From Camelot Dream to Nightmare: The Life of Joan Kennedy (As captured by UVA’s Miller Center)

Barbara A. Perry is the J. Wilson Newman Professor of Governance and Co-Chair of the Presidential Oral History Program at UVA’s Miller Center. She is the author of Edward M. Kennedy: An Oral History.

It seemed a match made in heaven, or at least in a fairytale. In 1958, Edward (Teddy) Kennedy married the stunningly beautiful Joan Bennett, a talented pianist. They first met in 1957 at Manhattanville College at an event which dedicated a gymnasium to Teddy's sister Kathleen, who had passed away in a 1948 plane crash.

Teddy had a cheating incident in his freshman year at Harvard, which expelled him. He was readmitted after his honorable discharge from two years of U.S. Army service in Europe. With his Harvard undergraduate degree in hand and experience in the family business of politics, Teddy and Joan settled in Charlottesville for him to complete his law degree at the University of Virginia Law School, where older brother Bobby had received his J.D.

Teddy earned an impressive victory in UVA Law’s annual moot court competition, partnering with future California senator John Tunney. A newly minted attorney, Teddy took a position as an assistant prosecutor in his family’s hometown of Boston. He and Joan started a family of three children: Kara (1960), Edward Jr. (1961), and Patrick (1967).

The Kennedy family thought Teddy should fill the Senate seat Jack had vacated as president-elect in 1961. Barely the constitutionally required age of 30, the youngest brother ran in 1962’s special election. In a 2006 interview, as part of the 29 interviews he did with the Miller Center, Teddy recalled the early signs of his wife Joan’s alcoholism:

   "We had the success in the campaign, but 1962 was also a time when I was really very moved or concerned [about a problem in my own family.] At the beginning of the campaign, I noticed that my wife drank. It hadn’t—all the time that we’d been at law school, I never noticed, it never really affected her. I remember the first time. We were supposed to go to the State [Democratic] Committee meeting, and I asked her if she was ready, and walked in the room and saw that she was unsteady. I thought that’s strange, because it was sort of the first time that she hadn’t been able to make it to an event. This was the start of ’62, and that kind of thing sort of picked up during the period of ’62. That was a difficult thing to cope with and deal with. I’m not sure that I dealt with it very well in terms of how do you get through it, get through it until the election. This was becoming increasingly a problem that was gnawing at me. And then we had—[1963 and the assassination of President Kennedy.]"

The next summer, Teddy nearly lost his life in a private plane crash on the way from Washington to a state party meeting in Massachusetts. The pilot and one of the senator’s aides perished. Kennedy sustained severe back injuries, and he spent months immobilized and then relearning to walk. Joan proved herself a political surrogate for her husband, as he was confined to a hospital and nursing facility during his 1964 reelection campaign.

The family suffered another horrific trauma in 1968 when Robert Kennedy Sr. fell victim to an assassin’s bullet while running for the Democratic presidential nomination. As Rose Kennedy, mother of the four Kennedy brothers, three of whom were now deceased from World War II and political murders, wrote: “It seemed impossible that the same kind of disaster could befall our family twice in five years. If I had read it in fiction, I would have said it was incredible.”

An assassination nightmare now haunted Teddy, who wore a bullet-proof vest in public and fought for gun-regulation in the Senate. He drowned his sorrows in alcohol, and rumors of womanizing circulated in the tabloids.

Thirteen months after Bobby’s death, the senator attended a gathering on tiny Chappaquiddick Island, just off Martha’s Vineyard. Teddy would inflict more tragedy on his family and that of Mary Jo Kopechne, who drowned in the senator’s car when he drove off a bridge into an inlet of swirling dark water. Imagine Joan’s anguish, pregnant with her fourth child and confined to bed rest. But she attended Kopechne’s funeral and Teddy’s court appearance (for leaving the scene of an accident), exposing her to the media circus surrounding his actions. Her pregnancy ended in a miscarriage.

In 1973, Joan and her husband received the devastating news that their 12-year-old son Teddy Jr. was diagnosed with cancer and needed to have part of his right leg amputated. Two years of agonizing chemotherapy cured the boy, but added more stress to the family, which also had to address young Patrick’s frightening asthma attacks. With Chappaquiddick still alive in the public’s mind, and Joan struggling with her addiction, the senator passed up a run for president in 1976. 

Some in the Kennedy family and Democratic Party hoped for a restoration of Jack’s truncated Camelot presidency. Joan supported her husband’s candidacy for the White House in 1980. Boston Globe reporter and columnist, Thomas Oliphant, who traveled with Teddy, told the Miller Center: "Joan’s health was quite good at that point. She, more than [the senator] . . .  came back to chat [with the press in the campaign plane]. A lot of us would see her coming and be very careful to hide the drink or whatever. She was very personable, very warm, very conversationally at ease. . . She enjoyed herself immensely. She was a big hit, and beginning right away, there she was. In light of everything that’s happened since then, it’s hard to get this across, but she really was in good shape then. . . This was a good period in her life, actually. If you wanted to get Freudian about it, it’s pretty easy to figure out why: because he [Senator Kennedy] needed her. And she spoke a little bit [in public]. Off camera she spoke a lot. I mean, she was very musical, extremely well educated, delightful to talk to.”

Joan appeared with Teddy and the children at her husband’s official announcement in Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall, but he lost badly to Jimmy Carter in the Iowa caucuses and never gained momentum against the incumbent president.

The Kennedy’s troubled marriage ended in divorce in 1982. In 1992, Senator Edward Kennedy married Washington lawyer and family friend, Victoria Reggie, and found the marital happiness that had escaped his relationship with Joan. 

Teddy’s empathy for Joan’s long battle with addiction is apparent in his 2006 comments to the Miller Center about the impact of Bobby’s death and Chappaquiddick on her: “This was a difficult time with her. I mean she tried and tried hard to get help during this time, and she went to different places. It looked like it was OK for a while, and then she had a tough period. I think the disease [alcoholism] is not completely inherited, but an awful lot of that thing is inherited. I mean her parents, unfortunately, both died of alcoholism. . . I think there’s a lot we’ve still got to learn about it, but boy it is devastating, a devastating disease. I think she’s tried nobly to deal with it. It’s just been devastating, I think over her entire life, really.”

The Kennedy family’s Roman Catholic faith is well-known for its belief in a life beyond earthly existence. For Joan, one wishes the Church’s words to those who have departed come true, “Eternal rest grant until them, oh Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them.”