Ted Kennedy - Family and Early Career

Family and Early Career

While attending law school, Kennedy met Virginia Joan Bennett when he was delivering a speech at Manhattanville College in October 1957. Bennett was a senior there, had worked as a model and won beauty contests, but was unfamiliar with the world of politics. After their engagement she grew nervous about marrying someone she did not know that well, but his father insisted that the wedding should proceed. They were married by Cardinal Francis Spellman on November 29, 1958, at St. Joseph's Church in Bronxville, New York. Together they had three children: Kara (February 27, 1960 – September 16, 2011), Ted, Jr. (born September 26, 1961), and Patrick J. (born July 14, 1967). By the mid-1960s, their marriage was in trouble due to Ted's womanizing and Joan's growing alcoholism.

Kennedy was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar in 1959. In 1960, John ran for President of the United States and Ted managed his campaign in the Western states. Ted learned to fly and during the Democratic primary campaign he barnstormed around the western states, meeting with delegates and bonding with them by trying his hand at ski jumping and bronc riding. The seven weeks he spent in Wisconsin helped his brother win the first contested primary of the season there and a similar time spent in Wyoming was rewarded when a unanimous vote from that state's delegates put his brother over the top at the 1960 Democratic National Convention.

Following his victory in the presidential election, John vacated his seat as U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, but Ted was not eligible to fill the vacancy until February 22, 1962, when he would turn thirty. Initially Ted wanted to stay out West and do something other than run for office right away; he said, "The disadvantage of my position is being constantly compared with two brothers of such superior ability." His brothers were not in favor of his running immediately either, but Ted coveted the Senate seat as an accomplishment to match his brothers' and their father overruled them. Therefore, John asked Massachusetts Governor Foster Furcolo to name Kennedy family friend Ben Smith as interim senator for John's unexpired term, which he did in December 1960. This kept the seat available for Ted. Meanwhile, Ted started work in February 1961 as an assistant district attorney for Suffolk County, Massachusetts (for which he took a nominal $1 salary), where he first developed a hard-nosed attitude towards crime. He took many overseas trips, billed as fact-finding tours with the goal of improving his foreign policy credentials. On a nine-nation Latin American trip in 1961, FBI reports from the time showed Kennedy meeting with Lauchlin Currie, an alleged former Soviet spy, together with locals in each country whom the reports deemed left-wingers and Communist sympathizers. Reports from the FBI and other sources had Kennedy renting a brothel and opening up bordellos after hours during the tour. The Latin American trip helped to formulate Kennedy's foreign policy views, and in subsequent Boston Globe columns he warned that the region might turn to Communism if the U.S. did not reach out to it in a more effective way. Kennedy also began speaking to local political clubs and organizations.

In the 1962 U.S. Senate special election in Massachusetts, Kennedy initially faced a Democratic Party primary challenge from Edward J. McCormack, Jr., the state Attorney General. Kennedy's slogan was "He can do more for Massachusetts", the same one John had used in his first campaign for the seat ten years earlier. McCormack had the support of many liberals and intellectuals, who thought Kennedy inexperienced and knew of his suspension from Harvard, a fact which later became public during the race. Kennedy also faced the notion that with one brother President and another U.S. Attorney General, "Don't you think that Teddy is one Kennedy too many?" But Kennedy proved to be an effective street-level campaigner. In a televised debate, McCormack said "The office of United States senator should be merited, and not inherited," and said that if his opponent's name was Edward Moore, not Edward Moore Kennedy, his candidacy "would be a joke". Voters thought McCormack's performance overbearing, and with the family political machine's finally getting fully behind him, Kennedy won the September 1962 primary by a two-to-one margin. In the November special election, Kennedy defeated Republican George Cabot Lodge II, product of another noted Massachusetts political family, gaining 55 percent of the vote.