The Trouble With Teddy

By Lance Morrow.

It is not entirely a nasty delight in gossip that makes people wonder about the character of Ted Kennedy.

The curiosity goes deeper than that. Kennedy somehow calls forth nagging mysteries of American politics and psychology. He is a lightning rod with strange electricities still firing in the air around him -- passions that are not always his responsibility but may emanate from psychic disturbances in the country itself. America does not have a completely healthy relationship with the Kennedys.

Ernest Hemingway wrote: "The most complicated subject that I know, since I am a man, is a man's life." Ted Kennedy is a complicated man. The picture of him as Palm Beach boozer, lout and tabloid grotesque is one version. He has other versions -- more interesting selves. Alcohol, or some other compulsion, may drive him now and then to bizarre and almost infantile behavior. But Ted Kennedy also is a remarkable and serious figure.

Once, long ago, he was the Prince Hal of American politics: high-spirited, youthful, heedless. He never evolved, like Prince Hal, into the ideal king. Instead he did something that was in its way just as impressive. He became one of the great lawmakers of the century, a Senate leader whose liberal mark upon American government has been prominent and permanent. The tabloid version does not do him justice. The public that knows Kennedy by his misadventures alone may vastly underrate him.

But Kennedy lives under the rule of a peculiar metaphysic. He had to soldier on in the messy world after Camelot floated away into memory. Unlike his brothers, extinguished in their prime, Teddy would get older and coarser and lose some of the boyo's flashing charm. He would make mistakes. And -- something that did not happen in Camelot -- he would pay for them.

Perhaps his life was cracked after Bobby died, and Teddy found he was on his own and began to cross over from the powerful myth of his family into real time, which is intolerant of the bright and ideal. The fracture set a pattern of sharp contradiction: the "brief shining moment" would give way to long, sordid aftermaths. Greek tragedy ("the curse of the Kennedys") would degenerate into sleazy checkout-counter revelations ("Jack and Bobby and Marilyn"). The serious lawmaker in Ted Kennedy would turn now and then into a drunken, overage, frat-house boor, the statesman into a party animal, the romance of the Kennedys into a smelly, toxic mess. The family patriarch, the oldest surviving Kennedy male, would revert to fat, sloppy baby.

The question is, Why? Was all this unhappy transformation the influence of metaphysics? Or was it alcohol? In any case, the shadow fell. Consider a string of hypotheses:

-- If it had not been for alcohol, Chappaquiddick almost surely would never have happened: Ted Kennedy, that is, would not have driven off the Dike Bridge on Martha's Vineyard in the middle of one night in the summer of 1969, drowning a young campaign worker named Mary Jo Kopechne.

-- Without Chappaquiddick, Teddy Kennedy would naturally have taken his place as leader of the Democratic Party, succeeding his assassinated brothers.

-- In that case Teddy would probably have run for President against Richard Nixon in 1972. Kennedy might have lost that year (the incumbent has the advantage). But Ted would probably have run again in 1976 and won, then run for re-election in 1980 and served another four years.

-- An eight-year Kennedy presidency might have run Ronald Reagan off the political road. Therefore no Reagan '80s. At least, one can make that case. Reagan in 1984 might have mobilized a conservative reaction against the liberal eight-year Kennedy regime and won.

If . . . If . . . If . . . The exercise is fanciful. Maybe some other logic entirely was at work. Perhaps Ted did not want to run for President. As the youngest in an enormous family, Ted had Joe, John and Robert all lined up ahead of him to fulfill the ambassador's ambitions to put a son in the White House. Then, quite suddenly, he found himself at the head of the line. Maybe the man prone to accidents and to drinking too much was trying to escape the responsibility -- to immunize himself from it by making a mess of his life. Prince Hal may have noticed that kings get slain.

In the '60s and '70s political writers ended their profiles of Ted by noting, "After all, he has lots of time. If he does not run this year, he will remain a plausible presidential candidate until the year 2000." No political writer advances that theory anymore.

But if Kennedy were to retire now, his accomplishment would be memorable. Almost all the major pieces of social legislation in the past quarter-century bear his fingerprints. He has been the nation's leading advocate for the disabled, the aged, the less privileged. He has promoted the Voting Rights Act and its extensions, the Freedom of Information Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Eighteen-Year-Old Vote law, the Age Discrimination Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the Act for Better Child Care, among others.

Ted Kennedy is the heart and conscience of traditional American liberalism, even in its present wan and dormant state. Judith Lichtman, president of the Women's Legal Defense Fund, has worked with Kennedy for 25 years on civil rights, sex discrimination, health care and child care. Says Lichtman: "He's the best legislator I know. He's up early, works all day and calls in the middle of the night to make sure he's got it right."

Kennedy has a superb staff of some 100 people who organize his ideas and initiatives. Those who watch Kennedy at work on Capitol Hill observe a stamina, energy, attention to detail and intellectual alertness that contradict the image of Kennedy as a feckless drinker. An alcoholic, especially at the age of 59 after years of habitual drinking, often finds it difficult to keep up with his work, or to keep a job at all. Alcohol punishes brain and body and wears them down.

Kennedy, on the other hand, is a man of astonishing physical resources and resilience. Orrin Hatch, the conservative Utah Republican, is a Kennedy friend who has sometimes, kiddingly or not, remonstrated with Ted for his excesses. But Hatch calls Kennedy "an indefatigable worker." Last week, as chairman of the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, Kennedy met until after midnight with the Bush Administration, railroad management and the union to work out an agreement to end the railroad workers' strike. Hatch, who had a hand in writing the legislation, said, "His brothers were great human beings, but they couldn't carry his shoes as a legislator."

