Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died (26 page)

“It’s in a bad site in his brain,” said a New York neurosurgeon who had treated many similar cases. “In the senator’s age group, it’s an incurable lesion. I’m not aware of anyone over the age of sixty-five who has survived. I’d give him no more than six months to a year to live.”
¹

Doctors’ predictions about such matters are notoriously inaccurate. In any case, the senator was determined to soldier on. Upon his release from the hospital, he told a group of waiting reporters that he intended to race his fifty-foot Concordia schooner
Mya
in Cape Cod’s annual Figawi competition on Memorial Day weekend. Vicki, who was standing by his side when he made this statement, visibly blanched.

“No way, his wife thought, was he going to get stuck out in the bay, with no wind, after undergoing a brain biopsy,” reported the
Washington Post’s
Lois Romano. “The forecast called for flat seas and not a whisper of a breeze. Vicki Kennedy wouldn’t budge. And then … a gust! ‘So did you see the wind reports?’ he asked her hopefully [on] Saturday morning [May 24]. ‘Southwest winds up to twenty-five miles per hour.’ She threw up her hands. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘let’s do it.’”
²

As things turned out, the senator was not up to making the first leg of the race on Saturday. However, on Sunday, May 25, he revived and took the 6:30
A.M
. high-speed ferry to Nantucket. That night, he sailed the
Mya
in the final leg of the regatta, making the twenty-mile voyage in two hours and twenty-eight minutes, and coming in second in his division.

“It couldn’t be a more beautiful day,” he said upon arriving at the dock, wearing a blue windbreaker and a Red Sox cap.

“He was bellowing and screaming on the water,” said his friend Senator Chris Dodd. “He was really in his form. We had a lot of fun…. It couldn’t have been a better day to sail.”

“It felt great to be out there today,” Senator Kennedy added. “It’s always a good day to go sailing.”
³

· · ·

A
T FIRST, BRAIN
surgery did not appear to be a viable option.

“The tumors have these tentacles,” explained Dr. Julian Wu, a neurosurgeon at Tufts New England Medical Center in Boston. “It’s kind of like an octopus. You might be able to take out the body [of the] octopus, but there might be little tentacles that grow back.”
⁴

The senator had a good deal of experience dealing with cancer. When his twelve-year-old son, Teddy Jr., was diagnosed with bone cancer in his right leg, the senator consulted a group of specialists on the boy’s treatment. After Teddy Jr.’s leg was amputated, he received two years of an experimental form of chemotherapy. When the senator’s daughter, Kara, had what some surgeons deemed inoperable lung cancer, he invited a group of experts to discuss her case. They advised surgery, and Kara was still in remission five years later. And so once again, the senator convened a meeting of experts, a “tumor board.”

“The meeting on [Friday] May 30 was extraordinary in at least two ways,” wrote Lawrence K. Altman, M.D., the chief medical correspondent at the
New York Times
. “One was the ability of a powerful patient—in this case, a scion of a legendary political family and the chairman of the Senate’s health committee—to summon noted consultants to learn about the latest therapy and research findings.

“The second was his efficiency in quickly convening more than a dozen experts from at least six academic centers. Some flew to Boston. Others participated by telephone after receiving pertinent test results and other medical records.”
⁵

At the May 30 meeting, opinions were divided over the benefit of surgery. According to Dr. Altman, “Some neurosurgeons strongly
favored it; two did not.”
⁶
Among those opposing surgery was Dr. Raymond Sawaya, chairman of neurosurgery at Baylor College of Medicine and the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Dr. Sawaya believed that the cancer had spread over a large area and, therefore, that most of it could not be eradicated.

“Tumors in the brain are like real estate,” said Reid Thompson, director of neurosurgical oncology at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. “It’s all location, location, location.”
⁷

“No matter what treatment you use,” said Dr. Henry Brem of Johns Hopkins Hospital, “it tends to be an aggressive, quickly replicating, quickly growing tumor.”
⁸

Nonetheless, Dr. Vivek Deshmukh, director of cerebrovascular and endovascular neurosurgery at George Washington University Medical Center, urged the senator to take his chances with the scalpel. “The treatment that has been shown to make the most difference as far as survival is removal of the tumor,” Dr. Deshmukh said. “Surgical removal carries the greatest benefit in terms of extending his survival.”
⁹

And so, on Friday afternoon, the senator put in a call to Dr. Allan Friedman, codirector of the Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center at Duke University Medical Center. The fifty-nine-year-old doctor was considered by many of his colleagues to be the Mozart of brain surgeons. He was preparing to take off for a long-planned vacation in Canada when his cell phone rang. On the other end of the line was Senator Edward Kennedy, who told the doctor that he had searched the world for the best neurosurgeon to remove his cancerous brain tumor.

“And I want you.”
¹⁰

· · ·

T
HERE DAYS LATER
, on Monday, June 2, 2008, after nurses had shaved a square patch on the senator’s head, he was wheeled into the icy-cold operating room. There, he was to undergo a procedure, pioneered by Dr. Friedman, called “awake surgery.” The doctor reminded the senator that a neurologist, standing on the other side of the anesthesia curtain, would ask him questions or ask him to perform certain tasks to ensure that Dr. Friedman did not cut into critical parts of the brain responsible for language.

The senator was heavily sedated for the first part of the surgery. Dr. Friedman made an incision and pulled back the scalp to expose the bone. He drilled a dime-sized hole in the skull and then inserted a second, larger drill bit. After opening a three-inch hole, he used a scalpel to cut through the dura, the layer of tissue covering the brain. It was at this point, after the senator’s skull had been opened, that the anesthesiologist awakened him, and Dr. Friedman began to stimulate the brain with an electrode.

