The Supportive Wife
As elated as Ted and Joan were with the political win, a cloud had settled over the family. Less than three months after the birth of Edward Jr.—nicknamed Teddy—Joe Sr. had his stroke. This was particularly hard on Ted, who, as the baby of the family, had a special bond with his demanding father. It was Ted who located a vascular specialist in Boston and flew him down to Florida to diagnose the elder Kennedy with the brain hemorrhage that stole Joe’s speech.
“My father’s illness hit me very hard,” Ted later wrote. “He had been so strong, so vital, so important in all our lives. And finally, for the first time in my life, the two of us had been together as men, sharing a common purpose. Now that aspect of our relationship was lost to me. It was almost more than I could bear.”
In true Kennedy fashion, however, the family didn’t dwell on the tragedy or reflect on it much publicly. Joan, ever the optimist, put on a happy face for the media and dutifully played the role of supportive wife. And just as her husband was forever compared to his brothers, Joan would forever be weighed against her iconic sisters-in-law. One newspaper article began: “In Boston, Mrs. Kennedy isn’t Jacqueline. She’s Joan, the tall, very pretty blonde girl who’s married to the President’s youngest brother.” The writer added, “We went to talk to Joan Kennedy about clothes because we had heard that she’s as elegant as the First Lady.”
Ted was enormously popular for a freshman senator, especially one so young. His name obviously helped, but it was more than that. He was affable and charismatic. His broad smile and shoulders, along with the genetic Kennedy good looks, didn’t hurt, either. By fall 1963, his Senate office received five thousand letters a week—“an immense mail for a freshman Senator from a state this size,” according to the Boston Globe. Ted had been slightly bruised by the battering he took during the election for being the president’s brother, so post-election he avoided public appearances with either Jack or Bobby in Washington. As one Boston Globe columnist wrote: “He is diligently working to belong, to lighten the presidential shadow beside him and to build a record of his own.”
In those early stories, Joan was unfailingly upbeat about every aspect of her woman-behind-the-man position. Ruth Finney, a writer with the New York World-Telegram and Sun, captured it perfectly in the top of a 1962 story written just after Ted’s election:
She’s going to be the youngest Senate wife in the history of that august body, but for 26-year-old Mrs. Edward M. Kennedy, the prospect holds no terrors.
She’s already managed—in the five years since she met Ted Kennedy—to make the transition from non-political, non-athletic debutante and music major to a fully participating member of the country’s most game-loving, hard-driving political family. She’s sure one more change will be no problem.
Senate debates?
“You’ll find me right there in the gallery looking on. I want to find out about everything.”
Constituents to be shown around town?
“That way I’ll get to do some sight-seeing, too!”
Sewing for the Red Cross with other Senate wives every Tuesday?
“It sounds fine.”
Behind the scenes, the veneer on her seemingly perfect life was starting to chip. Ted was growing more distant, and the always-present rumors about his female companions were steadily growing. In the spring of 1963, Joan, five months pregnant, miscarried for the first time. It had been her third pregnancy, and unlike the first two, she was under far more public scrutiny now that her husband was a senator. The Boston Globe carried a short story with the headline: “Joan Kennedy Loses Baby; She’s All Right.” Even in the seven-paragraph article, Joan couldn’t escape comparisons with her sisters-in-law. The final paragraph referenced Ethel and Jackie’s current pregnancies and their respective due dates, almost as if the press were keeping score. A year later, Joan lost another pregnancy, this time in her fourth month. The personal tragedy again became headline fodder for her hometown paper. The baby’s remains were flown from Washington to Boston and interred by Cardinal Richard Cushing, Archbishop of Boston, in the Kennedy family plot at Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline.
For Joan, the miscarriages were especially heartbreaking; besides the obvious personal loss, she knew they disappointed her husband. He’d been vocal about his plans for a large family like his own and his brother Bobby’s, and Joan couldn’t deliver. “We’ve been married four years and Ted can’t understand why we don’t have four children,” she once said.
“It was discouraging and depressing for Joan not to be able to see her way through her pregnancies like Ethel did,” Nurse Hennessey said. “Joan felt she wasn’t as healthy as the others because she was unable to carry to full term. The problem lay in a hormonal deficiency, but there was no impairment whatever of physical health.”
Each baby lost served as tragic reinforcement of Joan’s darkest insecurities. She simply couldn’t fulfill the procreative demands made of a Kennedy wife.
