Teddy & Kennedyism

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Edward Moore Kennedy smiled at the TV newsmen who brandished microphones in his face. Had he yet talked over his triumph with his brother, the President of the U.S.? No, but he hoped to shortly. Had he talked to his other brother, the U.S. Attorney General? No, but he hoped to shortly. Had he talked to his father, Joseph P. Kennedy? Replied Teddy, with the quiet pride of a son who knows he has pleased a demanding parent: "Yes, I talked to him. He was extremely excited."

From Old Joe on down, the Kennedy clan had every reason to be excited. For the youngest of the nine Kennedy children, the chubby little boy who used to wear bangs, had just scored a stunning political triumph. Seeking the Democratic Senate nomination in Massachusetts, he amassed 69% of the vote, humiliated State Attorney General Edward J. (Eddie) McCormack by a margin of 559,251 to 247,366. At 30, and just three years out of law school, he was one of the hottest political properties outside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Jigs & Japes. Buoyed up by his father's unwavering support, backed by the Kennedy wealth, Teddy also made the best of the Kennedy name, the Kennedy looks, the Kennedy manner. He had the familiar thatch of thick brown hair, the outthrust jaw, the meat-chopping gestures, the flat Boston accent. A voter could close his eyes, listen to the talk of "Cuber" and "Asier" and swear the President was on the platform. But these qualities alone were not enough to overwhelm Eddie McCormack, 39, another affable, handsome Irishman and the nephew of House Speaker John W. McCormack. In the end, Teddy won because he staged a campaign unmatched and unmatchable in its energy, enterprise and sheer intensity of purpose.

To the blare of a brass band, Teddy marched up and down Massachusetts. His right hand grew half an inch with all the hearty handshaking. He clapped men on the back: "How are you, buddy?" He reduced the women to squeals of delight with his rugged good looks. He was able and eager to dance an Irish jig when the occasion demanded. He spoke of the issues in stern, confident tones. He campaigned unabashedly on the claim that his influence would be felt in Washington on his brother's New Frontier. His slogan: "He can do more for Massachusetts."

Against this versatile onslaught, Eddie never really had a chance. Teddy won every ward in Boston, supposedly McCormack's bastion. He even carried Eddie's home precinct in Dorchester, 317-304. By the size and scope of his victory, Kennedy became an early-book favorite for November over Republican Nominee George Cabot Lodge, 35, another smiling scion of another famous Massachusetts family (see box p. 17).

"One Too Many?" But the importance of Kennedy's victory went far beyond the boundaries of Massachusetts. It gave new life to an issue that is certain to echo across the U.S. between now and November. That issue might best be called "Kennedyism"; it springs from the fretful feeling that there are too many Kennedys doing too many things too conspicuously and achieving too much power. Republicans mean to make the most of it. Says Republican National Chairman William Miller: "We're going to take a lot of votes all over the country out of this, because people are going to think twice about the dynasty issue now. It was bad enough making Bobby Attorney General. But even that wasn't the joke this one is. The idea that Teddy is qualified to be a U.S. Senator is ridiculous."

Before the election, political cartoonists ridiculed the Kennedys' massed march on Washington. Cracked Satirist Del Close of Chicago's Second City: "If Teddy wins. Laos won't be the only country with three princes." Columnists were critical. "Make no mistake about it," wrote Scripps-How-ard's Richard Starnes, "Teddy Kennedy has mortgaged his brother's Administration." Asked Inez Robb: "Don't you think that Teddy is one Kennedy too many?" On primary day, Editor Jonathan Daniels of the strongly pro-Kennedy Raleigh News and Observer wrote: "Whatever happens in Massachusetts today, the implications of Ted Kennedy's campaign will not help the President, the Democratic Party, or the country." When the ballots were counted, the New York Times was moved to rare emotion: "This victory for Edward Kennedy is demeaning to the dignity of the Senate and the democratic process."

Matter of Survival. The Kennedys were acutely aware of the potential peril of Kennedyism as an issue. Jack and Bobby were dubious about Teddy's candidacy from the beginning. Teddy understood their doubts; yet he plunged right ahead. Why? First, because his father insisted. Second, because the Senate race was a challenge--and Teddy Kennedy is remarkable even among the Kennedys for his fiercely competitive spirit.

The Kennedys are famed for their family solidarity, but Old Joe and Teddy have always been especially close. When their father suffered his stroke last year, all three sons hurried to his bedside in Palm Beach, Fla., but it was Teddy who sat up with him all night for three nights, while the others went home to sleep. When Jack and Bobby expressed their hesitation about Teddy's candidacy, Joe laid down the law. Said he: "You boys have what you want now, and everyone else helped you work to get it. Now it's Ted's turn. Whatever he wants, I'm. going to see he gets it." What Ted wanted was the Senate. He wanted it as a measure of proof that he could hold his own as a Kennedy. For Ted was the kid brother, and he had to excel to survive in a family where life is a constant contest and victory the only goal.

