NONFICTION

Ted Kennedy chronicler offers apologies, insights

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It was mid-morning. A small-town police chief stood before a powerful U. S. senator and broke the news: “I have some bad news. Your car was in an accident and the young lady is dead.”

All Sen. Edward Moore Kennedy could manage to answer was: “I know.”

With the words “I know,” truer than most would have imagined at the time, went the hopes and aspirations of his close advisers, his huge cadre of hangers-on, the liberal Democrats in the Northeast — even the Boiler Room Girls who had lost one of their own. It was clear now, the last of Joseph P. Kennedy’s boys would never lead them back to Camelot.

Unbeknown to the police chief, the senator knew the situation all too well. He had been driving the car nine hours earlier when it crashed through the wood railing of the 75-foot-long hump-backed bridge and landed upside down in six to seven feet of water.

For whatever reason, Sen. Kennedy did not notify police that a 29-year-old woman was trapped in his overturned car at the bottom of Poucha Pound.

Later, he didn’t notify authorities after talking it over with his two closest associates back at the site of the party he and the woman had left earlier.

He still didn’t call police in the morning when whatever alcohol he had consumed at the party certainly would have been metabolized and undetectable.

Sen. Kennedy didn’t phone his pregnant wife, Joan, to tell her he had survived the crash.

Instead, he phoned lawyers, political operatives and his German girlfriend.

Talk about a defining moment. The man who aspired to the highest office in the Free World had crashed his car, left Mary Jo Kopechne trapped under seven feet of tidewater, and somehow made it to dry land, but then didn’t know what to do.

After getting solid and indisputable advice from two men he trusted, the senator still didn’t know what to do.

It is no wonder Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen, who hoped some day to return to the White House on the tails of another Kennedy, was filled with fury when he heard the story.

Teddy Kennedy was finished. That day on Chappaquiddick Island, Ted Kennedy squandered his position as heir assumptive to the presidency.

This is the backdrop for author Edward Klein’s latest book on the complex and sometimes sordid world of one of the 20th century’s great political dynasties. “Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died,” follows Klein’s bestsellers “The Kennedy Curse” and “Just Jackie.”

In this one, Ted Kennedy, his White House hopes dashed beyond repair, fights on for the next 40 years, according to Klein’s premise, to become “one of the greatest lawmakers of his age.”

Klein ranks Sen. Kennedy with giants Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. The third-longest serving senator in history, Kennedy, according to Klein, in the 25 years after Chappaquiddick “became master of the Senate,” and the “least understood and most under-appreciated Kennedy of them all.”

Early on, this book teeters on the balance between a study of the national politics of an era and the incessant Kennedy clan soap opera. As the book moves forward, the soap opera clearly wins out.

Klein cannot ignore the Kennedy family skeletons nor Ted’s many warts, but even so, and despite his denials, Klein is clearly a Kennedy apologist.

Just as in an earlier book, Klein blamed the Irish potato famine of the 1840s for the Kennedys’ legendary drinking and womanizing, in this one, he excuses Ted’s inability to control the “Irish demons” by claiming Ted’s position as the youngest of nine driven children made his weaknesses all but inevitable.

In fact, when he raises Kennedy to the same pedestal as Senate icons Clay and Webster, he does so by pointing out that they, too, were great statesmen whose lives “were dedicated to lechery . . . and self-gratification.” It is as if to say: Back off. It goes with the territory.

Klein makes excuses for Ted’s cheating at Harvard, his unfaithfulness to Joan and his binge drinking after the assassinations of brothers Jack and Robert. He explains Ted’s stammering in his off-the-cuff speech — compared with his brilliant public speech-making — as the result of being the baby in a house of highly competitive siblings. Ted never had a chance to think in full sentences, he reasons.

Klein gives his readers an insight into the sad life of Joan Bennett Kennedy, the wealthy, educated and proper daughter of two highly successful alcoholics. When faced with the unimaginable strain of being a Kennedy wife, she too easily followed the genetically defined path of her parents. He also gives us the best view so far of Kennedy’s second wife, Vicki Reggie Kennedy, the fiercely independent corporate lawyer, only four years older than Ted’s niece Caroline, the senator’s protector in later life and the key to Ted’s “dramatic metamorphosis of the last decade.”

And finally, Klein introduces us to a new generation of Kennedys, and through Ted’s eyes, shows us why an uncle would favor John and Jackie’s daughter Caroline over Bobby and Ethel’s son Joseph. One starts to imagine this is a three-act saga in which to date, only the first two acts have been played out.

Who, in the next generation of Kennedys, Klein asks, will assume the family leadership position after Ted’s passing? Do any of them have the ruthlessness and obduracy of grandfather Joseph or the steel will of grandmother Rose? Is the Kennedy spirit still alive and well? Or have the tragedies of their generation and the millions of inherited dollars smoothed their edges and softened their mettle?

Edward Cuddihy is a retired managing editor of Buffalo News.

Ted Kennedy:

The Dream That Never Died

By Edward Klein

Crown

254 pages, $26

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