TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/042991/0429100.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 13.9 KB | 297 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 24

The Trouble With Teddy


A shadow hovers over Kennedy's life -- and recent U.S. history
as well. That dark presence affects more than just his private
life.

By LANCE MORROW -- Reported by Hays Gorey and Nancy Traver/
Washington


    It is not entirely a nasty delight in gossip that makes
people wonder about the character of Ted Kennedy.

    The curiosity goes deeper than that. Kennedy somehow calls
forth nagging mysteries of American politics and psychology. He
is a lightning rod with strange electricities still firing in
the air around him -- passions that are not always his
responsibility but may emanate from psychic disturbances in the
country itself. America does not have a completely healthy
relationship with the Kennedys.

    Ernest Hemingway wrote: "The most complicated subject that
I know, since I am a man, is a man's life." Ted Kennedy is a
complicated man. The picture of him as Palm Beach boozer, lout
and tabloid grotesque is one version. He has other versions --
more interesting selves. Alcohol, or some other compulsion, may
drive him now and then to bizarre and almost infantile behavior.
But Ted Kennedy also is a remarkable and serious figure.

    Once, long ago, he was the Prince Hal of American
politics: high-spirited, youthful, heedless. He never evolved,
like Prince Hal, into the ideal king. Instead he did something
that was in its way just as impressive. He became one of the
great lawmakers of the century, a Senate leader whose liberal
mark upon American government has been prominent and permanent.
The tabloid version does not do him justice. The public that
knows Kennedy by his misadventures alone may vastly underrate
him.

    But Kennedy lives under the rule of a peculiar metaphysic.
He had to soldier on in the messy world after Camelot floated
away into memory. Unlike his brothers, extinguished in their
prime, Teddy would get older and coarser and lose some of the
boyo's flashing charm. He would make mistakes. And -- something
that did not happen in Camelot -- he would pay for them.

    Perhaps his life was cracked after Bobby died, and Teddy
found he was on his own and began to cross over from the
powerful myth of his family into real time, which is intolerant
of the bright and ideal. The fracture set a pattern of sharp
contradiction: the "brief shining moment" would give way to
long, sordid aftermaths. Greek tragedy ("the curse of the
Kennedys") would degenerate into sleazy checkout-counter
revelations ("Jack and Bobby and Marilyn"). The serious lawmaker
in Ted Kennedy would turn now and then into a drunken, overage,
frat-house boor, the statesman into a party animal, the romance
of the Kennedys into a smelly, toxic mess. The family patriarch,
the oldest surviving Kennedy male, would revert to fat, sloppy
baby.

    The question is, Why? Was all this unhappy transformation
the influence of metaphysics? Or was it alcohol? In any case,
the shadow fell. Consider a string of hypotheses:

    -- If it had not been for alcohol, Chappaquiddick almost
surely would never have happened: Ted Kennedy, that is, would
not have driven off the Dike Bridge on Martha's Vineyard in the
middle of one night in the summer of 1969, drowning a young
campaign worker named Mary Jo Kopechne.

    -- Without Chappaquiddick, Teddy Kennedy would naturally
have taken his place as leader of the Democratic Party,
succeeding his assassinated brothers.

    -- In that case Teddy would probably have run for
President against Richard Nixon in 1972. Kennedy might have lost
that year (the incumbent has the advantage). But Ted would
probably have run again in 1976 and won, then run for
re-election in 1980 and served another four years.

    -- An eight-year Kennedy presidency might have run Ronald
Reagan off the political road. Therefore no Reagan '80s. At
least, one can make that case. Reagan in 1984 might have
mobilized a conservative reaction against the liberal eight-year
Kennedy regime and won.

    If . . . If . . . If . . . The exercise is fanciful. Maybe
some other logic entirely was at work. Perhaps Ted did not want
to run for President. As the youngest in an enormous family,
Ted had Joe, John and Robert all lined up ahead of him to
fulfill the ambassador's ambitions to put a son in the White
House. Then, quite suddenly, he found himself at the head of the
line. Maybe the man prone to accidents and to drinking too much
was trying to escape the responsibility -- to immunize himself
from it by making a mess of his life. Prince Hal may have
noticed that kings get slain.

