As we grieve an incredible person and pioneer of legislation, Senator Ted Kennedy has left his mark on American history! Through his personal triumphs and challenges, he has always risen with adversity and compassion! A man who has changed the face of healthcare and American legislation, the "Lion" has certainly left behind a legacy!
Who knew, Teddy had some flair for design! In Senator Edward and Victoria Kennedy’s new Washington, D.C., house, Kennedy family memorabilia is displayed on a long wall on the second floor. Photographs, letters and newspaper clippings are arranged like a mural blending public and private moments in the family saga. One framed sheet from a yellow legal pad is a true page from history. It contains President Kennedy’s penciled notes from a 1963 National Security Council meeting. In one corner the president had scribbled “Teddy’s house on Sunday” to remind himself that he was going to see his brother that weekend, and nearby is a photo taken that Sunday afternoon of him and Ted playing a tension-relieving game of golf.
There’s also a poem from Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis written when the senator married Victoria (better known as Vicki) in 1992; and a more recent thank-you letter from President Bill Clinton after he and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton went sailing on the Kennedys’ fifty-foot schooner, the Mya. In the same frame above the letter is the blue presidential pennant that flew from the mast while Clinton was on board. There is a remarkable group photo of Vicki Kennedy as a child and her family with Bobby Kennedy when he was attorney general. It was found in the Department of Justice files a couple of years ago and was sent to the Kennedys by Janet Reno. And there is a shot of the senator sharing a joke with a smiling John F. Kennedy, Jr., at a black-tie function last year—once a reminder of a happy occasion, now a memento of yet another family tragedy.
Situated adjacent to the master bedroom, the display is Washington interior designer Josepha B. Faley’s strategy for keeping the powerful Kennedy legacy “in perspective”—as she says—in her over-all design of the house. “There’s geometry in the way the items are hung, and the overall effect is unified—and calm,” says Faley, owner of Chatsworth Design.
Calm was a key word in the Kennedys’ instructions to Faley. “What Teddy and I definitely wanted was a warm, welcoming house,” says Vicki Kennedy. “We wanted to be able to entertain, but we also wanted a family home.” By using soft and subdued tones, the designer created a tranquil setting that successfully blends the senator’s English and New England antiques and his Louisiana-born wife’s French and Continental pieces, as well as their art and the senator’s enormous accumulation of family photographs and memorabilia.
The Kennedys bought the house last summer and moved in in September. It was purchase at first sight. “We saw it in the morning and put in a bid that evening,” Ted Kennedy recalls. “It’s elegant but lends itself to a wonderful informality: It’s full of light, and there are a lot of fireplaces, which I love.” His wife adds: “Fireplaces and candlelight are our thing. We have dinners with just candlelight and the glow from the fire.”
Her teenage son and daughter from an earlier marriage—the Kennedys’ marriage was the second for both—live in the house, but there are no off-limits zones and no rooms reserved for formal gatherings. Her daughter practices the piano in the main living room, where the Kennedys receive politicians, celebrities and ambassadors. But in other respects the house is a refuge from the political battleground of Capitol Hill, where Edward Kennedy has been a Democratic member of the United States Senate for Massachusetts for thirty-seven years.
The living room exemplifies this successful combination of elegance and comfort. Light tumbles in from the garden through French doors onto patinated and glazed yellow-beige walls, the polished sheen of period furniture and the faded reds and blues of the enormous Oriental rug. Pillows covered in a French silk with a bold floral pattern punctuate the gold-and-beige sofas, and the same design is repeated as a border on the oyster-white draperies. A large portrait by Leon Jordon of Joseph P. Kennedy, the patriarch whose drive and ambition launched the political dynasty, occupies a place of honor in the room, while halfway up the main staircase Rose Kennedy smiles from under the brim of a bright red hat.
Adjacent to the living room is the library, where the wood paneling has been sanded and reglazed to set off the armchairs and sofa upholstered in dark blue fabrics, the senator’s favorite color. The living room opens onto the morning room, which has nautical motifs painted on the wood floor, reminders of the couple’s shared passion for sailing. An early hint of this is the schooner design on the doormat at the main entrance to the house. Then there are all the photos of boats crewed by Kennedys of various ages and, in the second-floor study, a Jamie Wyeth watercolor showing Vicki and Ted Kennedy taking the Mya down the coast on their own—no mean feat in a vessel of that size.
Upstairs, a Louis XVI-style bed dominates the master bedroom. Two English chests that have been in the Kennedy family for years are in the nearby study. But what surprises most visitors to the Neoclassical house in Washington’s Kalorama district is the scattering of colorful paintings signed “Ted K.” Few people besides the family and close friends know that the senator is a gifted amateur artist; he started dabbling in oils in 1954. “My brother Jack was in the hospital with a bad back, and he took up painting as a distraction,” he explains. “I decided to keep him company, but I wasn’t very good. Then eight years ago they offered a free course in painting at the Senate, and I took it.” He’s been turning out oils ever since.
The first thing that catches the eye in the entrance hall is his oil painting of the Kennedys’ Cape Cod compound, which includes the sprawling white main house perched on the edge of a shimmering expanse of water. Elsewhere is another Teddy—as the family calls his paintings—of two sailboats; and yet another work shows a clapboard house in Maine. “Painting is relaxing,” he says. “I enjoy it. I do boats, seascapes, sand dunes and lobster pots. I haven’t got the courage to paint other things.”
Art of another kind decorates his exercise room, across the corridor from the master bedroom. There, Kennedy works out surrounded by the originals of political cartoons of himself (including the unflattering ones). This may explain why he doesn’t sound too concerned about what many see as an alarming rise in the meanness quotient in Washington politics. “Yes,” he says, “there’s a sharper edge in relationships, and that reflects itself in terms of political dialogue. Things get a little testy at times, but that sort of goes with the business.” The problem, he believes, is that “politics are more personal now and less involved in the basic issues.”
The acrimonious mood has certainly not deterred Ted Kennedy from running for a another Senate term in his historic yet technology-oriented state. “In the things I’m interested in, we’ve been able to get a lot done,” he says. “But there’s a lot more to do. We’ve made progress in knocking down the walls of discrimination; we’ve been able to have some impact in creating a more just society, with enhancing conditions for the aging.” But engaging young people “is a central challenge,” he says. “People get a lot of information today, but the public’s attention span is much shorter, which makes it more difficult to build awareness. You have some successes and you have some defeats, but that’s a fact of the political system.”
And when things got too “testy” for Senator Edward Kennedy, there was always a restorative sail on the Mya—or the calming influence of easel and brush.
R.I.P.
Edward Moore Kennedy
February 22, 1932 – August 25, 2009
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