CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
1994
In 1994, after thirty-two years in the Senate, I found myself campaigning for my political survival.
I knew that this election was going to be more challenging than usual, so I had been laying the groundwork for more than two years, actively campaigning around the state for other candidates in the 1992 elections and reconnecting with voters who had not seen me for a while. After those elections, I continued to return to the Commonwealth as much as the Senate schedule allowed to meet with various constituency groups and visit more cities and towns.
But despite our hard work, there were red flags. When campaign workers were gathering signatures to qualify me for the ballot, they found the electorate to be less receptive than in other years. A changing world had transformed Massachusetts into a quite different state from the one I'd known as a boy, or even as a young senator.
Textiles and shoes had been the twin anchors of the Commonwealth's economic stability and working-class hopes back in Honey Fitz's day. But the redbrick factories and mills that once seemed as natural to the landscape as cranberry bogs had been declining even before World War II, and now were shuttered, losers to outsourcing and overseas competition. Mass production of shoes in America had begun in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1885, but Ronald Reagan's favorite, the Bostonian, was being made in China and India now. Massachusetts textile mills had virtually ushered in the American industrial age, but Asian imports were rendering this industry uncompetitive as well.
As with any shrinkage of a job base, decline built on decline. Machine shops, mold makers, and electricians were drawn down into the spiral. Lower wages, unemployment, a shrinking tax base that supported fewer social services and funding for schools--it was enough to turn good people angry and cynical. And it had.
Massachusetts is a resilient state, and it wheeled about to stem the flow of lost jobs and revenues. Its network of higher learning centers began to draw in a new kind of worker, the white-collar professional in information,finance, biotech, and other high-tech jobs. Yet as welcome as they were, these "new economy" specialists could not fully compensate for the losses. New anxieties arose in the streets and neighborhoods, and were augmented by the rise of welfare and its perceived abuses. "What is Senator Kennedy doing about it?" ran the question in those neighborhoods. "Where is he? Why isn't he around here?" Reasonable questions, all of them; and to some, there were reasonable answers. But as Vicki and members of my staff tried to remind me from time to time, I was not in the habit of touting my accomplishments. (As a woman legislator urged Vicki during the campaign, "Honey, you've just got to tell him what my mama told me: 'If you don't toot your horn, nobody's gonna hear your tune.'") Well, I was taught not to toot my own horn. The last time I'd tried it, I'd gotten a letter from Dad telling me to stop mooing. But eventually I had to face up to the larger point in that criticism: I could no longer assume that the voters were closely monitoring my hard work on their behalf.
For one thing, I was not even especially well known to the newer, younger electorate, which had little investment in Boston's or the state's past. The name "Ted Kennedy" conveyed less information and less political connection to them than perhaps I would like to have thought.
For another, even my older base was perhaps starting to take me for granted. Or, if Vicki was to be believed, taking me for granite. "You've become like a building to them," she told me one day.
I soon grasped that my wife was handing me a hard and urgent truth. Her own conversations with people around the state had convinced her that to many, I'd become less a human being than a kind of monument. And that among those who did have strong opinions was a sizable percentage that didn't think I understood the problems and concerns of people like them.
I had also contributed to my political problems by persistent questions about my personal behavior, which were raised by the media during the Senate's confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas and, more notoriously, in coverage of allegations of a date rape in Palm Beach. On March 30, 1991, my nephew William Smith was accused of the crime and I was named in tabloid stories because I had been with him earlier that evening. The episode interrupted what I'd hoped would be a quiet getaway from my Senate duties, a weekend at the house my father had purchased in 1933. My son Patrick and I joined my sister Jean, her four children, and other friends in Palm Beach for Easter.
William was thirty that spring, and a medical student at Georgetown University School of Medicine. He would go on to a productive career as an activist in the worldwide cause of finding and disabling military land mines. He founded the Center for International Rehabilitation, a network for supporting the disabled.
William, Patrick, and I had left the house and gone out for a lateevening drink at a popular Palm Beach watering hole. As I later told a jury, we had all spent much of the day and evening reminiscing about Steve Smith, who had recently died of cancer shortly before his sixty-third birthday. Steve had managed or helped manage the presidential campaigns of Jack, Bobby, and me. He had taken over the family finances after my father died, becoming chairman of our family business office in New York. He spearheaded the fund-raising for the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, of which the Stephen E. Smith Center became a part. Beyond his accomplishments in the world, Steve was a gentle and humorous man beneath his facade of intensity. He was a good soul and I loved him very much.
