“Nobody, Nothing”
Though Joan had triumphed on the campaign trail, Ted remained the always-roving husband. After Jack’s death and Ted’s brush with his own, his wandering eye became ever more blatant. Joan managed for a long time to plant herself firmly in a state of denial, but the rumors were chipping away at her confidence and sobriety; by the middle of the decade, her footing there was slipping. Not that you could tell by her public appearances: She stayed as busy as ever after the 1964 election, visiting schools for mentally challenged children—the Kennedy family’s major charity—and touring hospitals to cheer up soldiers wounded in Vietnam. When Ted buried the hatchet with Ed McCormack—the Senate opponent whose line about how the office “should be merited, not inherited” stung in 1964—Joan provided the musical accompaniment for McCormack’s bid for governor. And she was by her husband’s side when the John F. Kennedy Federal Building was dedicated in Boston during a solemn ceremony led by Bobby.
In late 1966, she learned she was pregnant again, and this time, she limited her traveling in hopes of avoiding the miscarriages that ended her previous two pregnancies. Well into her third trimester, she had another scare: She, her husband, and their two children were aboard the Kennedy family’s New Frontier aircraft, the Caroline, when an engine died on takeoff and the pilot was forced to make an emergency landing. “The timing was ironic,” a news report declared. “The senator was flying back hurriedly from the Midwest because of a fatal air crash. Ethel Kennedy’s brother had just been killed, along with one of the closest clan cronies, Dean Markham.” After the landing, Joan caught a commercial flight back to Boston and visited her obstetrician, who said she was fine. Just days later, on July 14, 1967, Joan gave birth to Patrick, her third child. He was baptized by Cardinal Cushing and made his newspaper debut, as most Kennedys did, in the Boston Globe.
Joan immersed herself in the role of the glamorous senator’s wife so deeply that it became her primary identity, subsuming the woman she’d been before she met him. When she was needed, she filled the role precisely. But being Ted Kennedy’s wife meant that a lot of typical needs in life were met, whether you wanted them to be or not. “The house was always full of cooks, baby nurses and staff,” she once said. “I felt extra, no good. When I said I didn’t want a baby nurse, we had a baby nurse. Everything was done and taken care of and I didn’t do it. I was nobody, nothing, not needed.”
Behind the scenes, Joan wrestled with Teddy’s cheating and reached out to Jackie for advice. “He thinks you’re a wonderful wife,” said Jackie, who had become closer to Ted since Jack’s death. “And you’re smart and you’re talented and you’re a wonderful mother. His mother and father adore you, and the whole family loves you. You’re just the perfect wife. But he just has this addiction.” Jackie had come to accept this “addiction” in Jack. Joan was far more vulnerable. She began turning to the bottle more and more, and the distance between her and her husband steadily grew. The more women Ted entertained, the more she began to question herself. Joan confided:
When one grows up feeling that maybe one is sort of special and hoping that one’s husband thinks so, and then suddenly thinking that maybe he doesn’t, well, I didn’t lose my self-esteem altogether, but it was difficult to hear all the rumors. And I began thinking, well, maybe I’m just not attractive enough or attractive anymore, or whatever, and it was awfully easy to then say, well, after all, if that’s the way it is, I might as well have a drink.
Joan could hardly expect consolation or understanding from Rose, whose own husband’s dalliances included well-known affairs with multiple women. In the mid-1960s, after a magazine had reported that Ted was having an affair with a married woman, Rose approached Joan at Palm Beach. “My dear,” Rose said, “You can’t believe any of these things you are reading. Women chase after politicians.” For Rose, to acknowledge and name a thing was to give it power. Her psychological constitution couldn’t have differed more sharply from Joan’s.
Joan tried to convince herself that the womanizing didn’t matter. If Ted strayed, he always came home, after all, and it isn’t as though she was the only Kennedy wife to have to deal with an unfaithful husband. “I tried telling myself it didn’t matter,” she said, “but I couldn’t help wondering who might be with him. What hurt most was finding out about someone I knew.”
As Joan’s self-esteem shrank, so did her skirts. “The only thing I was sure of at that time was that I was a very attractive woman and I had a good figure,” Joan later said. Of course she knew: She’d always made news with her looks first—“radiant” was a common description from reporters—but when she started wearing minidresses to formal White House gatherings, the tone changed. “Joan Kennedy wore a glittering silver, six-inches-above-the-knee mini-dress to a White House reception for members of Congress and their spouses last night, where long gowns were informally prescribed. She was the talk of the party,” began one United Press International story. “ ‘It hardly covers the subject,’ quipped one senator as he watched the attractive, blonde wife of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy go down the receiving line in the Blue Room in the White House.”
