“The Beginning of the End”
After Chappaquiddick, Ted and Joan’s already-rocky union gradually fell apart. “We remained together for many years longer than we were happy, but I don’t think either of us seriously considered a divorce for most of those years,” Ted would later write. “So many other things were going on in our lives, so many difficulties, so many tragedies, that breaking up our marriage just wasn’t on the agenda. The reasons were many: our children, our faith, my career, and perhaps fear of change.”
Joan considered Chappaquiddick “the beginning of the end for Ted and me.” She could no longer ignore the rumors of womanizing. She was tired of playing the part of the dutiful senator’s wife. Still, she remained in the role, even as the distance between her and Ted became insurmountable. “I believe everything Ted said [about Chappaquiddick],” she told one reporter in June 1970. She called her husband “brave” for diving after Kopechne. “I’m lucky he came out of it alive at all,” she added. The union was dead, but breaking free of a Kennedy marriage was unthinkable—it hadn’t been done before—and Joan probably found it difficult to imagine being a pioneer in that regard. There was so much to lose in leaving Ted, and little reason for Joan to think that the decision would be received with gentleness and understanding by the rest of the clan.
In addition to taking refuge in the bottle, Joan drew some comfort from her music. She started performing in more prestigious venues, such as when she appeared with the Philadelphia Orchestra—a fund-raising benefit for the governor of Pennsylvania, who also happened to play violin. Joan later recalled the audience response as “electric.” The performance’s success opened new doors for Joan outside of her role as politician’s wife and Kennedy; she was hounded by television networks to “repeat the performance on any prime-time spot she chooses.” She’d already carved a niche for herself in narration, starting with Peter and the Wolf, and now she was being recognized as a talented pianist as well. Her performances gave her focus, and she’d refrain from drinking while rehearsing for them. “It took a lot out of me,” she later admitted.
During this period, she attempted a few affairs but found she wasn’t as skilled at romantic liaisons as was her husband. She was terribly unhappy, seeking psychiatric help as she tried to begin acknowledging and treating her drinking problem, but nothing worked. Sometimes she’d leave the children with nannies and disappear for a few days, eventually to be fetched by a friend of the family.
“My mom struggled mightily with mental illness and alcoholism,” her son Patrick said. “She, like the rest of my family, was enormously impacted by the violent murders of my uncles and the ensuing emotional impact of that trauma. No one knew what post-traumatic stress disorder was when we were growing up. She unfortunately also had mental illness running in her family, and both the biological predisposition and the environmental triggers pushed her into that illness in a very big way.
“I know she didn’t choose to suffer in the way that she suffered,” he continued. “This disease was something that took over. Because it’s so stigmatized and discriminated against, she never got the kind of early active intervention and support that frankly still aren’t available to many people.”
As the 1972 presidential race neared, the media began their quadrennial speculation about Ted’s possible candidacy. As in 1968, Ted was feeling a push from party leaders to consider a run, but Joan denied reports that the “Kennedy family” was pressuring him into the race. “What family?” she asked a reporter in a rare and bold moment of candor. “What’s left of the Kennedys? Besides Ted—only women and children. You don’t seriously think we want Ted to be President, do you? I never wanted Ted to be President. Never.” Ted ultimately decided against it in 1972, saying that the timing felt off. Joan was too unstable, for starters, and the fear of assassination felt all too real. He was not interested in “subjecting my family to fears over my safety . . .” Kennedy told Look magazine. He added, “I feel in my gut that it’s the wrong time, that it’s too early.”
It proved the right call. In late 1973 Joan and Ted got news that would level most parents: Teddy Jr. had cancer. The twelve-year-old had been home sick from school with Ted while Joan was off in Europe. As the youngster walked around the house in a bathrobe, Ted noticed a red lump below his right kneecap. “He grudgingly admitted that it hurt a little—which meant, in Kennedy lexicon, that it hurt a lot,” Ted later recalled. The concerned father summoned a doctor, and Teddy Jr. was soon diagnosed with bone cancer. He’d have to have his right leg amputated above the knee. Joan flew home to be at her son’s side.
While such a tragedy might unite other parents, at least temporarily, Teddy’s illness served as a reminder of how much Ted and Joan had grown apart. They had opposite philosophies on how he should be parented during his treatment and recovery.
Joan explained:
Ted would bring in the whole front line of the Washington Redskins and they would slap little Teddy on the shoulders and say, “Tough guy, you’re going to do fine.” And in the afternoon Ted would parade all these dignitaries and nurses and this stream of people through the room to meet little Teddy. Ted really believed that we can’t let the kid have one moment to himself to rest. He should be kept entertained. And this went on until finally about five or six days later little Ted said, “I’m so tired but I can’t tell Dad.” And so I had to do it.