My memories of Steve and other lost family members overwhelmed me as I tried to fall asleep. I invited Patrick and William to come with me to the club. William struck up a conversation with a woman, and he and she left the establishment. Out of that encounter came the woman's charge against William. Her claim, of course, made headlines and news broadcasts around the world. Ultimately, the jury wound up deliberating for only seventy-seven minutes before delivering a verdict of not guilty.
I could have avoided any involvement in the trial if I'd simply taken a walk on the beach by myself that night, instead of asking my son and nephew to accompany me to a bar.
Clarence Thomas, however, was another matter entirely. That was a controversy I could not avoid.
On July 1, 1991, President Bush nominated Thomas, a federal judge, to the Supreme Court to fill the seat of the great Thurgood Marshall. Marshall had been the first African American to serve as a Supreme Court justice. It seemed generally obvious that the president had been determined to select a black jurist to succeed Marshall, and a conservative black jurist at that.
The National Organization for Women objected to his nomination immediately. They focused on indications that he might vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, thus criminalizing abortion and denying women the right to make their own reproductive decisions. The NAACP and the Urban League objected sometime later. They pinpointed critical statements Thomas had made about affirmative action.
Worst of all, however, was Thomas's rating by the American Bar Association's fifteen-member evaluation committee for appointees. No member gave him the highest rating of "well-qualified." Two of them even pronounced him "unqualified." In stark contrast, every other sitting member of the Supreme Court has been determined to be "well-qualified" by the ABA. President Bush's earlier assertion that Thomas was the "best-qualified" nominee available hardly seemed credible.
I was a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Joe Biden, which began hearings on Thomas's appointment on September 10. The questioning went on for eight sessions spanning seventeen days, focusing on the nominee's opinions about issues such as the right to privacy, civil and minority rights, and his record as Equal Employment Opportunity Commission chairman, among other topics.
On September 27, the Judiciary Committee was evenly split on whether to recommend his confirmation: seven votes for his confirmation and seven against. In voting against confirmation, I said that "when ideology is the paramount consideration of the president in nominating a justice to the Supreme Court, the Senate is entitled to take that ideology into account in the confirmation process and to reject any nominee whose views are so extreme that they place him outside the mainstream." We sent the nomination to the Senate floor without a recommendation.
On October 6, as the full Senate body neared the end of its deliberations, two news outlets broke a story that threw the proceedings, and the nation, into an uproar: a tenured professor at the University of Oklahoma Law Center, Anita Hill, had submitted to our committee in September an affidavit stating that Thomas had sexually harassed her ten years earlier while she was employed as his personal assistant at the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education, which he then headed. Specifically, Ms. Hill charged, Thomas had discussed pornographic movies with her and had asked her several times for a date, even after she'd told him she did not wish to go out with him.
The Judiciary Committee reopened its hearings on October 11, and that is when the media and much of America suddenly developed a consuming interest in our deliberations. In defending himself, Thomas famously and furiously described his questioning as a circus and a national disgrace, "a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves."
On October 15, the full Senate confirmed Clarence Thomas as an associate justice of the Supreme Court by a vote of fifty-two to forty-eight, mostly but not entirely along party lines.
A sort of "urban legend" built up around my participation, or lack of participation, in the questioning of Clarence Thomas during the Anita Hill portion of the hearings. The idea took hold that I remained mostly silent--"muzzled myself," in the words of at least one journalist--because I was reluctant to interrogate the nominee on the question of his alleged sexual harassment of Hill: it would draw attention to my private life, especially in the wake of the Palm Beach incident.
The true reason why I did not ask many questions is less melodramatic and more procedural. Joe Biden had appointed Howell Heflin of Alabama and Patrick Leahy of Vermont, a former prosecutor, as the lead questioners of Thomas for this added-on stage of the hearings, which were out of the ordinary and subject to different rules. I had been a regular questioner in the main part of the hearings, and I don't think anyone doubted my performance then.
I was not at all reluctant to raise my voice. On day three of this phase, I angrily spoke up in protest of what I called the "character assassination" of Anita Hill. I made a strong statement at the end, as I voted in opposition to Thomas's confirmation. I worked to garner votes to turn down his nomination. I let it be known that I thought he was the wrong man for the job because of his narrow view of the Constitution and his judicial philosophy. But I also knew--and know--that perception is reality in politics. I had appeared to be silenced, and no amount of rational explanation about procedural mechanics was going to change that "reality." I also understood another hard truth: with all of the background noise about Palm Beach and my bachelor lifestyle, I would have been the wrong person to lead the questioning in the second phase of the Thomas hearing. And I know that many people were disappointed that I was unable to succeed in making a persuasive case against Thomas's confirmation.
