Kennedy's Darkest Moments
By rite and out of respect, we honor those recently passed with praise for their accomplishments. For Senator Ted Kennedy, who died on Aug. 25 at age 77, there is no shortage in that regard. He boasts the most productive Senate career in memory, a public life that shaped five decades of national politics, and a loving family who will now draw together to mourn their loving patriarch.
But for Kennedy, even more than for most great men, these accomplishments are difficult to separate from the turmoil and tragedy that he endured throughout his life, including trials both personal and professional that arose both by fate and by his own doing. There is perhaps no other politician in American history who has achieved so much despite such public controversy and personal loss.
Kennedy was only 12 years old when his eldest brother, Joseph Jr., died during a World War II bombing mission. By the age of 36, Teddy, as his family called him, had lost three more siblings, including his two remaining brothers, Jack and Bobby, who were killed at the hands of assassins. In 1964, a plane Kennedy was taking to a campaign event crashed into an apple orchard in western Massachusetts. The pilot died, as did Ed Moss, a Kennedy aide. The Senator, then just 32, faced months of recuperation from a serious back injury.
Other personal tragedies followed as family members struggled with drug abuse, disease and premature death. His first wife, Joan, suffered three miscarriages, and after their separation, she was repeatedly treated for alcoholism. Two of his children have battled cancer, with his oldest, Ted Jr., losing a leg to the disease at age 12.
A lifetime of hard, and often selfish, living also took its toll on Kennedy. In 1951, as a freshman at Harvard who was more interested in football than his studies, Kennedy arranged for a friend to take his spring Spanish exam. He was caught cheating and was subsequently expelled from the school for two years, during which time he served as a military police officer in Paris at the arrangement of his father. Years later, while he was a law student at the University of Virginia, Kennedy was arrested for reckless driving after a chase with police.
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"There may be something in the very nature of public achievement that brings with it this risk-taking behavior," observes Edward Klein, who has written five books on the Kennedy family. "People who cheat on exams —probably there is something in them that wants to get caught."
His marriage in 1958 to Joan Bennett was strained by Kennedy's alleged infidelities, a habit he reportedly shared with his father Joe and his brothers Bobby and Jack, who also, historians say, probably strayed from their marital vows. In 1969, after leaving a party with a young single woman under ambiguous circumstances, Ted Kennedy steered an Oldsmobile into the waters off Massachusetts' Chappaquiddick Island. Kennedy escaped the sinking car, but the woman, Mary Jo Kopechne, died. He waited about 10 hours before reporting the accident to police and later pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident.
After his divorce from Joan, Kennedy's hard-partying lifestyle became a growing issue. A 1979 article in TIME noted that Kennedy's "private peccadilloes" had sparked a major editorial debate among Washington news organizations about the public relevance of private behavior in advance of the 1980 elections. In 1990, Gentlemen's Quarterly published an exposé on the subject of Kennedy's drinking and womanizing with girls in their 20s. The story recounted a number of embarrassing incidents, including one in which Kennedy was allegedly discovered by a restaurant waitress having sex with a female lobbyist on the floor of a private dining room. The check showed they had ordered two bottles of chardonnay for lunch.
A few years later, Kennedy became involved in yet another embarrassment when, following a party he attended at a Kennedy family house in Palm Beach, Fla., his nephew William Kennedy Smith was accused of raping a young woman. Though Kennedy, then 59, was never implicated in the crime and Smith was eventually acquitted, Kennedy testified at the trial about the drunken evening in which a group of men had traveled into town to pick up two younger women at a bar.
In part because of his reputation with women, Kennedy took a surprisingly passive role in the 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Justice Clarence Thomas, who was accused of sexual harassment. This upset many of Kennedy's liberal supporters who remembered his leadership in defeating the nomination of Robert Bork a few years earlier. In a 1991 speech at Harvard, after the hearings, Kennedy acknowledged his misbehavior and apologized. "I recognize my own shortcomings — the faults in the conduct of my private life. I realize that I alone am responsible for them, and I am the one who must confront them," he said. Shortly afterward, he did reform his ways, marrying Vicki Reggie in 1992.
Perhaps the most striking thing about this pattern is that Kennedy was able to overcome it. His legacy is not one of a scamp or a drunkard but rather one of a statesman who defeated his personal demons to earn the respect of his peers and much of his nation.