Ted, reared in Joe’s exuberant but unforgiving household, did not appreciate being told to stand down. “Ted got mad at me,” Joan said, “and said I was no fun, that I didn’t want my son to have a good time. I had to take it. I guarded the door and I was the traffic cop.”
With the Kennedy family’s vast resources in his corner, Teddy recovered from the illness. By the time he did, his parents were living apart. Joan had been treated in private sanitariums at least three times, and had been fined for drunken driving after crashing into a car near her McLean, Virginia, home. Each time she stole away for treatment, the press seemed ready to remind her that she wouldn’t be recovering in private as headlines reported her most mundane activities like attending or not attending social occasions. As Ted briefly pondered a 1976 run for President, word spread that Joan wouldn’t campaign for him with the same vigor she’d done in the past. The couple “has reached an agreement that permits her to lead a life of her own and pursue her own interests,” wrote reporter Maxine Cheshire, whose byline appeared over dozens of Joan-related stories over the years. Ultimately, Ted decided against running for the same reasons he’d cited in 1972—he had to focus on his family.
In April 1976, Joan’s mother, Ginny, was found dead in her apartment in Cocoa Beach, Florida. Joan said she’d died of alcoholism, and it was a wake-up call. “I couldn’t help her,” she told Chellis. “But I knew I had to do something for my own survival.” And so she made a break from her marriage and the life she felt was driving her to drink. She moved from the home she shared with Ted in McLean to a condominium on Beacon Street in Boston. The children would stay with Ted, except for weekend visits from Patrick. This was Joan’s chance to walk away from the pressures of being a political wife and to focus on herself.
“I’d been told that an alcoholic by nature starts to blame everything and everybody except himself,” she said. “And that’s when I knew that I had to get away from there and have some time for myself.” She moved into the seven-room condo, walking distance from a bustling stretch of stores, restaurants, and subway stops, and began life on her own for the first time—though her money and her privileges still came from the Kennedys. Joan’s looks still made print, though not always in the way they had during her radiant youth. As Time magazine wrote, “public life has not been kind to Joan Kennedy. Its wounds can be seen in the puffy eyes, the exaggerated makeup, the tales of alcoholism.” Her sobriety yo-yo’d, her ups and downs chronicled every year or so in McCall’s or Look or People magazines. Sometimes the public admissions of her disease fueled her shame and drove her back to drink. It seemed she couldn’t handle the applause for her stints of publicized sobriety. She relapsed badly a few days after a 1978 McCall’s story, for example, then regrouped and conquered the bottle again—albeit temporarily.
But as 1980 neared, Joan seemed ready at long last to be by Ted’s side for a presidential run. It was unusual for a fractured couple to be campaigning to become the nation’s first couple, but their separation had long been publicized. Some of Ted’s handlers argued that Joan shouldn’t campaign, with one labeling her a loose canon. But her absence would have spoken even louder. “If Joan did not campaign,” Chellis wrote, “all the ghosts of Ted’s past might rise up to haunt him: a failed marriage, an alcoholic wife, repeated infidelities, Chappaquiddick. But if she did, voters could assume that she and Ted had reconciled and that if Joan could forgive him, so could they.” And Joan, an experienced campaigner with more than a little of her own pride invested in Ted’s political success, wanted to campaign; it was a chance to refute the image of her as a hopeless drunk, a chance to prove herself once again as invaluable. It was a chance to prove her mettle to Ted, to the nation, and to herself.
She kept up with the grueling pace and stayed strong for her children, who lived in “torture and torment” as the campaign “raised the dual specters of assassination and the 1969 drowning death of Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick.” She even had her own platform: She announced she’d commit herself to women’s equality. This was buoyed by her return to education, as she was on track to receive a Master’s in Education from Lesley College the next year.
Ultimately, Ted’s personal missteps were too great to convince voters to pick him over Jimmy Carter, and the campaign to oust the sitting president failed. Ted would never again seek the highest office. After reuniting for the campaign, Joan and Ted finally announced plans to call it quits in 1981 after twenty-three years of marriage. For Joan, it was a chance to reinvent herself again. “I’m learning what it is like for a woman to be living alone and handling all her affairs by herself,” she said in an interview. “A lot of women out there can identify with the fact I’m learning about money, I’m learning how to wield a vacuum and how to put the garbage out and how to cook, and how to go to the supermarket.
“I’ve never been doing better in my entire life.”