Vanity Fair: The Lion And The Legacy

[babylonsister]

The Lion and the Legacy

Senator Edward Kennedy’s diagnosis of brain cancer, in May 2008, touched off an extraordinary medical battle—and a veiled rivalry over who might succeed him as symbolic head of America’s fabled dynasty. Would it be R.F.K.’s oldest son, Joe? J.F.K.’s daughter, Caroline? Or the senator’s second wife, Victoria? An excerpt from the new book Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died reveals the family’s shifting dynamics, the confrontation that led Caroline to drop her political bid, and the triumphant, grueling winter of the last Kennedy brother.

by Edward Klein June 2009

Excerpted from Ted Kennedy: The Dream That Never Died, by Edward Klein, to be published in May by Crown, a division of Random House; © 2009 by the author.


Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg and her uncle Ted, photographed by Annie Leibovitz in Washington, D.C., January 2009.


It started as a fairly typical day for Ted Kennedy. Early in the morning on Saturday, May 17, 2008, his Portuguese water dogs, Sunny and Splash, bounced into his bedroom and woke him up. Groggy but obliging, Kennedy swung his legs over the side of the bed and, struggling against age and gravity, lifted himself to an erect position—or as nearly erect as his old bones would allow. He threw on some warm clothing, then headed out the door into the chill, salty air for a stroll on the beach with the dogs.

In front of the Kennedy compound, he lobbed a tennis ball into the water, and Sunny dived in after it. Suddenly he felt his jaw tighten, then noticed his left arm become numb. Dear God, don’t let me go like Dad, he later recalled thinking. He had a horror of having to spend his last years in the same condition as his paralyzed father, Joseph P. Kennedy, fully conscious but imprisoned in a useless body. According to one family friend, he fell to the sand and realized he could not move. The dogs reacted with frenzied yelps and barks, and several workmen, hearing the commotion, came running to the senator’s aid. They carried him back to the house and summoned Victoria Reggie Kennedy. When Vicki saw her husband’s condition, she let out a scream. Then she phoned 911.

At 8:19 a.m., the dispatcher at the Hyannis Fire Department received an emergency call from 50 Marchant Avenue in Hyannis Port. The famous Kennedy address set off frantic alarms, and within minutes help arrived. Paramedics lifted the overweight senator onto a gurney, hooked him up to oxygen, and slid him into the back of an ambulance. The ambulance and a police cruiser raced down South Street to Cape Cod Hospital.

“Vicki Kennedy knew in a split second that whatever was happening was grave,” reported Lois Romano of The Washington Post. “As the wife of one of the most iconic and admired politicians in modern history, she also knew it would play out in public. Knowing the media would be tipped off in minutes because of {her} 911 call, Vicki Kennedy worked her cell phone at her husband’s side. Before the ambulance pulled up, she had arranged for the Senator to be transported from the Cape to Massachusetts General Hospital, called his Senate staff to put in place a crisis management team, summoned family members and notified his closest friends.”

In the emergency room at Cape Cod Hospital, the doctors examined Kennedy for almost two hours and concluded that he had suffered two seizures, little electrical storms in the brain, rather than a stroke, which kills brain tissue and can lead to permanent paralysis. He was put back into the ambulance for the three-minute trip to Barnstable Municipal Airport. There a twin-engine medevac helicopter was standing by, ready to airlift him to Boston.

In less than half an hour, the chopper touched down on the roof of Massachusetts General, where Dr. Larry Ronan, the senator’s longtime primary-care physician, was an internist. By late afternoon Kennedy’s condition had stabilized, and immediate family members began to arrive at the hospital. The senator’s daughter, Kara, who had been battling lung cancer since 2003, flew up from Maryland. His son Teddy junior, who had lost a leg to cancer as a child, came from Connecticut. His younger son, Patrick, who suffered from a plethora of health problems, ranging from asthma to a non-cancerous tumor that had been removed from his spine, flew in from Washington, D.C., where he served as a congressman from Rhode Island.