That autumn was a time of soul-searching for me. The Palm Beach incident and the Clarence Thomas hearings, each in its own way, but really together, had stirred up public doubts about my past and my judgment. For the first time, my private life was viewed as impacting my public life. The high stakes of the Clarence Thomas nomination and the salacious allegations about his private life and its impact on his professional life certainly did not help that perception. My habitual reluctance to speak publicly about my personal life had intensified the doubting of many, and had allowed the latest tabloid frenzy to roll on unabated with rumor and innuendo.
I needed to reestablish good faith with my constituents. I began work on a speech to address the issues in a way I had never done before. It was not an easy one to write or give. I asked Vicki to accompany me to the speech and then to join me and my family at the Cape for the rest of the weekend. I told her that I was giving an important speech at Harvard, but I didn't tell her what I would say or why I wanted her to be there. Her presence was all I needed.
On October 25, with Vicki sitting amid the capacity audience, I took the microphone at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Television cameras focused their lenses on me from behind the packed auditorium. Late arrivals milled outside, unable to find seats. Many, I later gathered, had come because they expected me to announce a decision not to seek another term in the Senate.
I spoke of the nation's pressing policy issues for several minutes--national health insurance, gun control, civil rights. I alluded to the outrage of many progressive Americans at the confirmation of Thomas to the Supreme Court:
"Some of the anger of recent days reflects the pain of a new idea still being born--the idea of a society where sex discrimination is ended and sexual harassment is unacceptable--the idea of an America where the majority who are women are truly and finally equal citizens."
Then, shifting my focus to another source of recent public anger, I turned to the heart of what I'd come to say.
"I am painfully aware," I told my audience, "that the criticism directed at me in recent months involves far more than honest disagreements with my positions, or the usual criticism from the far right. It also involves the disappointment of friends and many others who rely on me to fight the good fight."
I looked around the auditorium and continued, in matter-of-fact tones:
"To them I say: I recognize my own shortcomings--the faults in the conduct of my private life. I realize that I alone am responsible for them, and I am the one who must confront them. I believe that each of us as individuals must not only struggle to make a better world, but to make ourselves better, too, and in this life those endeavors are never finished."
After the speech, I was relieved, but I knew it was only the beginning. I had work to do.
That evening, after a quiet dinner, I asked Vicki to take a walk with me. I wanted to show her some of the things that make Boston such a special place for me. We walked through the Public Garden and through the Common, jewels in Boston's Emerald Necklace, the magnificent park system created by Frederick Law Olmstead. We walked up Chestnut Street, where I showed her the buildings designed by Charles Bulfinch, the same architect who had designed the U.S. Capitol and the church, though I didn't know it at the time, at which my beloved mother eventually would be buried. I showed Vicki Louisburg Square, where citizens of Irish descent had gathered to challenge my grandfather when he appointed an Italian American to a post, shouting, "Remember your own, Honey Fitz. Remember your own!"
I always saw any campaign as an education, for me and for the voters. But I hadn't gone through especially competitive elections for a while, and the voters didn't know what I'd been doing in the Senate. They knew about all of the tabloid fodder, but not about the serious hard work of legislating and the many successes we had.
I faced some other troubling fires of discontent that burned in Massachusetts and the nation. There was increasing unhappiness with the status quo and a strong aversion to incumbency. "Term limits" was the cure-all of the moment. The Republicans' "Gingrich Revolution," which in 1994 would claim a net fifty-four House seats and eight in the Senate, was forming. Right-wing talk radio was on the rise, lending fury to the general discontent.
There were reasons enough for discontent. People were hurting in my state and all across the country. The rhetoric by political leaders was to demonize the poor as people getting something for nothing. Gingrich was calling America a welfare state. But the policies he was proposing were heartless.
And my likely Republican opponent was right out of central casting--young, tall, handsome, slender, with a beautiful wife and five attractive sons. Mitt Romney had a Harvard MBA and a fortune that he was prepared to spend.
