CHAPTER FIFTEEN
1970
On July 25, a week after the accident, in a television address carried nationally, I asked the people of Massachusetts to give me their advice and opinion as to whether I should resign as their senator. The polls were in favor of my continuing on. I took this as a validation of my legislative efforts but also as an affirmation of their faith and goodwill.
My constituents underscored their previous summer's vote of confidence in me by returning me to the Senate in November 1970. I defeated my Republican opponent, the businessman Josiah H. Spaulding, winning 61 percent of the vote.
Naturally, there were questions about whether I would run against Richard Nixon for president in 1972. I made it clear every time I was asked that I had no interest in such a run. I supported George McGovern in that election, though I turned down his invitation to run on his ticket for the vice presidency. "I just can't do it," I told him. I held fast even when Ted Sorensen gave me a memorandum asserting that it was constitutionally possible to be a vice president and also a cabinet member. It was not the prospect of being bored or isolated in that office that held me back. It was my concern about my family, and my responsibilities to them.
As I settled back into the Senate, into something like a state of equilibrium, I recognized that I had grown almost completely devoid of a state of mind I'd taken for granted since my early childhood. That state of mind was joy.
What amazing fun it had all once been. What adventures, what friendship and laughter and travels I had shared with my brothers and sisters. What a thrill I'd felt at mounting a wild bronco in Montana, or diving off a cliff in Monaco, or setting my sails into the teeth of a squall, or even facing off against old Wharton in the barracks at Fort Dix. What a lift to the spirit it had been, watching Jack and then Bobby soar into the stratosphere of world events, and to watch each of them accomplish mighty and good things; and then, incredibly, to join them on that plane, standing with them to engage history, with laughter and good cigars and the pranks we still played on one another. No more.
I had looked upon my winning the majority whip position from Russell Long in January 1969 as a high point of my Senate career. In January 1971, as I accepted the new realities of my situation, I lost it to Robert Byrd of West Virginia.
My downfall was due in part to the loss of some key allies who had supported me when I unseated Long. Warren Magnuson and Henry "Scoop" Jackson, both of Washington, peeled away because I had opposed appropriations for supersonic transport, which they supported along with Byrd. Boeing was too important to their home state for them to do otherwise.
And then there was Bill Fulbright. The Arkansas senator had voted for me against Russell Long. Our paths had parted since then over an opportunity to secure the names of American prisoners of war in Vietnam, an objective we both supported.
I'd received a communication from the North Vietnamese in 1970, offering to release the names to a representative of mine. After notifying Senator Fulbright of the offer, I sent a trusted emissary named John Nolan, who had worked with Bobby to get prisoners out of Cuba after the Bay of Pigs. John was given the names, returned to the United States, and presented them to the State Department.
I sat next to Fulbright the following Tuesday, during some piece of business on the Senate floor. I leaned to him and said, "Bill, remember I called you last week about securing those names?" Bill replied, "Yes, that's right. We're going to have a committee meeting this afternoon to decide what to do." I wasn't sure he'd heard me right. I said, "I've already sent someone over there, and we have the names." And Fulbright replied, icily, "That's a matter for the Foreign Relations Committee."
He maintained an edge toward me from that point. I suppose he believed that I was still overreaching, though I had notified him about the matter. And so he joined the opposition to me.
Byrd never did openly announce for my whip position, though he had been hard at work behind the scenes. One of his most influential allies was Richard Russell, but Russell lay dying of cancer at Walter Reed Hospital. Russell had given Byrd his proxy vote, but had he died before the balloting took place, it would be meaningless. On the day of the balloting, Byrd checked the hospital. Russell was still alive. He gave the go-ahead to his supporters--including four incoming senators who had all assured me of their support. Byrd scored a stunning upset, a vote of thirty-one to twentyfour. Russell died four hours later. Had the incoming senators voted the way they'd promised, I would have beaten Byrd by one vote, twenty-eight to twenty-seven. I figured out how they'd actually gone by a pair of telltale misspellings among the Byrd ballots: "B-I-R-D." No one who enjoyed more than a distant knowledge of the West Virginia senator would make such a mistake.
The fact is, those four did me a favor--they and the others who voted to oust me as whip. Robert Byrd went on to do an admirable job in the role, and eventually became a distinguished majority leader. As for me, the defeat served as a prompt to immerse myself more deeply in the necessary basic work of a U.S. senator.
