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A collection of memories as told to National Journal and CongressDaily reporters.
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I remember his personal touch. I have a very vivid recollection of a night I didn't think the Senate was going to be in session late, and I had invited my parents to come down to Capitol Hill to meet me for dinner, and we ate at a restaurant that no longer exists called the Brasserie. It turns out the Senate was in session late, so it was awkward for me to leave to have dinner with my parents, but I did it. And I left word with Senator Kennedy's secretary that I was going to be at that restaurant, in case I was needed. And when we sat for dinner, the waiter brought over a bottle of wine and said Senator Kennedy wanted us to enjoy that. I just thought that was just such a lovely touch.
Then I brought my parents over to the reception room off the Senate floor after dinner. The Senate was in session very late and I went over to the floor of the Senate and asked Senator Kennedy if he would come over to the reception room to say hello to my parents. And he was very tired, I recall, but he understood how important that was to me and to my parents, so he pulled himself up and we walked out. My mom, who was actually a Republican, just gasped at seeing me with Senator Kennedy because for my parents, the Kennedys were a part of history. I was so proud to be with him at that moment, to show my parents.
I was asked to be an usher at Arlington for the burial. It felt so right to be staffing Senator Kennedy one last time, right up to the end.
In my eight years of working for Senator Kennedy, from 1999 through 2007, first as his chief labor and pensions counsel and then as policy director, the thing that surprised me the most was just how hard he worked. He loved numbers and charts and stories about how people would be affected by legislation that he backed, such as boosting the minimum wage. It took 10 years before the minimum wage was finally raised in 2007, and it required hundreds of hours of floor speeches, in an effort that highlighted how relentless he could be on issues that he felt strongly about.
My fondest memories of him were on the Senate floor where I had a lot of opportunity to be with him. We all loved working for him because of what he stood for: justice and fairness for all. For me what was especially important about working for Kennedy was how much he could accomplish since his goal was always to pass legislation even though Democrats were in the minority. For instance, I'll always remember taking a trip with the senator to West Virginia after a big mining accident had occurred. He spent a lot of time with the families of dead or injured miners and clearly empathized with their grief. When we returned to Washington, Kennedy succeeded in leading the effort to negotiate a bipartisan mine safety bill.
I'm always up, so he would say how much he enjoyed being around me. He'd say, "You just wind her up, and she just goes, goes, goes, and goes." I also got to know Vicki really well. I remember when John Jr. died and we were all very sad because we knew how close he and the senator were. I'm a very religious person, and the senator knew that about me, and I remember when he was coming back after that -- we didn't think he was going to come back that soon -- the scheduler said, "He wants Stephanie with him for the day." They said to me, "Go with him for the day and just do what you do."
So that day, we ran around trying to put this bill together. And he said, "Let's go see Ted [Stevens] today." And Stevens was so curmudgeonly, of course. The senator had a good day. It was an amazing experience -- I was just being who I was and I think the senator appreciated that. I watched him come back and jump into the work. But I could see the heaviness on his face.
Later, when my father-in-law was diagnosed with lung cancer, I went to Philadelphia with my husband. If you've had a loved one diagnosed with any cancer, it hits you like a ton of bricks. And you have to learn about oncology really fast, and you're just confused. When I got back in, I'd been in the office an hour when I got a call from the senator saying he wanted me to come back into the office. And when I get there, he just looks at me and says, "My Rolodex is open to you. Whatever you need, I will do it for you." He used his position and his name for people. I just won't ever, ever, ever forget it and neither will my husband.
It explains what some may call the pathological loyalty all of us, as his staff, had for him. It's a family -- some might say it's a dysfunctional family, but it's a family.
Another time, I was up on the Cape at a retreat and he called and said, "I want you to come over." He was up at the compound, and he said, "You've got to come over. Drive up. You're too close not to come over. Vicki really wants to see you." So I drive over to the house. And it's the first time I'm over, and he says, "We're going go sailing." I'm like, "OK. We'll go sailing." So they put the hat on me and get me all bundled up in all these clothes and we're on the boat rocking back and forth, and a couple of cousins start yelling, "Let's race! We're all going to race!" So they're going along and it's rocking and he looks at me all of a sudden and he says, "What are you doing? You're getting sick!"
So, I have horrible motion sickness. And he's in the middle of this race and he says, "We've got to stop. We've got to take Stephanie back." And he's all mad and Vicki's going, "Why didn't you ask her about this? We would've given her this or that." And he's saying, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry!"
When I came to this job, Camelot was never this kind of larger-than-life thing for me. It wasn't that for me. But I remember being able to look in the mirror every day and loving who I was because the person I was working for was never going to change his convictions or his philosophy.
We went to Denver for the Democratic National Convention last year, and he was sick. While he was in the hospital, I did two things: I cut his convention speech in half so it would be easier for him to give because I knew he'd be in pain, which I don't think anybody who saw it realized. And the second thing I did was create a 30-second speech. His reaction to the 30-second version was, "I am not coming to the Democratic convention to speak for 30 seconds."
