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Significant Sequel. As the latest and last of the Kennedys, Teddy took up another family obsession: Harvard football.* Teddy was big enough (6 ft. 2 in., 200 Ibs.) and strong enough. But he lacked speed and agility. To improve his blocking, he persuaded a teammate to work with him for long hours after practice. To improve his tackling, he persuaded Captain Dick Clasby, a star tailback, to serve as his personal tackling dummy.
Kennedy made end on the first team in his senior year and earned his letter. With a covey of Kennedys cheering in the stands, he caught a touchdown pass against Yale that year for Harvard's only score in a 21-7 loss. There was a significant sequel to Teddy's efforts to improve his football skills. At Harvard, Teddy fumed at the fact that Clasby could outrun him. "Dick," he said, "sometime in the next ten years I'll bet I beat you in a race." Last month, when Clasby, now a lumber broker in a Detroit suburb, visited Teddy in Hyannisport, Kennedy suddenly announced: "I think I'm ready for that bet now." Clasby looked bewildered, but Teddy recalled his old challenge. The two marked off a so-yd. course on the lawn—and Teddy won by two yards.
Go West, Young Man. After getting his A.B. in 1956, Kennedy was turned down by Harvard law school. He planned to go to Stanford, but his father decreed that he should stay in the East. He ended up at the University of Virginia law school, where Bobby had compiled an excellent record. Only an average student, Teddy teamed with Varick Tunney, son of Gene Tunney, to win the school's competition in simulated court cases. Teddy also distinguished himself by winning a beautiful wife. Blonde Joan Bennett, daughter of a New York City advertising executive, was attending Manhattanville College, where two of the Kennedy sisters had gone. Teddy and Joan were married by Francis Cardinal Spellman in 1958. They now have two children, Kara, 2^, and Edward Jr., 1.
In 1958, while still attending law school, Teddy also got his first experience in active politics as the manager of Jack's pushover campaign for Senate reelection. In 1959, after graduating from Virginia, Teddy toured South America, returned to throw all his immense energies into the big-stakes political effort: Brother Jack's campaign for the 1960 Democratic nomination for President.
Teddy was assigned to handle a dozen Western states. Wherever they were, all members of the Kennedy family, friends and followers labored to and beyond the point of exhaustion. But both Jack and Bobby say that Teddy "was the hardest-working one of the whole bunch." He learned to fly, barnstormed by himself throughout the West, landed at strange airports in wind, rain, snow, hail and sleet. He would do almost anything to win delegates or favorable headlines. For the Kennedy cause, he rode a bucking bronco for a respectable five seconds in a Montana rodeo. On a foray into Wisconsin, he made the first ski jump of his life. He balked only at holding a cigarette in his mouth for a sharpshooter in Wyoming.