victoria reggieBOSTON — It was 1991, the worst year of Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s life since Chappaquiddick, 22 years earlier. With scandal unfolding that spring in Palm Beach, Fla., involving his nephew, the senator was humiliated by tabloid photos that showed him in a nightshirt after their boys’ night out, an aging, dissolute playboy.
In the Senate, he was engaged in a difficult struggle over a major civil rights bill. And then, that fall, with accusations of sexual harassment dominating the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, there was the televised spectacle of Ted Kennedy — long a champion of women’s rights — sitting mute and powerless, silenced by the Palm Beach case. His approval ratings plummeted.
But 1991, as it turned out, was also one of the best years of Ted Kennedy’s life. That was the year he fell in love with Victoria Reggie, the canny, razor-smart, beautiful 37-year-old daughter of old family friends, who was also a top banking lawyer.
Ms. Reggie was having her own struggles. Newly divorced from Grier C. Raclin, a lawyer, she was juggling her demanding career and life as the single mother of two small children. And back home in Crowley, La., her father, Edmund Reggie, a longtime judge and political insider, was facing felony charges of misapplying bank money. That June, her parents invited Ted Kennedy to a small dinner for their 40th wedding anniversary at Vicki’s home in Washington. When the senator showed up alone, Vicki joked in front of everyone: “What’s the matter? Couldn’t you get a date?”
“My mother, I think, was horrified,” Mrs. Kennedy would say later, in an interview with her husband’s biographer Adam Clymer. “ ‘Oh, don’t talk to men that way, poor Vicki.’ ”
The next day Mr. Kennedy made what he — and everyone who knew him — would later view as the smartest move of his life. He called to ask Vicki out to dinner.
In recalling the courtship, Vicki Kennedy told Mr. Clymer that she had been aware of the senator’s low approval ratings, which he had mentioned over dinner one night. They had fallen into the mid-40s. “And I said, ‘Oh, wow, I’ve never gone out with anybody whose approval rating wasn’t at least 48.’ ”
The senator proposed to her in January 1992 at a performance of “La Bohème” at the Metropolitan Opera in New York — a love of opera was one of many passions they shared. They married that July at his home in McLean, Va., in front of about 30 family members.
And that was the beginning of the extraordinary relationship —a love story as well as a political partnership — that would define the final years of Mr. Kennedy’s life, both personally and professionally. Mrs. Kennedy brought him a happiness, his friends said, that had long eluded him, seeing him through until the end, and to even now, as she presides at his public memorials in Boston and prepares for his burial at Arlington National Cemetery.
“I have seen political couples come and go for four decades,” said David Mixner, 63, a writer and civil rights activist who got his start in politics at age 14, when he volunteered for John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign. “I don’t think there has been a partnership and a love story in American politics like this one.”
While no one who knows her would ever describe Vicki Kennedy as a woman who needed rescuing, her friends say that Mrs. Kennedy, who had never expected to marry again, was also transformed. She gained a worshipful husband who adored her children, shared her deep religious faith, consulted with her on everything from Kennedy family matters to campaign strategy, and made her his partner in a life of politics and public service that she had been introduced to as a girl by her father and that she loved herself.
“She saw him as many of us did, as the person carrying on the progressive tradition of the Democratic Party,” said Marylouise Oates, a writer and friend of the Kennedys who is married to Robert M. Shrum, the Democratic strategist and former speechwriter for Mr. Kennedy. “He was the love of her life — and the icon of her life.”
It was the blending of two large, powerful political families, the Irish-American, Roman Catholic Kennedys from Boston and the Lebanese-American, Roman Catholic Reggies from Crowley, a relationship whose seeds were planted at the Democratic National Convention in 1956, when Ted was 24, and Vicki was 2.
That was when Edmund Reggie helped deliver his state’s delegates for John Kennedy, who was running for the vice-presidential nomination, but lost to Senator Estes Kefauver. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship between the Reggies and the Kennedys.
Mrs. Kennedy revealed what a valuable asset she was during her husband’s hard-fought campaign for re-election in 1994 against Mitt Romney, a 47-year-old multimillionaire venture capitalist.