All Out. "We tried to keep everything more or less equal," recalls Rose Kennedy, "but you wonder if the mother and father aren't quite tired when the ninth one comes along. You have to make more of an effort to tell bedtime stories and be interested in swimming matches. There were 17 years between my oldest and youngest child, and I had been telling bedtime stories for 20 years. When you have older brothers and sisters, they're the ones that seem to be more important in a family, and always get the best rooms and the first choice of boats and all those kinds of things, but Ted never seemed to resent it."

For years, the older Kennedy brothers and sisters have kidded Teddy by insisting that "the discipline was breaking down when you came along." Not likely. Like the older Kennedy children, Teddy got by on an allowance of 10-c- to a quarter a week, cut grass for extra cash, worked a paper route. There were, of course, privileges unknown to most children; for example, Teddy received his first Communion from Pope Pius XII. But he still got his spankings with a coat hanger. Anything less than an all-out effort, whether in geometry or golf, was bound to bring a reprimand from his father. Recalls Sister Jean, the wife of Stephen Smith, who helps manage the family fortune: "Daddy always said, 'Never take second best.' " Says Teddy with studied understatement: ''We felt our father's presence throughout our young lives."

Animal Energy. Under the family's rigorous current-events course. Teddy studied newspaper clippings posted on a bulletin board by his mother, answered her questions at lunch. He laboriously compiled a daily diary that was regularly checked by his parents ("You had to use words you could spell''), and he listened, from the distance of the separate table reserved for the family's small fry, as his big brothers and father staged their free-for-all arguments at dinner about national and world affairs. Nonetheless, Teddy made himself felt. Says Jean: "Even as a child, Ted had a terrific animal energy. People naturally gravitated to him. He was always a leader of the family on things such as whether we would play football or go sailing. You never had to push Ted--you always had to hold him back."

His family's travels took him through ten different schools. Although he was never a top scholar, Teddy managed to follow his three brothers to Harvard. As a freshman, he was struggling along with a C minus in Spanish when, on the spur of the moment, he asked a classmate to take an exam for him. The friend was caught, and they were both suspended. This year, to forestall the possibility that his expulsion might be used against him politically, Teddy made a public confession of the incident. During the campaign. Opponent McCormack never mentioned it.

Kennedy enlisted in the Army, spent nearly two years in Europe. Honing his competitive edge, he climbed the Matterhorn, entered and won a bobsled meet for novices in Switzerland--the first time he had ever ridden a sled. Discharged as a Pfc, Kennedy was readmitted to Harvard in 1953, banged around in a beat-up Pontiac, excelled in public speaking, earned honor grades in history and government in his senior year.

Significant Sequel. As the latest and last of the Kennedys, Teddy took up another family obsession: Harvard football.* Teddy was big enough (6 ft. 2 in., 200 Ibs.) and strong enough. But he lacked speed and agility. To improve his blocking, he persuaded a teammate to work with him for long hours after practice. To improve his tackling, he persuaded Captain Dick Clasby, a star tailback, to serve as his personal tackling dummy.

Kennedy made end on the first team in his senior year and earned his letter. With a covey of Kennedys cheering in the stands, he caught a touchdown pass against Yale that year for Harvard's only score in a 21-7 loss. There was a significant sequel to Teddy's efforts to improve his football skills. At Harvard, Teddy fumed at the fact that Clasby could outrun him. "Dick," he said, "sometime in the next ten years I'll bet I beat you in a race." Last month, when Clasby, now a lumber broker in a Detroit suburb, visited Teddy in Hyannisport, Kennedy suddenly announced: "I think I'm ready for that bet now." Clasby looked bewildered, but Teddy recalled his old challenge. The two marked off a so-yd. course on the lawn--and Teddy won by two yards.

Go West, Young Man. After getting his A.B. in 1956, Kennedy was turned down by Harvard law school. He planned to go to Stanford, but his father decreed that he should stay in the East. He ended up at the University of Virginia law school, where Bobby had compiled an excellent record. Only an average student, Teddy teamed with Varick Tunney, son of Gene Tunney, to win the school's competition in simulated court cases. Teddy also distinguished himself by winning a beautiful wife. Blonde Joan Bennett, daughter of a New York City advertising executive, was attending Manhattanville College, where two of the Kennedy sisters had gone. Teddy and Joan were married by Francis Cardinal Spellman in 1958. They now have two children, Kara, 2^, and Edward Jr., 1.

In 1958, while still attending law school, Teddy also got his first experience in active politics as the manager of Jack's pushover campaign for Senate reelection. In 1959, after graduating from Virginia, Teddy toured South America, returned to throw all his immense energies into the big-stakes political effort: Brother Jack's campaign for the 1960 Democratic nomination for President.

