Kennedy Wives: Triumph and Tragedy in America's Most Public Family (30 page)

4

New Kind of Kennedy

As Vicki’s life intertwined with Ted’s, she became a new kind of
Kennedy wife. She was his sounding board on the issues, and he respected her opinion and her input. Finally, being married to a Kennedy man wasn’t about just propping up his values and ambitions, but about joining forces and tackling matters as a team. “I was involved in every issue that mattered in the life of our country,” Vicki later recalled. “And I was lucky enough to be involved in those issues with the love of my life.” Ted even respected Vicki enough to float the idea of her someday becoming a senator—a suggestion she quickly dismissed.

Their life together made fewer headlines than Ted’s life with Joan had. Surely, Ted’s abdication of the pursuit of the presidency helped, as did Vicki’s reluctance to talk to most reporters. They still occasionally made a Splash together—Splash being the Portuguese water dog that the couple adopted and that would soon become a fixture on Capitol Hill by Ted’s side. Ted and Vicki in 2006 wrote a children’s book from Splash’s point of view called
My Senator and Me: A Dog’s-Eye View of Washington, D.C.
And their names were frequently listed among other hobnobbers at galas and musical performances and other tie-requiring shindigs. Every year they threw theme parties for family and friends, at which Ted and Vicki would don costumes. At Ted’s sixty-fifth birthday party, the theme was “the ocean.” Ted dressed as Ponce de Leon, and Vicki as the fountain of youth, a playfully self-aware reference to their age difference. At another party—for his staff at Christmas—Vicki dressed as Anastasia to Ted’s Rasputin.

Vicki had a profoundly positive impact on Ted, far beyond merely repairing his reputation. After hearing him warbling at a holiday party one year, Vicki gave him voice lessons as a Christmas present. The result was a deep bass so surprising that radio talk-show host Upton Bell said he worried that playing it might cause people to drive off the road. “He’s obviously been practicing,” Bell said after playing Ted’s rendition of the Tennessee Ernie Ford classic “Sixteen Tons.” Ted also credited Vicki for helping him shrink his waistline. While stumping for John Kerry in 2004, he dropped forty pounds, “revealing the trademark Kennedy chiseled features and a much trimmer physique.” Asked how he dropped the weight, Kennedy replied, “Vicki, Vicki, Vicki.”

Vicki would provide Ted strength in 1995 when his beloved mother Rose died at 104 years old. He’d been the Kennedy child with wit and self-deprecation enough to needle his mother when she became too demanding, and Rose had proved herself more than capable of needling back. He described a framed note from “Mother” that had long been hanging on his office wall, in which she reacted to a comment he’d once made to a reporter. “Dear Teddy,” Rose had written. “I just saw a story in which you said: ‘If I was President . . .’ You should have said, ‘If I were President . . .’ which is correct because it is a condition contrary to fact.”

The memory got a laugh from the mourners, and Ted’s tone turned more serious: “Mother always thought her children should strive for the highest place. But inside the family, with love and laughter, she knew how to put each of us in our place. She was ambitious not only for our success, but for our souls.”

Ted continued to play a father-figure role in the lives of his nieces and nephews, and Vicki would be his backbone as he watched tragedy beset the next generation. Michael Kennedy, Ethel’s sixth child and Ted’s 1994 reelection campaign manager, died in a skiing accident in 1997. A year and half later, in the summer of 1999, while piloting a Piper single-engine plane to Hyannis Port to attend the wedding of Rory, Ethel’s youngest, John F. Kennedy Jr. crashed into the ocean, killing him, his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and his sister-in-law, Lauren Bessette. It was a devastating blow to Ted, who was very close with his nephew.

John Jr. had the best Kennedy qualities—the looks, the smarts, the discipline, and the zest for life. Ted had stayed close with Jackie through the years, and he had loved her dearly. “She was always there for our family in her special way,” he would say in his eulogy for her in 1994, after she succumbed to lung cancer. “She was a blessing to us and to the nation—and a lesson to the world on how to do things right, how to be a mother, how to appreciate history, how to be courageous. No one else looked like her, spoke like her, wrote like her, or was so original in the way she did things.” After Jackie’s death, Ted felt even more protective of her two children. John Jr. had always been seen as heir to Jack’s throne, and, thanks to Jackie’s grounding influence, not just by birthright.

When John Jr. introduced his uncle Teddy at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, he eloquently and unwaveringly called a generation to public service and was rewarded with a lengthy standing ovation. Though John Jr. never ran for office, he was an important behind-the-scenes player, throwing his name and money behind Democratic causes and candidates. Now another Kennedy had been taken in his prime, and Ted was heartbroken.

