The End of an Era

I read yesterday that once the Finance Committee voted out the health care reform bill, the negotiations with the White House and all parties were held in Ted Kennedy’s old office on Capitol Hill. More directly his last office. It was the office he used, adjoining Majority Leader Reid’s office, where he could work with the parties to put together the health care bill.  Which some would say was his lifelong dream; to provide health care for all Americans. As someone who has just gone through months of personal and professional hell, job loss, investor crashes and lacks health insurance the debate and discussion particularly hits home for me. At least that is one of the reasons it hits home.

The recent deaths of Eunice Kennedy Shriver and Senator Edward Kennedy may have made national news, but for me they hit home in a surprising way. Surprising because I have been so removed from that time and place. As the expression goes, “I don’t live there anymore,” and yet it felt very much like the passing of an era, the closing of a door and invocation of past tragedies mostly my own. It made me think of my Dad. My Dad was Kenneth O’Donnell, JFK’s Political Aide, friend and advisor. He was Robert Kennedy’s friend, often political advisor and big brother. Sometimes they got along, sometimes they drove each other nuts, but they were always close. For my Dad, Bobby’s murder would eventually be a blow from which he would never recover. Guilt. He felt guilty.

The death of Eunice and Ted also reminded me of Jackie Kennedy Onassis. My parents adored Jackie. It had not always been that way, but their friendship grew, as friends do under the pressures of a political campaign, the pressures of the White House, and they became cemented by the tragedies of Dallas, November 22^nd, 1963. My Dad was never particularly close to Ted. It may be hard for readers to understand this now, but to my Dad, Jack and Bobby, Ted was a kid. He was the kid brother. My memories of Ted are more recent, when he was older, his face a picture of tragedy, lines that were earned by pain, not given. When my Dad died, he had been there for me. It seems like a lifetime ago now, and it is – I had not spoken to him in many years – but when it mattered most he was there. Made sure I got on the right track, on the right road, got into school, had a place to spend the summer having fun, and had a shoulder to lean on when it mattered. That changed dramatically with the death of my dear friend, Michael Kennedy, and later with John’s death. He changed. Some tragedy becomes too much. But, what I choose to remember now is that when it mattered he was there. I have been asked over and over again by the press to recount some stories, tell some tales and give some insight into the man. I have thought hard about it, and it is not easy to do without violating the privacy of someone who had so little left to them. Privacy that is – it was something he rarely enjoyed and something we all take for granted. Still, when I think of him, I think of the time when I was to give my first real political speech in Boston. It was a minor affair, a small event hosted by The Democracy Foundation, an organization I helped found with the help of Ted’s nephew, Joe Kennedy, who had been my friend and confidante at that time. I had written a paper for school suggesting the formation of The Democracy Foundation. Joe read it. Loved it. And in true Bobby Kennedy fashion, called a lawyer and helped me put the Foundation together. It ran for several years with the help and support of both Joe and Ted. That was then.

I recall being nervous, frightened and unsure of myself. When you lose both your parents at a young age, within six months of each other, and your life is upended by tragedy, it takes time to acquire the self confidence that comes naturally when your parents are there to urge you on, push your forward, provide that cheering section, that shoulder to cry on and that stern word of advice just before you make a dumb decision. It is the role only a parent can play.

Anyway, I remember nervously getting up in front of the microphone, my voice too soft to be heard even with the aid of the microphone. Somebody yelled, “can’t hear you” – I nearly died – I suddenly couldn’t remember my lines, what the hell was I supposed to say next? I felt all alone up there on the platform, everyone watching. Wondering? Is she up to it? Her father would not have this kind of problem. Suddenly, I felt his presence rather than heard him. I turned slowly, at least it seemed slowly, and there was Ted, slipping in the side door to the surprised cheer of the audience. He bounded, yes bounded, he could see somebody floundering from a mile away, and was suddenly at my side – “surprised you, didn’t we?” He bellowed to the delight of the audience. The crowd went crazy. They loved it. It all seemed so planned so natural, as if he and I had cooked this up from the beginning. Heck, I didn’t even know he was going to be there. In fact, his staff had told me he could not attend. He smiled at the audience, laughed and joked, carefully helping to pry my fingers from the lectern where the sweat from my palms had glued them tight. The event went on to be a huge success, there would be many more events before things started to go wrong, but he was there then, too. At that time, succeeding or failing, the one person I could count on was Ted. He didn’t really care whether you succeeded or failed. He just cared that you tried. Bobby had been like that, as well. Winning was important, but trying was the most important part. Sitting on the sidelines bellyaching was never okay. Sorry if that blows some of the People Magazine images of the Kennedys as always needing to be first. But, Ted cared if you tried. Just tried.