On the plane back the next day, we were in a pretty celebratory mood, we were going to have a big spaghetti dinner at his house. And he said, "Let's go over the stuff you cut." He said, "You cut all the best stuff," and started laughing.
It went down from 1,700 words originally to what might have been 1,100, and then down to about 600 words. It took about seven or eight minutes to deliver because people just didn't want to let go of him.
I think he was very frustrated when we were in South Africa in early 1985, and the criticism there and the criticism of him in some American press is that he must be there to campaign, because he was getting ready to campaign for president in 1988 and he was appealing to the black vote. As if he needed to come to South Africa to win the African-American vote -- that's the most ridiculous thing I ever heard, but it was frustrating to him.
I think he didn't like everything he was doing being seen through the lens of presidential politics. He made the decision not to run at the end of 1985.
He called me and said, "Come up to the Cape," and I looked at my then-partner David Doak, and said, "I have to go to Cape Cod and Kennedy is not running for president. Don't tell anybody." He hadn't told me that; I just figured it out. I just knew it.
I said it was his best shot -- to run against [George H.W.] Bush. I prefaced it with, "Can I make an argument?" He said, "Yes." And I said, "You don't have to run against Reagan; you don't have to run against a sitting incumbent president." So I made my argument and he said, "Well, I'm just not going to do it."
Then I said, "Well, I think we can't go through this exercise every four years. So I think if you are going to do it, you ought to say it's not just a decision for this year, it's a decision for the future."
I went off into the side bedroom on the first floor in Hyannis Port where his brother, JFK, had recovered from his war wounds. And the two of them had read "John Brown's Body" to each other -- Teddy at that point was 12 or 13. I came back out and one of the lines was "the presidency is not my life; public service is." He said, "That is exactly what I wanted to say."
When I was living in Arizona, they were looking for someone to do Senator Kennedy's systems and Internet stuff. The thing I remember most from the interview was [then-chief of staff] Paul Donovan saying, "When you work for Senator Kennedy, you don't make a mistake." And I said "sure," and I packed my things and moved to D.C.
In the mid-1990s, America Online was rolling out this new thing with online chats. And they'd get these celebrities to get online and answer questions. And Senator Kennedy was the first elected official to do it. Kennedy had a Web page and he was supportive of it, but there was not the level of engagement with the Internet most of these guys have at this point. The rest of the senior staff were a little bit skeptical.
Then when were doing it, we were all huddled in the senator's office. And initially they said, "Look, we'll give you 20 minutes or 30 minutes, and then we're out of here, Peter." But then the senator got more and more into it. And he stayed on for about 45 minutes to an hour. And the scheduler kept coming in and saying, "Senator, you've go to go," and Kennedy said, "No, no, no, a couple more minutes, a couple more minutes." And then he just got completely into it. His wife, Vicki, she was e-mailing questions, like, "Are you going to make it home for dinner tonight?" It was fabulous. He had a great time, and it was obviously a huge hit for AOL.
Then during the government shutdown in 1995, whether or not congressional staff were going to get paid was an unanswered question. So a couple of us were talking to the senator about the shutdown and what this meant. And one of Kennedy's questions was, "Can the junior staff pay their rent?" And I thought, "Holy cow." One of his first questions was, like, "Will my guys be OK?"
For me, that was one of the really important lessons. The level of respect shown to his staff was remarkable. And as a result, everybody stepped up. You get it right. You triple-checked everything, you thought everything all the way through. You worked as hard as you had to to get it right, because you were part of Senator Kennedy's staff.
It's known on Capitol Hill that a lot is expected of staffers, and that was true for Senator Kennedy's office. A few years ago, I staffed Senator Kennedy on a Judiciary Committee hearing on the plight of Iraqi refugees. The senator was outraged that our country wasn't doing more to protect Iraqi refugees and Iraqis who have been labeled traitors because they helped the U.S. military in some way -- as translators, cooks and drivers. The senator called the first-ever Iraqi refugee hearing and we had a couple of Iraqi witnesses. One of the witnesses had a translator.
During the hearing, while the witness was testifying in his language, the senator turned to me and asked me in a very serious tone, "Janice, what's he saying?" I looked at him and all I could think of is how I'm a good staffer, but the ability to translate Aramaic, which the witness was speaking -- which I think is the mother tongue of Jesus -- is a skill I didn't possess. I motioned to the witness' translator to hurry up and translate what the witness had just said or I'd be in trouble. Then I looked at up at the senator and he gave me one of his wry grins and a silent nod of approval.
The senator expected a lot out of his staffers, but he also rewarded us for a job well done. And we were motivated to do a good job for him. When he was pumped up, you were pumped up. If he was outraged, you would be outraged. After an event or a hearing or floor amendment, he would make sure to call us to say thank you for all the work. He sent thank-you notes, had small parties for staff, paid for lunches and dinners and sent us small gifts. He loved his staff and we loved him back.