The son of George W. Romney, the former Michigan governor and 1968 Republican presidential candidate, Mitt was forty-seven in 1994, and a legend in Boston financial circles. His private equity investment firm, Bain Capital, boasted a 113 percent average annual rate of return on investments. He'd never before won or even sought a political seat of any kind, but in 1994 this was held to be a good thing. In fact, one political analyst described him, for this very reason among others, as the ideal candidate: "a newcomer to politics, 45 to 50 years old, without any skeletons in his closet, a record of entrepreneurial success in the private sector, socially liberal, fiscally conservative." The analyst went on: "A critical mass of the voters are either like that themselves or aspire to that role. Mitt Romney at this point appears to fit that profile."
His TV ads cast me, by contrast, as old and tired. Time to retire old Ted. Say thank you, give him a gold watch, and let him spend his dotage on Cape Cod. At least that's how Romney started out. He also made a point of repeating that I had never held a real job. I had certainly heard that old saw before, but never from a candidate quite as eager and confident and charged up as Mitt.
Mitt ran as the man with a Mr. Clean image, whose hard work had blessed him with a fortune, and who was now going to "give something back" by bringing good honest business principles to the messy game of politics. I remember one newspaper profile of him that described him as singing only hymns and as having even his dog kneel down for nightly prayers.
I watched his media performance at a distance through the summer of 1994, getting ready as usual to transition into my own post-Labor Day campaigning after an unusually busy Senate year that ran through August. In May, after discussion with many Republicans, I'd proposed a compromise version of President Clinton's health care bill, a markup of existing legislation that would help assure coverage to workers who had lost or changed jobs. The effort had foundered in June after late partisan bickering undercut what had seemed a good chance for the bill's success. I had worked to draft the Goals 2000 legislation, which stimulated and supported local school reform efforts, including setting high standards for what students should learn. My efforts won broad bipartisan support. Working with the president, I'd led successful Senate efforts to pass the Family and Medical Leave Act and the School-to-Work Opportunities Act. I'd also spearheaded the Crime Act, which put ten thousand new policemen on America's streets and imposed tough new penalties for crimes involving gangs and firearms.
I ran ads in June and July, the earliest I had ever done so. It was a substantial buy. But I went dark in August. That was a mistake.
Mitt Romney's TV spots that summer were nominally geared to winning the September 20 primary against his fellow businessman John Lakian (whom he in fact defeated easily), but there was no mistaking the real target: me. Aggressive, slickly packaged, and frequent, they must have taken a good chunk out of his $7 million campaign budget, more spending than was usual for any campaign in Massachusetts. But were they getting him any traction? I doubted it. The ads boasted of Mitt's supposed success as a job-creating business executive, a success he promised to replicate as a senator. He was positioning himself as a moderate, almost an apolitical candidate. He was pro-choice, he declared. But efficiency was what he really had to sell: sleeves-rolled-up, businesslike efficiency, to replace the senior senator's outdated ways.
He called for an end to rewarding "children who have children" by terminating support for welfare mothers who give birth out of wedlock while on benefits.
This stand of his posed a sticky challenge to me, at least as some of my aides saw it. Romney was not alone in denouncing welfare. It was a convenient issue in 1994. People were hurting in my state and all across the country. Newt Gingrich was at the peak of his power, touting the Republicans' "Contract with America" and steering his party to a rout of Democrats in the midterm elections.
Thus the rhetoric of demonizing the poor as people getting something for nothing was especially effective this year, and some on my staff worried that my support of it could jeopardize my chances.
Just before Labor Day, my campaign manager and nephew Michael Kennedy called Vicki to say that the Boston Herald was going to publish a poll showing Mitt Romney and me virtually tied. Together they called our campaign pollster Tom Kiley to see what he thought of the poll, and he agreed that it was accurate. They then called me with the news: "You and Mitt are dead even."
That got my attention.
My Senate campaigns in the past had followed the timetable that Jack had formulated back in the 1950s. "Look," he used to tell me. "Everybody goes away in August. They're not paying much attention. They start caring after Labor Day, when vacation is over and the kids are back in school. And if the Red Sox are doing well, they're not going to focus on the election until after the pennant races. That's when they start making up their minds."
In 1994, the Senate business certainly did not go away in August. I divided my time between the critical legislative battles I've described above and getting the Kennedy campaign organization revved up for another go. We reactivated our trusty old troops and brought in promising newcomers. An effective political campaign force is a bit like an army: large, well trained, disciplined, with varying and complex missions, and overseen by a tight chain of command. As with my Senate staff, I have been lucky with the quality of my campaign personnel through the years.
This time around, they would be tested more intensely than usual. On Labor Day, polls showed that the race was even Steven.
