Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (49 page)

Joan Wins the Election for Ted

O
n the Monday after Ted Kennedy’s plane accident, a strat- egy meeting was scheduled with Ted’s political planners, Gerry Doherty and Eddie Boland, and Kennedy’s press repre- sentative, Ed Martin. Joan also attended. She had been told that Ted would be out of commission for some time—many months, probably. Not only was he physically impaired, but he was emotionally devastated by the crash. Ed Moss had been a close friend, much more than just an administrative aide. The two had enjoyed a special relationship; Ted could always count on Ed as being one of the few people not so intimidated by the Kennedy mystique that he would not give him an hon- est appraisal. He would be greatly missed.

What now? Ted would not withdraw from the race; that was for certain. He was practically a shoo-in. The Repub- lican Party had selected Howard Whitmore, Jr., a former Massachusetts state representative, to run against Teddy. Poor Whitmore was, at best, a reluctant candidate. So strong was the sympathy for Ted—and so grateful were many of the polled voters that he, unlike Jack, had been spared—that the odds were in his favor from the begin- ning. In fact, Whitmore would spend much of his cam- paign apologizing for his presence in the race and hoping that Ted, the other Kennedys, or the citizens of Massachu- setts would not be angry at him for even being in the race. Ted was bound to win, but someone needed to campaign for him, anyway.

Someone in his camp suggested that Joan stump for her husband. Kennedy wives were known to be strongly influ- ential on the campaign trail, and if ever such influence was needed, it was now. Yes, she immediately decided, “Of course I will.” Recalls Joe Gargan, “She made up her mind to do all she could to help him to recover physically and to win re-election.

“The first thing that had to be done, though, was to pick a hospital in Boston where Ted could spend the nine long months of required recovery,” said Gargan. “Joan and I went together to look at Mass [Massachusetts] General Hospital and also New England Baptist. We finally de- cided that New England Baptist was the best place for Ted because it had porches off the rooms where he could be pushed out onto to enjoy the fresh air. This was a good de- cision, because Ted spent as much time out in the sun and fresh air as he could.”

While Ted would film a few television commercials

from his bed, it would be Joan who would have to do all the real work. She had done it before in the summer of 1962 when she campaigned for Ted, and now, for the next five months of 1964, Joan Kennedy would campaign for her husband again, keeping to a grueling schedule that had been carefully organized by Ted’s handlers. “Joan became the candidate herself,” Joe Gargan recalls, “and was will- ing to go to every village and town in Massachusetts to ap- pear for Ted.”

President Johnson called Joan on July 3, six days before Ted was transferred to the Lahey Clinic in the New England Baptist Hospital. He had visited Ted earlier in his recupera- tion, a midnight visit to avoid the media. “Lady Bird and I just wanted to let you know that we’re thinking about you kids,” he told Joan.

“Oh my, Mr. President,” Joan said in a whisper, sounding so much like Jackie. “Thank you for calling, and thank you for the flowers. Ted’s fine. He’s doing so much better.”

“I hear you’re goin’ out there on the [campaign] trail,” LBJ told her. “It’s hard work, you know. Sure you can han- dle it?”

“Oh, I know it is, Mr. President,” Joan said. “But I must do it. I know I can. It’s my responsibility.”

“It is,” the President agreed. “So you go on out there and be a good little girl, and do a good job. They need you, gal.” Now here was a strange, ironic turn of events for Joan Kennedy: not only was she needed by her husband, Ted, but she had been encouraged by the President of the United States to “do a good job.” She had always felt like the use- less Kennedy wife, but it seemed that this was beginning to change. She was probably astonished at the way her life had evolved, and would even ignore LBJ’s condescending tone,

realizing that it was just who he was. (In a couple of years she would have her appendix removed, and the President would send her a note that said: “You’re sure a big girl to be having your appendix out.”)