I prepared an amendment for the senator that would provide extra funding to school districts serving large numbers of children whose parents were at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The rationale was that these kids were experiencing all of sorts of psychological trauma and falling behind academically due to what was happening to their parents. There were heightened discipline problems, tutoring needs, and so forth. Individual school districts were picking up the associated costs when really the federal government should have been doing so instead.
Anyway, I prepared an amendment at around $25 million. The senator asked why that number. I gave him a justification based on the number of children impacted and a survey of actual costs in several large districts. I told him I cut the resulting amount in half so the amendment wouldn't be seen as too liberal. He let out a hearty belly laugh and said, "You're in the wrong office. Double it."
All of us on his staff worked exceptionally hard for the senator, because we believed in his mission, because he worked harder than any other senator and because he was fearless. We worked hard for him because he cared so deeply about people that he never let the great be the enemy of the good. But we also worked hard for him because we liked him. He made hard work easy.
Senator Kennedy was a deeply gracious person and I mean that in the context of the rough politics of the Senate. He did not take debates personally. I remember a time he was in the Senate Judiciary room during a markup banging on the table because he was mad at something Senator Hatch did on an issue on sentencing reform. And he was furious about it, politically, and he was going on in that classic Kennedy booming voice. But later he was able to talk to Hatch in this very civil way, and he didn't take it personally.
He just knew how to treat people graciously. I went to a civil rights dinner with him, and people were treating him like a movie star. A lot of women of his generation who followed his family for years just kept stopping him and taking pictures with him. And he wasn't at all embarrassed, and just expected it. He was comfortable with it all.
And he was a very sociable person. We would often be briefing him as we walked -- you get the little bits of time that you do to talk about an issue. Even though he was a large man and he had back problems, you'd be running down the hall briefing him. And he'd be saying hello to all the people who worked there -- in the cafeteria, in the elevator. He knew people looked up for him and that he stood not just for himself but for his family. And I just thought he wore it with tremendous poise.
Many people have said that Senator Kennedy was a tireless fighter -- and he really was tireless. I remember one occasion in 2007 when the Senate had been in session and voting through the night. The senator had slept on the couch in his office, worked through the next day, and was scheduled that evening to speak to a grassroots audience who supported his paid sick days bill. When it was time to go to the speaking event, he was clearly exhausted and ready to go home. But he cared deeply about the issue and knew how much the group was counting on him, and so of course he went.
We had prepared some remarks, but as usual the senator gave his own off-the-cuff speech that deeply resonated with the audience, many of whom were low-wage workers. He spoke about people's need to care for family members when they are sick and talked about his own son's childhood fight with cancer. He pumped up the group, urging them to push hard for enactment of the bill. By the end, he was roaring and people were cheering.
Afterward, he lingered to talk. He even took pictures with some of the waitstaff, who were thrilled to meet him. As he got in the car to leave, he was still calling out over his shoulder: "This is great. We've got to do more on this issue, we've got to push this." That was the way he was. Always wanting to connect with everyday people. Always pushing himself and always inspiring those around him to do more. And because of him, more got done than anyone thought possible
I first met Ted Kennedy when I was handling scheduling for George McGovern in 1972 and he was a major surrogate of McGovern's. Later, I was hired by Kennedy for his 1980 presidential campaign and I was in charge of advance for him and his family.
The story that I don't think is well known about Kennedy is his involvement in the Supreme Court nomination fight of Judge Robert Bork.
On July 1 of 1987, President Reagan nominated Bork to the Supreme Court. The day before, I had left my job as president of People for the American Way and was planning to go on vacation to recharge in Europe. But on July 3rd, I got a call from Kennedy saying: "Tony, this guy Bork. We have to stop him. Can you come in and talk to me?" Kennedy viewed Bork as a real threat to the Constitution, to civil rights and to civil liberties, and he wanted to do everything in his power to prevent him from getting on the Supreme Court.
So, I ended up spending the next several months of that summer in round-the-clock meetings with Kennedy and his Senate Judiciary Committee counsel, Jeff Blattner and Carolyn Osolonik, and it wasn't like he left it at the legal theory or questioning of Bork's opinions or comments. We ended up running a sort of grassroots political campaign to build a huge coalition of people to oppose Bork. We had the usual suspects on board, like the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the women's rights groups.
But we didn't leave it at that. We called in the environmental groups to try to get them interested in this, and then my fondest memory is the work he did to reach out to the ministers. Kennedy went off to Hyannis, which he dearly loved, and he asked me to come up for three or four days to the Cape to their house. Over those next few days, we called every African-American minister that we could find in any of the states where it wasn't clear if we were going to hold the Democratic senators' vote on Bork. In those days, there were still a few Democrats in the South, like John Breaux and Bennett Johnston from Louisiana and it wasn't clear what they were going to do. We just sat around and called ministers. I'd get a minister on the phone and then Kennedy would do the pitch.