“If the stimulation of the electrode causes any changes in task performance, we know that we touched an important part of the brain,” explained Dr. Ania Pollack of the University of Kansas Hospital in Kansas City. “We mark that spot and we know we cannot injure it. That is called cortical mapping.”
¹¹

Peering through a high-powered microscope, and using a computer system to help him navigate the brain, Dr. Friedman began to expose the tumor. Then he used high-frequency sound waves and heat to dissolve the cancerous tissue and suction it out. He tried to remove as much of the tumor as possible, but the disease had cells that were well beyond the visibility of the electron microscope, and the doctor could not root out and destroy all the cells.

Nonetheless, Dr. Friedman was pleased with the results, and he announced that the surgery had “accomplished our goals.” Combined with radiation, chemotherapy, and experimental brain-cancer drugs, such as Temodar, Avastin, and a novel vaccine called CDX-110, the senator was expected to survive for several months.

Left unsaid, however, was an inescapable fact: The malignant tumor was already growing back.

22

T
ED’S FIRST FEW
weeks at home in Hyannis Port were a harrowing experience. His doctors started him on chemotherapy treatments, and for a while he was so drained of color and vitality that he looked as though he was at death’s door.

But he was an old hand at wrestling with the Angel of Death. Three of his brothers, a sister, and two nephews had all died violently; he had barely survived a plane crash that took the lives of two people; one of his sons had lost a leg to cancer; his daughter was a lung-cancer survivor; and, of course, Ted bore responsibility for the death of a young woman many years ago.

Despite these dreadful experiences (or perhaps because of them), he refused to succumb to self-pity and despair. As the hellish chemo treatments proceeded, he regained his buoyant and cheerful disposition. To everyone who came to visit him, he had one message: He couldn’t wait to get back to campaigning for Barack Obama.

But there was just one hitch. The inauguration of the next president of the United States was still more than seven months away, and Ted Kennedy had been discharged from the hospital with a grim prognosis. Half of all patients with his form of incurable brain cancer—a malignant glioma—died within a year, and those of his advanced age (he was seventy-six years old) usually went a lot faster.

Still, there were days when he felt well enough to be wheeled down the wooden pier of the Hyannis Port Yacht Club for a look at his beloved two-masted schooner, the
Mya
. Ninety-four-year-old Benedict Fitzgerald, who had served as Rose Kennedy’s personal attorney until her death, happened to be on the pier that day, and he reeled back in shock when he recognized the frail figure in the wheelchair.

“It was clearly going badly for Ted,” Fitzgerald said in an interview for this book. “I have a lot of happy memories of that beach. Many happy days with members of the Kennedy family over the years, dating back to when Joe Kennedy [the family patriarch] bought the place in the nineteen-twenties. But this was one of the saddest days.

“I remember Joe landing in a seaplane when Ted was just a baby,” he continued. “Joe had Gloria Swanson with him and a film can under his arm. Joe had had a movie theater built in the basement of the house. They said it was the only private movie theater in New England, and I suspect it was. He had a projectionist and everything.

“Joe invited us all to come and watch his latest movie. Gloria stayed at the house, and Rose was perfectly welcoming. She didn’t seem to know or care that this movie star was Joe’s mistress.

“When Ted is gone,” Fitzgerald added, “the house and all those memories will be history. Rose wanted to turn the place over to the Benedictine monks before she died. I drew up the legal papers
for her on my front porch. But when Ted found out about it, he ripped the thing in half. There was no way he was going to have the place turned into a monastery.”
¹

O
N SUNDAY, JULY
6, 2008, Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, phoned Vicki Kennedy in Hyannis Port to ask if her cancer-stricken husband was well enough to travel to Washington and make an appearance on the floor of the United States Senate. Just days before, a vote on a critical Medicare bill had fallen one shy of the sixty needed to break a Republican filibuster. Ted’s “aye” vote would tip the balance and break the filibuster.

“But,” Reid quickly added, “I’m not pushing, just asking.”
²

No one in Hyannis Port wanted Ted to go, not his children, not his doctors, and not the person who ultimately decided such matters—Victoria Reggie Kennedy.
³
But as he gained strength, Ted decided to overrule his wife, children, and doctors and fly to Washington to break the Republican filibuster. On Wednesday, July 9, he traveled to Washington in virtual secrecy; few of his colleagues outside the Democratic leadership knew of his plan to make a surprise appearance on the Senate floor. He did not want to give the Republicans time to plot a counterstrategy.
⁴

Just after four o’clock in the afternoon, he showed up at the north wing of the Capitol with Sunny and Splash, his Portuguese water dogs. The guards and the few Senate aides who happened to be passing by were thunderstruck by his appearance. Word quickly spread, and the hall began to fill with photographers and reporters.

For years, reporters assigned to cover Ted Kennedy had carried advance copies of his obituary with them, figuring that if his compulsive eating and drinking did not get him first, some nut with a gun might.
⁵
But he had defied the odds. Of all the Kennedy brothers,
only he had lived long enough, in the words of the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, “to comb grey hair.”

And now, like some apparition, he had come back to the Senate, where he had managed to accomplish more than either of his two brothers, John and Robert Kennedy. At present, he was the second-longest-serving member in the United States Senate, after Robert Byrd of West Virginia, and the third-longest-serving since the inaugural session of the Senate back in 1789. His colleagues on Capitol Hill—even those who heaped scorn on his liberal agenda—referred to him as the “Lion of the Senate.” They predicted he would go down in history as one of the chamber’s greats, up there with Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John Calhoun.
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