And so I burrowed in. I gave myself over to contemplation and study. I absorbed the Senate's history, the careers of its greatest members, the principles that lent it constancy over the years, and the many social movements and powerful figures that at times altered its influence and character. I reread the Constitution in the context of the mandates it prescribed for the Senate; and, in doing so, reexperienced the awe of this document that had first been opened to me by the likes of the great Arthur N. Holcombe, my teacher at Harvard.
I grew interested in every aspect of the Senate: its arcane rules both permanent and new; its parliamentary procedure; the functions of its many committees and subcommittees, some of which were well known and others half-forgotten or unsuspected, and therefore of potentially great use. I doubt that anyone has ever managed to completely internalize the immense font of knowledge that these areas comprise, but I committed myself to learning it as thoroughly and in as much minute detail as I could.
As I had during my hospital days in 1964, I sought out mentors. I called once again on John Kenneth Galbraith of Harvard and on another distinguished economist, Carl Kaysen of MIT, who had once been an aide to Jack in national security affairs. I also asked business executives and union leaders to meet with me for luncheons at which I asked endless questions about their expectations of this body and about its impact on their lives.
Always available to me in his office, or so it seemed, a pipestem caught between his fingers and a scowl of contemplation narrowing his dark eyes, was Senator Mike Mansfield. In his late sixties now, the majority leader looked every inch the statesman he was. Mansfield conveyed his understanding of and reverence for that institution to me.
Instead of doing this research during my Senate workday, I always did it outside the Senate: it was genuine "homework." I have a policy of not reading memos or signing letters during office time. I use that time for Senate business, committee work, meetings with other senators and constituents. My homework begins as soon as I'm in the car, headed to or from Capitol Hill. A staff member drives me, so I can use that time to make phone calls or read memos. And then, after dinner, I make my way through The Bag.
The Bag is divided into several compartments. There is the "must do" compartment, which includes material that needs action ASAP. Another section holds briefing memos from the staff on various issues, correspondence to be signed, correspondence to be read. Then I might dive into the section jammed with news clips from Massachusetts and around the country, Capitol Hill news, current newspapers, and magazines that I might not have yet seen.
By definition, we senators are generalists. But we must at least know more about the issues that fall under the jurisdiction of our committees than about other issues. That's one of the main reasons for my "policy dinners" and for my regular meetings and talks with experts.
I'm certainly not alone in my determination to master policy. I had a wonderful experience a few years ago with Mike Enzi, the popular Republican senator from Wyoming. I was chairing a subcommittee meeting on safety in the workplace. The first item on my agenda was toxins in the workplace, and Mike spoke up, saying that he'd just gone to a conference on that issue and had very specific recommendations. A little later I said, well, let's move on to poisons in some other aspect of the workplace, and he had specific recommendations on that too. He had gone to a conference on that. I raised a third issue, and Mike knew all about that issue as well, because he'd gone to another conference on that one. In just a few minutes, Mike Enzi showed us what a superb legislator he was and what it took to be a good one: knowledge, information, hard work. There's no substitute.
As I studied and contemplated the Senate, I kept myself involved in the great issues that had always mattered to me. Refugees, to name but one example. I had led the fight for U.S. aid to the millions uprooted from their homes and communities in Vietnam. Now a fresh wave of terrified, starving victims of war welled up--this time in Africa.
Biafra, a territory of seven million people, most of them Catholic Ibos, on the southeastern coast of Nigeria, had declared its independence from the much larger and heavily Muslim federation in May 1967. (Nigeria itself had only just gained independence from Great Britain in 1960.) Riots and armed fighting between these religious and ethnic adversaries had flared up for years, but Biafra's secession triggered an immediate fullscale civil war, with catastrophic results. It took weeks of horrific fighting, marked by massacres on both sides, but a quarter million Nigerian troops finally overwhelmed the tiny breakaway state, gunning down and starving the Ibos by the tens of thousands. By the time of Biafra's capitulation in 1970, the total dead on both sides exceeded one million. Well before that, the victors' merciless crushing of the rebel state had begun to smack of genocide.
In my first Senate speech following Bobby's death, on September 23, 1968, I pointed out that while the United States and other nations did nothing to intervene, more than seven thousand Biafrans were dying of starvation each day. After that I spent weeks pressing administration officials and State Department leaders to do their humanitarian duty. By the end of that year, my lobbying had produced results. Some relief planes were flying into the devastated area, but several were shot down--by both Nigerians and Biafrans.