We spent hours sitting in his home dialing up anyone who would give us some influential flock who would be willing to call their senators to try to convince the more conservative southern senators to defeat Bork. Eventually, the senators came around in part because this was such an electric issue in the African-American community -- which may never have happened but for Ted Kennedy making those calls.
The story has often been written about how groups got organized to block Bork, but the reality is that Kennedy himself was deeply, deeply invested and spent half of his vacation on this. To me this tells the story of the level to which he always expected more of himself than anyone else and worked harder than any one else to achieve his objectives once he defined them. This isn't someone who folds his cards and leaves the game. He is a fierce competitor. He really takes his work incredibly seriously, more so than any other politician I have ever known.
I worked on a bipartisan, Kennedy-Hatch religious liberties bill that ultimately passed the House and the Senate with unanimous consent. It brought together an unusual and diverse coalition, including the likes of the Christian Legal Society, a very conservative group, an Orthodox Jewish organization, the Mormon Church, the ACLU and the Human Rights Campaign. It was the quintessential example of strange bedfellows.
After the bill passed Congress, Senator Kennedy invited me to join him at the White House signing ceremony. That same day, somebody from Massachusetts was in town to see the senator, so Kennedy said to the guy, "Why don't you just come to the ceremony?"
All of us pile into the famous minivan, along with Splash, the senator's dog. We get to the White House, and we're at the front gate, and the senator grabs Splash and starts bringing him into the White House. Me and the guy look at each other like, "He's not going to bring the dog into the Oval Office, right?"
So, the senator's got Splash, and we walk into the Oval Office. I'm standing there thinking, "Please don't let the senator give me the dog. I don't want to be the Kennedy staffer standing in the Oval Office holding Splash's leash." And luckily, he gave it to the guy visiting from Massachusetts, so this poor guy, who I'm sure was some influential person, is standing in the Oval Office holding the dog as the senator makes the rounds.
As Kennedy works the room, Splash starts barking. President Clinton was still in his study, and the White House staffers are freaking out that there's this dog barking in the Oval Office. They're going, "You've got to tell your boss he's got to do something about the dog."
So I go over the senator, and I tell him, "Senator, they're really concerned about Splash barking." The senator goes over and says, "Splash, relax I'm just talking to people, behave." So, of course, the dog gets quiet for 30 seconds and then starts barking again.
At this point we have to escort Splash out the side door behind the president. And Clinton comes in and says, "Was there a dog in here or something?" And everyone, including the senator, shrugs with that guilty kind of look.
For me, this whole story captures so much of who the senator was: a legislator and a person. You had these two distinct worlds together: the conservative religious community and progressive civil liberties groups. And you're there all together, having this historic moment in the Oval Office at a signing ceremony furthering the cause of civil rights -- in this case religious freedom. And there's Splash.
It just showed no matter how serious the circumstances were, the senator always had that youthful, playful side to him. And that rare combination is part of what made him so charming.
When I went for a job interview to be minority counsel for Senator Kennedy on the Judiciary Committee in 1983, I was so in awe of the "Kennedy aura" that I had a hard time focusing and kept staring at the photos on the office's walls. I got the job offer, but then proceeded to display my jitters by walking into a darkened janitor's closet instead of the exiting through the door, a little gaffe that Kennedy couldn't help noticing. I still remember the bemused look on Kennedy's face.
I worked for the senator for three years from 1983 to 1986 and came to view the Kennedy world as a big extended family that prizes loyalty and stays close. I know I'm not alone in feeling a bond with the community of Kennedy staffers. There's no such thing as an ex-Kennedy staffer. As Michael Corleone said in Godfather III, "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in." For instance, the senator often asked me to contact prominent ex-staffers such as Stephen Breyer or Ken Feinberg. He always would reach out for substantive information or tactical advice.
I'll never forget traveling with Kennedy to Missouri right before Christmas one year on a trip that was designed to highlight the issue of hunger in America, a cause that the senator was passionate about. Despite bad weather, I remember being surprised that the event drew a big crowd of some 1,000 people. Afterwards, too, Kennedy showed his personal concern for me and other staffers by doing everything he could to help us get back to Washington to be with our families for the Christmas holidays. He was the most demanding boss and the kindest man I ever met
Former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell once remarked that Senator Kennedy was better prepared than any other senator every time he went to the floor. And that was true. The man devoured CRS [Congressional Research Service] reports like most people read a cheap novel during August break on a beach. When he took a bill to the floor, and at times it seemed like he was involved in every bill that went to the floor, it often meant very early mornings to go over the day's legislative strategy, briefings with outside experts to really delve into the policy and phone calls to staff late into the night to plot out the following day's activities.
His briefing book for the No Child Left Behind debate was legendary -- a huge book stuffed full of briefing memos, copies of the bill and the latest studies, all of which were dog-eared, heavily underlined and carefully tabbed.
As a man who came from a family of great wealth, there was no reason for him to work as hard as he did, but he did. He brought a passion and intensity to his work, the likes of which I will never forget.
