The Trouble With Teddy

(3 of 5)

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

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

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

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

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

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