Teddy was assigned to handle a dozen Western states. Wherever they were, all members of the Kennedy family, friends and followers labored to and beyond the point of exhaustion. But both Jack and Bobby say that Teddy "was the hardest-working one of the whole bunch." He learned to fly, barnstormed by himself throughout the West, landed at strange airports in wind, rain, snow, hail and sleet. He would do almost anything to win delegates or favorable headlines. For the Kennedy cause, he rode a bucking bronco for a respectable five seconds in a Montana rodeo. On a foray into Wisconsin, he made the first ski jump of his life. He balked only at holding a cigarette in his mouth for a sharpshooter in Wyoming.

By the Lapels. In Idaho, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona, Teddy made the townsfolk feel that just as soon as the elections were over he and Joan planned to settle there and find their future. Teddy crossed Wyoming six times, and delegates can recall literally being held by their lapels while Teddy extolled his brother. Says Wyoming Democratic Chairman Teno Roncalio: "He made me get up every morning and go horseback riding with him at 6 o'clock--and for an hour and a half!" At the Los Angeles convention, saddlesore Roncalio was vice chairman of the Wyoming delegation that gave all of its 15 votes to Jack--and put him over the top for the nomination. In the general election, Teddy fared worse: n Western states went for Nixon. But regional Democrats assign no blame to Teddy: had it not been for him, they say, Jack Kennedy might have been shut out.

After the election, Teddy went off on another trip abroad. It was the seventh he had made and, as always, he followed his father's instructions, scribbling down voluminous notes in brown, spiral-backed notebooks. He returned to Massachusetts to take a job as an assistant district attorney for Suffolk County. He accepted only a token $1 of the $5,000-a-year salary--like his brothers and sisters, he had received a $1,000,000 trust fund at the age of 21--and quietly began planning with his father to become the Democratic nominee in the senatorial election to fill his brother's old seat.**

Steady Eddie. It took some doing. Eddie McCormack was much more than the favorite nephew of the Speaker of the House of Representatives. An Annapolis graduate, McCormack finished first in his class at Boston University's law school, gave up a successful practice (estimated annual income: $40,000) to start out in politics as an elected member of the Boston city council. Twice elected attorney general--the last time in 1960 by more than 400,000 votes--Eddie compiled a solid, if not brilliant, record, particularly in civil rights cases. For Senator in 1962 he was, as much as anyone could be, the choice of the Democratic Party's regular organization, an uneasy alliance of local bosses split by national origin (Irish v. Italian) and geography (greater Boston v. western Massachusetts). Eddie was also the favorite of Massachusetts' intellectual community. Historian Samuel Eliot Morison, Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (a visiting professor at Harvard), and Harvard Law Professor Mark DeWolfe Howe joined to declare that "Teddy has been aptly described as a 'fledgling in everything except ambition.' "

Teddy could hardly have cared less about the party bosses. To whip up strength, he created his own organization of eager young pros and amateurs. Teddy's first job was to win the party's endorsement at the convention in June. He held out the promise of some postmaster-ships. But his real appeal was to those who simply wanted to ride with a winner. Teddy thought like a winner, talked like a winner, and acted like a winner. He urged delegates to vote for him and thereby "do yourself a favor." The delegates did, and the convention was no contest: Teddy won on the first ballot.

On His Own. But in Massachusetts, the party convention can do no more than endorse. What really counts is the primary, and McCormack. despite his convention loss"J decided to fight on. He gave it all he had; already lean, he lost 14 Ibs. during the campaign. He was at his best walking alone among the voters, shaking hands and showing his disarming, crooked smile. At dawn, he walked alone into one diner and handed his campaign folder to a man hunched over the counter.

"For Christ's sakes." cried the man. and threw the leaflet to the floor.

"Listen," said McCormack, who was up after three hours' sleep. "I feel just as bad as you do. If I can get up and come out and ask for your vote, the least you can do is vote for me."

"All right," said the man, "I'll vote for you."

At a candy factory in Cambridge, McCormack moved up and down aisles redolent of sugar and raspberry. The women workers all had chocolate covering on their right hands. McCormack shook their left hands and said, "I'm Eddie McCormack. I hope you'll vote for me." Back came the replies: "I will ... I will . . . I will." Said one woman: "We're working people, you know." On another occasion, a man assured him: "I'm for you. Ted still wets the bed."

But none of this was enough--and McCormack, a practical politician from an eminently political family, knew it. In desperation, he lashed out. In the first of his two TV debates against Teddy, he launched a savage personal attack against Teddy's youth, his qualifications, name, his slogan. It was all true, but Teddy never buckled and, in the end, the attack probably got him some sympathy.