One day -- I think it was on a Friday -- there was a lull in a debate over a minimum wage bill. There was no reason for him to stick around, yet he decided to go to the floor and gave one of the most rip-roaring speeches I have ever heard -- and let me tell you, I heard a lot of them. Senator Kennedy could really deliver a speech. At one point he was yelling so loud, while pointing toward the Republican side of the aisle where no one was around, that I literally had to leave the floor, my ears were ringing so hard.
His work habits were legendary. Each night he went home with an attaché case called "The Bag," filled with memos from his very large and very talented staff. And every morning, staff got the memos back, at the very least with a check mark acknowledging they'd been read, but oftentimes filled with criticisms and/or suggestions as well.
It was a privilege and honor to work for him, but he could be very demanding. He pushed his staff hard. The hours could be long and hectic, but no one cared, because he was working just as hard.
I learned so much from him. He was a good and honest man who will go down in the history books as one of the greatest legislators in this century or any other.
As Senator Kennedy once said of his brother Robert, the same can be said of the senator, that he "need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it."
I will miss him very much.
I was 28 years old -- not quite 28 years old -- when I first went to work for him. The first years were spent getting to know one another and building up a relationship. We were both fairly young and fairly new at what we did. Yet he had sufficient confidence in his own instincts to be willing to do sometimes pretty assertive, pretty far-out things.
One small thing he did early on came after he grew interested in gun control. One day we got a postcard from some gun dealer who said, "This is a ticket to our exhibit hall at our [National Rifle Association] convention." It didn't quite say, "I dare you to come visit" -- but it was basically that. It was, "Ha, ha, ha, I'm sending you a ticket to this, and I bet you'll never use it."
Well, we discussed it, and Senator Kennedy said it might be interesting to visit an NRA convention. And, sure enough, the NRA had a scheduled session on gun control legislation. The trouble was, they had a speaker only on one side, and it was John Dingell. So Senator Kennedy said, "Why don't we see if they'll be willing to have me appear with John Dingell?"
At that time, the head of the NRA was a very reasonable guy, and we got along very well with him, even though we disagreed with him. I called him and I said, "The senator had been invited by one your members to come and see one of the exhibits. Wouldn't you want to have both sides represented and let the people listen to what Senator Kennedy has to say? It really might make for a more interesting program."
He said, "You know, that's not impossible" and "I'll take it to my board and see what they think." He came back and reported that the board was unwilling to do that, but they'd be willing to have a closed meeting of the board of directors where Senator Kennedy and Congressman Dingell could speak -- but that's as far as they could go. Senator Kennedy said, "If that's the way you want to do, I'll be glad to do it."
When the appointment time came, Senator Kennedy went into the board meeting and Congressman Dingell was there, and Senator Kennedy said, "You know, it really doesn't make much sense for me to speak just to you. Why don't we just go outside to speak to the press?"
And, as I recall, Dingell said he'd be quite happy to speak only to the board.
Well, Senator Kennedy spoke to the press. And, of course, his remarks were highly covered. And Congressman Dingell didn't come out -- he didn't want to get in a debate with Senator Kennedy.
If not typical, it's at least representative to his kind of approach: He was willing to do offbeat things, to go places and do things other senators might not do. He did not curtail his own feelings. So he was beautiful to work for.
He loved Ireland, and a disproportionate amount of my time with him was spent on the Northern Ireland peace process. Starting out, I had no knowledge of the place whatsoever. My Irish heritage is from so far back -- no one was singing "Danny Boy" in my house. But because of the job, I had to become an expert on it. And it's sort of contagious with the senator -- his love for the issue. When you're with him, it's always "Ireland, Ireland, Ireland." It's his family history -- his ancestry is from there, so he has those family ties.
The senator told the story about how the family got together at the Cape after President Kennedy visited Ireland in 1963. The first night, President Kennedy wanted everyone to watch the TV coverage of his trip to Ireland. Then the second evening, when they'd normally do something different, he wanted to watch the films again -- and a few family members watched again. The senator said that by the third night, it was just him and the president, watching them again.
The senator got heavily involved with Ireland issues. He was instrumental in convincing President Clinton to grant Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams a visa to briefly visit the U.S. in 1994, and that set the stage for the peace process which resulted in the signing of the Belfast Agreement in 1998. The true extent of his role in the peace process is still not fully known.
When a writer in Ireland was working on a book about the peace process in the mid-'90s, the senator and I agreed we shouldn't be overly helpful. We just felt that there was just so much more to be done -- this was before the agreement was completed. For Senator Kennedy to be seen patting himself on the back for what a great job he did -- that would just annoy Protestants in Northern Ireland. So, he was always willing to forgo publicity and accolades for a greater goal. It's not that he never did an interview, but when people really wanted him to get into the nitty gritty of "I did this" and "I did that," he was always conscious that if you really annoy the people you are trying to bring along, you can have a really negative impact on the process, so it was like, "Nope."