The war itself was nearly at an end when I called hearings before my refugee subcommittee in early January 1970. But the suffering was far from over: the victorious Nigerian armies were running unrestrained through Biafra, ransacking households, murdering and raping. After testimony on the extent of the brutality, I renewed my call for America to intervene in this open-ended massacre. The hearings generated enough press coverage that President Nixon, encouraged by Henry Kissinger, joined with Great Britain to once again ship tons of food and medicine to the helpless Ibos.
On the domestic front, I committed myself to the issue that had already caught my passion. I recognized that improving health care, and ensuring Americans' ability to pay for it, would be my main mission, and I would fight for it for however long it would take.
I knew that this mission would require many years and a great deal of energy. How many years, and how much energy, I could not then imagine. Health care, and its inadequacies, have been woven into the fabric of my life.
As a young boy I had witnessed Rosemary's struggles. I had watched Jack endure his many ailments, diseases, and near-death experiences. I had shared the family's shock over my father's stroke in 1961 that robbed him of his speech. I had tried to comfort Jack and Jackie in 1963 as they grieved the loss of the newborn Patrick Bouvier, who died from inadequate lung development. In 1964, with my broken back, I had been personally introduced to the pain and helplessness of a debilitating injury, and to the numbing routine of lengthy hospitalization. And these family crises of health were but prologue for what was to come.
My family's good fortune had insulated me from the desperation that for most Americans compounds the trauma of drastic illness or injury--the effort to meet crushing medical bills and, often, of having to make life-and-death decisions imposed by the enormity of those bills. Perhaps it has been this acute awareness of my own good fortune, as well as the suffering of so many of my loved ones, that has spurred me to always look beyond mere statistics, beyond conventional cost-benefit analyses, and to insist that "health care" be rooted in care.
I was in fact an activist in this area--a "foot soldier," as I've called myself--even before I entered the Senate. As I've mentioned, I had the extraordinary privilege of working with Dr. Sidney Farber in 1961 on the Massachusetts Cancer Crusade. Dr. Farber is recognized as being the father of both modern pediatric pathology and of chemotherapy as a treatment for neoplastic (tumor-forming) disease. He taught me about the ravages of cancer in American society, the depths of suffering caused by it, the self-defeating and unnecessary shame felt by victims and their loved ones, and the staggering costs of the disease.
I could never have dreamed back then how intimately I was destined to experience cancer's dark realities. Or how transformative those informal seminars were to prove, to me personally as well as to the cause of cancer research. It was this singular physician who ignited my long campaign as a senator to increase funding for this research.
The morass of genetic, environmental, and human-intake causes and the intricacies of its play among human cells, make cancer perhaps the greatest of all challenges to medical science. In 1971, still inspired by Farber and aware that the annual death toll from cancer was at nearly 340,000 and rising, I felt the time was right for a major offensive against the disease. I wanted to pass a National Cancer Act, and bolster it with enough funding to offer realistic hope for new discoveries and breakthroughs. I had recently become the chairman of the health subcommittee, and I was in touch with several of America's most distinguished health advocates and economic experts who felt the same way.
Besides Dr. Farber, these included some giants of their times, people whose contributions, like those of Walter Reuther, have regrettably faded in the public memory. One of them was Mary Lasker. The wife of the wealthy Albert Lasker, a pioneer of modern advertising, Mary was herself a pioneer: she fought for higher health standards and for medical research in America for most of her long life, and received a Congressional Gold Medal before her death at ninety-four. Mary brought prestige and tactical wisdom to our efforts.
Another valuable partner was Benno Schmidt. The well-connected New York investment banker shared my belief that cancer research was a critical national duty. His financial expertise told him that the country could and would support our quest for as much as one and a half billion dollars, a fourfold increase in research funding. That estimate became our figure in the bill.
Our intention, expressed in the legislation's early drafts, was to bypass the then ineffectual National Cancer Institute, an appendage of the National Institutes of Health, by creating a new independent agency structured along the lines of NASA. Mary Lasker had long advocated for such an agency. In her early seventies then, she lent her distinguished reputation to a round of speeches and published essays advocating for our bill.
