The House of Kennedy(63)
Yet if cocktails will keep Ted’s inhibitions loosened, the next round is on President Nixon. While Ted’s reputation has been severely damaged, he’s still a Kennedy, and the Kennedys are still widely beloved. On June 23, 1971, White House chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, strategizes about capitalizing on reports of Ted’s continued philandering. “We need to take advantage of this opportunity and get him [Ted] in a compromising situation if we can.”
A grand jury declines to take further legal action against Ted in the Chappaquiddick case, yet his peers stand in extended public judgment. In a 1979 essay titled “Prelude to the Bridge,” New York Times columnist William Safire compiles a list of Ted’s damning actions—from his expulsion from Harvard to his excessive speeding in Virginia to leaving the scene of a deadly accident—for which Ted has seemingly suffered no consequences. “When in big trouble,” Safire writes, “Ted Kennedy’s repeated history has been to run, to hide, to get caught, and to get away with it.”
A former LBJ staffer offers the dire prediction, “This is the fall of the House of Kennedy.”
But Ted’s confidante Helga Wagner, whose connection to Ted and Chappaquiddick is exposed as part of a Scientology investigation, advises, “People have to forgive and forget.”
Chapter 42
My uncle stuck to whatever it is that he does,” Patricia Kennedy Lawford’s son, Christopher, writes. “It usually works, especially in Massachusetts.”
But if Ted’s going to create a lasting legacy—as a sitting senator, or future president—he must expand his vision to a national scale. The issue he chooses in 1970, universal health care, is personal. In his 1972 book, In Critical Condition: The Crisis in America’s Health Care, Ted mentions his sister Rosemary’s “struggles,” his brother Jack’s “many ailments, diseases, and near-death experiences,” not to mention his own experience in 1964, when he spent five months in a Boston hospital recovering from his extensive injuries sustained in the plane crash that killed two others. “I knew the care was expensive, but I didn’t have to worry about that,” Kennedy writes in Newsweek, arguing, “Every American should be able to get the same treatment that U.S. senators are entitled to.”
For more than four decades, Ted pursues the passage of universal health care, calling it “the cause of my life.”
The issue turns suddenly and urgently personal again in November 1973, when his son, twelve-year-old Ted Jr., is diagnosed with bone cancer. (Thirty years later, in 2002, his daughter, Kara, will also receive a cancer diagnosis, this time for lung cancer.) Joan “breaks down” when she hears the news while traveling in Europe, and rushes home to help prepare her son for a November 16 surgery at Georgetown University Hospital. To save his life, Ted Jr. must lose his leg, which is amputated above the knee.
Ted’s twenty-two-year-old niece Kathleen Kennedy, Bobby’s eldest daughter, is to be married that same day, and Ted is supposed to stand in for his brother and escort her down the aisle. On the day of Ted Jr.’s surgery, he rushes from the hospital to Washington’s Holy Trinity Church, walks Kathleen to the altar to where her groom, David Townsend, is waiting, then before he returns to the hospital, closes down the wedding reception to a tearful chorus of his favorite song, “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.”
Ted Jr.’s surgery is successful, and he later fondly recalls an incident during a snowstorm the winter he was first learning to use his prosthesis. Father and son decide to sled down the driveway on the family’s Flexible Flyer. The conditions are so icy that Ted Jr. slips and falls as he tries to climb back up the hill. “And I started to cry and I said, ‘I can’t do this. I said, I’ll never be able to climb that hill.’
“And he lifted me up in his strong, gentle arms and said something I will never forget, he said, ‘I know you can do it. There is nothing you can’t do. We’re going to climb that hill together, even if it takes all day.’”
Ted Jr.’s November 1973 illness coincides with the tenth anniversary of JFK’s assassination. Throughout these ten tumultuous years, all of the Kennedys have been searching for a way to preserve Jack’s—and the family’s—legacy.
By October 20, 1979, architect I.M. Pei has turned aspiration into a physical repository. Seven thousand invited guests gather to behold the John F. Kennedy Library, a concrete and glass tower standing on Dorchester Bay across from the Boston skyline. Ted dedicates it to the memory of his late brother. “It was all so brief,” he says of the JFK presidency. “Those thousand days are like an evening gone. But they are not forgotten.”
Ted’s pointed references to time are not lost on President Jimmy Carter, with whom he shares the stage. Though their relations that October day are cordial, the two men are as yet undeclared rivals for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination. After the terrible events on Chappaquiddick and the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, there was no chance of Ted running in 1972, and even 1976 seemed too soon.
Even so, Carter has had to withstand years of speculation that he only won the Democratic Party’s nomination back in 1976 because Ted chose not to run, and that even now as the incumbent president, he might still be pushed out by Ted in the 1980 election. Carter has already made clear that a Kennedy challenge was call for a fight. “I’ll whip his ass,” Carter predicted with assurance.