated) threat logged in Ted’s FBI file comes from none other than Bobby’s convicted killer, Sirhan Sirhan. A fellow prison inmate claims Sirhan “offered him one million dollars and a car in exchange for killing Senator Kennedy,” the file records.
Ted was not alone in his suffering. On June 22, 1969, Judy Garland, a longtime Kennedy family friend, dies in London of barbiturate poisoning. She’d been close with many of the Kennedys, especially Pat Kennedy Lawford, a California neighbor, and had vacationed with them all in Hyannis Port (Judy’s daughter Lorna Luft recalls “so many Kennedys, they just seemed to multiply as you watched,” so eventually she and her brother “just sort of blended in with the crowd of kids and enjoyed ourselves”). Judy had often visited Bobby and Ethel in Hickory Hill, and after Ted’s 1964 plane crash, had sent him a telegram wishing him a speedy recovery that said “We need you so much.”
Her relationship with Jack had been especially warm, and multiple sources recall how he’d never let her off the phone without singing at least a few bars of “Over the Rainbow,” one of his favorite songs. As she later wrote in a letter to Harold Arlen, composer of The Wizard of Oz, that song transcended the film. “It’s become part of my life. It is so symbolic of all my dreams and wishes that I’m sure that’s why people sometimes get tears in their eyes when they hear it.”
Ted’s fa?ade of strength is as insubstantial as the late Judy Garland’s rainbow. True to Kennedy form, he deals with his own grief by pushing himself physically. Richard Goodwin, speechwriter and adviser to both Jack and Bobby, recalls, “He was really terribly shaken up by Bobby’s death. He used to sail all night long by himself in the days and weeks after that happened, just sailing.”
In August 1968, at College of the Holy Cross, Ted makes his first public speech since Bobby’s funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. “There is no safety in hiding,” he states to the crowd assembled in Worcester, Massachusetts. “Like my brothers before me, I pick up a fallen standard. Sustained by memory of our priceless years together, I shall try to carry forward that special commitment to justice, excellence, and courage that distinguished their lives.”
Teddy had always leaned on the influence and support of his older brothers, but now he had to stand alone. “You’ve got to learn to fight your own battles,” sixteen-year-old Bobby had once told nine-year-old Ted, as a new boarding student at Portsmouth Priory in Rhode Island.
On his way to being a contender for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination, Ted’s passion for Bobby’s social causes also burns brightly. Now Bobby’s prophetic words stand in stark relief.
Ted makes a renewed commitment to his legislative role, embarking on a vigorous—and ultimately victorious—contest against the Senate veteran Russell B. Long of Louisiana to become the youngest man, at age thirty-six, ever elected majority whip, also known as the assistant leader of the Senate.
And Ted, now the de facto Kennedy family spokesman, is also thrust into the role of father figure, not only to his own three children but also to Jack’s two and Bobby’s eleven. Ethel in particular needs all the help she can summon. But Ted’s family devotion too often skips over his immediate family with Joan, including Kara, Ted Jr., and Patrick. By spring 1969, Joan is pregnant again, though for years she has battled her own perceived inadequacies, reinforced by Ted’s infidelities. “It was difficult to hear all the rumors,” she once explained. “And I began thinking, well, maybe I’m just not attractive enough.”
Joan was “so fragile,” Lester Hyman recalls, though Joan bristles at the characterization. “They would all write how vulnerable I was, and everybody felt sorry for me,” she retorts. “If only they knew that I was so strong, I was stronger than anyone else just to be able to survive. It was very hard.” Not even their shared family traumas warmed the strained relationship between Joan and Ted. “Rather than get mad or ask about rumors of Ted and his girlfriends, it was easier for me to just go and have a few drinks and calm myself down. As if I weren’t hurt or angry,” Joan explains many years later. This was a dangerous tactic given her family history of alcoholism.
Hyman remembers a distressing encounter during a party at Ted and Joan’s home in McLean. “Joan came over to me, and she had a water glass, and she said, ‘Could you do me a favor?’ I said, ‘What’s that?’ And she said, ‘Take this water glass and just fill it with vodka, please.’ I said, ‘Joan, do you think you should?’ She said, ‘Please, just do this for me, and don’t tell Ted.’”