We faced a powerful competitor for our goal: the Nixon administration, anxious to put its own stamp on cancer research, but at a much lower price tag than ours. In January, the president proposed a bill with an increase of $100 million in spending for this purpose, thus capturing temporary cachet as the leader in the fight. "Temporary" could easily become "permanent" unless we outflanked him: he was hardly likely to cede the momentum, and the credit, to a liberal Democrat in Congress--especially one named Kennedy.
My allies and I were now in a fight for the initiative and, along with it, a truly adequate research budget. We needed a bipartisan thrust; this effort must not get tangled up in partisan politics. And so I formed a partnership with an eager Jacob Javits, the Republican senator from New York, to get our bill written and moving through Congress.
A final obstacle remained: Nixon could not bring himself to sign a landmark bill that had the Kennedy name attached. So I immediately said to take my name off the bill, though I felt badly that Jacob Javits was also being denied the credit he deserved because of Nixon's feelings about me.
Nixon had insisted that his own bill, not the one created by our team, be the one submitted. So we replaced the language of the Nixon bill with the language of ours, and kept it labeled as the Nixon bill. The measure passed by a vote of seventy-nine to one and was signed by Nixon in 1971. The new department created by the act, the Conquest of Cancer Agency, remained within the NIH, as the Republicans wished. But administratively it would report not to NIH but directly to the president. And it carried our budget figures. The important point was that cancer research had entered a new era of federal funding and productivity.
Many others, of course, have felt the same urgency as I about health care. Progressives' calls for some sort of federal health-cost protection for Americans had fitfully arisen and subsided since the days before World War I. President Roosevelt considered a health insurance provision in the Social Security Act of 1935, but omitted it out of concern that its projected costs would scuttle the act, a cornerstone of his New Deal. He later asked Congress to include adequate medical care as part of an "economic bill of rights," but was rebuffed. When President Truman proposed national health insurance to Congress in 1945, the American Medical Association mobilized a virulent opposition campaign, aimed at the heartland, portraying the idea as "socialized medicine." Senator Robert Taft of Ohio took up that charge, and a House subcommittee member went even further, labeling it "a communist plot." Medicare was passed in 1965 under Lyndon Johnson, with my strong support. Still, large disparities remained. With eighty million Americans uninsured and a national outlay of $60 billion in health-related costs, Time reported on May 11, 1970, that "there is a growing consensus that some national insurance blanket must be thrown over the ailing body of health care." True enough--and the scatter-quilt of federal programs was hardly a remedy.
In a December 1969 speech at the Boston University Medical Center, I declared that the time had come to begin phasing in such a program, despite its unarguably high costs. I expanded these views and enfolded them into a larger arraignment of the American health care system in my 1972 book In Critical Condition. As a member of the Labor Committee's health subcommittee, I had been in communication since the end of 1968 with Walter Reuther. Reuther is remembered as the progressive president of the United Auto Workers union, but his larger legacy, all but forgotten to history, is that of a social visionary whose humanitarian concerns included but extended well beyond the members of his union. When Reuther himself called for national health insurance in November 1968, I'd sensed an alignment of forces that could produce a new opportunity for action. In January 1969, when he invited me to join his new Committee of One Hundred for National Health Insurance, I did not hesitate. Reuther was killed in a small-airplane crash in May 1970, but the committee's work went forward, and in August 1970, drawing on its contributions, I introduced the first bill of my career for national health insurance. It was defeated: the first setback in a long, long struggle.
Still, with the help of others, I was able to gain some important early victories. In 1965, two physicians on the faculty of Tufts University, Jack Geiger and Count Gibson, came to one of the semi-regular policy dinners that I held, this time in Boston. The discussion that evening involved health care, and in the course of it the two doctors began to focus on the need to eradicate the barrier of distance that often discouraged poor and working people from visiting their doctors. From our conversation was born a plan for community health centers, modeled on experimental centers in the third world, notably Africa. The idea was not only to redress illnesses and injury, but to educate the community in prevention and healthy living. Excited by their concept, and aware of funding possibilities through the new Office of Economic Opportunity, I introduced an appropriation bill in 1966 that would expand upon their concept, providing $38 million to make it a reality. The original plan was for two neighborhood health centers, one at Columbia Point in Boston and the other in Mount Bayou, Mississippi.
