The Kennedy women covered up their husbands' excesses (The Guardian) [View All]

[Apollo11]

The Guardian (London, UK) - August 27, 2009

Silvio Berlusconi may well have led a life of much greater probity than any of the Kennedy brothers; yet Italy's prime minister is already an object of universal derision while the Kennedys, even after their deaths, still rank high in the pantheon of American gods.

It doesn't help Berlusconi that he looks and behaves like a villain in a comic opera, and that he cannot aspire to the gravitas of which the Kennedys were capable. But one shouldn't overlook the role of wives in fashioning their husbands' reputations. It was Berlusconi's wife, Veronica Lario, who understandably started the flood of allegations that he was obsessed with young women. The wives of Jack, Robert and Edward Kennedy, on the other hand, were united in protecting them from the public exposure of their weaknesses.

Most important by far was the president's wife, Jackie Kennedy, who was a ferocious custodian of the Kennedy image, even though her husband was a serial adulterer. She not only tolerated his infidelities, but did her very best to conceal them from the world. She was even the principal creator of the Camelot myth that she devoted so much of her life to promoting. The other Kennedy wives – Robert's wife, Ethel, and Edward's two wives, Joan and Vicki - were also intensely loyal to their wayward spouses.

Ethel, a devout Catholic, never wavered in her support for the philandering Robert, by whom she had 11 children. Joan, by her own admission, took to the bottle so as not to "get mad or ask questions concerning the rumours about Ted and his girlfriends", and she stood steadfastly by him during the 1969 Chappaquiddick scandal, in which he took eight hours to contact the police after Mary Jo Kopechne, a young woman he was driving home from a party, drowned when his car went off a bridge on Martha's Vineyard. Joan even went with him to Kopechne's funeral. In 1980, when he ran for president, he had already been separated from Joan for two years. But she nevertheless campaigned for him and promised that, if he were elected, she would live with him in the White House. They were finally divorced in 1982.

Edward's second wife, Vicki, married him 10 years later, just after he had been involved in another damaging scandal – the trial of his nephew, William Kennedy Smith, for the alleged rape in Ted's house of a girl they had met while out drinking in a bar. Vicki was so determined to protect him from any further bad publicity that she even made sure that this notorious drinker was never photographed with a glass in his hand.

It was a great achievement of Edward Kennedy to have risen so high above Chappaquiddick and a rackety private life that President Obama felt able to describe him this week as "a great leader" and "the greatest United States senator of our time". But I doubt if that would have been possible if he had been married to Veronica Lario.

Alexander Chancellor

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/aug/27/alexander-chancellor-kennedys-reputations