Soon a dozen or so members of the extended Kennedy family circle—the senator’s friends, aides, political associates, and hangers-on—were all crammed into the hospital room, and the atmosphere in his V.I.P. suite began to resemble that of an Irish wake or, perhaps more accurately, one of those medieval paintings that depict the death of a great prince. Should it come now, the senator’s death would not be sudden and violent, like those of his three brothers—Joe junior in a plane accident during World War II, Jack and Bobby at the hands of assassins. Rather, it would be like those “good deaths” during the Middle Ages, which were performed, in the words of the French historian Georges Duby, “as on a stage before many spectators, many auditors attentive to every gesture, to every word, eager for the dying man to show what he is worth.”
The Question of Succession

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http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/06/edward-kennedy-excerpt200906

[Tangerine LaBamba]

1. Edward Klein should have his hands taped together

so that he could never use a keyboard or a pen or a pencil again.

He's written some of the most spurious, non-verified, unsourced bullshit about the Kennedy family and other public figures. He wrote an attack book - there is no other name for it - about Hillary Clinton that was just shameful. He never cites sources, never has anything reputable to say about the people.

He's nothing but a hack, a lying, fatuous hack. He only gets away with what he does because his targets are always public figure and they don't have the same defamation and/or libel laws available to them.

I'm a VF subscriber, but this one just sent me over the edge .....................

[Baby Snooks]

2. "Schadenfreude"

We love to watch the gods and goddesses fall from their pedestals. We love it even more when we can push them off their pedestals. The German word is Schadenfreude. It has become an obsession in our society.

I doubt that Ted Kennedy would "choose" anyone and as for Joe most expect he will be the "heir apparent" but he has to be elected first and he most likely will not be any more than Vicki will be.

We had a fleeting glimpse of Camelot last year with Caroline. But it was fleeting. Ted is really the end of Camelot.

Ted Kennedy has been the consummate Kennedy in that he has managed to keep his private life separate from his public life all these years. He learned to separate the two the way his mother did. And the media for the most part through the years allowed him to the way it allowed his mother to. So many questions that could have been asked of her. No one did. So many questions that could have been asked of him. No one did.

If Edward Klein is to be damned for anything, it is for violating that and denying Ted Kennedy what everyone else had allowed all these years. He became the patriarch. The way his mother had been the matriarch. They both learned to ignore the questions. And the media stopped asking them.

Caroline's mistake was believing she would be allowed to keep her private life separate from her public life as well and she found out she wouldn't be allowed anything at all. We pushed her mother off the pedestal when she became Jacqueline Onassis and unfortunately we pushed Caroline and John off the pedestal along with her.

Great wealth produces great envy. And that of course is the source of the Schadenfreude at work with Caroline even within the Kennedy family.

[Tangerine LaBamba]

3. You're4 absolutely right, and I agree

that Camelot, such as it was, ends with Ted. That man has endured so many losses, so much tragedy, and still, what he's done with his life makes him - to me, anyway - the most outstanding of all the Kennedys, including his martyred brothers.

Did you know that, until his latest illness, Senator Kennedy left his Capitol Hill office at the same time every week to go to an elementary school in a very poor neighborhood not that far from the Hill - DC has lots of these poverty enclaves right beside places of great wealth and power - where he read to the kids for an hour.

Once a week, every week, for years and years, and no one ever found out about it.

That's the measure of the man.

That's why slime like what this Klein bottom-feeder puts out is even more offensive than usual ...........................

[Baby Snooks]

4. So many things no one knew about...

As I recall he started going to the school after he participated in one of the "celebrity reader" programs years ago. He enjoyed it so much he just kept going back. I didn't know he was going every week.

Those were the "literacy programs" years ago. Barbara Bush was a reader as well. About the only nice thing I can say about her is she didn't just lend her name to a program. She actually was committed to it.

They had a similar program in the New York schools about ten years ago and I believe Caroline was a reader as well. They were wonderful programs. I hated to see them discontinued. She really was more involved in the schools in New York than the media was willing to acknowledge. She was pretty much thrown to the wolves as soon as she announced she was interested in replacing Hillary Clinton.

I met her once years ago and she is so "unaffected" in person and not what the media, and Edwin Klein, have made her out to be. I made fun of her "you know"s and shouldn't have but it was funny at the time.

We all engage in the Schadenfreude I suppose. I think she was just out of her element and I don't mean that to demean her.

She probably would make a better Shirley in a "Boston Legal" law firm than a Hillary in the US Senate - she does have a good sense of the law and of the failings of our legal system and honestly I wish she would go into practice and start forcing issues in the courts. She would make a wonderful advocate and we have so few of them in this country.