In searching for allies, I approached Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the charismatic congressman and social activist from New York's 18th District, which included Harlem. As chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, Powell had championed Jack's New Frontier programs, and helped steer many of them into law. He'd done the same for Lyndon Johnson's Great Society initiatives.
In 1966, Powell was fifty-seven, still handsome with his neatly trimmed mustache, and still very much the master of his congressional domain. When I visited his committee to make my pitch, he obliged me to wait for several hours as they went through their other business. Yet when he finally turned to me, I received the full force of his famous spark and dazzle. "Teddy Kennedy!" he began. "You want these neighborhood health centers?" I said that I did. "How many are you going to have for thirty-eight million?" he asked. I said that it would cover two and (quickly anticipating Powell's own interests in backing me) perhaps four. Powell shot back, "You write in there that one of them is going to be in my district, and you've got it!" I told him that that would be fine with me. I wrote it in; Powell steered the bill through the House; the Senate passed it; and that was the beginning of neighborhood health centers across the United States.
My battle against cancer first struck home in 1973.
Teddy was a seventh grader at the St. Albans School in Washington that fall. He'd turned twelve on September 26 and was proud to be a member of the Bulldogs' football team despite his slight build. Thinner and smaller than I had been at the same age, he was nevertheless a good athlete in the style of Bobby, whom he'd adored--a good runner especially.
He was an even better student, thanks in part to his own perseverance. He'd determined to keep up academically in this highly demanding school. He was exceptional at memorization. This was something he and I worked on when he was a small boy, and I remember almost to the moment when he dazzled us with his first big breakthrough. It was during a ski weekend with Bobby and his family at Stowe, Vermont, one spring. After a hearty dinner, I reminded my son that it was time for him to go and learn his next assignment: "Casey at the Bat." Triumphantly, Teddy announced that he'd already memorized it--then recited it at the table, to everyone's applause.
At St. Albans, he and the other students were required to memorize one poem each week. I remember listening enchanted as Teddy mastered Yeats's "The Second Coming": "Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer..."
On November 6, Teddy came down with a cold and remained home from school at our McLean house, where he padded about in a bathrobe. I was in the library, just winding up a briefing session with staff. As I walked out, I spotted my son and noticed that the area just below his right kneecap was discolored by an ugly reddish lump. He grudgingly admitted that it hurt a little--which meant, in Kennedy lexicon, that it hurt a lot. I assumed that it was nothing more than just a football bruise. (Teddy himself said later that he'd thought it was Osgood-Schlatter disease, a common affliction to fast-growing young knees that several of his classmates had experienced.) I asked our governess, Teresa Fitzpatrick, to telephone Dr. S. Philip Caper, who had been affiliated with Harvard Medical School, but was then in Washington as a staff member for my Senate health subcommittee.
The doctor rang our doorbell scarcely half an hour later. He was en route to a formal event and was dressed for the occasion, yet he examined my son with fully professional concentration. It was probably nothing to worry about, Phil said, but we should keep an eye on it. He'd check back in a couple of days.
I flew to Boston on Thursday, November 8, to complete some work out of my office there and had planned to fly down to Florida the next day for a brief visit with my mother in Palm Beach. But when Teresa called me to say that Teddy's leg was not better, I really became concerned. I told Teresa to call Dr. Caper, and I made plans to return to Washington the next day when my Boston events were finished, instead of visiting my mother. Phil arranged for Teddy to see the chairman of orthopedic surgery at Georgetown University Hospital, Dr. George Hyatt. Dr. Hyatt examined my son and had X-rays taken.
As I flew back to Washington the next day, I began to have an almost overwhelming sense of dread, but I willed myself not to think of the possibilities. In truth, they were unthinkable. Phil Caper met me at the airport, and the expression on his face made me brace myself. He told me the situation was serious: that Dr. George Hyatt at Georgetown felt certain that we were looking at a bone tumor. We immediately went to Georgetown, where Phil and I met personally with Dr. Hyatt, and he repeated the same devastating news. He added that if we were indeed looking at bone cancer, then Teddy's leg would most likely have to be amputated. He wanted to bring Teddy into the hospital for more tests and to consult with a broader group of experts from other institutions as well. I readily agreed.
Later that day, my good-natured twelve-year-old son checked into the hospital for more X-rays and blood tests and examinations. He was so innocent and trusting. I could barely absorb the realities of the situation, and I didn't feel that it was the time to discuss it with him. Joan was traveling in Europe, and I hadn't even been able to talk to her yet.
