Pegged from childhood as the least promising of all the Kennedy men, the baby-faced and trouble-prone Ted Kennedy’s legacy likely to outlast those of his more famous older brothers – at least according to his home-town supporters.
Compiled by a team of Boston Globe reporters who have covered the famous family for decades, “Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy,” offers a sweeping overview of Kennedy’s public and private life.
Kennedy’s biggest failures – Chappaquidick and the death of Mary Jo Kopechne; the date-rape trial and acquittal of nephew William Smith; his failed 1980 presidential bid – are examined in detail, alongside his troubled mid-life years as a dissolute bachelor living in D.C.
But the book also takes a more introspective look at the burden put on the youngest Kennedy, as family member after family member failed to realize their full potential due to untimely and often violent deaths.
Kennedy – who from early on was the family jokester, prone to lighthearted pranks that sometimes grew into serious scrapes as the years wore on – became the de facto family head, charged with keeping a fracturing Kennedy clan together during troubled times.
Among the books highlights:
* Ted’s early penny-pinching earned him his stern father’s approval. When Kennedy was twelve, he boarded the train to Palm Beach, Florida in Boston carrying a big box of sandwiches to sell to fellow travelers. He was also famous for running a black market at his boarding school, buying up nickel chocolate bars when he went into Boston for catechism class, and then selling them to his sweets-starved classmates for 15 cents apiece.
* Kennedy’s only college football touchdown came in the last game of his senior year in the middle of a blizzard. Harvard lost the game, but Joe Sr. was ecstatic at his son’s prowess and prevailed upon a connection at the Chicago Bears to give his son a tryout. The six-foot-two, 200 pound Ted put on the pads, “took two or three hits, and said he’d never been so frightened in his life,” recalls former Harvard roommate Ted Carey. Kennedy later got a letter of interest from the Green Bay Packers, but wrote back that he’d rather go to law school.
* Kennedy once bet his friend Carey $100 that he wouldn’t go to Egypt even if Kennedy bought him the ticket. Carey took the bet and within 72 hours was on his way to Logan Airport, a towel wrapped around his head to look like a sheikh, driven by Ted and college buddies. When Carey got to New York for his connecting flight, he heard his name being paged. It was Kennedy, frantically trying to call off the bet because reporters had gotten wind of it. “His brother Jack was a Senator and his father had learned of it and he was wild.” Carey told Kennedy it was too late, and hung up. But instead of getting on his flight to Egypt, he flew back his parent’s house in Connecticut and let his roommate sweat all weekend.
* Kennedy’s parents urged him to marry young and start a big family early, unlike his big brother Jack, who was well in his 30s by the time he married Jackie Bouvier. Kennedy’s sister introduced him to a friend, Joan, a nice Catholic girl from a New York Republican family who’d never heard of the Kennedy boys. The two had a short, chaste courtship that consisted of a few dozen heavily chaperoned dates; they spent almost no time alone together before their marriage. Joan’s family arranged for their fairytale wedding to be filmed, and the entire wedding party wore microphones. Joan got an early warning of what life with Ted would be like when she watched her wedding film and heard Jack Kennedy, obviously forgetting he was being recorded, whisper to his little brother that marriage didn’t mean he had to be faithful. Decades later, after their separation, Joan would grant Kennedy an annulment instead of insisting on a divorce so he could receive Communion at the funeral of his staunchly Catholic mother, Rose.
* Ted Kennedy was sent out west for the 1960 presidential race, charged with flipping Republican-leaning states for his brother. The brash young Kennedy drew crowds wherever he went, mostly thanks to his daredevil stunts. In Montana he came out of a rodeo gate on a bucking bronco, clinging for five seconds before getting tossed off. In Wyoming he got a group of voters to back his brother after skiing down an 80-foot jump, miraculously landing on his feet. Despite all that, JFK lost all but three of the 10 western states Kennedy had been assigned to oversee.
* In 1962, Ted Kennedy was supposed to launch his political career by running for his brother Jack’s former Senate seat. Patriarch Joe Sr. had the plan all laid out, but many Massachusetts Dems refused to line up behind his youngest son, who many viewed as a bumbling playboy riding his brother’s coattails. As the election drew near and Ted’s chances grew slimmer, big brother Jack stepped in, discreetly calling top advisors to the White House and surreptiously using federal resources to shore up Kennedy support in his home state. JFK even called in the Boston Globe’s top political writer and negotiated how news of Ted’s cheating at Harvard would be released. The Globe put it on the front page, but with a softball headline and no mention of the actual transgression until the fifth paragraph, and without using the word “cheating.” The effort it took to straighten out Kennedy’s campaign prompted JFK to comment at one point, “Jesus, we’re having more f – – – ing trouble with this than we did with the Bay of Pigs.” His adviser, George Bundy, a former Harvard dean, responded, “Yes, and with just about the same results.”
* Although Kennedy was considered a political failure in the eyes of many for never reaching the presidency like his brother Jack – or mounting a truly credible run, like his brother Bobby – his closes aides say that Ted never really wanted to be in the White House, preferring to wield his power in the Senate. He ran out of family obligation, they say. Whatever his motivations, some Democrats blamed him for Jimmy Carter’s 1980 defeat, including Hamilton Jordan, who wrote a never before published memo saying as much. Kennedy briefly considered trying again in 1984 and had a strategy that included wooing George Wallace to boost his standing in the south and hiring Tim Russert as his press secretary.
* Kennedy, caught having sex with an unidentified female off the Rivera coast during his second bachelorhood, and legendary in D.C. for his boozy evenings with drinking buddy Chris Dodd, finally acknowledged he needed to lighten up on the drinking after a close friend confronted him. The friend was Utah Republican Orrin Hatch, one of many conservative Senators who’ve forged tight bonds with ultra-liberal Kennedy over the years.
Last Lion
The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy by the staff of the Boston Globe
Simon & Schuster