In 1968 she again was on the campaign trail—this time for Bobby, who was taking his own run at the presidency. Though Ted wasn’t immediately in favor of Bobby running—he worried that his brother would fail to take down a sitting president and divide the party, not to mention hurt Bobby’s chances in 1972—the family threw their full might behind him as soon as he’d made his decision. Ethel was pregnant with their eleventh child, so when she wasn’t traveling, Joan would be “substitute consort.” Bobby’s theme was Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” so whenever a piano was nearby, Joan ably played it for the crowd.
On June 4, 1968, the music stopped. Just minutes after Bobby won the California primary, virtually assuring him the party’s nomination, he was gunned down in Los Angeles. Ted had been out campaigning for him that night about four hundred miles away in San Francisco and was one of many nationwide who learned of the shooting from a live newscast of the primary. Ted maneuvered a flight to Los Angeles, and when Bobby’s spokesman Frank Mankiewicz spotted him in the hospital, he saw a broken man. “I have never, ever, nor do I expect ever, to see a face in more grief,” Mankiewicz later recalled. “It was beyond grief and agony.”
When word reached Joan, she again withered. She stood with the family for Bobby’s funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, and she was aboard the train that carried his body back to Washington—the route of which was flanked by millions of mourners waving flags in an outpouring of shared grief. But Joan was too devastated to attend the burial at Arlington, Chellis wrote. “She disappeared, and no one knew where she had gone.”
After another brother died young, political watchers immediately saw the change in Ted. As the months passed after Bobby’s death, he seemed to age in years. Reporter Jeremiah V. Murphy wrote of Ted’s August visit to the Holy Cross college campus: “He looked slightly heavier, his hair was cut a little longer, and there were lines around his eyes that were not there before June 5.” Continued Murphy:
Gone, perhaps forever, is the Teddy Kennedy with the quick smile, the funny quips about “Bobby.” Gone is the Ted Kennedy who in the company of close friends would imitate the speech-making of the late James Michael Curley. He has been replaced by an older Ted Kennedy, taller and bigger through the shoulders than both his brothers. He is still handsome, but there is tragedy in his eyes.
This new, darker Ted spent a lot of time at sea and with his mistresses, while Joan spent more and more time drinking. “It wasn’t my personality to make a lot of noise, or to yell or scream or do anything,” Joan told Chellis. “My personality was more shy and retiring. And so rather than get mad, or ask questions concerning the rumors about Ted and his girl friends, or really stand up for myself at all, it was easier for me to just go and have a few drinks and calm myself down as if I weren’t hurt or angry. I didn’t know how to deal with it. And unfortunately, I found out that alcohol could sedate me. So I didn’t care as much. And things didn’t hurt so much.”
Neither Joan nor Ted slowed their public appearances in the wake of Bobby’s death. Within months, Joan had announced that she’d be campaigning for a Kennedy family friend, US Representative Edward Boland. The Boston Globe reported that she was greeted by “a flurry of awed whispers—‘She is pretty! She is pretty!’ ” Not two weeks later, Joan announced she’d campaign for Bayh, too. Whatever grief she felt, she didn’t share it with reporters—not that they didn’t prod. One reporter asked, “What will your husband be doing now? The whole world is waiting to know.” And another: “Won’t it be a strain now that the spotlight has shifted onto Ted?” Joan provided vague non-answers to both.
She drank to cope, to numb, to lessen the heartache and the loneliness. “I drank socially at first, and then I began to drink alcoholically,” she later said,
But at the time I didn’t know it. No one really ever does know. I mean, sure, once in a while you have too much to drink and you wake up the next morning and you have a hangover and you think, Oh, I’m not going to do that again. And you say something like that and then a week or two goes by and nothing happens, and then you go and you drink too much again. It becomes a pattern that starts to creep up on you.
Joan wasn’t a daily drinker but a binge drinker, staying sober for spells and then diving headfirst into days of uncontrolled drunkenness. The family knew she had a problem but considered drinking a personal vice, a weakness, something that she should buck up and take control of. “I tried to talk about it, but I was embarrassed and Ted was embarrassed about it,” she said. “Everybody was embarrassed, but nobody would really talk about it.”
Still, the couple muddled through, and in spring 1969, Joan finally got welcome news: She was pregnant again. She again planned to take it easy, as she’d done with her third pregnancy, to lessen the risk of miscarriage. She stayed at the couple’s Cape house and curtailed her traveling. Now that election season was over, she focused again on her children—Kara, now nine, Teddy Jr., seven, and Patrick, eighteen months. She seemed to bristle when reporters asked about Ted’s prospects for a presidential run. “It’s too early to predict anything about anyone,” she told one reporter. “I can’t say I’d urge him to run. . . . Anyway, it’s his decision, not mine.” It seemed clear that the next few years of Joan’s life would be consumed by the new baby and her husband’s potential presidential bid.
In a few short months, Ted would make a tragic decision that would forever alter the family’s future.