I called a meeting at our Back Bay apartment on September 18 to discuss our strategy with Bob Shrum, John Sasso, Paul Kirk, Tom Kiley, Michael Kennedy, and other top campaign aides. Vicki and her father, Edmund Reggie (who had been so helpful in my brothers' campaigns), were also there. I listened as they made their presentations and recommendations.
Up until that point, for thirty-two years of public life, I had never mentioned my opponent in a campaign ad. But times had changed and my Republican opponents had been running ads against me while I remained silent. Those ads had obviously taken their toll. Shrum, pointing out that we could not attack my opponent's voting record because there was no record to attack, argued strongly that Romney's business practices were fair game. His business was to take over and invest in other companies, and it was in that arena where we should go searching for clues to the kind of judgments he would bring to bear in representing the people as their United States senator. Vicki strongly agreed with this, and I gave my go-ahead.
In addition, I was advised to take a position in favor of so-called welfare reform. Romney had made a point of being opposed to additional benefits being given to single mothers who had more children. None of us wanted to reward irresponsibility, but who were we punishing? It seemed to me that we would be hurting innocent babies who needed assistance. I told my staff that I was not going to try to win this election on the backs of poor women and children. Case closed.
After the meeting, I got on the phone and asked Ranny Cooper, my extremely capable former chief of staff, to take a leave of absence from her private-sector job to join the campaign. Ranny had run my office for many years. She knew me, knew how to get things done, and if she were there I knew I wouldn't have to worry about anything.
And then there was Dave Burke. Dave had also been my trusted chief of staff at an earlier time. When he wrote to offer to help in any way he could, I don't think he ever expected me to follow up in quite the way I did. Dave had been the president of CBS News and had had a very successful private-sector career. I doubt that he thought he was volunteering to leave his beautiful wife, Trixie, for six weeks to live out of a suitcase to be my "body man." But that's exactly what I asked him to do. I needed a peer to ride in the car with me, someone who knew me and had good judgment. There were press stakeouts at every campaign stop. There were constantly changing issues of the day. I needed a trusted aide to bounce ideas off of. Dave was the man. Vicki was usually campaigning on her own during the day, but she joined us for the evening events. And I have to say that with Dave and Vicki, my mood was lighter every day. I always enjoy campaigning, but we were really having fun.
Vicki, meanwhile, had been busy developing another new campaign avenue for me. We had decided actively and energetically to pursue the women's vote. Women had been brought into the political process by the Clinton campaign like never before, and Vicki wanted to harness that energy and enthusiasm for our campaign. And she did.
With trusted aide Lisa McBirney, Vicki began meeting with professional women in Massachusetts as early as 1993. She was a natural. As women in that group have since told me, she was one of them, swapping stories of working motherhood and even talking about how we met. While I have never been at ease discussing such things, Vicki apparently chatted about our courtship and the children and she listened to the stories of women who have since become her very good friends. My formerly "granite" exterior was falling away, as voters began to connect with me through Vicki's eyes.
For all of her natural ability and love of politics, Vicki had never been on the campaign trail before. But with the help of Angela Menino, the much-loved and politically savvy wife of Boston mayor Tom Menino, Vicki plunged in.
In the evenings, the two of us would laugh over the "war" stories we accumulated along the way. About being in a parade and seeing people give me the finger. Or even worse, young people with no expression at all--they had no idea who I was.
Vicki told me that many times Angela would introduce her to a woman and ask, "Would you like to meet Mrs. Kennedy?" and the woman would say, "No, thank you!" Vicki asked, "Angela, what do I say?" And Angela said, "You just ask them for their vote. Say you hope they'll be able to support your husband, and if they say no, say, 'Well, I hope you'll give it consideration.'"
But then there were wonderful little moments that gave both of us such joy. We were at a Lebanese festival in the northeast part of the state when an elderly Lebanese woman came up to Vicki, pulled her aside, and asked, "So, honey, is he good to you?" Vicki said yes, he is good to me. The woman asked, "Do you love him?" Vicki said she loved me. And then the most important question of all. "Does he eat Lebanese food?" Vicki said yes, I did, I loved Lebanese food. Then, in what Vicki described as the comforting tones of Arabic-accented English that reminded my wife of her beloved grandmother, and while making the sign of the cross, the old woman said, "Okay, honey, I'm gonna vote for him for the first time in my life." How we both loved that story.
