“Drink up,” Ted liked to say when he had friends over to the house for happy hour. “That’s what men do.” He would then toss a couple of ice cubes into a tumbler for each person, splash in some of the best scotch money could buy—usually a Macallan that cost about $1,500 a bottle—and then get good and liquored up with his friends. Sometimes Patrick would come by and use the opportunity to bond with his father. When they were both a little tipsy, things somehow seemed better between them. They were able to talk more freely, anyway. Patrick always felt guilty about it, though. He didn’t want to encourage his father in his overindulgences. He felt it was wrong and agreed with his siblings that something should be done to address Ted’s drinking. Therefore, after much deliberation, he, along with Kara and Teddy, decided it was time to confront their father. The date was set: Monday, December 30, 1991.
Talking to Ted about his drinking presented a frightening prospect to his children. They realized they would have to break convention and be truly candid with their father and, in the process, actually be critical of him. This kind of totally honest dynamic was not the norm in their relationship. They loved, honored, and respected their father; they’d never before challenged him. They also had no idea how to express a genuine feeling to him or be hurt or vulnerable with him. It just wasn’t the way they were with one another. Joan Kennedy recalled, “Our kids were all used to a certain kind of formality with their father, which they viewed as respect, but which was actually, if you really want to know the truth about it, fear. Plain and simple fear. We were all scared of Ted. I don’t know that it was his fault as much as it was just the history and the legend and all of the Kennedy crap that, I guess, always stood in the way of true intimacy.”
Patrick was especially nervous since he had his own secret addictions. He was taking prescription medication to excess as well as drinking. It was easy to get away with it; he was single and there was no one to monitor him. He was also young and figured he had time to address his issues, whereas his father maybe didn’t have that same luxury. Still, talking to Ted about his vices while knowing he had his own—and maybe his were even worse—wasn’t going to be easy. As soon as it was decided that the difficult conversation was going to happen, Patrick started to take copious notes on index cards of what he wanted to say. He practiced different variations of commentary as if he were about to appear on Meet the Press. He would later confess he was more afraid of facing his father than he’d ever been of anything else he’d done.
The three Kennedys asked to see Ted at his home in McLean, Virginia. Upon arriving, they were led across a huge entryway and through the parlor by a butler, who showed them into the study. “He will be with you shortly,” the servant intoned before bowing and retreating. Patrick described the study this way: “… big comfortable couches; books everywhere; windows overlooking the Potomac; a high ceiling with an original harpoon from whaling days hanging from it; a scrimshaw coffee table made from planks from the USS Massachusetts; and a fireplace with a picture of my grandfather above it.”
Ted sat down on one side of the room, his children on the other. Teddy began by saying how much he and his siblings loved their father and then tentatively broached the subject of his drinking. He said they were worried about it, and about him. Kara and Patrick agreed with their brother that they wished Ted would just stop. They also said they felt his habit was ripping the family apart. They wanted a more satisfying relationship with him, and they believed that his drinking was standing in the way of it. Then … the three of them just burst into tears. Apparently, it was too much for them; facing the father for whom they felt so much respect and concern was more upsetting than they’d even imagined. The way the scene has been described doesn’t sound as much like an intervention as it does maybe group therapy without professional guidance. “You matter to us, Dad,” Kara said in finishing. “We love you.”
Ted sat with an implacable expression. “Are you finished yet?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Then, in a controlled voice, Ted said he had actually been consulting a doctor about his drinking, though he wasn’t specific. Also, he claimed to have been talking to a priest. “If you had bothered to ask me instead of just accusing me, maybe you would have known that,” he said. Then, without another word of explanation, he rose and walked out of the room.
The Kennedy siblings looked at one another with disbelief, a feeling of dread sweeping over them. Maybe Patrick put it best: “Oh, shit.”
AFTER THE “INTERVENTION,” Ted couldn’t make up his mind as to which emotion he felt more deeply: regret or rage. In his mind, he had given his children a wonderful, entitled life; they had no right to criticize him. “Kids don’t get to talk to their parents that way,” he said, making clear his old-school way of parenting. “I think it’s very traitorous.”
The next day, Ted sent each “traitor” a long letter, lambasting them for the audacity they showed in their meeting with him and telling them that he’d gotten the message loud and clear, or as he wrote to Patrick, “the point had been made.” What bothered him most, Ted wrote, was when they told him his drinking had affected the family. “What in heaven’s sake does anyone think has been on my mind day and night,” he wrote to Patrick, “in restless dreams and sleepless nights—My God, Our family—my sisters and the cousins and the brutality of treatment to John and Bobby and I wonder how much I am to blame for all of this…” He finished his note to Patrick by saying he had written it not in anger but “with great disappointment and enormous sadness.”
It was clear that Ted was in pain. He certainly had valid reasons for it. However, he also had no insight into his illness. For too long, he had deluded himself into believing that it was not a serious issue in his life or in the lives of his children, and there seemed to be no getting through to him. Also, it bears noting that Ted knew how to manipulate his family. Guilt was his weapon of choice, and it worked, piercing the hearts of his children, who were already so wounded. They could see through it, too. “Typical filibuster from the Senator,” is how one of them described the letter. In the end, Ted told them that they should stay with one another for the foreseeable future when wanting to get together as a family. Considering what had happened, he said, he felt it best if he not host them at his home.
In February, Ted would turn sixty. Less than two months had passed, and already he missed his kids. After he’d had a little time to think about it, he began to regret the way he’d acted, especially after talking to Vicki about it. Vicki didn’t know a lot about the Kennedys yet, but she’d been around long enough to know that it had probably taken everything in them for Ted’s children to intervene as they had with their father. “Do you know how much courage it took for them to be able to do that?” she asked him. “Poor Patrick? Confronting you? Do you know what that must have been like for him?”
Ted knew Vicki was right. Things had gone too far, he decided. He certainly couldn’t turn sixty without his sons and daughter at his side. Therefore, he wrote to all three again and invited them to his parties—not just one, but the many that would be held in honor of his milestone birthday. He didn’t apologize to them, though. That wasn’t Ted’s way. “I don’t apologize,” he’d often say. “Ever.” “He liked to think of himself as unapologetic,” Joan Kennedy once said. “‘People in power don’t say they’re sorry,’ he once told me, ‘because that’s a sure sign of weakness.’ You actually could get an apology out of Ted if you really worked at it, but it was pretty rare and often not worth the trouble.”
Patrick and Teddy both responded saying they would be happy to attend, but only if Ted promised not to drink. Patrick, in particular, said he realized these sorts of parties “were always particularly well lubricated.” To Ted, this request smacked of emotional blackmail; he would most certainly make no such promise. “How about this?” he angrily proposed, according to one account. “You take care of your business, and I’ll take care of mine.” Fine, decided his sons; they weren’t in any kind of party mood anyway and definitely wouldn’t be going.
Kara decided not to push her father; always a pragmatist, she felt they’d lost the battle and could maybe try again once the dust settled. Therefore, when Ted asked her not only to attend but to help with the planning of the parties, she readily agreed. She also pleaded with her brothers to reconsider. It wasn’t going to happen, though. Therefore, Ted Kennedy would turn sixty without his sons present for the celebrations.