Years later, when my book came out, Ted was there again. Again, after a tragedy – Michael had died that year. Michael had meant everything to me at that time and losing him sent me into an emotional tail spin. That was when I first met Chris Lawford. Michael’s brother, Bobby, had sent him out to LA to help me get on solid ground. He did. While I haven’t talk to Chris in a while, I daresay, without his help, to use Ted’s phrase, it probably would have become “a tragedy within a tragedy.” When my book A COMMON GOOD, The Friendship of Robert F. Kennedy & Kenneth P. O’Donnell came out that spring, I didn’t really care. The book which had been inspired by and written with Michael’s guiding hand seemed to be a symbol of more tragedy. Michael was gone. And, I felt and frankly was very much alone. It still pains me to look at the cover to this day. The cover, a classic black & white shot of my Dad and Bobby standing in the White House.

Ted wanted to have a book party. I didn’t want to. The book had become a symbol of loss, and everyone, and I mean everyone, was trying to take credit for work that Michael and I had done. Ted insisted on a book party. He was able to get Ambassador Elizabeth Bagley, a stunning, smart as hell blond and her husband, Smith, to host the party at their home in Georgetown. The Bagleys were then, and still are today major money players, in the Democratic Party and were happy to help. Anything for Ted. The party was painful. I hated it. Michael was not there, and it seemed so pointless until Ted arrived, bringing with him an entourage of Senators whom he had cajoled into attending. They didn’t know Michael, me or my Dad, but they loved Ted, so they came. What I remember most about that party were three things. One was when Ted stood in the middle of the room and spoke about, not Michael at first, but my Dad. He spoke about the love, yes that’s right, love and admiration, that he felt for my Dad, and the deep tie that, bound him with Jack and Bobby. He said, with tears in his eyes and rolling down his cheeks, that they could not have done it without Ken. Ken was in many ways “their political third brother.” Coming from Ted, who was the third brother, such a statement would have blown my Dad away. Ted was not a kid brother anymore, but a keeper of the legacy that he was striving to maintain, while still struggling to make his own. My Dad would have been both surprised and deeply touched. Somebody had in fact, paid attention. Somebody had cared that he had devoted his life to two men who he felt could change the country and the world. In the end, their deaths would be the beginning of his own. Somebody had noticed. Ted. Ted had noticed. That would have surprised him.

The second important thing was that Kerry Kennedy had quietly attended. She had not needed to, since the room was awash in Kennedys and their entourages. But, Michael adored his sister. She ran and continues to run the foundation that bore their father’s name, The RFK Memorial, a foundation whose success and vision Michael had made very much his own. It would have mattered to him that she came. It had mattered to me.

The third important thing was that at the book party was where I would meet famed journalist, Warren Rogers. Warren had written for, among others, Life Magazine for years, working under the best. That included the late legendary, tough and visionary newsman editor, Jim Bellows. Warren had covered the White House during my Dad’s day and had become a good friend to my Dad and Bobby. Warren was a white haired handsome, tough as nail journalists, a “dirty finger nail” reporter, as he used to say proudly, who would become the key to my future and, ironically, a step away from the Kennedys.

There are many stories, and many will find their way into my forth coming book, but some need to be shared now. To put a human face on a man, a family and an era that is quickly, and in some ways, appropriately becoming relegated to the History Channel and LIFE Magazine specials. Some years ago, after John’s death, I had worked with a group to re-launch George Magazine and had taken on the challenge at the direct request of Ted Kennedy. He had called me in New York and challenged me to try and make it work. The challenge was formidable, the task difficult and made more difficult by my own mistakes. The largest mistake was trying to re-launch GEORGE at all. The magazine was too identified with John. While John had the right idea, if I was going to do it, I needed to make it my own. Not an extension of John. Ted didn’t tell me that. Perhaps he assumed I understood it. I didn’t.

Mrs. Shriver had told me that, though. I respected and admired her, because my Dad and Mother did, and because when I was having a tough time in Washington, it was either Jackie or Eunice who I could count on. Always unasked, if you needed them they were there. They seemed to know, to sense when the shit was about to hit the fan, had already hit the fan or you just needed some direct advice. Mrs. Shriver, I never called her Eunice, always gave direct advice. When she heard about the launch of the magazine she called me. I thought to congratulate me. I was wrong.