That summer at Hyannis Port, Joan detached from the Kennedy clan and spent more time on adjacent Squaw Island, where she and Ted had an oceanfront home. The island took its name from a squaw buried in an unmarked grave at its highest point, and most who summered there were folks of old money looking for some peace and quiet in its secluded embrace. The house had been rejected by Jackie and Jean, Ted’s sister, as being too small, but Joan loved the gray-shingled, four-bedroom home. It stood alone on a high bluff and boasted a view of Nantucket Sound from every window. “Teddy’s away so much, he told me to decorate it any way I want to,” Joan told a reporter at the time. So she got to work: She carpeted the living room in vivid blue, which, set against the warm white walls and ceiling, lent a nautical feel to the space. The huge master bedroom upstairs was decorated with pink carpet and a white velvet chaise, and throughout the house were early American antiques that Joan adored.
Joan had always been closest with Jackie of all the Kennedy wives. The two shared a deep love for the arts, and, unlike the rest of the family, they preferred sneaking away when the touch-football competitions began. Joan said: “Jackie would say, ‘They have no idea what we do when we’re alone. I know you go over to Squaw Island by yourself and play the piano and I go off alone and paint, and they think we’re weird because we’re alone. They can’t stand to be alone.’ ” Having found a like-minded introvert among a clan of rowdy competitors, Joan treasured the camaraderie. “In the summers, everybody else in the family would do everything together from morning to night—the touch football, the sailing, the tennis, the waterskiing—all day long they’d play together en masse. [Jackie] was wonderful, she made me feel like it was OK to be myself.”
The two would steal away together, a Secret Service man in tow. Joan remembered getting one agent to drive Jackie’s speedboat so the two wives could water ski. “She was very very good, and she would go again,” Joan reported. “Then the two of us were dropped off a mile away from the harbor and we swam in together. We did this the whole time she was first lady, and almost nobody knew about it.”
Soon, everything would change in a way that neither Joan nor the rest of the family could have possibly fathomed. As the summer of 1963 gave way to fall, Ted and Joan were readying to settle into a new, bigger house on 31 Street Northwest. That November, they were coming up on their fifth wedding anniversary, and Joan had planned a special celebratory dinner to mark the event on November 22, a week before the actual anniversary. That morning she was still polishing off her to-do list before heading to Elizabeth Arden’s to have her hair styled for the big night. She was there when Jack climbed into the presidential limousine in Dallas, Texas.
Ted was sleepily presiding over the Senate chambers that afternoon. Later, he recalled it’d been a dull day with a routine debate about federal aid to public libraries. At about 1:40 p.m., he heard a shout from the lobby. It had come from someone who’d stopped to read an Associated Press teletype machine. Ted was summoned over, and he watched as the machine clapped out a bulletin: “My first overwhelming sense was disbelief,” Ted would later write. “How could it be true? And then horror, as I stood there listening to the tick, tick, tick of the teletype machine. I couldn’t hear anything or anyone else. Gradually, I became aware of the voices around me. I heard someone say the president was dead.” His thoughts quickly turned to Joan, his sensitive and still-sheltered wife. “She adored Jack. She would be devastated by the news. I asked Milt Gwitzman, my Harvard classmate and an adviser to Jack, to drive me to our Georgtown house. My old Texan friend Claude Hooton, in town to join weekend festivities, rode with us as we sped through traffic lights. . . . We located Joan at her hairdresser getting ready for a weekend with our friends.” Ted knew the loss would shatter Joan, but after ensuring she didn’t get the news from a stranger or the media, he had White House staffers call her to say he wouldn’t be home at all that night. He and his sister Eunice were flying to Hyannis Port to be with their parents.
Candy McMurray, Joan’s sister, arrived at Washington National for the party. She called Joan and suggested that she and her husband take the next flight back home to Texas. She assumed Joan would be mired in family responsibilities, but that wasn’t the case. Joan was left behind in Washington, her jovial dinner plans shattered. She begged Candy to stay, so the McMurrays took an airport cab to Georgetown, where Joan was in bed, prostrate.
That night, caterers arrived as scheduled with food and drink for the anniversary party. Joan had canceled the event, of course, but the caterers had been booked and paid long before. Ultimately, Joan was grateful: The anniversary feast fed mourners, instead. “People kept drifting in all evening long,” she recalled to a reporter in 1970. “We were the closest Kennedys to Washington, with Bobby and Ethel in McLean and the Shrivers in Maryland. Our friends wanted to comfort us and be comforted. I didn’t feel as though I could shut myself upstairs in my room and cry.” Joan spent the day after the assassination at home, unlike the other Kennedy mothers. As the late historian William Manchester wrote in his 1966 book The Death of a President, “Joan found the mere contemplation of violence crippling.” She had rarely before faced heartbreak, and to have a family member gunned down, stolen from his wife, his children, the whole country, was too much for kindhearted Joan to bear.