    In the '60s and '70s political writers ended their
profiles of Ted by noting, "After all, he has lots of time. If
he does not run this year, he will remain a plausible
presidential candidate until the year 2000." No political writer
advances that theory anymore.

    But if Kennedy were to retire now, his accomplishment
would be memorable. Almost all the major pieces of social
legislation in the past quarter-century bear his fingerprints.
He has been the nation's leading advocate for the disabled, the
aged, the less privileged. He has promoted the Voting Rights Act
and its extensions, the Freedom of Information Act, the
Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Eighteen-Year-Old Vote
law, the Age Discrimination Act, the Americans with Disabilities
Act, and the Act for Better Child Care, among others.

    Ted Kennedy is the heart and conscience of traditional
American liberalism, even in its present wan and dormant state.
Judith Lichtman, president of the Women's Legal Defense Fund,
has worked with Kennedy for 25 years on civil rights, sex
discrimination, health care and child care. Says Lichtman: "He's
the best legislator I know. He's up early, works all day and
calls in the middle of the night to make sure he's got it
right."

    Kennedy has a superb staff of some 100 people who organize
his ideas and initiatives. Those who watch Kennedy at work on
Capitol Hill observe a stamina, energy, attention to detail and
intellectual alertness that contradict the image of Kennedy as
a feckless drinker. An alcoholic, especially at the age of 59
after years of habitual drinking, often finds it difficult to
keep up with his work, or to keep a job at all. Alcohol punishes
brain and body and wears them down.

    Kennedy, on the other hand, is a man of astonishing
physical resources and resilience. Orrin Hatch, the conservative
Utah Republican, is a Kennedy friend who has sometimes,
kiddingly or not, remonstrated with Ted for his excesses. But
Hatch calls Kennedy "an indefatigable worker." Last week, as
chairman of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee,
Kennedy met until after midnight with the Bush Administration,
railroad management and the union to work out an agreement to
end the railroad workers' strike. Hatch, who had a hand in
writing the legislation, said, "His brothers were great human
beings, but they couldn't carry his shoes as a legislator."

    The tabloid version makes bar crawling seem like Ted
Kennedy's main recreation. In fact, Kennedy leads an extremely
rich, varied, complex personal life in which he balances his
roles as father to his own three children and surrogate father
to 20 of his 25 nieces and nephews. He never misses a graduation
of any of them from prep school or college. On a day when the
weather is mild, he sometimes takes his 100-year-old mother Rose
for an outing in her wheelchair along the streets of Hyannis
Port.

    Self-pity is a common alcoholic trait. Kennedy displays
none of that disagreeable quality. He apparently lives much in
the moment. He does not dwell on his family's almost opulently
tragic past or on the deaths of his four siblings.

    He likes to spend an evening at home, sitting in an
armchair near the fire, a Scotch with lots of ice cubes resting
nearby on the table. He talks with friends or puts a movie on
the VCR. On several nights during Thanksgiving vacation last
year, he watched tapes of the PBS series on the Civil War.
Nearly every Saturday night when Ted is at Hyannis Port, his
family and friends gather in the living room of the large, white
frame house to sing Irish songs like Sweet Rosie O'Grady and My
Wild Irish Rose. Rose sometimes joins in the singing. Before she
goes back upstairs, Teddy by himself always sings Sweet Ade
line, a song that was the trademark of her father Honey Fitz
many years ago when he campaigned for mayor of Boston.

    Ted Kennedy is unpretentious. His capacity for friendship
is large and warm. Recently, without publicity, he has gone
into the homes of several of the Massachusetts families who
lost children during the Persian Gulf war. After visiting a
Cape Cod family whose young son died in the gulf, he phoned to
invite them to attend Mass at his home with him, his mother and
his son Teddy.

    Kennedy's devotion to his own three children -- Kara, 31,
a video producer living in Washington; Teddy Jr., 29, in his
final semester of a two-year master's program in environmental
studies at Yale; and Patrick, 23, a second-term state
representative in Rhode Island -- is extraordinary. As a father,
he openly displays a tender and loving affection. After a
weekend together, father and children embrace and kiss each
other goodbye. He is deeply involved in his children's lives.
In many respects they are his best and closest friends. Ted and
his former wife Joan, a recovering alcoholic, were divorced in
1983. She lives in Boston. He played a major role in raising the
three children.