The tabloid version makes bar crawling seem like Ted Kennedy's main recreation. In fact, Kennedy leads an extremely rich, varied, complex personal life in which he balances his roles as father to his own three children and surrogate father to 20 of his 25 nieces and nephews. He never misses a graduation of any of them from prep school or college. On a day when the weather is mild, he sometimes takes his 100-year-old mother Rose for an outing in her wheelchair along the streets of Hyannis Port.

Self-pity is a common alcoholic trait. Kennedy displays none of that disagreeable quality. He apparently lives much in the moment. He does not dwell on his family's almost opulently tragic past or on the deaths of his four siblings.

He likes to spend an evening at home, sitting in an armchair near the fire, a Scotch with lots of ice cubes resting nearby on the table. He talks with friends or puts a movie on the VCR. On several nights during Thanksgiving vacation last year, he watched tapes of the PBS series on the Civil War. Nearly every Saturday night when Ted is at Hyannis Port, his family and friends gather in the living room of the large, white frame house to sing Irish songs like Sweet Rosie O'Grady and My Wild Irish Rose. Rose sometimes joins in the singing. Before she goes back upstairs, Teddy by himself always sings Sweet Adeline, a song that was the trademark of her father Honey Fitz many years ago when he campaigned for mayor of Boston.

Ted Kennedy is unpretentious. His capacity for friendship is large and warm. Recently, without publicity, he has gone into the homes of several of the Massachusetts families who lost children during the Persian Gulf war. After visiting a Cape Cod family whose young son died in the gulf, he phoned to invite them to attend Mass at his home with him, his mother and his son Teddy.

Kennedy's devotion to his own three children -- Kara, 31, a video producer living in Washington; Teddy Jr., 29, in his final semester of a two-year master's program in environmental studies at Yale; and Patrick, 23, a second- term state representative in Rhode Island -- is extraordinary. As a father, he openly displays a tender and loving affection. After a weekend together, father and children embrace and kiss each other goodbye. He is deeply involved in his children's lives. In many respects they are his best and closest friends. Ted and his former wife Joan, a recovering alcoholic, were divorced in 1983. She lives in Boston. He played a major role in raising the three children.

The tabloid Kennedy chases women half his age. In fact, in the past few years he has had several lengthy relationships with women who range in age from the mid-30s to 42 to a bit over 50. All are women of brains and professional stature, not bimbos.

For all that, stories abound of close encounters with Teddy in many different stages of intoxication. There are now famous tales of his drinking bouts in Capitol Hill restaurants, notably a favorite, La Brasserie, with Connecticut's Senator Christopher Dodd. Stories also abound of a drunken Kennedy making passes at women and, in one case, having sex with a woman lobbyist on the floor of a private room in La Brasserie. The latest reports from Palm Beach -- those involving Ted anyway -- suggest behavior that is merely a bit off: taking the younger generation out drinking in clubs in the middle of the night, maybe wandering around the house without his trousers.

At the start of every year Kennedy goes on a liquid diet to shed excess pounds. Aside from consomme and diet sodas, his meals consist of diet shakes. During the six-to-seven-week period, which usually ends on his birthday, Feb. 22, after a loss of 30 or 40 lbs., he avoids alcohol.

Kennedy does drink a lot when he is drinking. He has a considerable capacity for booze. But he also possesses amazing stamina and resiliency for a man his age. During an afternoon and evening, he may toss down many drinks (Scotch, wine, frozen daiquiris) -- sometimes, when he is on one of his sailboats. He may drink far into the evening. But with only a few hours' sleep, he is on time for his morning tennis game at the Cape (usually 9 a.m.) or for his business on the Hill in Washington.

The portrait of Ted Kennedy is not a coherent picture but has a shattered or kaleidoscopic quality. Or perhaps, like many public figures, he has arranged his life in compartments, some sealed off from the others. Kennedy's repeated drunkenness over a period of many years -- he was continually arrested for extremely reckless driving while a student at the University of Virginia Law School -- has raised in many minds the possibility, or in some the certainty, that he is an alcoholic.

Alcoholism is impossible to define with complete precision. The behavior and symptoms of alcoholics differ enormously. Some alcoholics need to drink daily and suffer when they do not. Others can interrupt their drinking for weeks or even months at a time and then binge.

Alcoholics usually have trouble stopping drinking when they start: after they begin, they persist until they are more or less drunk. Ted Kennedy sometimes has one drink, then goes about his business.

Alcoholism impairs work, health, social relationships, family relationships. Ultimately, as the disease progresses, it destroys more and more of the alcoholic's life, at an accelerating rate.

Kennedy is a hardworking and successful U.S. Senator with a busy schedule and a heavy load of intellectual labor that he apparently performs well. His mind is nimble and sharp, except when he has been drinking a lot. He is attentive to his enormous family and a considerable array of friends.

Kennedy's face sometimes looks flushed and mottled, with the classic alcoholic signs of burst capillaries, puffiness and gin-roses of the drunk. Sometimes he simply looks like hell -- fat, dissolute, aging, fuddled. But his powers of recuperation are amazing. He has, when he needs it, an organizing inner discipline that allows him, by an act of sheer will, to pull himself together, to focus and resume a senatorial, Kennedy star quality.

What then is shadow in Ted Kennedy? It is not only impossible to say but also presumptuous. A man with Kennedy's temperament and past may need a sort of unofficial self that he can plunge back into now and then -- a rowdy, loutish oblivion where he feels easy, where he takes a woozy vacation from being a Kennedy. It is said that a drunk stops growing emotionally at the age at which he began serious drinking. That would probably be the age then of the unofficial self.

Like other Kennedys, Ted may have a strange capacity to serve as both an exemplar and a warning. He has some of the best and worst qualities of the country. The only shadow that he is responsible for, of course, is the one inside himself.

With reporting by Hays Gorey and Nancy Traver/Washington