With Vicki and her father, Edmund, looking on in the Church of St. Thomas More, Ted eulogized his nephew in a stirring tribute a week after the plane went down. “From the first day of his life, John seemed to belong not only to our family, but to the American family. The whole world knew his name before he did,” Ted said. Sadly, Ted was becoming way too good at these eulogies. “He had a legacy, and he learned to treasure it. He was part of a legend, and he learned to live with it. Above all, Jackie gave him a place to be himself, to grow up, to laugh and cry, to dream and strive on his own. John learned that lesson well. He had amazing grace. He accepted who he was, but he cared more about what he could and should become. He saw things that could be lost in the glare of the spotlight. And he could laugh at the absurdity of too much pomp and circumstance.”

Finally, in a somber nod to the many tragedies that had come before, Ted ended by paraphrasing a Yeats poem about a man who died young. “We dared to think, in that other Irish phrase, that this John Kennedy would live to comb gray hair. . . . But like his father, he had every gift but length of years.”

Three years later, Ted was sitting in a doctor’s office with his daughter, Kara, at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Kara, then age forty-two, had recently seen a doctor for a routine visit and been sidelined with a shocking diagnosis of lung cancer. Ted had insisted on procuring for her the best possible medical team for another opinion. The news was grim. Not only did she have cancer, it was inoperable, and she had less than a year to live. As he had done with his son, Teddy, the senator went on the offensive. Rejecting the prognosis, he thanked the doctor and left, and then he went to work. “We were told that every doctor we would consult would say the same thing, and I recall saying, ‘Fine. I just want to hear every one of them say it,’ ” Ted recalled. He didn’t rest until he found a surgeon who agreed to operate, removing a portion of Kara’s right lung in January 2003.

After the surgery, Ted and Vicki took Kara to her chemotherapy treatments in Washington in the morning. When Ted had to leave for Senate work, Vicki would stay behind. Seven years after Kara’s aggressive treatment, Ted reported that she was a cancer-free and active mother of two. (Kara would later die of a sudden heart attack in 2011, nine years after her cancer diagnosis. Some oncologists would speculate that the aggressive treatment that spared her from the cancer—and prolonged her life—might have weakened her heart.)

Ted and Vicki didn’t know it at the time, but the battle they faced with Kara’s illness was an overture for an even more dire diagnosis they’d receive a decade later. Again their mantra would be, “One step at a time.”

5

Time to Sail

May 17, 2008, started out as a picture-perfect day. The weather
was ideal—warm but not hot, with a crisp breeze—for Vicki and Ted to take the boat out for the first sail of the year. Ted was still keyed up from the day before, when he felt so “on” that he’d set aside his prepared remarks and spoken from his heart at a ribbon cutting for a learning center at New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park. As he and Vicki geared up for the day’s sail, they did the mundane things that couples do on lovely mornings together: They had coffee, read the newspapers, talked about family matters. Before breakfast, Ted thought he’d take the dogs for a walk. He never made it outside. As Ted walked past the grand piano that had once belonged to his mother, he felt disoriented. He moved toward the door to get outside for some air, but he couldn’t go any farther. In a haze, he lowered himself into a chair and lost consciousness.

Judy Campbell, Ted and Vicki’s household assistant, spotted him and called out for Vicki. Judy called 911, then Ted’s Boston physician, as Vicki cradled her husband’s head and kissed his cheek. “You’re going to be okay,” she whispered.

In truth, Vicki had no idea if he’d be okay. She had no idea what was happening at all. “I just knew it was something very serious, something grave,” she later recalled. Ted was first taken by medics to a local hospital, and then transported via medevac to Boston for tests. The initial diagnoses batted around were so wildly varied that Vicki couldn’t keep up. “I went from concern to fear to terror to uncertainty,” Vicki said. As Ted slowly regained consciousness, doctors said they thought he’d had a generalized seizure, but they didn’t know what had caused it or whether
others might follow. Finally, they had a tentative diagnosis: Ted might have a brain tumor.

“By the end of that day, it was like, you know what? Prove it to me,” Vicki would later say.“Enough already. I’ve had a terrible day. Prove it to me. And I wasn’t in denial, but I wasn’t in acceptance, either. I just wanted them to show us. And they did.”

The following Monday, a biopsy confirmed the diagnosis of a malignant glioma in the left parietal lobe. “Vicki and I privately were told that the prognosis was bleak—a few months at most,” Ted said. Most diagnoses of the sort are: Only 30 percent of people with the condition are still alive two years after the diagnosis; just 10 percent of patients may live five years or longer. As with the other cancer diagnoses he’d faced, Ted refused to accept defeat. Neither did Vicki. Make no mistake, she would later tell an audience of cancer patients and their loved ones, Ted’s brain tumor wasn’t his alone. “It was our brain tumor,” she said. “And that’s always how I’ve described it. It was our brain tumor in every single way.”