Our campaign days were long. And I was still keeping a busy Senate schedule back in Washington. So Vicki and Michael Kennedy were surrogates for me at events around the state. And I had extraordinary assistance and support from my fellow Democrats in the congressional delegation and from local elected officials. The governor was a Republican, but the Senate president Bill Bulger and Speaker of the House Charlie Flaherty were in my corner, and they rallied their troops in a meaningful and effective way. Tom Menino was also tremendously helpful. I remember gathering in his basement one night in the spring of 1994, as he brought his organization together for pasta and a pep talk. When he finished, I was ready to go out and campaign for myself in the cold. The friendship and support of these dedicated elected officials is something I'll never forget. Tip O'Neill was right that all politics is local. And these political leaders had their fingers on the local pulse. Along with them and the state representatives and state senators and mayors all around the Commonwealth that welcomed us and encouraged their supporters to join our effort, we were able to rebuild a successful organization.
The Senate was in session for most of August that year, so I didn't have the month to hit the ground as usual. I was chairman of the committee that was churning out much of the important legislation, and I didn't want to be absent. I believed that my constituents would be pleased that I was doing the people's business, but the truth was that they were being bombarded with advertisements from the Republican Senate primary essentially aimed at me, and, other than weekends, I wasn't there to counteract the impact. So the local officials and the revitalized organization and surrogates were more important than ever that summer.
Vicki would come back from the campaign trail and regale me with tales of her adventures. She loved campaigning, and, as she said to me, she loved most of all sharing the stories with me at the end of the day. At a popular restaurant in Boston, where you had to shout to be heard above the din of the crowd, a campaign worker asked a woman diner, "HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO MEET MRS. TED KENNEDY?" The woman looked up and said, without missing a beat, "NOT AS PRETTY AS THE FIRST ONE!" Vicki smiled and said, "THANK YOU SO MUCH! I HOPE YOU'LL SUPPORT MY HUSBAND!" Vicki loved that story and used it to tease me to no end about the sacrifices she made for me. And then she would dissolve into laughter. Yes, I love this woman. She told me about a man at another table who replied to her greeting with, "KENNEDY! I WOULDN'T VOTE FOR HIM IF YOU PAID ME TO!" Then he remembered his manners. "BUT IT'S NICE TO MEET YOU, MA'AM!"
In Worcester a few days later, a fellow deflected her "I hope you'll support my husband" greeting with the off-center retort, "I only support people who are French." "Ah," Vicki said. "Then you'll want to support my husband, Ted Ken-a-day!" They both started laughing. She believes she won him over with that one.
When I was able to be there, I had my own interesting encounters that were a bit different from previous campaigns. The tenor of some of the questions fired at me at events left no doubt that the electorate was angry. People were hurting.
But there were still the fun times: singing Irish songs in senior centers; eating food at the ethnic festivals; walking in the parades. Those are the things that bring you close to the people and make politics fun. They're a long way from the more modern campaign staples of television advertising and the Internet, but they're every bit as important, at least for me. I wouldn't trade the people part of politics for anything in the world.
The Senate finally recessed on October 8, and I was able to be in Massachusetts full-time. Vicki's mother, Doris, basically relocated to our home in Virginia to help look after the children. Curran was eleven and Caroline was eight, and the separation was especially hard on them and on Vicki. But having Doris there helped ease the burden. We began to feel momentum as I was able to get around the state. As one state rep put it, "People just want to see your shoe leather hit the pavement." And hit the pavement we did.
I gained some impressive backup. My nephew John Kennedy, accompanied by his large German shepherd, Sam, joined the campaign and brought crowds to their feet with his infectious charm and witty but impassioned message. Another nephew, Chris Lawford, then playing a heartthrob in a popular daytime soap opera, created quite a stir wherever he went. Other nieces and nephews, and of course our own children, hit the trail. The actor Alec Baldwin went to college campuses to register new voters. President Clinton and Hillary came to the state to stump for me. Both were enormously popular and great assets.
Meanwhile, we were matching Mitt Romney's sizable treasure chest with resources of our own, eventually spending upwards of $10 million. I mortgaged my house as part of the effort so I could spend more time campaigning and less time fund-raising in those important last weeks. That meant we would have an aggressive fund-raising schedule to retire debt after the election, but that was fine with me. It was money well and wisely spent: much of it supported the political TV spots created by Bob Shrum and his team.
Bob's and Vicki's intuition about probing Romney's corporate behavior proved brilliantly on target. It led to the most effective "negative" ad that we ran. The ad went directly to Romney's claim that he had created ten thousand jobs. From there, it went to the single word, "Ampad," which came to define his true record as a businessman.