After two days of tests, the news was no better, but the doctors let me take him home for the rest of the weekend. We wanted his life to be as normal as possible for as long as possible. When we got back to our home in the Washington suburbs, I grabbed a football, went out to the lawn, and threw passes to my son. As he ran to catch them, I was fighting not to be crushed by emotion, knowing that this was probably the last time that Teddy would be able to run on two legs. I didn't tell him what the future held. There would be time enough for that. I just played ball with my son and savored every moment and prayed that he was going to survive. There had been so much loss. But please God. Not Teddy.
I called Joan. She needed to come home from Europe. We were facing a life-and-death situation for our son.
Teddy returned to the hospital after the weekend and on Tuesday, November 13, the doctors operated on his leg to remove a small slice of the tissue believed to be malignant. The tissue was analyzed immediately by Dr. Lent Johnson of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, the country's leading expert in analyzing this kind of tumor.
I did not leave the hospital. Dr. Hyatt delivered news both devastating and hopeful: Teddy's right leg would have to be amputated above the knee, and quickly, in an attempt to overtake the cancer that was probably spreading. The hopeful news was that the type of cancer seemed to be chondrosarcoma, which attacked the ligaments and was a good deal less deadly than osteosarcoma, cancer of the bone, which took the lives of 80 percent of its victims within five years. Still, no one was sure.
The surgeons made plans to amputate Teddy's leg on Friday, November 16. Only Teddy's persistent cold prevented them from operating the next day, as they'd have preferred.
As of Thursday, I still had not told Teddy of what lay ahead. I'd consulted a child psychiatrist to get help on how to break the news. He said that we shouldn't tell Teddy too far in advance, to minimize his level of anxiety, and we had to tell him in the right way. On the day before Teddy was to have surgery, I went with Phil Caper and Dr. Robert Coles, the renowned child psychiatrist from Harvard, to deliver the news to my son. I'd heard and delivered more than my share of bad news in my life, but this was the worst of the worst. My twelve-year-old son started crying, and I was fighting back emotion with every ounce of my being. I held Teddy in my arms and told him that I'd be there with him, that we'd face this problem together, that surgery would take care of the problem so he could be well, that we would have many happy days still ahead. I needed to believe those words as much as he did. In the end, he accepted the news bravely, but I'm not sure that his young mind could truly absorb what it really would mean to lose his leg above the knee.
My visits to the hospital had attracted press attention, and few secrets can be kept in great urban hospitals. I decided to prevail on the essential humanity of the reporters, who were by now asking insistent questions. I told them the facts, but asked them not to print their stories until the following day, when the operation would occur. The reporters said they would comply. Just in case someone had not heard of the agreement or elected to ignore it, I removed Teddy's radio and TV set. I made the excuse that we were offering them to other children in the hospital who could not afford such luxuries.
Because of Teddy's lingering cold, the doctors postponed the surgery again, until 8:30 Saturday morning. This posed a distressing new dilemma. Saturday, November 17, 1973, was a date I'd circled on my calendar many months ago. My niece Kathleen was to be married on this day: Kathleen, the sparkling, great-hearted eldest child of Bobby and Ethel. Kathleen, named in honor of our late sister "Kick," the eldest grandchild of Joe and Rose and the first to be wed. Her thick shock of raven hair has always reminded me of Bobby, as has her devoutness, her curiosity, and her passion for public service.
At 11 a.m. on this day, Kathleen was to marry David Townsend, then a doctoral candidate at Harvard in history and literature. The church was Holy Trinity, where Jack had worshipped during his time as president. I had promised to give my niece away at the ceremony. Kathleen had offered to postpone the wedding after she'd heard about Teddy's operation schedule, but I dissuaded her. I wanted nothing to cloud her memories of this milestone in her life. But the delay in Teddy's surgery caused me anguish. I needed to know that my son was going to be all right before I left the hospital.
At around ten that morning, the doctors appeared from the operating room to announce that the surgery had been a success and Teddy, still anesthetized, was well out of danger. Only then did I rush the several blocks to Holy Trinity to walk Bobby's firstborn down the aisle on her wedding day. As soon as the nuptial mass was over, I rushed back to the hospital.
