Alison Stewart: Full Bio is our monthly series when we have a continuing conversation about a deeply researched biography to get a full understanding of the subject. This week, we will discuss Ted Kennedy: A Life by John A. Farrell. Farrell has written biographies of Tip O'Neill and Clarence Darrow and his 2017 bio of Richard Nixon was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In his career, Farrell was a journalist with the Boston Globe, and that is when he covered the senator from Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy, who was on the job for 47 years, having been elected nine times.

The book comes in a 752 pages and goes into great detail about Kennedy's legislative successes and failures. His drinking, the tragedy on Chappaquiddick, his liberal leadership, and his unexpected rise to be the leader of a family plagued by tragedy. Unexpected because Ted was the youngest child of nine, a rubric sweet kid who had everything he could need, but who arrived at the end of his parents' run as caretakers. We start today with the Kennedy family because as become clear in the book, writing about individual Kennedys cannot be done without writing about the whole clan.

His mother Rose was the daughter of a Massachusetts political royalty. Her father, honey Fitz, was a congressman and the storied mayor of Boston. Ted Kennedy's father was also the child of a local politician and businessman. He was proudly Catholic and Irish. By the time Ted was born in 1932 in Bronxville, New York, the family was rich and very powerful. That's where we start. Here's my conversation with John A. Farrell about Ted Kennedy: A Life.

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John, when Ted Kennedy was born, Edward Moore Kennedy on February 22nd, 1932, he was the youngest of nine children of Joseph Kennedy and Rose Kennedy. By the time Teddy was born, John, what was the family's social status and financial status?

John A. Farrell: They were probably the wealthiest Irish American Catholic family in the land and probably one of the wealthiest families in the land. Joseph P. Kennedy, the famed buccaneer father had made a tremendous killing on Wall Street in banking, later in Hollywood. By the time the Great Depression came along, he had gotten out of the market and he was more interested in political power than he was in business power. Young Ted came along, as you said, born to luxury to an estate in Bronxville, New York, and very quickly ended up in London society as a toddler when his father became the first Irish Catholic Ambassador to the court of St. James in London.

Alison Stewart: What was expected of Kennedy boys growing up?

John A. Farrell: As Rose Kennedy once confided to her diary, her children were perfect. They had been to the best orthodontists. They had been to the best schools. They were not allowed to gain weight. They were trained in skiing and tennis and golf and sailing and all the upper-class sports. They were taught by relentless teasing and friendly interrogation at the dinner table that at any moment if their dad was around, he might turn to them and ask them a series of questions about current events.

They were on top of the political and social news of the day. The weakness in that system was that both parents traveled widely. By the time little Ted came along, they were somewhat estranged in part because of Joseph's slandering. They had this relentless expectation. All the kids did, but it was based on a shaky foundation, which may explain some of the neurotic behavior that at least several of the boys entertained as they went on through life.

Alison Stewart: You described the family MO as a bit Darwinian. How did this play out in Teddy's childhood?

John A. Farrell: Silken Darwinian. The most important thing about the family dynamic was that he had three older brothers and the eldest brother Joseph Jr. was the prince. Then the middle two brothers, John and Robert were there like backup men in case anything happened to Joseph. Nothing was ever expected of little Teddy, the clown. No one could ever imagine the string of disasters that took place with first Joseph Jr. dying bravely in a very dangerous airplane attack on the Nazi U-boat Pens across the English Channel in World War II. Then, of course, John and Robert Kennedy each picking up the mantle of the vanished elder brother and being assassinated.

No one ever had those expectations as Ted, he was the jester of the family, and nobody ever thought that a jester would have to wear the crown.

Alison Stewart: You've heard this common phrase that so much tragedy befell this family because of the sins of the father. What sins do people mean? What's something that the patriarch of the Kennedy family did that really fell outside the bounds of basic decency?

John A. Farrell: I think the demand for perfection and then teaching the children, at least the boys or especially the boys, that through a skilled public relations machine, you could manufacture truth, you could manufacture image. Dad's money will always get us out of any scrap. You had instances where John F. Kennedy, for example, would get in a car accident and he would turn to his friend Lem Billings and say, "You take the ticket because dad will never forgive me." Or Ted Kennedy getting caught in a cheating scandal at Harvard and going to see his dad and his dad getting furious.