For the next five months, the routine would be the same: Early in the morning, Joan’s chauffeur would pick her up from her home on Squaw Island, where she would bid farewell to the children, Edward Jr., three, and Kara Anne, four, and then be driven to Lahey, seventy-five miles away. There, in Ted’s fifth-floor suite of the Lahey Pavilion, she would confer with him over the rigorous schedule of ap- pointments she was expected of keep. He was strapped into an orthopedic frame, unable to move, his spine held rigid while it healed. In the morning he would awaken, face- down. He would shave in that position and also eat that way. Between his face and the floor was a fixed tray on which he would place a phone, newspapers, books, writing material, and food. He would be rotated several times daily, “like a human rotisserie,” he joked. Still, after his 9

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. therapy, he and Joan would somehow review her speeches, discuss the important campaign issues, and deal with whatever other business they needed to handle for that day.

Joan would then leave for a suite across the hall from Ted’s that had been set up as a second campaign headquar- ters, the primary one being Ted’s Province Street campaign post. She would carefully review the list of people who wanted to see Ted that day—other politicians, reporters, friends—and decide which should have entrée and which should be turned away. Then she would conduct as much telephone business as possible before having to leave at about noon for her first of sometimes as many as eight stops.

In all, in ten weeks—six days a week—she would visit 39 cities and 312 towns. “She went to the Fish Pier in Boston, the factory gates in Lowell, Lawrence, and Fall River,” re- calls Joe Gargan. “Whether it was a ward party in wards six and seven in South Boston, or a music festival in the hills of the Berkshires, Joan was willing to try. . . .”

Joan was grateful for the support of the media and Ted’s constituency; however, she couldn’t help but wonder if peo- ple she met while campaigning were reacting to her person- ality or to her beauty. To compensate for her insecurity, and because she wanted to be good as a campaigning wife, she would say or do whatever she had to on the road—and if she had to dance, she would do that, too, as she did when she and State Comptroller Joseph Alecks performed a fast polka at the Pulaski Day banquet in the hall of the Kosciuzko Vet- erans Association Building.

At the end of the day, if she had energy, she would go back to the hospital and with great exhilaration would fill Ted in on all that had happened. Joe Gargan recalls that “Ted was very pleased with what Joan was doing, and proud be- cause the reports he was getting about her were positive.” That may be true; however, Ted didn’t act that way when he was around Joan. Though he tried to act grateful, he was dis- tant.

“It was okay at the start,” Joan recalled, “but as the months went on, it became too much of a good thing.” She said that she didn’t like being rushed through crowds by po- lice officers as thousands of hands reached out to her. It felt “so unreal and impersonal,” she said. Soon, she began to bend under the pressure of such nerve-wracking work, her stomach constantly in knots. She would carefully rehearse her speeches in the car on the way to each stop, hoping that

she would not buckle under the pressure and go blank in front of the crowd. Toward the end of the campaign, she began to seem lost.

Unfortunately, for Joan, more pressure in her life eventu- ally led to one thing: more alcohol. As the tour continued she began to drink, just to deal with the stress. “Her face seemed hard,” said one observer who had followed her progress on the tour. “She didn’t seem to smile as much as at the start. A couple of times I saw her she looked like she had crawled through a rat hole. The old Joan wasn’t like that, never in a million years. The old Joan was so beautifully dressed. Jesus, the old Joan would have charmed a bird out of a tree. But there was something very wrong about her, now.”

So much was expected of her—people loved meeting her, being photographed with her, touching her, feeling as if they were getting to know her—that she feared she would never be able to live up to their expectations. Rather than applaud her own successes, she couldn’t help but focus on the times she would fumble on the platform, give a wrong answer, or just not be as effective as she had hoped. She would wring her hands with nervousness be- fore each speech, making some of those sitting ringside al- most as anxious as she was.

