Edward Klein - Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died

Let others delight in the good old days;
I am delighted to be alive right now.
This age is suited to my way of life.

O VID

O N A FINE summers day in 1970, Ted Kennedy skippered his sailboat from Hyannis Port over to Monhegan Island, an unspoiled, rocky outcropping ten miles off the coast of Maine, where I customarily spent the month of August with my children. Hed come to visit our mutual friend, the artist Jamie Wyeth, whod painted a portrait of Teds brother Jack not long after the presidents assassination. Jamie always worked from live subjects, and while making his preliminary sketches of JFK, hed asked Ted to sit in, as it were, for the dead president. As the portrait took shape, Ted had assumed the identity of his martyred brother, and in that guise, he and Jamie had become fast friends.

Ted and Joan Kennedy were staying with Jamie and his wife, Phyllis, who owned the most beautiful home on the island. It had once belonged to the famous illustrator Rockwell Kent, and it overlooked a boulder-strewn beach called Lobster Cove, where a picturesque old shipwreck lay rusting on its side.

Automobiles werent permitted on Monhegan Island, and I ran into the Kennedys and Wyeths as they were coming down the footpath from Lobster Cove on their way to the general store. Phyllis Wyeth, whod been left paralyzed from the waist down as the result of an accident, was in a wheelchair. She introduced me to her weekend guests: Joan, thirty-three, blond and willowy, at the height of her mature beauty; and Ted, thirty-eight, in robust good health. It was easy to see why Ted had been called the handsomest of the handsome Kennedy brothers.

How are you, Senator, I said, shaking his hand.

My commonplace greeting seemed to perturb him, perhaps because Phyllis had mentioned that I was a journalist with Newsweek, and Ted Kennedy, at that time, was a fugitive from the media. Recently, Massachusetts had released the official transcript of the inquest into the 1969 death of Mary Jo Kopechne on Chappaquiddick Island. The judge presiding over the inquest strongly implied that a drunken Ted Kennedy had been driving Mary Jo to a sexual tryst when his car plunged off a bridge and into a body of water, where Mary Jo died.

I couldnt tell whether Ted had a sailors sunburn, or whether his face was scarlet with shame. His edgy defensiveness was underscored by his stumbling syntaxa stammer that at times made him sound slow-witted and even a bit dumb.

Well, um, yes, ah, glorious day he said. Beautiful here, isnt it? Sailing, um. Good day er, for that. Wind.

Someone once referred to Ted Kennedys off-the-cuff speaking styleas opposed to his superbly crafted speechesas a parody of [Yankees manager] Casey Stengel: nouns in search of verbs.

As we talked, I was struck by the fact that Ted didnt look at Joan. Their eyes never met. Indeed, they didnt even bother with the casual intimacies that are common between husband and wife.

Although I didnt know it at the time, Joan was well on her way to becoming a full-blown alcoholic. If Ted had once counted on Joan to turn a blind eye to his infidelities, her alcoholism had changed all that. Instead of tranquilizing her and making her more submissive, drink had freed Joan to speak her mind.

She had recently given an indiscreet interview to the Ladies Home Journal. She and Ted, she said, know our good and bad traits, we have seen one another at rock bottom. It was clear that Joans tendency to talk about Ted in less than glowing terms had put a strain on their marriage. The tragedy of Chappaquiddick had only made matters worse.

A FTER OUR BRIEF chat on Monhegan Island, ten years passed before I ran into Ted Kennedy again. This time, it was at a Christmas party given by his sister-in-law Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis at her Fifth Avenue penthouse apartment. Ted was still recovering from his ill-fated primary race against President Jimmy Carter. A month or so before Jackies cocktail reception, Carter had been soundly defeated by Ronald Reagan in the general election, which must have given Ted Kennedy a feeling of schadenfreude. It also might have accounted for the high spirits he displayed that December evening at Jackies.

Ted had gained a good deal of weight, and there were strands of gray in his thick mass of disordered hair. I had heard rumors that he and Joan were living apart, and in fact hed come to the party without her. Joans absence was particularly conspicuous because other members of Jackies extended familyincluding her mother, her stepbrother, and assorted Kennedys, Shrivers, Lawfords, and Smithswere present. So were a few favored writers and journalists who, like me, had been befriended by Jackie.

Teddy, Jackie said as she introduced us, this is Ed Klein. He used to be at Newsweek, and now hes the editor of the New York Times Magazine.

The senator and I have met before, I said. You were visiting Jamie and Phyllis Wyeth on Monhegan Island.

Oh, yes, um, I remember that, ah, day, ah, well, he said.

But he was slurring his words and speaking more loudly than necessary, and I concluded that hed had too much to drink. Still, it was interesting to note that, even when inebriated, Ted Kennedy displayed impeccable manners. He had not yet turned fifty and could still hold his liquor.

A GAIN, A DECADE or so went by before I met Ted Kennedy for the third time. It was the early 1990s, and Id left the Times after eleven years as editor of its Sunday magazine and was now writing for Vanity Fair and Parade. Id been invited as the sole journalist to attend a private dinner given by a group of wealthy contributors in honor of Senator Kennedy at the 21 Club, a Manhattan mecca for top business executives and Wall Street bankers.

Ted was preparing for a reelection campaign, and although hed established a record as one of the Senates all-time greats (hed had a hand in passing every major health, education, and civil rights bill over the past thirty years), he was in serious political trouble back home in Massachusetts. As a result of his entanglement in the sordid Palm Beach rape case against his nephew William Kennedy Smith, Teds poll numbers had sunk to an all-time low. It looked as though the unthinkable might happen: a Kennedy might actually lose a race in Massachusetts.