Time to Sail
May 17, 2008, started out as a picture-perfect day. The weather was ideal—warm but not hot, with a crisp breeze—for Vicki and Ted to take the boat out for the first sail of the year. Ted was still keyed up from the day before, when he felt so “on” that he’d set aside his prepared remarks and spoken from his heart at a ribbon cutting for a learning center at New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park. As he and Vicki geared up for the day’s sail, they did the mundane things that couples do on lovely mornings together: They had coffee, read the newspapers, talked about family matters. Before breakfast, Ted thought he’d take the dogs for a walk. He never made it outside. As Ted walked past the grand piano that had once belonged to his mother, he felt disoriented. He moved toward the door to get outside for some air, but he couldn’t go any farther. In a haze, he lowered himself into a chair and lost consciousness.
Judy Campbell, Ted and Vicki’s household assistant, spotted him and called out for Vicki. Judy called 911, then Ted’s Boston physician, as Vicki cradled her husband’s head and kissed his cheek. “You’re going to be okay,” she whispered.
In truth, Vicki had no idea if he’d be okay. She had no idea what was happening at all. “I just knew it was something very serious, something grave,” she later recalled. Ted was first taken by medics to a local hospital, and then transported via medevac to Boston for tests. The initial diagnoses batted around were so wildly varied that Vicki couldn’t keep up. “I went from concern to fear to terror to uncertainty,” Vicki said. As Ted slowly regained consciousness, doctors said they thought he’d had a generalized seizure, but they didn’t know what had caused it or whether others might follow. Finally, they had a tentative diagnosis: Ted might have a brain tumor.
“By the end of that day, it was like, you know what? Prove it to me,” Vicki would later say.“Enough already. I’ve had a terrible day. Prove it to me. And I wasn’t in denial, but I wasn’t in acceptance, either. I just wanted them to show us. And they did.”
The following Monday, a biopsy confirmed the diagnosis of a malignant glioma in the left parietal lobe. “Vicki and I privately were told that the prognosis was bleak—a few months at most,” Ted said. Most diagnoses of the sort are: Only 30 percent of people with the condition are still alive two years after the diagnosis; just 10 percent of patients may live five years or longer. As with the other cancer diagnoses he’d faced, Ted refused to accept defeat. Neither did Vicki. Make no mistake, she would later tell an audience of cancer patients and their loved ones, Ted’s brain tumor wasn’t his alone. “It was our brain tumor,” she said. “And that’s always how I’ve described it. It was our brain tumor in every single way.”
Almost fifty years after Camelot, the Kennedy name still drew the public’s fascination and attracted the media spotlight. Photographers and TV crews were camped out on the hospital lawn, so Vicki orchestrated a photograph with a laughing Ted surrounded by his cheery-looking children to accompany the news of his diagnosis. The upbeat tone was intentional. Ted felt a strong obligation to be a role model, particularly while facing such a terrible diagnosis. He’d endured hard times before, and he’d heard from countless strangers how much his strength had helped them through their own trials, no matter how desperate. If Ted could put a hopeful face on this latest obstacle, maybe he could help someone else live just one happier day, he reasoned. And besides, getting his own cancer diagnosis was nothing compared with having heard the diagnoses of his two children. “His perspective was that it was so much worse when it’s your child,” Vicki said. “He could take it. He was going to be a role model for others. He wasn’t putting on a happy face; he understood himself and what he needed to do to stay ahead of the darkness, as he put it.”
For Ted, dodging the darkness meant sailing. He and Vicki missed out on that sail May 17, so when they returned from the hospital, they hopped aboard their schooner Mya and went to sea. “Everything seemed back to normal, except for the crowd of cameramen and reporters who awaited us onshore,” Ted said.
Back at the homestead, Ted summoned a doctor friend to recruit the nation’s best medical experts to draw up the battle plans. The result was an extraordinary display of Ted’s power and wealth: More than a dozen experts from at least six academic centers heeded the invitation, the New York Times reported. Some of the doctors flew to Boston for an in-person meeting May 30; others requested test results and medical records so that they could participate by phone. In the meeting, the experts weighed Ted’s options: surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, according to Dr. Raymond Sawaya, a nationally renowned neurosurgeon who was part of the meeting. Ted said he wanted to be “prudently aggressive” and to make the process as helpful to others as possible.
“If I can show that there is hope for me, perhaps I can give hope to all those who face this kind of disease,” he said. But while they aimed to stay optimistic, they were far from naive about it, Vicki said. They understood the gravity of the diagnosis, and Ted quickly got his affairs in order—legal, legislative, financial, and spiritual. That preparation allowed them to both live in the present and to focus on some goals Ted had set.