One of Joan’s biggest problems while on the campaign trail for Ted was that she felt like a fraud when having to tell reporters that she and Ted were happy in their marriage, that they enjoyed operas together, that Rose had sent them Shakespeare’s complete plays on records and that they loved listening to them together—all fiction.

Except on rare occasions, Ted had seemed uninterested in Joan romantically. It was crushing for Joan to realize that

when Ted would finally leave his hospital bed, it would be for the bed of one of his many consorts and not Joan’s. He was thinking about his political future, about a book of rem- iniscences about his father he was compiling called
The Fruitful Bough,
but certainly not about Joan.

“You have an opportunity to do something here, Joansie,” he told her of the campaign in front of volunteers. “So do it. For yourself.”

The problem, of course, was that Joan would rather have been doing it for Ted. Or, as Joe Gargan so aptly and suc- cinctly put it, “I was not surprised at how hard she worked, because Joan loved Ted.”

On Election Day, November 3, 1964, Ted would win by the largest majority ever recorded to that time in Massachu- setts. He would manage 1,716,908 votes, almost 75 percent of the total, practically obliterating Republican Howard Whitmore.

“Joan won the election for you,” Bobby would tell his brother, only half joking.

Jackie sent Joan—not Ted—a note: “Congratulations, and a job well done. How wonderful! I hope this shows you how much you can accomplish. . . . I am so excited for you.”

Even Ethel would be impressed, and she was not often impressed by Joan. She telephoned her sister-in-law and told her, “The whole family is proud of you. What a wonderful job you did.”

Rose, the “political pro” of the Kennedy women—who had presided at the tea parties that first introduced Jack to the voting public—sent Joan two dozen roses with her con- gratulations.

Somehow, though, despite all of the kudos, it would be a hollow victory for Joan Kennedy because the approval of

the most important person—Ted—was not forthcoming. In fact, he acted strangely aloof, as if he didn’t want to give her any credit at all. Demonstrating his lack of graciousness, he would tell one reporter that he would have won the election anyway, that Joan’s work was just “icing on a cake that I had baked myself.”

Despite the fact that he had cheated death, Ted Kennedy was not a changed man. He was still too self-centered and busy to be grateful for anything his wife ever did for him. In the end, he would treat Joan as if she had done what any Kennedy wife would have done under the circumstances: her duty.

Jackie on the Anniversary of November 22, 1963

T
he first anniversary of Jack’s death hit Jackie hard; all the agonizing memories rushed back and she could barely func- tion during the month of November. She complained to her hairdresser, Rosemary Sorrentino, that she wished the world would celebrate the day of her husband’s birth, not his death. “Why commemorate the most awful day in our his- tory?” she asked Sorrentino, who probably didn’t have an answer.

“Time goes by too swiftly, my dear Jackie,” LBJ wrote to her shortly after the anniversary, “but the day never goes by without some tremor of a memory or some edge of a feeling that reminds me of all that you and I went through together.”

The note brought tears to Jackie’s eyes. Surely she was touched by the President’s gentle reminder that, though life had gone on and the business of government had not ceased even for a second, no one who witnessed those dark days in Dallas would ever be quite the same.

By this time—November 1964—Jackie had moved into a fourteen-room apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan for which she paid $200,000. Jackie and her secretary, Nancy Tuckerman, had found an interesting way of looking at prospective homes before Jackie settled on the Fifth Av- enue apartment. Nancy recalls, “You could never be bored when you were with Jackie, because you never knew what to expect from her. She had this love of intrigue that often led to some sort of conspiratorial act. For instance, when she decided to move from Washington to New York and we went apartment-hunting, to avoid publicity she came up with the idea that I would play the part of the prospective buyer while she’d come along disguised as the children’s nanny!”

In a sweeping move to rid herself of the past, the thirty- five-year-old former First Lady also sold Wexford, a week- end retreat in Virginia that she and Jack had purchased after their Glen Ora lease had expired. Now she would live at the Carlyle Hotel while her new home was being renovated.