But the truth is, he has had such an impact there. He wasn't even on the Foreign Relations Committee and he had this impact. He would always do that -- pick a couple of issues where he would become the expert on them.
When I created a nonprofit, the U.S.-Ireland Alliance, so much of it had to do with that experience of working with him. There are very few times when you get to actually have the impact of creating peace somewhere.
In 1974, when my trip to Latin America through the Judiciary Committee was being arranged, we had to go to the chairman, Jim Eastland, the senator from Mississippi, to get that done. He was one of the most conservative Democrats in the Senate, and Ted Kennedy was one of the more liberal. And Jim Eastland, I'm sure, did not care a whole lot about whether the military regime in Chile was engaged in human rights violations, but Ted Kennedy had to go to him to get it done. I remember I waited outside Eastland's office at the end of the day as Kennedy went in to have a scotch or a bourbon with him. I knew what was going on, but I didn't have to be in there -- I'm sure I would've been a detriment had I been in there. And Kennedy came out with the letter I had drafted with Eastland's signature on it. Kennedy just knew how to make the Senate work.
The cardinal in Santiago, Raúl Silva Henríquez, came to Washington while I was working for Senator Kennedy. This was a time in Chile when there were a lot of human rights violations and torture violations, and he wanted to tell Kennedy to keep the pressure on. But because Kennedy was such a visible leader in favor of the anti-military junta, the cardinal did not want to be seen going to Kennedy's office. It would've been politically explosive for him. Now, at that time, I lived on Capitol Hill. So, at around midmorning one day during his visit, the cardinal arranged to come to my house. Kennedy left his office through the back door and came over to meet him. I still can picture him -- the cardinal. I introduced him to my young son at the time. My wife was a little bit nervous, but not too surprised. She offered him some coffee -- she had prepared coffee. But in Chile they drink a lot of tea, so my wife had to go scurrying off to find some tea. And the meeting never did get exposed for the cardinal.
Working for the senator was a pretty intense kind of thing. We worked very, very, very hard, and he was demanding. If he wasn't satisfied, well, you knew. And he worked -- that's the other thing. No matter what the image was of him, he took home the briefcase and read all the memos and commented on the side. And you'd get the memo back and take it to somebody who could interpret his scribbling. I realized I was there too long when I could interpret it. But it wasn't a case where you had somebody who just signed off. He was very much involved, and worked very hard on the weekends. There was a mad dash to his office every Friday to get the final memo and all the final things into his briefcase for the weekend. And he would go through each of them.
He had this generosity. He recognized that there is more to life than work. When I went to work for him, my kids were little. And in the summer when he would head up to Cape Cod, he would turn over his pool at the house in McLean to his staff and their kids. He understood you have to take care of people.
One summer in the mid-1980s, when the Grove City decision had come down from the Supreme Court, and Kennedy and [Oregon Republican Sen. Bob] Packwood had teamed up to amend the law, they were determined to get this thing done, but it meant that the staff had to work through the August recess. It was a very difficult issue, with the conservatives not willing to give an inch. We would be meeting in the leadership office in the Capitol and he would call and ask how we were doing. And then he would say he would meet me at the bottom of the Capitol steps, that he had ordered Chinese food for everyone and that we had to go pick it up.
Another very strong memory was in 1983. It was a year the economy was in the tank. We had cheese lines and unemployment was a mess, and he did hunger hearings all over the country to dramatize what was happening with people. I don't know how we paid for it because he was not a committee chairman and we didn't have any of the committee infrastructure. But he had such a network of people to draw on to help with the logistics. After it was all over, we had the names of all the people who had testified -- I remember one was a migrant family that was living in their car, and he sent all of them a turkey for Thanksgiving.
We were getting ready to make the announcement the next day, and he had a whole bunch of us out to his old place in McLean for dinner. He had told me and others earlier in the day he wasn't running. He did not have a sense of melancholy about it. The truth is he was almost consoling those of us who wanted a campaign to go forward. But he was definitely focused on the future. I was talking to him, and he said, "You know, there are several senators who have exemptions and can serve on three major committees. I might go for one of these exemptions and get on the Armed Services Committee."
His mind just never stopped, and he had already made the transition from being a potential presidential candidate and was thinking through what kind of role he wanted to play on issues. And in the Reagan years, arms control was a major issue. He said, "I think I should call [then Armed Services Committee ranking Democratic Sen. John C.] Stennis tonight." So he called up Stennis and said he wasn't running for president and was interested in serving on the committee and wanted to have his support, and he got it right then and there. He talked about President Kennedy's interest in arms control, they had a nice long chat. Sen. Stennis told me later on how flattered he was that Sen. Kennedy wanted to be on his committee. I thought this was a guy who knew what he wanted to do, how to get things done, and had enormous respect from his colleagues regardless of their ideological differences.