“We had an unspoken pact between us that we would not grieve until it was time to grieve,” she said. “We weren’t going to ruin the time we had, which we hoped was going to be a very long time, that we weren’t going to ruin it by talking about what-ifs. We weren’t going to spend our time dying. We were going to spend our time living, and we did that and it was magnificent.”
Ted’s first goal was to make it to the Democratic National Convention in August 2008, where he hoped to speak. It was just three months away, which until recently would have seemed like no time at all. But when faced with a terminal disease, it was a lofty goal indeed. Ted wanted to sway the odds in his favor. His team of medical experts had been divided on whether he should undergo surgery to remove as much of the tumor as possible. Most were strongly in favor of it, but two of the doctors balked “because the cancer was not a discrete nodule, but was spread over a large area, making it unlikely that most of it could be removed,” wrote Dr. Lawrence Altman for the Times. “Chances for success are somewhat proportional to the amount of tumor removed, although experts disagree about precisely how much visible tumor must be removed for the best chances.”
Ted opted for surgery. It lasted a grueling three and a half hours, and part of it was performed while Ted was conscious so that doctors could test his neurological function. As neurologist Vivek Deshmukh described to Newsweek, Ted likely would have been put to sleep to have his skin incised, some bone removed, and the protective layer of the brain cut open. “But once you’ve started removing the tumor, the brain itself is not a pain-sensitive structure. That’s when you have the patient awake,” he said. As the surgeon removes the growth, he constantly asks the patient questions and has the patient perform activities, such as raising an arm or moving a leg. Ted likely didn’t feel pain, but he might have felt “some manipulation up there,” Deshmukh said.* After Ted’s surgery was over, doctors told reporters it’d been a success. Similarly, Vicki e-mailed upbeat notes relaying the positive news to the family.
* Though Deshmukh didn’t treat Ted, he was intimately familiar with brain surgery: He’d performed surgery two years prior on another senator, Senator Tim Johnson of South Dakota, who had required emergency surgery after a brain hemorrhage.
For the next six weeks, Vicki and Ted drove from Hyannis Port to Boston—a three-hour drive round-trip—five days a week for radiation and chemotherapy treatments. From the outset, Vicki embraced her role as caregiver. Ted had always praised her strength in crises, and she stayed strong in his presence. Sometimes, when the weight of it all got too heavy, she’d slip into the shower and dissolve into tears. But when she would reemerge, she’d again play the role of protector. “He needed me to be his advocate, and I took the role willingly,” she said. “He could be the happy lion, and I was the fierce lioness.”
That didn’t mean her wishes always beat out Ted’s. Just before the Independence Day recess, the Senate had a vote on a bill to cut Medicare reimbursement rates. Democrats had fallen a single vote short of the sixty needed to prevent the cut. Ted and Vicki were driving to Boston for treatment when he read the news in the paper. “Medicare is in jeopardy!” he declared in the car. He was consumed by guilt. “I would’ve been the one vote,” he said. “I need to get back to Washington.”
Vicki balked. “You can’t go back to Washington,” she insisted. “You just had brain surgery.”
Ted wouldn’t be swayed. The guilt was too much. He’d been away getting treatment, unable to vote, and that single vote had hurt a cause he’d fought for for much of his Senate career—health care. So, just four weeks after his surgery, he orchestrated his return to the Senate.
“It was a secret little background thing that no one knew about, except the majority leader and Teddy, who was absolutely determined,” Vicki said.
The vote was called again, and as the roll got under way—the senators’ “aye” and “nay” responses going down on record for a second time—Ted appeared in the chamber. Applause erupted. Vicki, who was watching from the gallery, began to weep. The ovation was thundering. “Immediately, the roll call came to a pause, as the cheers for Mr. Kennedy drowned out all other sound,” one reporter wrote. Not only did Ted’s single vote reverse the Medicare cut, but nine Republicans changed sides. The final tally was sixty-nine to thirty, giving the Democrats a veto-proof majority. Senator Kay Bailey, a Texas Republican, was disappointed in the vote, but not in Ted’s appearance. “There wasn’t a person in the room or in the gallery who wasn’t thrilled to see Senator Kennedy back, looking so good,” she said.
Buoyed by that triumphant return to the Senate, Ted and Vicki refocused on his convention goal. Ted called his friend, political adviser Bob Shrum, for help. Shrum had been Ted’s speechwriter for years, and he’d worked with eight Democratic presidential candidates (none of whom won). Despite his egg on the Oval Office efforts, Shrum was respected as a political wordsmith. He’d helped write Ted’s well-received concession speech at the 1980 Democratic Convention. (“For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”) Vicki and Bob became Ted’s sounding board as he secretly worked to craft what they knew would likely be his last convention speech. “I knew essentially what I wanted to say at the outset, and Bob and Vicki and I have a synergistic way of working together,” Ted said.