Almost fifty years after Camelot, the Kennedy name still drew the public’s fascination and attracted the media spotlight. Photographers and TV crews were camped out on the hospital lawn, so Vicki orchestrated a photograph with a laughing Ted surrounded by his cheery-looking children to accompany the news of his diagnosis. The upbeat tone was intentional. Ted felt a strong obligation to be a role model, particularly while facing such a terrible diagnosis. He’d endured hard times before, and he’d heard from countless strangers how much his strength had helped them through their own trials, no matter how desperate. If Ted could put a hopeful face on this latest obstacle, maybe he could help someone else live just one happier day, he reasoned. And besides, getting his own cancer diagnosis was nothing compared with having heard the diagnoses of his two children. “His perspective was that it was so much worse when it’s your child,” Vicki said. “He could take it. He was going to be a role model for others. He wasn’t putting on a happy face; he understood himself and what he needed to do to stay ahead of the darkness, as he put it.”

For Ted, dodging the darkness meant sailing. He and Vicki missed out on that sail May 17, so when they returned from the hospital, they hopped aboard their schooner
Mya
and went to sea. “Everything seemed
back to normal, except for the crowd of cameramen and reporters who awaited us onshore,” Ted said.

Back at the homestead, Ted summoned a doctor friend to recruit the nation’s best medical experts to draw up the battle plans. The result was an extraordinary display of Ted’s power and wealth: More than a dozen experts from at least six academic centers heeded the invitation, the
New York Times
reported. Some of the doctors flew to Boston for an in-person meeting May 30; others requested test results and medical records so that they could participate by phone. In the meeting, the experts weighed Ted’s options: surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, according to Dr. Raymond Sawaya, a nationally renowned neurosurgeon who was part of the meeting. Ted said he wanted to be “prudently aggressive” and to make the process as helpful to others as possible.

“If I can show that there is hope for me, perhaps I can give hope to all those who face this kind of disease,” he said. But while they aimed to stay optimistic, they were far from naive about it, Vicki said. They understood the gravity of the diagnosis, and Ted quickly got his affairs in order—legal, legislative, financial, and spiritual. That preparation allowed them to both live in the present and to focus on some goals Ted had set.

“We had an unspoken pact between us that we would not grieve until it was time to grieve,” she said. “We weren’t going to ruin the time we had, which we hoped was going to be a very long time, that we weren’t going to ruin it by talking about what-ifs. We weren’t going to spend our time dying. We were going to spend our time living, and we did that and it was magnificent.”

Ted’s first goal was to make it to the Democratic National Convention in August 2008, where he hoped to speak. It was just three months away, which until recently would have seemed like no time at all. But when faced with a terminal disease, it was a lofty goal indeed. Ted wanted to sway the odds in his favor. His team of medical experts had been divided on whether he should undergo surgery to remove as much of the tumor as possible. Most were strongly in favor of it, but two of the doctors balked “because the cancer was not a discrete nodule, but was spread over a large area, making it unlikely that most of it could be removed,” wrote Dr. Lawrence Altman for the
Times
. “Chances for success are somewhat
proportional to the amount of tumor removed, although experts disagree about precisely how much visible tumor must be removed for the best chances.”

Ted opted for surgery. It lasted a grueling three and a half hours, and part of it was performed while Ted was conscious so that doctors could test his neurological function. As neurologist Vivek Deshmukh described to
Newsweek
, Ted likely would have been put to sleep to have his skin incised, some bone removed, and the protective layer of the brain cut open. “But once you’ve started removing the tumor, the brain itself is not a pain-sensitive structure. That’s when you have the patient awake,” he said. As the surgeon removes the growth, he constantly asks the patient questions and has the patient perform activities, such as raising an arm or moving a leg. Ted likely didn’t feel pain, but he might have felt “some manipulation up there,” Deshmukh said.
*
After Ted’s surgery was over, doctors told reporters it’d been a success. Similarly, Vicki e-mailed upbeat notes relaying the positive news to the family.

For the next six weeks, Vicki and Ted drove from Hyannis Port to Boston—a three-hour drive round-trip—five days a week for radiation and chemotherapy treatments. From the outset, Vicki embraced her role as caregiver. Ted had always praised her strength in crises, and she stayed strong in his presence. Sometimes, when the weight of it all got too heavy, she’d slip into the shower and dissolve into tears. But when she would reemerge, she’d again play the role of protector. “He needed me to be his advocate, and I took the role willingly,” she said. “He could be the happy lion, and I was the fierce lioness.”

That didn’t mean her wishes always beat out Ted’s. Just before the Independence Day recess, the Senate had a vote on a bill to cut Medicare reimbursement rates. Democrats had fallen a single vote short of the sixty needed to prevent the cut. Ted and Vicki were driving to Boston for treatment when he read the news in the paper. “Medicare is in jeopardy!” he declared in the car. He was consumed by guilt. “I would’ve been the one vote,” he said. “I need to get back to Washington.”