We were on a plane together going to the 1974 Democratic midterm convention in Kansas City, Mo. I have a longstanding passion for getting young people employed, so I said to him, "Why don't you put in a bill to get a lot of money behind providing job experience for inner-city young people who have trouble?" He said, "Y'know what? We could do that. But the way the government is being run now, they would just mess it up in the Labor Department -- they would run it into the ground." I thought it was a really important insight: Don't just pass a bill, figure out what the impact is going to be.
I saw what a wonderful father he was. I spent a lot of time in his home working with him on organizing things before he was out on the road all the time. Patrick was 13 or 14 years old at the time, the other children were already out of the home.
He was the master strategist. He'd see around the corners, figure out how to do the politics to get things done, and make the whole greater than the sum of the parts. If you look at the array of areas he has gotten laws passed, it's just dizzying.
He was extremely knowledgeable in an amazing array of subjects. I remember having a conversation with him sometime in the 1970s about intercontinental ballistic missiles. You don't necessarily associate Ted Kennedy with ICBs, but he knew a lot about that.
The senator was not someone who invoked emotion or expressed it in public. He thought it was unseemly. But he took these causes personally. There was a young boy in Washington state, the child of a single mother, nine or 10. He had childhood leukemia. He was covered by Medicaid, but it didn't cover organ transplants. Even in those days, if you could do a bone marrow transplant there was a high cure rate. It was expensive. Neighbors were holding bake sales and stuff to raise money. They got up to $80,000 when the child died.
We started putting the story in speeches, because it was a heart-rending example. But after doing it two or three times, the senator asked us to take it out because he was choking up every time he said it. These things were personal to him.
Kennedy was pretty bold. He'd forge ahead when other people are scared. He said to me there were always a thousand reasons not to do something, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. We finally passed FDAMA (the Food and Drug Administration Modernization Act) in 1997, and we started it in '95 with the Gingrich takeover of Congress. They wanted to gut the FDA, thought it was an impediment for progress. Kennedy went to the mat on this. By delaying and arguing and blustering and negotiating and mounting a major PR campaign, and writing inflammatory letters to The New York Times, all but two provisions were compromised in a way that was satisfactory to us. And the question was whether to keep fighting or declare victory and go home. Kennedy decided he would fight. He filibustered the thing. He was on the floor for three days. The staff was in the backroom coming up with ways to keep it going.
One issue was federal preemption of state regulation of cosmetics. Kennedy kept coming up with all these examples, and dangers with cosmetics and why it shouldn't be unregulated. It made the front page of Women's Wear Daily. And then the Republicans backed off. The industry went to the guys in the Senate who were carrying water for them and said to back off, that Kennedy was doing more damage with the floor debates and stories than any benefit they could get.
He wouldn't get bogged down in details, but when they were necessary to know, he really knew them. When he was in a meeting or on the floor, he wanted to know more than anyone else.
In one of the many "war on drugs" bills, there was a caucus-wide effort. Most of the people involved wanted more police on the streets. Kennedy had this view that it wouldn't be very effective, that prevention and treatment were the most effective way to reduce illegal drugs. The formula was supposed to be 50 percent of the money on law enforcement and 50 percent on prevention and treatment. People accepted it as a fair formulation.
One meeting he went in to argue about the allocation of funds. We pull up to the Capitol building, where the meeting is, and he says, "Let's hang on for a few minutes and explain this to me. What's the issue I have to be focusing on?" We were saying the caucus wasn't proposing a 50-50 split, and that his job was to make sure it was 50-50.
The argument hinged on appropriations and obligations. Sure, he didn't know [the distinctions] before the briefing. We briefed him for four minutes and he had it down cold. He went into the meeting and spun this back to other senators at the appropriate time, and former Sen. Bob Graham was indignant because he didn't think it worked out to 50-50. Kennedy turned to the budget expert, and said it was obligation versus appropriation versus outlay, and he laid out the details. The budget guy said he was right. If you had asked him 20 minutes later what the difference was, he might not have been able to remember.
A lot people love to give advice. Senator Kennedy was not one of those people.
I think he gave advice by the way in which he handled events. He was always dependable. If he said yes, you could always count on it. Looking back on it, it was frustrating as a staffer. Many times he'd write "see me" on a memo, I would even try and pin him down by putting boxes for him to check: yes, no and see me. "See me" meant he wasn't ready to make a decision on it. But once he made a decision, that was it. I don't ever remember him being wishy-washy on it or changing his mind.
You read a lot in the literature about logrolling on the Hill. Senator Kennedy didn't do that. He would talk to any senator about supporting him, but he would never do it in a way that would obligate himself to someone else. You don't want to be in a position of having to deliver on something you may not agree with in principle.
One time we were having field hearings on the Navajo reservations in Window Rock, Ariz. The last witness was a medicine man, Descheny Nez Tracy. He was speaking in Navajo with his daughter translating. He was going on and on and it started to snow. We had another hearing that evening in Albuquerque, our pilot came in and gave me a note saying if we were going to fly out of here, we had to do it in the next 15 minutes. Kennedy tried to cut off the medicine man and he just couldn't do it. We had the plane fly out of there and we agreed to go by car. We had to drive in a blinding snowstorm between Window Rock and Albuquerque, and the cars weren't SUVs back then. As we were driving, I remember the senator saying, "If I hadn't tried to cut off the medicine man, we wouldn't be having this trouble."