“It’s a mistake,” she had said point blank. “The magazine?” I asked, hurt and surprised. Defensive. “No,” Mrs. Shriver said, “Not the magazine. Doing it the way you are doing it. Be your own person. Make your own mark. Make a name for yourself out there. On your own terms, then launch something like the magazine. In order to work, the magazine must reflect who you are, not who John was. You have it, but you need to look at Arnold. If you need a role model, it should be Arnold. Arnold is his own man. He has his own identity. He stands toe to toe with my family. He is not a supplicant to my family. He makes his own rules, runs his own life and is his own man. You have it Helen, like Arnold, but it won’t work until you are your own person. You need to get away from the Kennedy family and go be Helen.” I remember I was surprised, defensive and hurt. I also knew in my gut that Mrs. Shriver was right.

But, unsure how to do that, unsure how to accomplish what Arnold accomplished, sounds stupid now, but unsure how to be your own person, I had plunged ahead. Some action was better than none. Right? No. Not always. It was stupid. I still had lessons to learn. “Sometimes,” Michael had told me once, “You seem determined to learn things the hard way.” Well maybe that was true. I had been wrong. Mrs. Shriver had tried to warn me. Guide me. She had given me the best damn advice anyone had given me. Since Jackie, anyway. I had not listened. In the end I would pay a price for my arrogance, some of it deserved, most of it not and dished out by people who should know have known better. Still the mistake had been mine. What I learned is that you can carry on the spirit of George, of what John intended, but as your own endeavor, not as an extension of John or the Kennedys. That is what I intend The O’Donnell Report will be. A political column based on the spirit of what John intended, but very much my own words, my own vision, and my own future. I think Mrs. Shriver would be proud and pleased that I finally got it right.

When things got tough she was the only person that ever hung in there with you. She didn’t hold your hand or spare your feelings if you were wrong. She told you the truth. She never bullshitted. She never misled you and never ever deliberately hurt anyone. She was, if it can be said of a woman, my Dad’s kind of guy. My Dad and Mrs. Shriver were often at odds during the campaigns and in the White House years. In a way, she drove him crazy, because she was, as he once put it, “just as smart as the President, maybe smarter and twice as tough.” She never backed down. Never let my father intimidate her. She was a woman in a man’s world, and he could not handle her. She could stand toe to toe with him during a political argument and often she was right. She never went around him. She wasn’t that type. She was best described in the way people later described my Dad and Frank, she was someone who “came right at you. And you knew where you stood with her.” My Dad respected Eunice. Respected her.  Eunice was like Jackie, “they were both tough as nails” my father once said, not in criticism, but respect. “Tough as nails,” was a compliment as far as my father was concerned.

None of this should be all that surprising. My family had a long tradition with the Kennedys and my father and Jack had been there from the start. By 1958 Jack Kennedy was gearing up to run for the United States Senate. While his election was a foregone conclusion, the number he won by was critical. Many in politics recognized that John Kennedy was "a man in a hurry" who had his eye on the White House in 1960. He needed to put up some big numbers in the 1958 Senate race in Massachusetts to demonstrate that he was up to the task of a national campaign. If his numbers were not large enough, the job of convincing an already skeptical Democratic Party that he had what it took to win in 1960 would become that much harder.

The task to achieve the goal of a convincing win in the 1958 campaign fell to my dad and the late Larry O'Brien, both trusted Kennedy political aides and good friends. Together s “Irish Mafia.” They were its core. “There was nobody better than Larry,” my Dad said once and the feeling was mutual. Together they made a hell of a political team for Jack Kennedy. Hard bitten and political, my Dad felt he could handle anything in the game of politics and nothing could throw him off the win. Nothing except a stunning brunette named Jackie Kennedy, now the candidate's wife, who swept my Dad and everyone around her off their feet. For someone who did not like politics, Jackie Kennedy proved to be a master of the art of politics. My father's first experience with her was in the all important Senatorial Campaign.
Up until the campaign, this would be the most extensive time he had ever spent with her. He approached the assignment with all the dread of a “guy's guy" who was not particularly well suited to dealing with a woman like Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. He eventually came to dub her either “the Queen” or “Madame La Femme.” She was, in his view, beautiful, smart, savvy, wickedly funny and John Kennedy's best political weapon. The friendship that developed between them would last for the next twenty years. Through the good times and, more importantly, through the heart wrenching tragedy of John and Robert Kennedy's deaths, Jackie Kennedy Onassis and my father would remain mutual fans and friends forever.

Growing up, I remember my parents spoke often of John and Jackie Kennedy. John Kennedy, though long gone, was in many ways a living presence in our house. His death represented unbelievable tragedy to both my parents, not just in terms of personal loss, but also in terms of the loss of possibilities for this country. Given his close personal and professional relation with the President, my father believed John Kennedy represented the most extraordinary set of possibilities and hope for a better future not only for the United States but for the world. My dad remembered that the President, as the stories in my forthcoming book, "Not Your Turn, Not Your Time," will show, had a very firm and exciting future planned for Jackie and his children. John Kennedy may have been President, but as he often expressed to my father, he and Jackie had great plans for life beyond the White House. Sadly, they would remain only plans.

