Catching Up
Ted’s decision to run for Jack’s former Senate seat in 1962 did not come easily. If he ran, he’d be vying first against Edward McCormack Jr., the popular attorney general of Massachusetts, who also happened to be the nephew of the Speaker of the US House, John McCormack. And if he bested McCormack, he’d still have to face Republican George C.Lodge, a former political reporter who had just been reappointed by President Kennedy as assistant secretary of labor for international affairs. Lodge was from a prominent political family in New England with a long history of battling the Kennedys in elections. In 1916, George Lodge’s grandfather, Henry Cabot Lodge, defeated John F. Fitzgerald for the Massachusetts Senate seat. Thirty-six years later, Henry C. Lodge Jr. was edged out by Jack for the seat. Now, Henry Jr.’s son would try to win it back. Ted knew that both of his opponents would attack his lack of experience and accuse him of coasting on the Kennedy name. If he were to run, he’d need to steel himself for that.
Then there was another matter: the plans he’d made with Joan. While campaigning in the west, the couple had fallen in love with the region. They had briefly moved to San Francisco with Kara and had set their sights on Arizona as a possible home. But with the Massachusetts Senate seat there for the taking, Joe insisted that it was “their turn.” And Ted, for all of his dreams of independence, like his brothers before him had trouble turning his back on his father’s wishes. Later, he recalled pondering words he’d heard his family say to him when he was a boy:
You can have a serious life or a nonserious life, Teddy. I’ll still love you whichever choice you make. But if you decide to have a nonserious life, I won’t have much time for you. You make up your own mind. There are too many children here who are doing things that are interesting for me to do much with you.
Ted struggled mightily with the decision. “I’d worshipped my father as a young boy,” Ted confided. What son doesn’t want to make his father proud? And then there were Ted’s brothers, whom he idolized. They were war heroes and public servants—serious-minded winners who didn’t seem enticed by the frivolity that often tempted Ted. They certainly had their father’s attention, and his respect. Ted wanted those things for himself.
I had been swept up by the dash and nobility of Joe Jr., and admired his wartime self-sacrifice even as I wept over it. Jack and Bobby had been godlike figures to me and my sisters. Now Jack was about to be installed as a world leader, and Bobby had already earned national recognition. . . . I was ready to step into the public arena alongside these men who were my father and brothers. To be of use. And to catch up.
Joan could hardly compete with the lifelong aspirations embedded into a man who, at heart, was in many ways still a boy wanting to please his father. “Ted was the obvious choice [for the Senate seat]” Joan recalled, “so all thoughts of private practice were put on hold—permanently, as it turned out.”
As soon as Ted decided to run, their lives seemed to hurtle down this new course. Ted, now twenty-eight years old, felt too green for the seat, so he asked Jack for a role in the administration, padding his resume until the 1962 elections. Cold War tensions were at their highest and Ted claimed he was “passionately . . . interested in arms control.” But Jack shrugged off the suggestion, telling Ted he’d do more good working his tail off in Massachusetts. But first—the president announced as though a light bulb went off in his head—Ted should go to Africa.
“Yes. Go [to Africa] and see what’s going on over there. That’s a continent that’s going to be enormously important,” Jack said. “There are all kinds of things happening down in the Congo. This Tshombe’s on the loose. And there’s this East-West struggle going on in these countries. The Belgian Congo has just obtained its independence from Belgium.” Ted remembered stammering a response. There was no time to put together such a trip! But the president had his ways. After making a few phone calls, he found that a group of senators had just two days earlier gone on a fact-finding tour of West Africa. If Ted left that night, he could catch up with them. So just like that, Ted packed his bags and left his wife and daughter for a four-week trip, on the advice of his brother, meant to shore up his credentials.
Within a week, Joan was house hunting in Boston alone so that she, Ted, and Kara could move there, as the president had suggested. Joan found the family a small apartment on a top floor in Louisburg Square on Beacon Hill, in one of the city’s most elite neighborhoods. It was a gorgeous brick building, built in the 1830s, which had served as home to such famous names as William Dean Howells, the former editor of the Atlantic, and Little Women author Louisa May Alcott. The private square was historically significant to the Kennedys, too: Decades earlier, citizens of Irish descent had protested Ted’s grandfather for appointing an Italian American to a post. The mob had shouted, “Remember your own, Honey Fitz. Remember your own!”
Joan, who soon learned she was pregnant with her second child, settled back in Boston and began readying for the race. “This time, we were on our own,” Joan said. “Everybody else was down in Washington running the country, so Ted and I started the grassroots round ourselves.”
