Kenny O’Donnell and his life with the Kennedys, his daughter Helen O’Donnell asked each of her interview subjects the same question: “Compare John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Edward Kennedy.” “John Kennedy was the ultimate pragmatist, [while] Bob Kennedy, when he changed, became the ultimate man of passion,” Lester Hyman responds, adding, “Ted Kennedy is the perfect amalgam of the two of them, the pragmatic side and the passionate side.” In his interview with the Miller Center, which specializes in presidential scholarship, the Boston Globe’s Robert Healy identifies a similar alchemy. “Jack was all head. Ted’s all heart.”
On November 4, 1958, Jack regains his seat in the Senate, and the moment sparks Ted’s own political ambitions. “The day that John Kennedy was elected,” John Tunney remembers, “Teddy made a decision that he was going to run for the Senate,” though he would not be eligible until after his thirtieth birthday in 1962.
That night, after the victory party, the brothers make a private toast to their respective political ambitions. Ted begins, “Here’s to 1960, Mr. President—if you can make it.” And Jack replies, “Here’s to 1962, Senator Kennedy, if you can make it.”
Chapter 37
On October 28, 1957, the Kennedy family is dedicating a sports complex at Manhattanville College in memory of Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy, who attended the Catholic women’s school. Ted’s sister Jean, also an alumna, introduces her classmate Joan Bennett, a Bronxville local, to her twenty-five-year-old brother. “He was tall and he was gorgeous,” Joan remembers. Joan is herself twenty-one and has modeled for Revlon and Coca-Cola. The Kennedys approve of the blond beauty, whom Jack nicknames “the Dish,” and Secret Service agent Larry Newman later describes as “the kind of girl anyone would want to date, the kind who would never take a drink, never be anything but cheerful and sunny.”
Only married men succeed in politics, Joe and Rose insist. So in late summer 1958, Ted fumbles his proposal to Joan, barely managing, “What do you think about our getting married?” and failing to present her with a ring. She accepts, though acknowledges to herself that Ted is a man she barely knows. Joe purchases the ring Ted finally gives to Joan when he arrives late to their engagement party.
Despite Joan’s misgivings, the wedding is announced, an ivory bridal gown is chosen, and several hundred guests are invited to witness the ceremony set for November 29, 1958, at St. Joseph’s Church in Bronxville, New York. Still, according to Kennedy cousin Mary Lou McCarthy, “From the beginning, she was in trouble, and she seemed to know.”
Harry Bennett, a Republican and father of the bride, arranges that the wedding be filmed. But when newlywed Joan watches the footage, she receives not the wedding gift her father intended but the shock of her life. Jack, forgetting that he was miked, can be heard reassuring Joan’s new husband, “Being married doesn’t really mean you have to be faithful to your wife.”
He isn’t.
Although Kennedy biographer Barbara Leaming calls Joan “the perfect polished wife” and notes that she and Ted “were a couple of such attractiveness that they seemed to belie all the laws of time and nature,” early in the marriage, Joan finds in her bed a gold necklace that doesn’t belong to her. When, over lunch in Washington, she asks Jackie’s advice, her sister-in-law is blunt. “No woman is ever enough for a guy in that family,” she says, then insists, “Make sure Ted knows you found that necklace.”
Ted does share one secret with his new wife: his longing to leave the Kennedy East Coast strongholds. He tells John Tunney that “he was thinking of going west, going out to maybe California and putting his roots down. He even talked about having part ownership of a football team, an NFL team.”
Ted does go west, but only on sanctioned Kennedy business. He’s the manager of thirteen western states in Jack’s 1960 presidential campaign. Tirelessly canvassing for signatures, organizing field staff, and subsisting on a diet of fast food, Ted steadily gains weight. (“He was terrible with candy and ice cream,” Lester Hyman explains, but “when he runs for election he drops twenty pounds.”)
Ted excels in finding daring, newsworthy ways to bring in pledged votes for Jack—riding a bucking bronco in Miles City, Montana, and landing a 180-foot ski jump outside of Madison, Wisconsin. In the weeks leading up to the New Hampshire primary—during which his and Joan’s first child, Kara Anne Kennedy, is born on February 27, 1960—he even climbs into strangers’ cars to affix