Jackie Kennedy was very much part of that hope and shared that sense of loss of a future that might have been. My father and she became deep and sincere friends, brought together by the good times, but their friendship became truly forged by the depths of their shared loss. They were like two returning war veterans; nobody could understand the depth of their pain but one another. In each other and in their friendship, they found solace for the incredible heartache with which John Kennedy's sudden death left them both.

My father was always protective of Jackie. He loved her, wanted her to have her own life and though he himself was in so many ways unable to move on with his own life, he spent all his energies urging her to find and forge a new life for herself away from the Kennedys and the tragedy of the past. He wanted for her what he seemed unable to achieve for himself. He did not want her to become entombed by the Kennedy “legacy.” In helping her to become free, he never found the time to free himself and became another of its victims. For her part, Jackie worked tirelessly to get him to move forward, to let go of the past, but he could not and would not break free. Like many true Irishmen, he felt most comfortable in the tales and stories of past glory. He seemed to sense his time was limited, he had done his best, and his one final task, was to share his memories of the flesh and blood human beings who had achieved the beginning of a “sea change” in the way government of , by and for us was conducted. He especially wanted to pass along his memories of the real John and Jackie Kennedy with all of us, so that we too might one day understand, years later, what made them people who could touch the hearts and minds of Americans and people around the world with genuine hope and courage. Through his stories, like the Irish bards of yore, my dad wanted us to come to understand and appreciate “Madame La Femme” in all her uniqueness, beauty and originality. In a world of sameness and copies, Jackie, “Madame La Femme,” was truly an original.

I grew up hearing stories about Jackie everyday. I remember that my father always held her up as the woman to admire and to aspire to be like. No detail was too small from the hair color, to the makeup, to the style with which she dealt with other people, to the importance of being “mysterious.” Men, my Dad used to say, love mystery, and Jackie represented all of those things, most especially mystery -- that quality that left others wondering when she had left the room. When my father died, there were two moments that stood out for me the most. The first memory was of Ethel Kennedy, Bobby’s widow, standing in the middle of the chaos in our house after the funeral. She was the first one there for me when my Dad died and the last one to leave after the funeral. She remained loyal to the memory of my mother and my father, and that meant a lot to a young girl, orphaned by the deaths of both her parents in the same year. She was strong, in control and represented a connection to Bobby and a reminder that despite the tragedy and the differences of the past, we remained an extended family.

The second moment I remember was Jackie. Her presence in the church nearly brought the service to a halt. She tried to be discreet, but her mere entry into the church fixed the entire congregation's attention on her alone. She had true charisma and, try as she might, no matter the event, it followed her everywhere. Her presence at the funeral, along with Ethel, symbolized to me the respect in which their husbands had held my father. No amount of second generation revisionist's history will ever change that fact.

Later, after I had retreated to one of the limousines in tears, I remember Jackie climbing into the car and holding me, telling me she would always be there, she would never forget my father and never forget me. That they would always remain loyal to the past and the friendship and the history they had forged together. She never did forget me and always kept her word. I wish I had been older and had come to know Jackie better. There are so many questions I would have wanted to ask her. Still, in some ways, I feel as if I have come to know her through my recollections of her.

I rarely revisit these stories much anymore. I have, for many years, now resisted various attempts to get me to talk about the Kennedys and those days. In part because it is painful, in part because I feel that many people have misunderstood my intentions and as a result have mistreated me, especially after Michael’s death. I also do not want to, as Chris Lawford once said to me, “become a chronicler of the past and the Kennedys.” I also resisted it because it’s just all so damn sad. Finally, I have resisted this because I am moving on with my life. While I am currently working on a book on JFK and President Obama and a movie project on The Rat Pack, I simply don’t live there anymore.

Still, this is the time to say something. It was time to talk about the real people, not the plaster images or the People magazine versions, but the real human beings. While that life is now in my past, there was a time when it held, and they held a special place in my heart and in my life. They always will. They were not saints, they were not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but, like my Dad and Mother, they loved their lives, they loved their family and they loved their country. They may not have always gotten it right, but they sure as hell tried, and they all had a hell of a good time when things where good. Their lives remind me of a wonderful quote from Frank Sinatra, “You gotta love livin', cause dyin' is a pain in the ass..” They would all certainly agree. Let us hope that with the passing of an era we recall their lessons that can move us forward, that we can learn from, but as Mrs. Shriver warned me some time ago, let us make this our own future, taking lessons from the past, but striving to make our mark on the future of this state and this nation.