Then carving a path for him through safe military service in the Korean War to redeem himself and be able to go back to Harvard. Yes, there was anger, yes, there was a reproach, but there was also a feeling you could get away with murder in that family.

Alison Stewart: My guest is John Farrell. The name of the book is Ted Kennedy: A Life, it is our choice for Full Bio. Something I didn't know about Ted Kennedy's childhood before he even got to college was he was very, very young when they sent him to boarding school. He was shuttled around a lot. What was something from this time as a little kid being-- was he seven when he went to boarding school?

John A. Farrell: Yes. All the boys went to boarding school, but they went in their teens to a high school. Ted was sent out immediately and was yanked in and out of different schools as the family moved, for example, from the United States to England, from England back. When Rose wanted to adjust her social schedule and be in Palm Beach for the spring season, then Ted would be yanked out of his New York school, taken down to Florida, put into a strange classroom. At one point, they didn't know what to do with him, and so they sent him to Robert's school, which was a high school.

He was five, six, seven years younger than all the other boys there. They tormented him, teased him mercilessly. He had this pet turtle. When the turtle died, he felt aghast and awful about it. He had a little funeral for it. He dug a little grave and buried his dead turtle. The elder boys dug it up and in the middle of the night, after the adults had gone away in the dormitory, they played catch with it around his bed and taunted him. That's the kind of childhood that he had. Yet always he was taught, you're a Kennedy, you have to fight your own battles. You can't show weakness. If anything horrible happens, it's stiff upper lip time.

Keep up a brave front, show that you're courageous. When combined with the ability of the dad to get them out of serious trouble, it led to a sense of bravado. Every time they got out of one fix, it fed that bravado until it became a family where risks were really underestimated. Not to leap too far ahead in the story but as happened to Ted Kennedy, eventually there was a moment where he cracked.

Alison Stewart: John you write that his mother worried that her youngest son and these are her words, that he would become a fat, patent, and lazy person as to what she saw possibly in his future.

Later on in the book, you know that he felt in ways close to her. What impact did that relationship have on Ted Kennedy, this mother who could be in one hand, very harsh, in my opinion, but on the other hand, did champion him?

John A. Farrell: In investigative journalism, it's follow the money, and in biography, it's follow the mother.

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Nature and nurture, it really was an empty childhood. Rose was very candid about it and so was Ted's dad. The brothers and sisters, many instances in later years, they would talk out loud to reporters, or biographers, or famous writers who were visiting the house. They would just say, "Ted's slow, we don't expect anything from him." That gets back to you. You begin to see yourself that way, you begin to see yourself as somebody who's not as worthy as the elder brothers. I think that Rose because she was around slightly more than Joe, probably had more of that impact.

Like I said, she was candid. When John Kennedy won the presidency, a reporter from Time magazine interviewed Rose and asked her about nine children and she said, "By the time the ninth one comes along, you don't want to go stand outside on a cold hillside while they take skiing lessons. You don't want to read the story that you've read eight times before." She confessed to the fact that he was somewhat ignored. Because he was the baby, because he was the youngest, there was a certain amount of pampering that went on by Rose and by his older sisters. You could say that he was both ignored and spoiled if that's possible.

Alison Stewart: My guest is John Farrell. The name of the book is Ted Kennedy: A Life. He played the part he had up a playboy-like existence before going to Harvard in 1950. What motivated an 18-year-old Teddy Kennedy?

John A. Farrell: The great motivation was always family. There were a few years before Joe died in World War II before his sister Kathleen died in a plane crash right after World War II. Before his sister, Rosemary was the victim of a flawed lobotomy and had to be sent away, where the family was an idyllic setting for him mostly in the summertime on Cape Cod when he was home from boarding school. He idolized those brothers. The thing that always kept him, the playboy, that happy-go-lucky, little fat kid to the path ahead, was family. Living up to the famous name, living up to what the brothers would expect of him.

