Kennedys

When Angier Biddle Duke arrived in Madrid as ambassador in 1965 the Kennedys began to arrive too. Duke had been close to the Kennedys. Prior to his assignment to Madrid he had served as chief of protocol in the State Department, the official handling visits of heads of state to Washington. It didn’t hurt his ambitions that he was a major contributor to the Democratic Party. In the early 19th century, the Biddles were America’s great banking family. Similarly, the Dukes made a fortune in tobacco, the name of the distinguished Duke University in North Carolina honoring their largesse. Angier was that rare thing: both a Biddle and a Duke.

With Duke, the embassy became a lively place, with interesting people arriving regularly from Washington and from Hollywood. I felt privileged, as a young diplomat, to be surrounded by so much glamour. It was one of the attractions of the diplomatic service. It would take time before I outgrew the illusion that being with famous or important people makes oneself famous or important too.

Duke, although incredibly rich, was plain spoken and unpretentious with a fine sense of humor. I recall being at a banquet with him in Madrid, up on the dais, and being anxious as to how to eat the chicken. I grew up lower middle class in the Bronx. In my family we had no reservations about picking up a piece of chicken with our hands. I even liked chewing on the bones and sucking out the marrow. My mother always said it was “the best part.” But now I was in the diplomatic service; I couldn’t do that, certainly not with Ambassador Duke sitting next to me.

I was startled when he picked up a piece of chicken with his hands and gnawed away at it. That was when I learned that the very rich and well born do not worry any more than do the poor about how they eat. Lower class people may eat casually because they don’t know any better; upper class people because they couldn’t care less what others think of them. It is only the bourgeois middle class that worries about their position in society and are anxious not to betray any lack of refinement. Determined to be “classy”—upper class not middle, at least in spirit if not financially—I too picked up a piece of chicken and gnawed at it.

“Good isn’t it?” Duke said, smiling.

“It sure is, Mr. Ambassador,” I said.

Edward Kennedy cared even less than Duke how he ate. Kennedy visited Madrid as a guest of Ambassador Duke in May, 1967, and I was asked to arrange a short talk and a Q and A for him at the University of Madrid, where I would do the interpreting. I was thrilled to spend time with one of the Kennedys, the closest thing we had in the United States in those days to royalty. The American people, despite their democratic principles—or perhaps because of them—have always had a secret desire for the very aristocracy we rejected in our revolution against the British. After the war, George Washington had to resist those who wished to crown him king.

Personally, I’ve never cared a bit about British royalty, but I did care very much about the Kennedys. I approached my meeting with Edward Kennedy with a certain awe. But when the ambassador introduced me to the senator in his office, Kennedy said, “Call me Teddy,” immediately setting me at ease. Like Martin Luther King, Ted Kennedy was an example of American informality.

On the way to the university, in a chauffeured embassy car, Kennedy and I stopped off at a favorite restaurant of mine that no longer exists and had a long, Spanish mid-day meal with lots of wine. Not just the two of us: as an extension of his democratic ways, Kennedy had insisted that the chauffeur join us.

Kennedy’s table manners were as “casual” as he was. Not only did he eat as he liked, without regard to certain proprieties, he even made off with a bit of food from my plate that I hadn’t eaten. “You mind?” he asked, spearing a chunk of my lamb chop and then a small potato.

“Not a bit,” I said.

He even sampled some of my flan after eating his own dessert, a large piece of chocolate cake. His eating habits probably account for why he grew so stout in later years. But, of course, he had always been the chubby Kennedy.

When it came time to leave the restaurant, at around 5 in the afternoon (our appointment at the university was for 5:30) guess who paid the bill? Like many rich people, the Kennedys had the habit of not carrying money with them. Perhaps that is how the rich get rich or, at least, stay rich. There are always people around them to take care of such “details.” I was the one who took care of the details that day. I had to pay for the chauffeur’s meal too, though he didn’t realize I had and thanked Kennedy profusely for inviting him. That galled me.

But it was okay. It was an honor to take a Kennedy and a United States senator to lunch, though, in all modesty, I was, at that time, probably more qualified than he was to be a United States senator, which isn’t saying much about the quality of senators. So I guess I envied him a bit. He seemed the perfect embodiment of the notion that life isn’t fair. Over the decades, however, he would prove to be a very fine and well respected senator, one I could hardly connect in my mind with the young, rather uncouth guy I spent some time with many years before. He was a contradiction. As the cultural commentator, the late Dominick Dunne, would write about him, “He lived recklessly and often failed miserably in life, but he would also, if not at first, perform brilliantly in Congress.”