“We went to every little town in Massachusetts. We would go together or we would go separately,” Joan said. Ted would hit the big cities, and Joan would go to the smaller towns. “If Ted was in Boston, then I tried to be in Springfield. I met with women’s groups and went to many small towns my husband couldn’t get to. I used to be at three coffees and three teas in one day.” Ted seemed pleased with his popular wife, whose looks were so fetching that the president had nicknamed her “The Dish.” Ted told her once that “everyone is curious about what the sister-in-law of the President looks like and what she wears.” About the campaign events, he would proudly announce, “Joansie, you got a crowd.”
“It was just a bunch of us kids,” she later recalled. “We felt it was us against the world.”
Joan’s long legs and enticing smile proved useful as always, but so did her piano playing. She and Ted would gather with voters for the typical candidate events—morning coffees, afternoon teas, often attended by one ethnicity at a time—and after the hand shaking and back patting, Ted would give a little pep talk, and Joan would take her place at the piano. “I’d get the hostess to tell me what her favorite songs were . . .they often turned out to be some of those show tunes that came in handy at parties when I was a teenager—and, if I was lucky, everyone would sing along.”
Sometimes the crowds were not so adoring, and the ugly side of political life surfaced. Joan, optimistic and trusting to a fault, had to steel herself with her husband now in the public eye. She had of course witnessed Nixon’s attacks on her brother-in-law during the presidential campaign, but those lobbed at her husband were just as harsh and hit closer to home. Ted was mostly attacked for his inexperience, as highlighted in particularly vicious language by McCormack during one of two televised debates between the candidates. McCormack said: “I say we need a senator with a conscience, not connections. We need a senator with experience, not arrogance. The office of a United States senator should be merited and not inherited.” Joan admitted the insults stung. “Yes, I minded . . . but I tried not to let it upset me, and I tried not to let it show,” she said. Getting upset and losing her composure would have put her out of step with the family, so she adopted the same approach that had worked for Rose and Jackie: She ignored the lobs, held her tongue, smiled, and said only the most genteel and quotable things. Sometimes, she would wash those quotes down with a drink.
With one brother-in-law in the Oval Office, another in the cabinet, and her husband vying for the Senate, Joan increasingly found herself the focus of newspaper stories. Invariably focusing first on her looks, the articles usually included staged and smiling photographs of the young mother with her family, which now included a second child, Edward Jr. Her words were always upbeat, and her interests summed up in good-little-girl sound bites. When a photograph was included of her and Ted together, she often was smiling at him in clearly visible, utter adoration. One AP profile of Joan circulated to newspapers nationwide highlighted several interests that Joan adopted to be closer to Ted: politics, of course, and skiing, and going for long walks outdoors. The article focused on the many hobbies Joan could return to once the election was over: visiting her sister in Texas, scrapbooking, and preparing for Thanksgiving. They were the safe and predictable activities expected of a wholesome, all-American, stand-by-your-man kind of wife.
But Joan’s contributions to the campaign were in reality more substantive than that. Each night she’d do her “homework,” as she called it, and learned more about local and national politics than she ever thought she could stomach. She rounded up delegates to the Democratic State Convention, and, after a few trial runs alongside Ted, began accepting invitations to speak on her own in public. In fall of 1962, she spoke to a meeting of women at Ohabei Shalom Temple in Brookline with the wives of Ted’s rivals. “All the way to Brookline, I practiced saying the name of the temple,” Joan told a reporter soon after. “Then at the last minute, I lost my nerve. I skipped the name. I was afraid I’d mispronounce it.”
Joan didn’t see much of her husband that summer—in mid-July 1961, he left for a month to tour several Latin American countries—but he was home in time for the birth of their first son, Edward Moore Kennedy Jr., in September. Joan told the magazine Redbook that she tried to set limits on Ted’s time away. She admitted that she didn’t see her husband until eleven o’clock most nights but that they put Saturday aside as a day for each other.
If Joan had any misgivings about the part she was to play, she certainly didn’t share them with the press.
“My role, as I see it, is to be ready to go anywhere and to accommodate myself to Ted’s schedule,” she once said, as though relinquishing her personal interests and individuality weren’t a surefire way to slowly erode her young marriage. “It’s not a difficult role, frankly, because I learned to love campaigning in 1960. I think I’ve learned a lot about the country, and about politics too.” To another reporter, her words rang equally hollow: “Really, I’m quite fortunate. Most women have no opportunity to learn about their husband’s working lives. But when you’re in public life, it’s not a 9 to 5 job. You bring it home with you.”
And in November 1962, Ted brought home a victory.