she had to be protected by the Secret Service as a member of the immediate presidential family. She had tried to sign off on that security protection, but her father had begged her not to Francis Kennedy told her he could not bear it if something were to happen to her.
A detail of twenty men spread over three shifts a day, guarded Theresa
Kennedy. When she went to a restaurant, if she went to a movie with her boyfriend, they were there. They rented apartments in the same building, used a command van in the street. She was never alone. And she had to give her schedule to the chief of the security detail every single day.
Her guards were two-headed monsters: half servant, half master. With advanced electronic equipment they could hear the lovemaking when she brought a male friend back to her apartment. And they were frightening- they moved like wolves, gliding silently, their heads tilted alertly as if to catch a scent on the wind, but actually they were straining to listen to their earplug radios.
Theresa had refused a 'net security,' that is, security of the closest kind. She drove her own car, refused to let the security team take an adjoining apartment, refused to walk with guards alongside her. She had insisted that the security be a 'perimeter security,' that they erect a wall around her as if she were a large garden. In this way she could lead a personal life. This arrangement led to some embarrassing moments. One day she went shopping and needed change for a telephone call. She thought she had seen one of her security detail pretending to shop nearby. She had gone up to the man and said, 'Could you give me a quarter?' He had looked at her with shocked bewilderment, and she realized that she had made a mistake, that he was not her security guard. She had burst out laughing and apologized. The man was amused and delighted as he gave her the quarter. 'Anything for a Kennedy,' he said jokingly.
Like so many of the young, Theresa Kennedy believed, on no particular evidence, that people were 'good,' as she believed herself to be good.
She marched for freedom, spoke out for the right and against the wrong.
She tried to never commit petty mean acts in everyday life. As a child she gave the contents of her piggy bank to the American Indians.
In her position as daughter of the President of the United States it was awkward for her when she spoke out for pro-choice abortion activists, and lent her name to radical and left-wing organizations. She endured the abuse of the media and the insults of political opponents.
Innocently, she was scrupulously fair in her love affairs; she believed in absolute frankness, she abhorred deceit.
In her years abroad there were incidents from which she should have learned some valuable lessons. In Paris a group of tramps living under one of the bridges tried to rape her when she roamed the city in search of local color. In Rome two beggars tried to snatch her purse as she was giving them money, and in both cases she had been rescued by her vigilant Secret Service detail. But this made no impression on her general faith that man was good. Every human being had the immortal seed of goodness in his soul, no one was beyond redemption. As a feminist she had, of course, learned of the tyranny of men over women, but did not really comprehend the brutal force men used when dealing with their own world. She had no sense of how one human being could betray another human being in the most false and cruel ways.
The chief of her security detail, a man too old to guard the more important people in government, was appalled by her innocence and tried to educate her. He told her horror stories about men in general, stories taken from his long experience in the service; he was more frank than he would ordinarily have been, since this job was his last assignment before retiring.
'You're too young to understand this world,' he said. 'And in your position you have to be very careful. You think because you do good for someone they will do good for you.' Just the day before, she had picked up a, male hitchhiker, who assumed that this was a sexual invitation. The security chief had acted immediately; the two security cars forced
Theresa's car to the edge of the road just as the hitchhiker put his hand in Theresa's lap.
'Let me tell you a story,' the chief said. 'I once worked for the smartest and nicest man in the government service. In clandestine operations. Just once he got outsmarted, caught in a trap, and this bad guy had him at his mercy. Could just blow him away. And this guy was a real bad guy. But for some reason he let my boss off the hook and said, 'Remember, you owe me one.' Well, we spent six months tracking this guy down and we nailed him. And my boss blew him away, never gave him a chance to surrender or turn 'double.' And you know why? He told me himself This bad guy once had the power of God and therefore was too dangerous to be allowed to live. And my boss didn't have a feeling of gratitude, he said the guy's mercy was just a whim and you can't count on whims the next time around.' The chief did not tell Theresa his boss had been a man named Christian Klee.
The election of Francis Xavier Kennedy as President was a miracle of American politics. He had been elected on the magic of his name and his extraordinary physical and intellectual gifts, despite the fact that he had served only one term in the Senate before being elected to the presidency.
He was called the 'nephew' of John F. Kennedy, the President who had been assassinated in 1963, but was outside the organized Kennedy clan still active in American politics. In reality, he was a cousin, and the only one of the far-flung family who had inherited the charisma of his two famous uncles John and Robert Kennedy.
Francis Kennedy had been a boy genius in the law, a professor at Harvard at the age of twenty-eight. Later he had organized his own law firm, which crusaded for broad liberal reforms in the government and the private business sector. His law firm did not make a great deal of money, which was not important to him, since he had inherited considerable wealth, but it did bring him a great deal of national fame. He crusaded for the rights of minorities and the welfare of the economically disabled, he defended the helpless.
Kennedy had swept the country along with him in his campaign for the presidency. He had proclaimed he would write a new social contract for the American people. What makes a civilization endure? He asked them. It is the contract between the governors and the governed. The government must promise public safety from crime, from economic hardship; it must promise to every citizen the right and the means to pursue the individual dream of enjoying personal happiness in this life. And then, only then, would the governed be obligated to obey the common laws that ensure civilization. And Kennedy proposed that as part of that sacred social contract all major questions in American society be settled by referendums rather than by decisions made by the Congress, by the Supreme Court or by the President.
He promised that he would wipe out crime. He promised that he would wipe out poverty, which was a root of crime and a crime in and of itself. He promised a national health insurance program financed by the state and a Social Security System that would truly enable workingmen to have a comfortable retirement.
To affirm his dedication to these ideals and to remove the armor of his own personal wealth, he proclaimed on television that he would give his personal fortune of forty million dollars to the Treasury of the United States. This was done in a highly public legal ceremony that was shown by every television-station news program in the country. The image of Francis
Kennedy's grand gesture had a huge impact on every voting citizen.
He flew to every major city in the country, and his automobile cavalcade covered the small towns. His wife and daughter by his side, their beauty flanking his, he overwhelmed the public consciousness. His three debates with the Republican presidential incumbent were triumphs. The combination of his wit, his intelligence and his youthful exuberance completely destroyed his opponent. No President had ever entered his first term of office more beloved by the populace.
He had conquered everything except fate. His wife had died of cancer before his inauguration.
Despite his crushing sorrow, Francis Xavier Kennedy managed to enact the first step of the program. During the election process he had made the daring political move of naming his personal staff in advance so that the electorate could approve them. He had named Oddblood Gray, a black activist, as his liaison with Congress on domestic affairs. He had selected a woman to be his running mate and made the political decision that she would also function as a member of his staff. The other nominations were more conventional. And it was this staff that helped push through his first victory, the revision of the Social Security laws so that every workingman could be sure of enough money to live on when he retired. The tax to finance this revision was paid by the profits of the giant corporations of America, and these immediately became his deadly enemies.
But after this initial victory, Kennedy seemed to lose momentum. His bill to give the people a referendum vote on major issues was defeated by Congress, as was his call for a national health insurance plan. And Kennedy himself was losing energy in confronting the stone wall Congress put up before him. Though Kennedy and his White