As difficult and painful as the surgery and the loss of his leg were for him, Teddy's positive and upbeat nature carried him through his recovery and rehabilitation. But even as Teddy was working hard on his exercise regimen and enjoying visits by special guests (the entire offensive line of the Washington Redskins, for example), the doctors were revisiting their conclusion that his cancer was strictly chondrosarcoma. Pathology lab results showed dreaded bone cancer cells indeed present in my son's tumor.
This fresh blow to my hopes for Teddy left me stunned at first; but a more aggressive emotion quickly took hold: defiance. If the cancer has escalated, we'll escalate back. However unwittingly, I began to form the template for future counterattacks against the disease in my family, including my own test thirty-five years on.
I got on the phone and called doctors from around the United States who I knew were working on experimental forms of treatment--doctors I'd gotten to know in our shared crusade for cancer funding. I convened a meeting at my home in McLean. The practitioner whose results seemed the most promising to me was based right in Boston: Dr. Edward Frei III, of Children's Hospital. In this period before the general advent of chemotherapy, Dr. Frei had found success administering a drug called methotrexate, which destroyed cancer cells efficiently. (Sidney Farber was experimenting with this drug in the 1940s as well.)
The other doctors agreed on this treatment, and on February 1, 1974, my resolute twelve-year-old commenced a rigorous pattern that would be repeated without interruption over two years. Every three weeks, I would fly with Teddy from Washington to Boston, where he would endure six hours of lying nearly motionless in his hospital bed while a needle dripped medicine into his bloodstream, followed by another long period of citrovorum injections. The entire process covered three days.
Helping Teddy recover took precedence over every other activity in my life, including my duties in the Senate. I slept beside him in his hospital room. I would hold his head against my chest when the nausea overcame him. In time, I learned the technique of injecting him myself, so that we could cut the visit short by a day and get him into his classroom on Monday mornings.
My many hours at Boston Children's Hospital were precious in another way. While Teddy was asleep or in treatment, I wandered the halls and the waiting rooms, and sought out other parents who, like me, were keeping vigil over terribly ill sons and daughters--many of them with the dreaded osteosarcoma. These were mostly working people: salesmen, secretaries, laborers, teachers, taxi drivers. Their long hours and modest savings allowed them to raise their families comfortably and with hope--until catastrophe struck. It was in these conversations that the inhumanity of our health care system truly hit home to me. We shared common ground in our anxieties about whether our children would live or die, or survive with debilitating frailties. But for my new friends, this was only one terrible part of a larger nightmare.
Teddy's treatment, like that of the other children suffering from cancer, was free in the first six or seven months, because it was part of an NIH experimental grant: a clinical trial with uncertain results, to which we had all agreed. The results in fact proved highly promising for all the young patients, a dividend of the rise in research funding. But this happy news brought with it a heartbreaking downside: once the usefulness of the treatment and medicines had been verified, the experiment ended, and the patients' families were billed for the remaining treatment.
I will never forget sitting down and listening to those parents. Suddenly they were faced with finding a way to scrape up three thousand dollars for each treatment. The treatments were necessary every three weeks for two years. These families were terrified. They could not begin to afford it. They would tell me of being reduced to a grim, almost macabre calculus: How much of a chance, they would ask the doctors, did their children have if they purchased the resources for only a year? Or eight months? Or six months? They were not being stingy. They were bargaining based on how much they could afford. Many had already borrowed to the limit. Others had sold or remortgaged their homes. Several had run the risk of being fired from their jobs for the crime of taking time off work to be with their son or daughter. In a few cases, debt or bankruptcy was compounded by the knowledge that the child would never recover: the illness had no cure, because funding in that field remained inadequate.
I began directing my Senate health committee's work toward the realities of lives such as those: the uninsured, the underinsured. I held hearings--but not always just ordinary hearings. Whenever feasible, I would take my committee and witnesses to hospitals in rural and inner-city neighborhoods. I wanted my colleagues to be taken out of their comfort zones, as I had been taken out of mine. I wanted them to experience the ravages of preventable illness and death as I'd learned to experience them: not as abstractions on a printed page, but as blood, and bandages, and needles, and wails of pain down a hospital corridor, and tears, and mourning.
The field hearings did not produce instant, dramatic results--cries of empathy from hardheaded Senate conservatives, a raft of new legislation, fresh winds of enlightened consensus. I never assumed that they would. I had no illusions about the battle for health care. But now that battle had my complete attention. I had even won an early fight in it: my son would live.