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When he is at home, Ted starts almost every day with bacon and eggs in the wood-paneled breakfast room with his three children—Kara, 11, Teddy Jr., 10, and Patrick, 4. He also eats dinner with them as often as possible. On Sundays he takes them to a guitar Mass at Holy Trinity Church in Georgetown, and he often scans the ads for family movies. When he is away, Kennedy calls home to talk to the children every night, a habit designed in part to assure them of his safety. Last year at Halloween, he startled his neighbors by joining the kids for the trick-or-treat rounds, dressed in a sheet.
As a surrogate father to Bobby's eleven children, Ted visits Hickory Hill about twice a week. Occasionally he takes the older ones on sailing trips or camping overnight. Last week, on the 46th anniversary of Bobby's birthday, Joan, Ted and their children joined Ethel and six of her sons and daughters to visit R.F.K.'s grave at Arlington National Cemetery. This week the family makes the trip again to observe the eighth anniversary of Jack's death.
At 8:15 a.m. on working days, Kennedy slips behind the wheel of his 1971 Pontiac GTO convertible and drives rapidly to the Capitol, one foot on the accelerator, the other lightly on the brake.* Almost invariably dressed in a dark British-cut suit, a monogrammed shirt with a PT-109 clip holding his tie, Kennedy trots rather than walks into his office to begin his daily race of trying to keep up with a schedule jammed with more interviews, hearings, appointments, speeches and votes than any man could realistically accomplish.
Senate Record
Calls come into Kennedy's office at the rate of 1,000 a day. He receives roughly twice as much mail—2,500 to 3,000 letters weekly—as any other Senator. Most of it is routine, but there is also a flood of hate letters. Some of these are crank notes ("Listen, lover boy"), but the serious "threat" mail is turned over to the Secret Service; there is an average of two death threats per week. Kennedy rarely if ever sees them.
Kennedy's staff of 27, variously described as "sharks," "incredibly ambitious," and the "best damn bunch on the Hill," is an object of some enmity and envy at the Capitol. Like his brothers, Ted has assembled young, intense and singlemindedly loyal subalterns. When Kennedy was a 30-year-old freshman Senator, elected chiefly by his brother's being in the White House, it was sneeringly said that Ted was kept afloat by his staff. Now he is sensitive to the charge; as a result, he takes only one or two aides with him on trips.
Even so, the staff's tough-minded thoroughness has served Kennedy well and, combined with his own hard work and undiminishing publicity, has made him an energetic and generally effective legislator. He has made two major errors in the Senate. The first was his sponsorship of an old family friend, Boston Municipal Court Judge Francis X. Morrissey, for the federal district court in Massachusetts. The second came when, through inattention and uncharacteristic sloppiness, he lost the Senate whip's job to West Virginia's Robert Byrd earlier this year.