For the first time in decades, Mr. Kennedy was contending with a viable Republican opponent. Mr. Romney cast the 62-year-old senator as an old, tired, out-of-step liberal.
Mrs. Kennedy was instrumental in the campaign’s creation of a series of devastating advertisements that challenged Mr. Romney’s proclamations about his record as a venture capitalist in creating jobs in recession-battered Massachusetts. The spots focused on the workers at the Ampad stationery factory in Marion, Ind., where Mr. Romney’s company, Bain Capital, had eliminated jobs, reduced wages and discarded the union contract.
In a strategy session that spring, Mrs. Kennedy urged her husband’s advisers to learn more about Mr. Romney’s company. Although Mr. Romney was claiming that he had created thousands of jobs in Massachusetts, it was her experience as a banking lawyer, she said, that when venture capitalists took over businesses, there could be a lot of downsizing and layoffs.
As a result of her urging, the campaign hired The Investigative Group Inc., a detective firm headed by a former Senate Watergate counsel, Terry Lenzner. The firm discovered how Bain management had handled the Ampad workers after taking over the factory. The advertisements ran in the fall.
“She was key,” Mr. Shrum said of Mrs. Kennedy. “She had a very good strategic sense.”
In an interview on the 1994 campaign with Mr. Clymer, Mrs. Kennedy demonstrated great attention to detail, down to her objection to a health care-related commercial that put her husband in a lab coat — not because it made him look fat, as had been reported, but because he did not look like himself.
“It looked like a costume as opposed to what he really was doing,” she said.
The interview also revealed the intimacy of their political bond. She told Mr. Clymer that two days before a debate with Mr. Romney, her husband “was brushing his teeth in Boston, and he just apropos of nothing turned to me, and he said, ‘I’m ready, you know.’
“And I said, ‘Yeah, I know.’ Because I did. I knew. You could just see it.”
The senator was credited with besting Mr. Romney in the debate.
Years later, Mr. Mixner would observe Mrs. Kennedy in action at a 2004 fund-raising reception she and the senator had at their home in Washington for the gay, lesbian and bisexual community.
Vicki Kennedy greeted each of the some 300 guests at the front door. “She remembered every single name — and where each person was from,” Mr. Mixner recalled this week. “I would just say a name, and then she would greet them, and say just the right thing — ‘Thank you for your work on the environmental community.’ I was floored.”
The people at that event, Mr. Mixner said, helped elect seven Democratic senators that fall.
“The two of them never wasted a day,” Mr. Mixner said of the senator and his wife. “They sailed, they sang, they laughed, they told great old Irish political stories.”
And even as she was by his side in the last year of his life, helping him navigate the doctors’ appointments and medical care, friends say, she was also the one making sure his life was as full as he wanted it to be. That meant time to work on health care legislation and on his memoir, to sail with friends and family, to enjoy her cooking, and to sit on the porch with their Portuguese water dogs, Sunny and Splash — and the newest addition, as of last winter, Captain Courageous.
“In that first week, when the diagnosis came — how she put the entire medical profession through their paces,” Joseph Kennedy Jr., a nephew of the senator, said in an interview Friday after the wake. “And then she basically put my uncle, who had always carried our entire family on his shoulders, she put him on hers, and she just carried him.”
On Thursday and Friday, dressed in simple black, she was carrying on as his partner, friends say, presiding at his wake in Boston, greeting the tens of thousands of mourners. She stood for hours at the Kennedy library, shaking hands, saying a few words to each person who came through, extending herself, Joe Kennedy said, to Teddy’s people as he would have wanted, just as they had planned it, together.
There has been the inevitable talk of Vicki Kennedy’s running for her husband’s vacant Senate seat. But her friends say she has not expressed interest in it.
With her husband gone, “I think she will do exactly what he wanted her to do,” Mr. Mixner said, “and continue living life to the fullest — with great sorrow, with a great sense of loss,” but not, he added, “as a victim or as a widow.”