In fact, he's known in later years as the great liberal senator, but there are very few issues that he took up, that were not Kennedy family issues. The Kennedy family issues were healthcare, they were immigration, they were civil rights, and almost everything that Ted Kennedy the senator became noted for, was an issue that either Honey Fitz, his grandfather, or Joseph Kennedy, his father, or John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, his brothers had championed and he saw them as this familial duty to live up to the legacy.

Family over and over and over again is the determining factor in his life. Then of course, when he's the only one left, then he's the one who sets the legacy, who has to guard the legacy, who has to preserve it and it becomes an even holier thing for him and less likely that it would be something he would step away from.

Alison Stewart: You're listening to my conversation about the book Ted Kennedy: A Life by John A. Farrell, we'll continue the conversation with a look at Ted's [unintelligible 00:15:00] at Harvard, where he was caught cheating and his path into the family business, politics. This is All Of It.

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You are listening to All Of It and our Full Bio series and we have a continuing conversation about a deeply researched biography to get a full understanding of the subject. This week we're discussing Ted Kennedy: A Life by biographer John A. Farrell. We pick up the story with a young Ted Kennedy about to enter the oldest university in the country and one of the most prominent, Harvard. He stumbled there, got caught cheating, but was allowed to return after a brief stint in the military, and then on to law school. What came next was not entirely his choice, let's get back into our full bio conversation about Ted Kennedy: A Life.

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Ted Kennedy goes to Harvard. In all honesty, was Ted academically gifted enough to get into Harvard on his own? Or was this a legacy/bought seat?

John A. Farrell: I think that in those days, there was a segment of the Harvard entering classes that everybody knew were there because great-granddad had gone to Harvard and granddad had gone to Harvard and dad had gone to Harvard and now young Ted is going to go to Harvard. Whether or not their parents contributed a great deal of money or not, or whether your name was Roosevelt, Lodge, or Kennedy, there was a sizable group of that class, a segment of that class, that were there because of social reasons, tradition, wealth, and influence.

It wasn't a great scandal that Ted Kennedy who had mediocre marks in elementary school, and better marks at Milton Academy, where he finally stabilized his academic career could get into Harvard. By the time that he graduated, given the fact that he had taken two years off and matured a great deal, he had worked his way up to above the middle of his class, so he could do the work as well.

Alison Stewart: This is part of the legend of Ted Kennedy, is that he had a friend take a test for him. Why did he have a friend take a test for him at Harvard?

John A. Farrell: There was a definite character flaw of being rich and spoiled in all the Kennedy boys, I believe, that made them think as many of their associates said in later years that there were rules for Kennedys, and there were rules for everybody else. In Ted's case, he dearly wanted to play football, Jack and Joe, and Bobby had played football. As it turned out, Teddy might have been the best football player in the family but if he failed his Spanish exam, as a freshman, he was not going to be allowed to play football in the following fall.

He panicked to an extent, asked a friend-- a really stupid scheme, he asked a friend to take the test for him, as if the proctor of the exam would know when this guy handed in the exam that this was not Ted Kennedy, but they had done it once before that semester, so they thought they could get away with it again. He was caught. He was kicked out for two years in which, as we said, he spent the Korean War era at a very nice [unintelligible 00:18:58] in Paris in the NATO Honor Guard, where he learned to enjoy wine and women and came back quite a different mature individual when he re-entered Harvard.

Somewhat chastened by the experience, but also with the realization again that dad can get us out of these things and no penalty will be too long-lasting. He was not a great student at Harvard, neither was he a stumble bomb. He was not a great analytic mind, neither was he dumb. He was an above-average, smart guy with certain canny strengths, particularly in politics, and they served him well over the years. Boy, this a long answer to a question [chuckles] but finally, he recognized his limitations. He wasn't like other young men like Joe Biden who felt that he had to inflate his academic record when talking with people later in life.

Throughout all his life, he would make jokes about the fact that he needed all these brilliant people around him to help him. That shows a certain amount of security in your own self and your own depth of knowledge that you can joke about it. He was no genius, but he was no dummy either.

Alison Stewart: He would go on to University of Virginia Law School. Did Ted Kennedy have a sense of what he wanted to do with his life?