For Vicki, the convention goal was invigorating. Every morning, she and Ted would start work at ten o’clock in a secret practice space they’d set up inside the Cape Cod house. They weren’t sure what kind of teleprompter setup would work best for Ted, so they rotated positioning it from front and to the sides before deciding that he could follow the text best when it was in front of him. On August 24, the day before the convention, they boarded a chartered jet for Denver, the convention site, with family and friends and Ted’s internist. After settling into an apartment they’d rented in Denver, Ted began practicing his speech again with a teleprompter. A minute in, he had to stop. A sharp pain stabbed his left side.
“You know, I really don’t feel well,” he said. He was taken to a hospital, where he got a maddening diagnosis. After prevailing against brain surgery and chemotherapy and radiation, Ted’s big night was being threatened by a kidney stone. Vicki, who had fought so long to be stoic for her husband, burst into tears as doctors readied to give him potent pain medication.
There’s little worse than seeing someone you deeply love in physical agony. But Vicki knew that this could be Ted’s final public appearance. She knew that Ted’s mental clarity was essential to his accomplishing what had become an important goal for both of them: his speaking at the convention. She knew that his ability to make choices for himself was one of the last things Ted had.
“If you give him pain medicine, then you will have made the decision for him about speaking tonight,” she cried. “You can’t take away his ability to make this decision for himself. He’s worked too hard for this night.”
Doctors assured her that the first dose would have left Ted’s bloodstream before his speech, so they administered it. A few hours later, a nurse gave another dose—unwelcome news for the concerned wife. “Vicki, shall we say, remonstrated with her,” Ted recalled.
Drowsy in his hospital bed, Ted looked up at his wife. “What do you think?” he asked.
“You can just go out and wave,” she said. “Just go out there with the family and wave.”
Ted wouldn’t admit defeat. He couldn’t do it. He hadn’t flown all the way to Denver after working all those weeks on perfecting a speech to be felled by a lousy kidney stone. No, he would speak. Kennedys don’t cry and Kennedys don’t let pain sideline them and Kennedys rise to the occasion, no matter how they’re feeling. Shrum cut Ted’s planned remarks in half—and, as a just-in-case, cut another version even further to just four lines. Ted would have to play by ear which version he felt up to tackling in front of the crowd.
About ninety minutes before the convention was to start, Ted awoke from his drug-induced sleep and decided to test his ability to walk. He made it just a few steps before needing to rest again. Vicki was anxious and exhausted, having been up all night. Soon, the crew was getting him ready to go, and before Ted knew it, his niece Caroline Kennedy was introducing him to the crowd. With Vicki looking on, he basked in the applause of the cheering delegates, and she knew exactly what he meant when he said, “Nothing, nothing was going to keep me away from this special gathering tonight.”
After he finished, he didn’t want to leave the stage, much less leave the party. His doctors urged him to return to the hospital, but Ted was high on adrenaline. “They liked my speech!” Vicki recalled him saying. The next morning, he was still floating.
With the convention goal reached, Ted and Vicki mapped out his next target: returning to the Senate. It would have special significance, as one of the doctors who had early on provided a bleak prognosis for Ted had assured him that he would never be well enough to go back. Go home, the doctor had said, and love your wife, be with your children.
“It’s sayonara, baby, it’s all over,” Vicki recalled as the doctor’s attitude, which “didn’t sit well with Teddy.” Returning to his office in the Senate would be symbolic of Ted’s refusal to accept the defeatist prediction of a gloomy doctor. The Senate had been a second home to him. Family mementos adorned his office walls—family photos, Jack’s military dog tags, a framed letter from a very young Jack to Rose, in which the president-to-be asked to be Ted’s godfather. Ted’s mahogany desk had once been Jack’s, and Ted’s name was inscribed in a drawer below his brother’s. A few days after Barack Obama was elected president, Ted made his Senate return. With Vicki by his side—as well as his dogs, Splash and Sunny—he beamed as he told reporters that he was ready to fight for health care reform. Vicki was touched by the support Ted received from his colleagues. A banner reading “Welcome Back Senator!” hung in the Russell Caucus Room, and a group of a hundred or so office aides and committee staffers discussed the upcoming agenda while eating Legal Sea Foods—a Massachusetts favorite.
Ted’s voice trembled slightly as he spoke and his walk was a tad shaky, so he steadied himself with his father’s cane—the same cane the senator had used in 1964 while recovering from the plane crash that nearly took his life. Vicki, too, provided extra support. She later remembered the day with a smile: “You’ve never seen . . . a senator so happy to be caught by a gaggle of reporters.”