    The tabloid Kennedy chases women half his age. In fact, in
the past few years he has had several lengthy relationships
with women who range in age from the mid-30s to 42 to a bit
over 50. All are women of brains and professional stature, not
bimbos.

    For all that, stories abound of close encounters with
Teddy in many different stages of intoxication. There are now
famous tales of his drinking bouts in Capitol Hill restaurants,
notably a favorite, La Brasserie, with Connecticut's Senator
Christopher Dodd. Stories also abound of a drunken Kennedy
making passes at women and, in one case, having sex with a woman
lobbyist on the floor of a private room in La Brasserie. The
latest reports from Palm Beach -- those involving Ted anyway --
suggest behavior that is merely a bit off: taking the younger
generation out drinking in clubs in the middle of the night,
maybe wandering around the house without his trousers.

    At the start of every year Kennedy goes on a liquid diet
to shed excess pounds. Aside from consomme and diet sodas, his
meals consist of diet shakes. During the six-to-seven-week
period, which usually ends on his birthday, Feb. 22, after a
loss of 30 or 40 lbs., he avoids alcohol.

    Kennedy does drink a lot when he is drinking. He has a
considerable capacity for booze. But he also possesses amazing
stamina and resiliency for a man his age. During an afternoon
and evening, he may toss down many drinks (Scotch, wine, frozen
daiquiris) -- sometimes, when he is on one of his sailboats. He
may drink far into the evening. But with only a few hours'
sleep, he is on time for his morning tennis game at the Cape
(usually 9 a.m.) or for his business on the Hill in Washington.

    The portrait of Ted Kennedy is not a coherent picture but
has a shattered or kaleidoscopic quality. Or perhaps, like many
public figures, he has arranged his life in compartments, some
sealed off from the others. Kennedy's repeated drunkenness over a
period of many years -- he was continually arrested for
extremely reckless driving while a student at the University of
Virginia Law School -- has raised in many minds the possibility,
or in some the certainty, that he is an alcoholic.

    Alcoholism is impossible to define with complete
precision. The behavior and symptoms of alcoholics differ
enormously. Some alcoholics need to drink daily and suffer when
they do not. Others can interrupt their drinking for weeks or
even months at a time and then binge.

    Alcoholics usually have trouble stopping drinking when
they start: after they begin, they persist until they are more
or less drunk. Ted Kennedy sometimes has one drink, then goes
about his business.

    Alcoholism impairs work, health, social relationships,
family relationships. Ultimately, as the disease progresses, it
destroys more and more of the alcoholic's life, at an
accelerating rate.

    Kennedy is a hardworking and successful U.S. Senator with
a busy schedule and a heavy load of intellectual labor that he
apparently performs well. His mind is nimble and sharp, except
when he has been drinking a lot. He is attentive to his
enormous family and a considerable array of friends.

    Kennedy's face sometimes looks flushed and mottled, with
the classic alcoholic signs of burst capillaries, puffiness and
gin-roses of the drunk. Sometimes he simply looks like hell --
fat, dissolute, aging, fuddled. But his powers of recuperation
are amazing. He has, when he needs it, an organizing inner
discipline that allows him, by an act of sheer will, to pull
himself together, to focus and resume a senatorial, Kennedy star
quality.

    What then is shadow in Ted Kennedy? It is not only
impossible to say but also presumptuous. A man with Kennedy's
temperament and past may need a sort of unofficial self that he
can plunge back into now and then -- a rowdy, loutish oblivion
where he feels easy, where he takes a woozy vacation from being
a Kennedy. It is said that a drunk stops growing emotionally at
the age at which he began serious drinking. That would probably
be the age then of the unofficial self.

    Like other Kennedys, Ted may have a strange capacity to
serve as both an exemplar and a warning. He has some of the best
and worst qualities of the country. The only shadow that he is
responsible for, of course, is the one inside himself.