Eddie continued the struggle. His small, intensely loyal staff worked round the clock; yet schedules went awry, and Eddie lost votes by failing to appear at the proper rally at the proper time. Hard up for cash, he set his father "Knocko" and his older brother "Jocko" to supervising a tiny group of volunteers who worked throughout the night making campaign posters.

All to no avail. Teddy had it over him in every way. Kennedy came equipped with searchlights, drum majorettes, flying flags and marching bands that whipped the crowds into football fervor. Teddy was supreme at the street-corner rally. The sight of an Irish eye would start him singing Sweet Adeline--at least until he got word that his flat baritone was losing him votes. Squads of Kennedy girl volunteers, their hair teased to perfection, fanned out across the state. There was no lack of recruits. One woman, picking phone numbers at random, was surprised to find that nearly everyone she called was willing to pitch in for Teddy.

The Living Doll. As Teddy put on the pressure, his campaign scenes became kaleidoscopic. At a textile machinery plant in Worcester, Teddy moved eagerly through the din and the smell of hot metal to shake the hands of the men in the foundry. One man gestured that his hand was too greasy to shake. "Gimme that, buddy!" cried Kennedy, slamming his own big hand into the worker's. Then he strode on, his hand black with grease below his neat, white cuff.

Everything went Teddy's way. At one point, a worker buttonholed him and said: "Teddy, me boy, they say you've never worked a day in your life." After an uneasy pause, the man added: "Let me tell you, you haven't missed a thing." Wherever Teddy went, he won the women. The old ones wanted to mother him, the young ones wanted to marry him. "Isn't he a doll!" shrieked secretaries from Revere to Westfield. In Chicopee a beaming group from the Polish Women's Citizens' Club listened to his talk, then rushed forward to chat with him over coffee and cupcakes. Cried Lucy Wisniowski: "I love that Kennedy family."

In his speeches Kennedy pounded away at international, national, state and local issues. He favored a jet airport for Worcester, pollution control on the Merrimack River, a federal highway in the Berkshires. His message was deadly serious, if not profound. "I think we can get new industries for Massachusetts. I have promised to go out and visit the major corporations of the country, and tell them the advantages of Massachusetts. I have a particular interest in the education of the young people, especially school dropouts, because I think this is one of our great natural concerns. I feel as we move through the 19603 that we must have the kind of transportation, the kind of urban renewal, the kind of increase in job opportunities that will make our state grow. I vigorously support a health-care program for our senior citizens that should be financed under the social security system." Merciful End. Toward campaign's end, Eddie McCormack was standing almost alone on the tailgate of a station wagon and forlornly pleading his cause: "Look at the record--Eddie McCormack has a record." As Teddy swept on, Eddie turned bitter. "Of course I'm hurt," he said privately. "I think it's unjust that he should even try for the nomination. Two years ago. I led all candidates in this state at the polls. Right now I hold the most important elective office held in this state by a Democrat. Then along came Teddy Kennedy out of the blue. If this is politics, if they can get away with this, then I don't want any part of politics."

On primary day, symbolically, Speaker John McCormack attracted almost no attention when he returned to Massachusetts to vote. But President Kennedy and Jackie drew an excited audience when they helicoptered in from Newport. (Jackie got confused in the booth, had to call on the President for some husbandly assistance with the voting machine.) That night, the end came with merciful speed at 8:32, when an aide handed a slip of paper to Teddy Kennedy's brother-in-law, Steve Smith. "Here's where Knocko lives." he said. It was South Boston's Ward 7. Precinct 5. Knocko had been Democratic leader there for 30 years. The count was Kennedy 396, McCormack 347.

When the avalanche had run its course, McCormack vowed he would never again run for public office. Without breaking stride, the new Democratic candidate for the Senate began to prepare for the campaign against Republican Lodge and H. Stuart Hughes, 46, a Harvard history professor and grandson of onetime Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, who was running as an independent.

One Man's Family. That was that--for now. But the issue of Kennedyism may well persist beyond November. If Teddy gets to the Senate, he will still have to stand for re-election in 1964--on the same ticket with the President. Nothing could be better calculated to drive home the issue of the Government's becoming a citadel for one man's family. Yet that possibility obviously did not bother the Democratic voters of Massachusetts last week. In fact, they could only regret that Old Joe Kennedy had run out of sons.

*Joseph Jr. (who was killed over Europe as a World War II flyer) made the varsity squad, but never earned his letter. Jack suffered the first of his back injuries while scrimmaging with the jayvees against the varsity. Bobby earned three letters, made first string in his senior year. He also broke his leg in a scrimmage, stubbornly kept on playing until he collapsed. Back in 1911. Joe Sr. won his H in baseball.

**In December 1960, Democratic Governor Foster Furcolo appointed Benjamin A. Smith II, 46, a Harvard roommate of the President's and a former mayor of Gloucester, to fill the seat until the 1962 election. Last week the President named Smith to be his representative at the October independence celebration of the young African nation of Uganda.

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