Vicki balked. “You can’t go back to Washington,” she insisted. “You just had brain surgery.”

Ted wouldn’t be swayed. The guilt was too much. He’d been away getting treatment, unable to vote, and that single vote had hurt a cause he’d fought for for much of his Senate career—health care. So, just four weeks after his surgery, he orchestrated his return to the Senate.

“It was a secret little background thing that no one knew about, except the majority leader and Teddy, who was absolutely determined,” Vicki said.

The vote was called again, and as the roll got under way—the senators’ “aye” and “nay” responses going down on record for a second time—Ted appeared in the chamber. Applause erupted. Vicki, who was watching from the gallery, began to weep. The ovation was thundering. “Immediately, the roll call came to a pause, as the cheers for Mr. Kennedy drowned out all other sound,” one reporter wrote. Not only did Ted’s single vote reverse the Medicare cut, but nine Republicans changed sides. The final tally was sixty-nine to thirty, giving the Democrats a veto-proof majority. Senator Kay Bailey, a Texas Republican, was disappointed in the vote, but not in Ted’s appearance. “There wasn’t a person in the room or in the gallery who wasn’t thrilled to see Senator Kennedy back, looking so good,” she said.

Buoyed by that triumphant return to the Senate, Ted and Vicki refocused on his convention goal. Ted called his friend, political adviser Bob Shrum, for help. Shrum had been Ted’s speechwriter for years, and he’d worked with eight Democratic presidential candidates (none of whom won). Despite his egg on the Oval Office efforts, Shrum was respected as a political wordsmith. He’d helped write Ted’s well-received concession speech at the 1980 Democratic Convention. (“For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”) Vicki and Bob became Ted’s sounding board as he secretly worked to craft what they knew would likely be his last convention speech. “I knew essentially what I wanted to say at the outset, and Bob and Vicki and I have a synergistic way of working together,” Ted said.

For Vicki, the convention goal was invigorating. Every morning, she and Ted would start work at ten o’clock in a secret practice space they’d
set up inside the Cape Cod house. They weren’t sure what kind of teleprompter setup would work best for Ted, so they rotated positioning it from front and to the sides before deciding that he could follow the text best when it was in front of him. On August 24, the day before the convention, they boarded a chartered jet for Denver, the convention site, with family and friends and Ted’s internist. After settling into an apartment they’d rented in Denver, Ted began practicing his speech again with a teleprompter. A minute in, he had to stop. A sharp pain stabbed his left side.

“You know, I really don’t feel well,” he said. He was taken to a hospital, where he got a maddening diagnosis. After prevailing against brain surgery and chemotherapy and radiation, Ted’s big night was being threatened by a kidney stone. Vicki, who had fought so long to be stoic for her husband, burst into tears as doctors readied to give him potent pain medication.

There’s little worse than seeing someone you deeply love in physical agony. But Vicki knew that this could be Ted’s final public appearance. She knew that Ted’s mental clarity was essential to his accomplishing what had become an important goal for both of them: his speaking at the convention. She knew that his ability to make choices for himself was one of the last things Ted had.

“If you give him pain medicine, then you will have made the decision for him about speaking tonight,” she cried. “You can’t take away his ability to make this decision for himself. He’s worked too hard for this night.”

Doctors assured her that the first dose would have left Ted’s bloodstream before his speech, so they administered it. A few hours later, a nurse gave another dose—unwelcome news for the concerned wife. “Vicki, shall we say, remonstrated with her,” Ted recalled.

Drowsy in his hospital bed, Ted looked up at his wife. “What do you think?” he asked.

“You can just go out and wave,” she said. “Just go out there with the family and wave.”

Ted wouldn’t admit defeat. He couldn’t do it. He hadn’t flown all the way to Denver after working all those weeks on perfecting a speech to be felled by a lousy kidney stone. No, he would speak. Kennedys don’t cry and Kennedys don’t let pain sideline them and Kennedys rise to the
occasion, no matter how they’re feeling. Shrum cut Ted’s planned remarks in half—and, as a just-in-case, cut another version even further to just four lines. Ted would have to play by ear which version he felt up to tackling in front of the crowd.

About ninety minutes before the convention was to start, Ted awoke from his drug-induced sleep and decided to test his ability to walk. He made it just a few steps before needing to rest again. Vicki was anxious and exhausted, having been up all night. Soon, the crew was getting him ready to go, and before Ted knew it, his niece Caroline Kennedy was introducing him to the crowd. With Vicki looking on, he basked in the applause of the cheering delegates, and she knew exactly what he meant when he said, “Nothing, nothing was going to keep me away from this special gathering tonight.”

After he finished, he didn’t want to leave the stage, much less leave the party. His doctors urged him to return to the hospital, but Ted was high on adrenaline. “They liked my speech!” Vicki recalled him saying. The next morning, he was still floating.