Our campaign had received a call from a union representative, telling us about the takeover of an Indiana company by Ampad, Romney's Bain Capital subsidiary, and Ampad's subsequent firing or slashing of salary and benefits of most of the workers. Shrum's partner Tad Devine went out to Indiana to film the workers, and he threw away the script and just let them tell their stories. My dad always said that there's no substitute for sincerity, and these people, working people who were losing their health insurance and their jobs, spoke from the heart. One especially effective ad ended with a middle-aged female worker looking directly into the camera, saying, "I'd like to say to the people of Massachusetts, if you think it can't happen to you, think again, because we thought it couldn't happen here either."
Our first televised debate at Faneuil Hall was in the final week of October. With Romney's poll lead decreasing and the truth of his job creation record in deep question, Mitt had realigned himself a little. He'd moved away from his "businessman" strategy and begun to campaign almost as a liberal reformer. I had begun to joke at rallies that I had heard of flip and I had heard of flop. But with Mitt, it was flip-flop-flip. He'd changed positions so often that if we gave him a little more time he'd be voting for me on election day. Yes, I was having fun.
Still, I knew that a lot was riding on the outcome of the debate in Faneuil Hall. Romney was slipping, but things remained close. I was taking nothing for granted. This was a change year. People all over the country were itching for change, and Massachusetts was no exception. Term limits were in vogue. Mitt had talked about thanking me for my service and sending me home to Cape Cod to retire. He was young and slender and I was not. Would his message resonate in a face-to-face meeting? We were about to find out.
When the day arrived, Vicki and I went to the Kennedy Library and sat outside in the back. We ate sandwiches, and I pored over my briefing materials. We went back to our apartment, and I took a nap so I'd be at peak energy for the intensity of the give-and-take. By evening I was prepared, but nervous.
During the drive to Faneuil Hall, Dave Burke perceived that I was a little tense, and did his best to lighten me up. Dave is great--a superb mind, a loyal aide and friend over the decades, and a fellow who knows the value of laughter. From the time we got in the car, Dave and Vicki made fast patter to keep the mood light. Dave grilled us about the most important thing we had learned in the campaign, then provided the answer himself: that the Roy Rogers on the Mass Pike didn't serve fried chicken until 11 a.m. We laughed so much at that one, as it conjured up memories of long days crisscrossing the state and craving that chicken before the appointed hour. As we neared the hall, Dave tapped me on the shoulder: "I just want to know why Steve Breyer is sitting on the Supreme Court," he asked in mock seriousness, "and I'm sitting in this damn car with you."
I laughed and relaxed even more. But then I looked out of the window, and any remaining nervousness vanished. I saw a huge swell of people stretching for blocks. They carried Kennedy signs and chanted, "Teddy! Teddy! Teddy!" It was like the old torchlight parades that Grampa used to tell me about, and that he loved so much. I rolled down the car window, leaned out, raised my arm, and pumped my fist. My adrenaline was flowing. These were my people. They were working people. They were the people I had been representing for thirty-two years, and we still had work to do.
As I stepped out of the car, onto the cobblestone street and into Faneuil Hall, I couldn't help but think of the history of the place: from meetings to plan the Revolutionary War to my brother Jack's last campaign speech in 1960 to more modern gatherings. This building, the Cradle of Liberty, was at the center of it all.
As Mitt and I took the stage, I noticed two exceptionally large podiums. For some reason, unlike every other election, I had been unable to lose weight this time, and I was at an all-time high. As I found out later, my dear friend Eddy Martin got into the hall and swapped the smaller podiums for two larger ones, masking my size and totally dwarfing poor Mitt. Eddy never told me what he did, and it was only years later, at the time of his death, that I learned the true story.
I remember the first question I was asked in the debate: "Why is this race even close?" My first thought was, Good question. I'm wondering the same thing! My next thought was, I'd better start talking and hope I think of something pretty soon. So I started talking and was relieved when my time was up.
Both Mitt and I were prepared. Both of us kept our composure, and both of us remained hyper-alert for an opening, any opening. I saw one when Mitt gave a long-winded, nuanced answer about supposedly being pro-choice (unlike his professed anti-choice stance as a candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 2008). I paused for a beat and said, "I am pro-choice. My opponent is multiple choice." The crowd laughed.
No one laughed, however, least of all me, when I was asked about how I coped with my personal failings. There it was. The unspoken was spoken. My personal life was on the table. And unlike other questions and answers that I had reviewed with my advisers during debate prep, this was an area that we did not cover. This one was all mine. I had thought about it, to be sure. I knew what I felt inside. But to have to say it in public was my challenge.