In 1979-80, Senator Kennedy was chairman of the Judiciary Committee. I was his chief counsel. From the start he wanted cooperation among Democrats and Republicans. When disagreements arose, he'd tell us just what to do. "Work it out," he'd say. "It's always possible."
He had Ken Feinberg, his former office chief of staff and a member of his Judiciary staff, join me for breakfast every morning with Emory Sneeden, Senator Thurmond's chief minority counsel. We'd drink our coffee and plan the day together with an eye toward minimizing partisan disagreements and maximizing results. On days when a public meeting of the committee was scheduled, we'd try to make certain every senator knew what was likely to take place: The goal, if possible, was to have no heated arguments, no surprises. And those simple breakfast meetings helped bring about the harmony and the results he desired.
Suddenly, however, on a day close to the 1980 election, Senator Thurmond decided to stop the breakfast meetings. That very afternoon the committee was to meet and vote on the confirmation of several judicial nominations. The meeting began, and heated argument over the nominees and their qualifications inevitably erupted. Voices were raised, higher and higher. Senators began to shake their fists. In the midst of the chaos Senator Kennedy turned to me, shook his head, and said, "Well, what did they teach you at Harvard about how to deal with this?"
Wisely not waiting for my reply, he divided the nominees into different groups, assigned senators to each, and adjourned the meeting. Immediately after, he went to see Senator Thurmond. He persuaded him to lift the ban on bipartisan staff meetings. And the committee returned to getting its work done and working everything out.
He was the best politician I ever met in my life.
Going back to the '94 campaign, it's a tough race, Mitt Romney actually pulled ahead in early September. So, Kennedy's got a little pied-a-terre in Boston, we had sort of the decisive meeting where we were going to decide on the general election strategy. Tom Kiley presented the polling, Bob Shrum and I were advocating a very tough campaign against Romney, going against his business record, people who had lost their jobs [from the companies Romney restructured while at Bain Capital], tough stuff. And Kennedy had never run a negative ad.
He took it all in and said, "OK, we're going after his record, but I don't want to start with the layoffs. I want to sequence things differently: I want to start with the workers who didn't have health insurance." There was no whining, no, "Why am I in this situation?" It was all business -- "This is what we need to do to win." I remember thinking to myself in terms of decision-making this is the kind I'd want out of a president. No acrimony, here's our strategy, completely businesslike. It was a magnificent showcase of political judgment and action. I was very impressed by it, and I felt a lot better about the campaign.
Then the whole controversy over Romney being a Mormon came up -- basically Joe Kennedy attacked Romney for being a Mormon. And Andy Hiller, a Boston TV reporter, sort of got in Kennedy's face and asked him about it, and after three or four questions, Teddy's trying not to answer, finally he said something that implied that the Mormon Church discriminated against women. And when you start talking about something like that, it's on the table.
Romney, to his credit, recognized that we had made this mistake and went out and bemoaned the fact that the brother of President Kennedy, who had faced questions about his religion, would now be bringing this up in the campaign. Romney played it out well, and we are now in the bunker on this.
I remember a conference call: I was in a studio in Philadelphia making a commercial; Kennedy's on the phone, John Sasso, Shrum, and Paul Donovan, his Senate chief of staff. Basically what we were telling him is, "You've got to go retract the statement you made on television. We've got to end this and get back to Romney and Bain Capital and laying people off. This not a nuance deal, this is black and white." So Shrum says that, I say that, Sasso says that, and he was getting a mad at us and at one point he says, "Are you guys telling me I've got to put my tail between my legs and go out there?" And he didn't say it in a friendly way, either. And Shrum said, "That's exactly what we're telling you." And he just went out there and did it. The thing about him, you have a strategy, he'll carry it out.
In 2000, he had campaigned his ass off for Al Gore. And think about it for a moment, for the last three Democratic presidential nominating contests he endorsed Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama -- at a critical moment. Not bad. It's like June, and I'm basically running the Gore campaign, and the phone rings and my assistant says, "It's Senator Kennedy on the phone." So I hop on the phone and this was right after we had announced that Senator Kennedy and Caroline would be speaking on the first night of the convention. And there's this, "Ah Tad, I just want to thank you for that speech, I know you were in there making a difference."
I said to him, "Well, senator, to be honest with you, it wasn't me who got you that speech; do you want to know who got that for you?" And he's kind of taken aback and says, "Well, sure." I said, "You did when you won New Hampshire for Gore." I started laughing and he started laughing. Here's a guy who's calling me to thank me for getting him that speech. That's the way he operated, he would always thank people. If you did something for him, he wanted you to know he knew about it and was grateful.
To me, Ted Kennedy's great asset was his love of politics and his ability to practice it like no one else.