John A. Farrell: When he was in the position of the jester of the youngest one in the family, there was laughing and kidding in the family that he should be the one who should be the playboy. John F. Kennedy in particular went to his father and said, "Don't put Ted on the treadmill with Bobby and I. Just let him have a life of his own." In part, that probably reflected John Kennedy's feelings that he wouldn't have minded being the playboy, but he had now been drafted by Joe's death to carry the family banner.

Ted to his credit, because he idolized his two older brothers, decided that he wanted to follow them in the family business, which was politics. When he came back from doing penance in the army, and his dad said, "Look around, see what it is that you'd want to do. You could take over the family business. It's pretty easy. It runs itself. You could be that business guy for me." He went out west and he saw the oil wells the family had, and he saw the real estate the family had in Chicago. He came back and he said, "No, dad, it's politics. I want to be part of the team."

Alison Stewart: My guess is John Farrell. We're talking about his book, Ted Kennedy: A Life, it's our choice for Full Bio. Ted Kennedy decides to marry a young woman his sister introduces him to, Joan Bennett. She's 22. He is 26. Why was she considered a good wife choice for a young Kennedy man?

John A. Farrell: She was beautiful. She was smart and she went to what was one of the premier Catholic universities in the country at the time. Manhattanville College of the Sacred Heart, where refined young Catholic women and especially Irish Catholic women were taught to have a social conscience in addition to mastering the talents of wife and mom. It was an accidental meeting because John Kennedy was supposed to dedicate this gymnasium in the name of their sister, and he wanted to go to a football game.

He called Teddy, or had somebody from the office call Teddy and said, "Teddy, you're going to have to do this. You don't get a choice. I'm busy." It was Ted who went and made the speech at the dedication of the gymnasium, the Kathleen Kennedy gymnasium, and there he ran into this woman Joan Bennett. For both of them, it was like, "Okay, this is what young people our age and our class do at this time of life." It wasn't an impassioned love affair like Romeo and Juliet, where we're going to defy our parents and get married.

It wasn't intense in that they saw each other all the time. He was out working on his brother's campaigns for long parts of that engagement. His dad had to pick out the engagement ring for them. Right before they got married, they realized this, and they spoke to each other. They both had a case of cold feet, but by the time that happened, the word had gone out, the expectations were high, it was going to be this amazing wedding. The Cardinal Spellman was going to perform the marriage rights, and they backed down.

They couldn't stand up to their two fathers and say, "No, it's not going to happen. We're not ready." They went ahead and went through with it. As Ted later said, "I did it because that's what my brothers were doing. That's what guys my age seemed to be doing," rather than because they really wanted this life sealed to each other. She was immediately immersed in the spirit of competition. Had to be as she famously told a reporter a few years later, "Now, I can do everything that's required of me. I know how to ski. I know how to play tennis. I know how to sail."

He, in following the family tradition, almost immediately began to stray from his wedding vows. It was a hollow marriage all along. I think there was some definite affection there and particularly in the early years where they thought about getting away from the strictures of the family and going out on their own but eventually were tugged back.

Alison Stewart: There's a list of things that Joan was told when they were courting that she should think about or do to be popular when she went to the family compound and played football or played games with them. One was to laugh off a twisted ankle. Another one was to go hard and smash into a wall. Why would these kinds of things, why was it important to show toughness in the Kennedy family?

John A. Farrell: That's a good question. It definitely was part of the mythos playing touch football or putting on the pose of playing touch football, even when you were John F. Kennedy and your back had been racked by injury in war and botched surgeries. Still, the young candidate was always going to be the quarterback, and it was touch football because nobody was going to tackle him because you probably would've put him right back into the hospital.

There definitely was this feeling that you had to be tough, particularly Robert Kennedy, who was the classic runt of the family. He was his brother John's protector and always trying to be tough enough to measure up because he was the slightest and smallest of the brothers in his dad's eyes. It was unfortunate, especially because as this amazing string of tragedies begins to unroll, there's no tradition of consolation.

There's no tradition of real mourning or counseling. You tough it out. You go for a walk on the beach and you come back and you pick up because this is what brother Joe would've wanted us to do. He wouldn't want a lot of crying around the house. He would've wanted us to go sailing and put our shoulders right back against that wheel. I don't know where it came from other than the Irish American immigrant experience where you had to be tough to make your way in a foreign land.

 

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