I decided to place my trust in the simple, unadorned truth. I paused a moment, and then began: "Every day of my life I try to be a better human being, a better father, a better son, a better husband. And since my life has changed with Vicki, I believe the people of this state understand that the kind of purpose and direction and new affection and confidence on personal matters has been enormously reinvigorating. And hopefully I am a better senator."
And then they asked Mitt Romney, and his unfortunate tone-deafness became evident to everyone. After making an ineffective attempt at humor--"I assume you mean my weakness"--he started to talk about how much he loved to volunteer and how his life had been about being able to give service to others. He went on in that way for so long that the moderator felt compelled to remind him that he was asked about his greatest weakness.
By the end of the evening, after I tried to pin Romney down on the specific costs of his health care proposals; after he became exasperated with me for asking for specifics and I shot back, "That's what you have to do as a legislator, Mr. Romney"; after he complained about my ads and I told him that we could discuss that after the debate because people were hurting and they wanted to hear about issues that affected their lives, I started to feel that things were going okay for me. And you could feel in the room that the crowd was feeling that way too.
My nephew Congressman Joe Kennedy told me that the next day people were crossing the street to shake his hand, congratulating him on the great debate. But, he said, he really knew we'd done well when they put their arm around his shoulders and whispered in his ear, "I've been with your uncle the whole time."
On election day, I won by a margin of 58 percent to Romney's 41 percent.
The next morning, Vicki and I woke up early to meet commuters coming in to Park Street Station in Boston. We just wanted to say thank you. The results around the country had not been so positive. Close friends and colleagues of mine had lost their seats in a Republican tsunami. But thanks to the people of Massachusetts, I was going back to Washington.
A lot of people have asked me since then whether the Romney race was my most difficult. It wasn't. It was competitive, clearly the most competitive since Eddie McCormack. But it wasn't difficult because I knew where I stood. I knew what I believed. I knew what I needed to do. And I was determined to do what I needed to do in terms of the hard campaigning, but not to trim down my positions and beliefs, even if they seemed out of favor that year. At the end of the day, I was running to do something I cared about that would make a difference in people's lives, not just to hold an office. And I was sharing the campaign with Vicki, the love of my life and my soul mate.
I also felt that I benefited from the good memories that many people in the state, particularly in Boston, still had of Grampa Fitzgerald and my mother. Both Grampa and my mother loved the personal side of politics, and their connections to the people ran deep. In 1994, my 104-year-old mother was still a presence, if not in the public square anymore, certainly in the public's heart. At the same time, the people of my state revered the memory of President Kennedy, their native son, and they remembered Bobby. I recognized that I stood on the shoulders of all of them, and that I had benefited from the goodwill that they enjoyed.
We had a joyful Thanksgiving celebration that year. As always, we gathered at our home in Hyannis Port. We had two wonderful new additions at the Thanksgiving table that year: Kiley Elizabeth Kennedy, the three-month-old daughter of my son Teddy and his wife, Kiki; and Grace Kennedy Allen, the two-month-old daughter of my daughter Kara and her husband, Michael. Joined by my mother, we were four generations of Kennedys gathered around the dinner table in the home that has always been such a refuge for me. I was a very happy man.
The next evening, the celebration continued, and in addition to our children, we were joined for dinner by Vicki's parents, Paul and Gail Kirk, and Eddy and Marge Martin. Vicki had prepared her usual post-Thanksgiving fare--turkey gumbo, in honor of her Louisiana roots, and turkey tetrazzini, which was a favorite of Michael Allen's--and wine was flowing as everyone was toasting me and congratulating me on the win. I don't like attention directed to me in that way, as loving as it was, so I stood up and began, "Well, this victory really isn't about me. It's about my family, and it's about the people of Massachusetts and their residual goodwill that goes all the way back to Grampa's day--"
Suddenly, Vicki was on her feet, cutting me off. "Please excuse my language, but BULLSHIT! "
That got everyone's attention. She went on, "This is just ridiculous!" She paused to let that sink in, and I stared back at her. Then she said, "You know, Teddy, if you had lost, it would've been you that lost. It wouldn't have been your family that lost. You would've lost.
"You won. You won! Not your family. You."
She sat down again.
Her outburst lingered in the air. It has lingered in my mind ever since. I'm grateful to her for it. Her message to me was one I needed to hear--perhaps one I'd yearned to hear.