Kennedy flattered me by asking that I consider joining his staff if ever I left the diplomatic service. I was keen. There was already discussion in the media in those days about Teddy someday being a candidate for president—so obsessed were Americans with finding another Kennedy to replace the murdered John—and I relished the thought of working in the White House. When his older brother, Robert was assassinated during the presidential campaign of 1968, Teddy was regarded as his natural replacement, if not immediately then soon. However, the Chappaquiddick incident a year later, on July 18, 1969, in which Kennedy was responsible for the drowning death of a young woman in his automobile, and of leaving the scene and not reporting the accident for eleven hours, would foreclose his chances and, by that time, I had opted out of political life anyway. You can’t be both an artist and a politician, and my whole life might be seen as slowly sloughing off the latter in favor of the former.

Five years before Chappaquiddick, Kennedy was in a small plane crash en route to a campaign appearance in Massachusetts. It was a foggy night and the flight should never have been made. During the day in Madrid he was still wearing a cervical collar because, in the June, 1964 accident, he had broken his back though, luckily, without paralysis. He spent months in traction and would suffer from back pain the rest of his life. The Kennedy family certainly has had a penchant for tragedy. I think it was because they did not think that rules and limitations applied to them—which made them rather dashing and charming but dangerous to themselves and others.

Despite his back pain, Teddy was in great spirits that day in Madrid, though I suspect the wine had something to do with it. We got on very well. At lunch he wanted me to teach him some Spanish. I was reminded that he had been expelled from Harvard University for cheating on a Spanish examination. He had hired another student, whose Spanish was excellent, to take the examination for him. We continued with the Spanish lesson when we got back into the car, the chauffeur occasionally covering his mouth to hide his mirth at Kennedy’s clumsy efforts. When we arrived at the university Kennedy vainly took off the cervical collar and left it in the car. “I don’t want them seeing me with this,” he said. Then he combed his hair carefully and seemed to immediately sober up—which is more than I could say for myself. He seemed to have a genius for appearing respectable when required, for transitioning from a drunken lunch to a public appearance.

At the university, after a few remarks by Kennedy about “how glad I am to be here” and “my love for Spain,” the students began asking a series of questions. A key one was, “Senator Kennedy, what are your plans for the presidency?” Kennedy answered it in a timeworn political manner: “I am concentrating all my efforts on being a good senator from the State of Massachusetts.” Politicians are always wary of peaking too early and usually run for office only when they can claim to have been urged to do so by “the people.”

The highlight of the session concerned the war in Viet Nam. A young student stood up and said, “Tell us about Tio Ben.”

I translated for Kennedy and he said, “What’s he talking about? I haven’t a clue.”

I asked the young man what he meant. “We know why the United States is in Viet Nam,” he said heatedly, “to get the rice.” Now I understood: the reference was to that important brand of American rice, Uncle Ben’s. “Tio” means uncle. The student saw the Viet Nam War as plain old colonialism, instead of what it was: a mistaken extension of Cold War thinking. He believed we needed rice and had gone to Viet Nam to take it away from the Vietnamese.

When I translated what the student had said, Kennedy laughed. “Tell him I don’t know what we’re doing in Viet Nam, but it isn’t to get rice. The United States actually exports rice.” Later, I checked on this and found that Kennedy was correct. Enough rice is grown in the State of Louisiana alone to take care of all American needs and then some.

Leaving the university at around 7 in the evening, Kennedy said, “That was fun, Michael. Let’s get something to drink.” That was the last thing I wanted to do, especially since my meager finances were likely to be taxed even more, but, of course, I went along with it. We found a bar and sat at the counter. Again, Kennedy’s appetite—this time for tapas—was enormous. I think he tried one of everything. I was still full from our giant lunch, but I did quaff a good deal of wine with him. Luckily, for my family budget, the chauffeur had remained in the car, since Kennedy had said we would only be a few minutes. We were actually there over an hour, Kennedy becoming more voluble and enthusiastic with each passing moment. “Do you believe that ‘Uncle Ben’s’ thing?” he kept asking, roaring with laughter. Kennedy would soon become an outspoken opponent of the Viet Nam War or, as the Vietnamese prefer to call it, “The American War.”

