Bob Child/Associated Press
Senator Edward M. Kennedy with his first wife, Joan, and son Edward Jr. in 1979 at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., where the younger Kennedy was a student.
In early December, Washington's political class was in one of its episodic ventilations over who would fill the latest round of job openings. The intrigue of the moment involved Hillary Clinton's replacement as secretary of state. Susan Rice, the U. S. ambassador to the United Nations and onetime front-runner, was taking a public battering, and the fallback candidate, Senator John Kerry, was looking more likely to get the job. This would in turn mean that another Massachusetts Senate seat would be up for grabs — the third election since the death of Ted Kennedy in 2009.
In the midst of all that, I was eating lunch at a private club near the White House at the invitation of Ted Kennedy Jr. As the namesake of the late senator, he was of course entitled under Massachusetts law to slide happily into any available political seat without so much as leaving the compound to drop off a ballot petition. There was only one slight problem with this: he lived in Connecticut, not Massachusetts. But Kennedys have a way of surmounting pesky barriers like these, and conjecture about Kerry's seat, if it were to become open (which it has), was on the table.
Ted Jr., as he is known, has eager blue eyes and windswept Kennedy hair. He is friendly and solicitous, but his efforts at ingratiating himself come off more self-taught than natural, a bit too eager, as when, weeks earlier, he marveled at how really great it was to see me. At one point he asked if I had ever been to the family home on Cape Cod. When I said no, he insisted, "Oh, you have to come down sometime." We had never met before.
He speaks in the patrician New England accent and nasal-honking intonations that conjure his father. He kept saying things like "I am entering a new phase of my life" and "I come from a family of public servants," and it was perfectly clear what Ted Jr. had called me here to discuss. After a lifetime of entreaties, many from his father, the oldest son of Edward M. Kennedy was now, at 51, prepared to join the family business. In the musty parlance of his heritage, he was being "called to service."
For someone so incubated in the heat of public life, Kennedy betrayed a surprising transparency, or maybe naïveté, in explaining to me how he had been preparing for this next phase. "I've been cultivating all sorts of friendships and relationships with people who can be helpful," he said. And then he made clear how I came in. He also kept mentioning to me that "my father and brother had always spoken highly of you," which carried a whiff of declaring me "reliable" within the family. (Was I, too, being called to service?) What he envisioned, Ted Jr. said, was "a foundational story" being written about him. "What's this guy like?" he asked. "What's he thinking?"
This was somewhat unusual. When someone decides to "come out" as a politician, it is typically in connection with a specific job — as in, "I will be running for such-and-such." They don't generally say, "I'm being called to service, please write a foundational story about me." My immediate question involved exactly what service Ted Jr. was being called to. And where? Would it be in Massachusetts, where he purchased the former home of his Uncle Jack, behind the main family compound in Hyannis Port? Or in Connecticut, where he lives in the New Haven suburb of Branford with his wife, Kiki, a Yale psychiatrist, and teenage son and daughter (their oldest daughter is a freshman at Wesleyan)? There was also the possibility of an executive appointment from a president who regarded his father as a crucial Senate mentor and kingmaker. Ted Jr. wanted me to know that he was open to that.
Whatever the case, there was some urgency that the foundational story be done soon, presumably to help get his name "in play" for the imminent job openings. We were joined at the table by Dick Keil, a former White House reporter for Bloomberg News who now works for a media consulting company called Purple Strategies, which was co-founded by Steve McMahon, a Democratic strategist/TV pundit/friend of Ted Jr.'s from the old days, when he worked on Ted Sr.'s 1980 presidential campaign. Keil, McMahon and Ben Binswanger, another friend, who attended Wesleyan with Ted Jr. and later worked for Senator Kennedy, were all helping guide the soon-to-be-candidate-for-something through the delicate paces of his "rollout." Ted Jr.'s brother, Patrick, a former congressman from Rhode Island who now lives in New Jersey, was also part of the small advisory team, as was Kiki.
Mark Leibovich is the magazine's chief national correspondent. His book, "This Town," about contemporary Washington, will be published this summer.
Editor: Joel Lovell
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