The Kennedys weren’t ones to be crippled, however. Life moved on, and Ted swallowed his grief. Joan began to drink hers. Ted didn’t seem to notice much at first. He immersed himself in work, the long hours keeping him away from home more than ever. “In the end, the best way to honor Jack’s memory was to take up his unfinished work,” Ted decided. That meant forging ahead with his 1964 campaign to win his first full term in the Senate.
On June 19, 1964, seven months after his brother’s death, Ted boarded a plane in Washington headed to the Democratic State Convention at West Springfield, Massachusetts, where he was to be re-nominated by acclamation for senator. He’d planned to leave earlier in the day, when the weather was clearer, but he was delayed by a Senate vote on civil rights—a groundbreaking anti-discrimination vote on a bill that had prompted the longest continuous debate in Senate history. There were four other occupants on the tardy plane: the pilot, Edwin Zimny, Kennedy aide Edward Moss, US Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, and his wife, Marvella. Just fifteen miles from its destination, the plane crashed into an apple orchard, its low branches acting “as a knife, slicing open the front of the plane,” Ted would recall. “The impact hurled my corkscrewed body forward into the cockpit, directly between the pilot and my friend Ed Moss.”
Senator Bayh and his wife pulled themselves out of the wreckage with only cuts, but the pilot was killed on impact. Moss was unresponsive in the cockpit, where he’d been fatally injured. “I tried to get some response from the others in the plane and I could not raise anyone,” Senator Bayh told a reporter soon after the wreck. “Ted was crumpled up on the floor. I got out thinking I could get help for him. My wife and I decided to take one more try. I called his name and he answered. I reached my hand through the opening and he grabbed it.”
Ted was badly hurt—his back was broken and a lung punctured, and, as he tried to escape the plane for fear the scent of gasoline was forewarning an explosion, he discovered his legs weren’t working. The Bayhs courageously helped pull him from the wreckage, leaving him covered with a raincoat in the apple orchard as they rushed, barefoot, to the nearest road to flag down a passing car for help. “Nine cars passed them before one finally stopped,” Ted wrote. “A man named Robert Schauer picked up the Bayhs and drove them to his home, where they called for help. Schauer lent them blankets and pillows and returned them to the crash site. Police and an ambulance finally arrived about an hour and a half after Birch had pulled me from the plane.”
Joan, who had suffered her second miscarriage not four weeks earlier, was already at the convention when word spread about the crash. She was sped to Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton with Governor Endicott Peabody at her side. When she arrived, reporters were already there, shouting out questions. She replied automatically, armed not with facts or doctors’ prognoses, but with little more than hope. “He’s going to be fine. He’s going to be fine,” repeated Joan, hurrying past the crowd with stoic determination. When she reached his room, Ted managed a weak, “Hi, Joansie. Don’t worry.”
Initially news reports actually downplayed Ted’s injuries, seemingly relying on hospital spokesmen who perhaps had been coached. “Kennedy’s injuries were not serious. He was semiconscious when brought in. . . . The injuries appeared to be cuts and bruises,” the Boston Globe reported. In reality, Ted’s condition was dire. “My life hung in the balance for a while,” he recalled. Several ribs were broken, and Ted underwent transfusions to replace lost blood. Doctors had suctioned away water and air from his chest to keep him from suffocating. In the end, his youth, size, and fitness all worked in his favor, and Ted was given a choice on how to address his badly broken back: He could either have immediate surgery or he could stay in bed, immobilized, for some six months to let the vertebrae attempt to heal on their own. Joe Sr., unable to walk or talk on his own because of his stroke, still managed to make the trip to be at Ted’s hospital bed, where he made his preference known: “Whipping his head from side to side, he shouted out, ‘Naaaa, naaaa, naaaa!’ ” Ted recalled. “I understood that Dad was recalling the back operation on Jack that had left him in permanent pain (and no doubt thinking of Rosemary as well). I made a decision that not only honored his wishes, but mine also: I would take the more conservative option of allowing the broken bones and vertebrae to heal naturally.” It’s remarkable that, even as an adult—a married man and father—Ted still deferred to his ailing father, even in matters of his own health.
Dropping out of the Senate race wasn’t an option, so Joan was tapped to do what’s expected of Kennedy wives in such a crisis: She was to campaign on Ted’s behalf. She would stand in for her injured husband. It would be her finest hour.