Both of us somewhat drunk, we sang songs in the back of the limousine on the way back to the embassy. I don’t remember just which songs but “Twenty-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” and “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” come to mind, he, I’m sure, just as proud of his terrible harmonizing as I was of mine. I managed to deliver him to Ambassador Duke’s residence at the back of the embassy in one piece. Said Duke to Kennedy, “Great, just in time for cocktails.” My heart sank. Any more to drink and I was going to pass out. Luckily, Duke took Kennedy by the arm, they disappeared into the residence, and I escaped and went home to recover.

I never saw Teddy Kennedy again, though I have often thought of what might have been had he become president of the United States—both for the country and for me. “The Road Not Taken” as Robert Frost put it in a famous poem. Kennedy died of brain cancer in August of 2009, the youngest of the great generation of Kennedy siblings and the last to die.

Over the years I found it difficult to connect the young Teddy Kennedy I had known in Madrid with the distinguished, aging and then sick senator. By the time he died he had served more time in the United States Senate than any living senator except one, and he had grown quite fat and white haired. I, of course, have not aged at all.

I met one of Teddy Kennedy’s sisters that same year. Patricia Kennedy had been married to the British actor, Peter Lawford, who was part of the “rat pack” that included Sammy Davis, Jr., Frank Sinatra, and Dean Martin. Pat Kennedy was divorced from Peter Lawford at the time she arrived in Madrid in 1966. Ambassador Duke was out of town and Minister William Walker, the second in command of the embassy, asked me to go to dinner with him and Pat Kennedy and the boyfriend accompanying her. It was a strange evening. One thing making it stranger is that Pat Kennedy was wearing the shortest mini-skirt I had ever seen. I had nothing against mini-skirts on women of any age, but there was something absurd about the way her mini-skirt fit. She had very much a little girl look. Her underpants were on full display. I expected her at any moment to stick her thumb in her mouth or pull a lollypop out of her pocketbook.

Which might not have been unexpected given the shallowness of her conversation. Walker and I continued to sound her out on the ideas of the day, but she seemed to know, and have views on, nothing at all. Boredom is a sensation I rarely experience, but I experienced it that evening. And the fellow Pat Kennedy was with didn’t add anything to the conversation—which increasingly became more and more between Walker and me. The next day Walker stopped me in the embassy hallway and said, “Did you believe those two? Dumb as posts.”

Nevertheless, in my youthful idealism, I still clung to the belief that the Kennedys were somehow superhuman or, at least, better than the rest of us. But perhaps it was only the men who got the opportunity to project that image. They certainly got all the attention. I don’t know if Pat Kennedy was typical of the Kennedy women, but given the extremely sexist environment in which they were raised, perhaps the women didn’t thrive because they knew from birth that they were of little value except, perhaps, as ornaments and to breed.

“Senator Edward Kennedy on the left, the author on the right, at the program at the University of Madrid.”

 

Of course, Jacqueline Kennedy was not born a Kennedy, so she may have escaped some of that family’s deleterious effects on its women. Jacqueline too came to Madrid at the invitation of Angier Biddle Duke, and he had a reception in her honor to which I was invited. I don’t know if I can fully communicate the reverence with which I approached meeting her. She was the widow of our heroic, handsome, and martyred president. She was the embodiment of Camelot. If someone had told me that she was the Virgin Mary, even as someone who doesn’t believe in such things, I would have accepted it. She certainly was the American Madonna, and I don’t mean the dancing-singing one of later years. For five years in a row she had been voted the most popular woman in the world. The Jacqueline Kennedy of that moment in Madrid was someone I worshipped. If not the American Madonna or the Virgin Mary, she was certainly the closest thing America has ever produced to a goddess.

I would have given anything to meet Jacqueline Kennedy. And now, here I was indeed meeting her, and we were standing alone together at the ambassador’s reception, and I was struck dumb. I was meeting the most famous woman in the world and I would have wanted to tell her that I adored her, that I would do anything for her, that I would have died for her. What I actually did say I cannot recall. Something stupid, for sure. I remember only her smile and soft “Thank you.”

I met three Kennedys during my years in Madrid. And they had a lot to do with my growing up. Meeting them helped me to stop idolizing them or anyone else for that matter. I came to see them as human beings, flawed like the rest of us. Like other people there was much that was admirable about them, much that was not. Why do we always have to pigeonhole people as either black or white? We may all be different shades of gray.

It is said that maturity is all about recognizing limitations. Recognizing the limitations of the Kennedys helped me to forgive myself for some of my own. Still, I miss the Kennedys. They made a lot of us feel good about our country.