New Kind of Kennedy
As Vicki’s life intertwined with Ted’s, she became a new kind of Kennedy wife. She was his sounding board on the issues, and he respected her opinion and her input. Finally, being married to a Kennedy man wasn’t about just propping up his values and ambitions, but about joining forces and tackling matters as a team. “I was involved in every issue that mattered in the life of our country,” Vicki later recalled. “And I was lucky enough to be involved in those issues with the love of my life.” Ted even respected Vicki enough to float the idea of her someday becoming a senator—a suggestion she quickly dismissed.
Their life together made fewer headlines than Ted’s life with Joan had. Surely, Ted’s abdication of the pursuit of the presidency helped, as did Vicki’s reluctance to talk to most reporters. They still occasionally made a Splash together—Splash being the Portuguese water dog that the couple adopted and that would soon become a fixture on Capitol Hill by Ted’s side. Ted and Vicki in 2006 wrote a children’s book from Splash’s point of view called My Senator and Me: A Dog’s-Eye View of Washington, D.C. And their names were frequently listed among other hobnobbers at galas and musical performances and other tie-requiring shindigs. Every year they threw theme parties for family and friends, at which Ted and Vicki would don costumes. At Ted’s sixty-fifth birthday party, the theme was “the ocean.” Ted dressed as Ponce de Leon, and Vicki as the fountain of youth, a playfully self-aware reference to their age difference. At another party—for his staff at Christmas—Vicki dressed as Anastasia to Ted’s Rasputin.
Vicki had a profoundly positive impact on Ted, far beyond merely repairing his reputation. After hearing him warbling at a holiday party one year, Vicki gave him voice lessons as a Christmas present. The result was a deep bass so surprising that radio talk-show host Upton Bell said he worried that playing it might cause people to drive off the road. “He’s obviously been practicing,” Bell said after playing Ted’s rendition of the Tennessee Ernie Ford classic “Sixteen Tons.” Ted also credited Vicki for helping him shrink his waistline. While stumping for John Kerry in 2004, he dropped forty pounds, “revealing the trademark Kennedy chiseled features and a much trimmer physique.” Asked how he dropped the weight, Kennedy replied, “Vicki, Vicki, Vicki.”
Vicki would provide Ted strength in 1995 when his beloved mother Rose died at 104 years old. He’d been the Kennedy child with wit and self-deprecation enough to needle his mother when she became too demanding, and Rose had proved herself more than capable of needling back. He described a framed note from “Mother” that had long been hanging on his office wall, in which she reacted to a comment he’d once made to a reporter. “Dear Teddy,” Rose had written. “I just saw a story in which you said: ‘If I was President . . .’ You should have said, ‘If I were President . . .’ which is correct because it is a condition contrary to fact.”
The memory got a laugh from the mourners, and Ted’s tone turned more serious: “Mother always thought her children should strive for the highest place. But inside the family, with love and laughter, she knew how to put each of us in our place. She was ambitious not only for our success, but for our souls.”
Ted continued to play a father-figure role in the lives of his nieces and nephews, and Vicki would be his backbone as he watched tragedy beset the next generation. Michael Kennedy, Ethel’s sixth child and Ted’s 1994 reelection campaign manager, died in a skiing accident in 1997. A year and half later, in the summer of 1999, while piloting a Piper single-engine plane to Hyannis Port to attend the wedding of Rory, Ethel’s youngest, John F. Kennedy Jr. crashed into the ocean, killing him, his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and his sister-in-law, Lauren Bessette. It was a devastating blow to Ted, who was very close with his nephew.
John Jr. had the best Kennedy qualities—the looks, the smarts, the discipline, and the zest for life. Ted had stayed close with Jackie through the years, and he had loved her dearly. “She was always there for our family in her special way,” he would say in his eulogy for her in 1994, after she succumbed to lung cancer. “She was a blessing to us and to the nation—and a lesson to the world on how to do things right, how to be a mother, how to appreciate history, how to be courageous. No one else looked like her, spoke like her, wrote like her, or was so original in the way she did things.” After Jackie’s death, Ted felt even more protective of her two children. John Jr. had always been seen as heir to Jack’s throne, and, thanks to Jackie’s grounding influence, not just by birthright.
When John Jr. introduced his uncle Teddy at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, he eloquently and unwaveringly called a generation to public service and was rewarded with a lengthy standing ovation. Though John Jr. never ran for office, he was an important behind-the-scenes player, throwing his name and money behind Democratic causes and candidates. Now another Kennedy had been taken in his prime, and Ted was heartbroken.
With Vicki and her father, Edmund, looking on in the Church of St. Thomas More, Ted eulogized his nephew in a stirring tribute a week after the plane went down. “From the first day of his life, John seemed to belong not only to our family, but to the American family. The whole world knew his name before he did,” Ted said. Sadly, Ted was becoming way too good at these eulogies. “He had a legacy, and he learned to treasure it. He was part of a legend, and he learned to live with it. Above all, Jackie gave him a place to be himself, to grow up, to laugh and cry, to dream and strive on his own. John learned that lesson well. He had amazing grace. He accepted who he was, but he cared more about what he could and should become. He saw things that could be lost in the glare of the spotlight. And he could laugh at the absurdity of too much pomp and circumstance.”
Finally, in a somber nod to the many tragedies that had come before, Ted ended by paraphrasing a Yeats poem about a man who died young. “We dared to think, in that other Irish phrase, that this John Kennedy would live to comb gray hair. . . . But like his father, he had every gift but length of years.”
Three years later, Ted was sitting in a doctor’s office with his daughter, Kara, at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Kara, then age forty-two, had recently seen a doctor for a routine visit and been sidelined with a shocking diagnosis of lung cancer. Ted had insisted on procuring for her the best possible medical team for another opinion. The news was grim. Not only did she have cancer, it was inoperable, and she had less than a year to live. As he had done with his son, Teddy, the senator went on the offensive. Rejecting the prognosis, he thanked the doctor and left, and then he went to work. “We were told that every doctor we would consult would say the same thing, and I recall saying, ‘Fine. I just want to hear every one of them say it,’ ” Ted recalled. He didn’t rest until he found a surgeon who agreed to operate, removing a portion of Kara’s right lung in January 2003.
After the surgery, Ted and Vicki took Kara to her chemotherapy treatments in Washington in the morning. When Ted had to leave for Senate work, Vicki would stay behind. Seven years after Kara’s aggressive treatment, Ted reported that she was a cancer-free and active mother of two. (Kara would later die of a sudden heart attack in 2011, nine years after her cancer diagnosis. Some oncologists would speculate that the aggressive treatment that spared her from the cancer—and prolonged her life—might have weakened her heart.)
Ted and Vicki didn’t know it at the time, but the battle they faced with Kara’s illness was an overture for an even more dire diagnosis they’d receive a decade later. Again their mantra would be, “One step at a time.”