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 Glued to the television
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| Bow Bridge in Central Park. Photo: JH. 5:15 PM. Click image to order. |
August 30, 2009. If that’s how fast eight months passed, we’ll be ringing in the New Year in about twenty minutes. Or what’ll feel like it.
It was a beautiful weekend in New York. Grey and wet and rainy on Saturday, clearing on Sunday with a warm Sun and a light breeze. As quiet as the city was, the Promenade on Sunday afternoon was jammed with people taking in the gorgeous day, peaceful by the river. |
| View from the John Finley Walk on the East River at 84th Street, looking north toward the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge and Queens. Sunday afternoon at 6:30. |
The mail continues pouring in about Dominick Dunne. As well as I knew him (which was not as well as his longtime close friends knew him), I didn’t know what his readers and fans thought of him. I didn’t realize how much he connected with people, how much they felt he spoke to them and for them. The memorial service for him will be held on Thursday, September 10th at St. Vincent Ferrer Roman Catholic Church on Lexington Avenue and 65th Street.
On Saturday a lot of Americans were glued to the television watching the funeral service for Senator Ted Kennedy (which I missed). From all reports it was a very impressive service.
I am of the generation that grew up with the Kennedys as public figures. I recall as a very young teenager when Senator John Kennedy came to our town to a reception at a neighbor’s house. I didn’t know then, as I know now, that it must have been some kind of fundraiser because he was beginning to his run for the Presidency. He was not as popular amongst the WASP communities of Western Massachusetts, because of his religion.
His wife Jacqueline was almost completely unknown despite the publicity of their Newport wedding and their picture on the cover of LIFE. Religion was the issue and it was believed with great certainty among the experts that no Roman Catholic would ever be president.
Then when he became President everything changed. Esquire Magazine referred to him as the “first movie star president,” and indeed the public was rapturous about him as if he were a movie star, and his First Lady was one too.
When there was talk that his youngest brother Teddy, the handsome Kennedy who really did look like a movie star, might run for Senate, in Massachusetts there was a lot of talk about what kind of guy he was. He was very popular amongst his contemporaries at Harvard although he had a well-known reputation already for being a skirt-chaser and rather lax as a student. So the opposing opinion was that this was a kind of dumb, irresponsible guy who could never do the job.
The press at first reported that his older brothers – President John Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy – were uncertain about his ability to win the Senate seat. But, we were told, his father, old Joe, the patriarch, wanted it for his boy Teddy. And Joe represented the image of family power to the American people. His was not always an admirable or even respectable image to many people, but it prevailed nonetheless, and with credible authority.
In 1964, Teddy (as the world knew him) was badly injured in an airplane crash just three miles north of my hometown of Westfield (where the small plane was scheduled to land) in Southampton, Massachusetts. His survival was considered miraculous. Already, years before, two of his elder siblings, Joe Jr., and Kathleen Kennedy Hartington has died in plane crashes when Teddy was just a young boy. And so began the popular notion that the Kennedys were accident-prone and possibly ill-fated.
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Because he was the youngest, because the reputation of his early manhood and socializing habits were not in his favor, little was expected him when he was first a senator. Nor was much expected of his political future without his big brothers to pave the way for him. However, fate and his own sense of self eventually changed all that.
His excesses were often talked about, written about, and well-known in certain circles. And the tragic death of his aide Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick, which occurred in July forty years ago this year, nearly ended his political career. But the man resurrected himself and, like his father, prevailed.
More than anything he was devoted to his constituency and to his family, which included the families of his murdered brothers. The man we were first introduced to as the baby in the dynamic Kennedy family grew to be the only surviving male of his generation, and the beneficent patriarch of this fascinating, remarkable American family.
On today’s NYSD, we have the privilege of a photo memoir from our esteemed photojournalist Jill Krementz who personally covered Senator Kennedy in a piece for LIFE magazine as well as other assignments. It’s a beauty, and a touching reminder of the best of the man. |
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