A Placid Ted Kennedy Settles Into Life as Husband, Father, Family Man

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy is strolling to the beach, his arm around his wife of three months, when he spots a carrot in the grass.

Taking his arm from his bride, the senior senator from Massachusetts stoops to pick it up, explaining to a reporter that it was left there by his 6-year-old stepdaughter, who was hoping to lure rabbits.

He breaks off the carrot’s tip and puts it back in the grass so that the little girl will think it has been sampled by bunnies.

Public relations? Or the new Ted Kennedy?

A cynic might suspect the former. But it certainly is fitting with the new image Ted Kennedy projects--placid, content, husband, father, family man.

The change has largely been noticed since his marriage to Victoria Reggie three months ago.

“I don’t think there’s any question that my relationship with Vicki has had a very profound, welcome, happy impact on my life,” Kennedy said. He calls their marriage “an emotional time of security and love and a time of stability and commitment.”

It was a sentiment the senator would share with the 14 journalists the couple had invited to his family’s historic Cape Cod compound one at a time over four days. The result: A barrage of overwhelmingly favorable stories about a man who has endured some of the worst publicity of any politician.

“It’s a honeymoon, both personally and politically,” said Tobe Berkovitz, professor of mass communications and public relations at Boston University. “Right now, the press is playing patty-cakes with him.”

“He tends to take a megadose of bashing periodically about what are seen as his character flaws, but he’s a politician who has a superb staff who very effectively try to reverse the spin, and they have done that,” Berkovitz added.

The couple said their marathon of interviews came in response to dozens of requests from journalists, but most of the reporters said the invitations popped up unsolicited.

“This wasn’t happenstance,” said Kevin Carragee, a professor of communications at Boston College who specializes in media coverage of politics. “It was carefully thought out to reconstitute his image. They recognized he has a problem nationally and in the state about his image, and this wasn’t just something that resulted from requests for interviews.”

Whatever the intent, Kennedy’s new wife, a 38-year-old attorney from Louisiana with two young children, was a charmer. And she acknowledged that their marriage could be a political advantage for her 60-year-old husband.

“If it is, that’s great,” she said. “It’s certainly not why we went into this.”

But timing can be everything.

The senator’s image was so badly battered in the last year by the rape trial of his nephew, William Kennedy Smith, that colleagues made disparaging remarks about him on the Senate floor. A new book by a former aide alleges Kennedy used cocaine with his own children and was a womanizer, charges Kennedy calls “outrageous.” The aide, Richard Burke, resigned from the senator’s staff after suffering a nervous breakdown.

Unlike his fire-and-brimstone speeches of past conventions, Kennedy delivered only a low-key address at this year’s Democratic National Convention following a tribute to his slain brother, Robert.

Even the new Mrs. Kennedy is slightly touched by scandal. Her father, retired Judge Edmund Reggie, was convicted Sept. 26 of defrauding a Louisiana savings and loan.

The senator blames most of the negative publicity on his political opponents.

“It’s been heading my way for a long period of time,” said Kennedy, who is likely to face a fight for reelection in 1994, possibly from popular Republican Gov. William F. Weld.

Negative stories “have taken a toll, and the Republicans believe they have a far better chance at securing that seat than ever before,” Carragee said.

On the other hand, “It might also be very well that you see a new image because there’s a new life there,” said Charles Royer, director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

“He’s just gotten married,” Royer said. “He’s obviously very happy.”

Kennedy had lost weight and clearly was in good humor as he and his wife entertained questions in the home of his mother, Rose, now 102.

The couple spoke from matching armchairs underneath a portrait of the famous PT-109 that his brother John commanded. The room is filled with mementos of the family legacy, including a photograph of the senator with his first wife, Joan Bennett Kennedy.

The walls are papered with such pictures, taken in the United States and England, where Kennedy’s father was U.S. ambassador. Many show the brothers who have died in war, plane crashes and by assassins’ bullets. Nearby are framed, black-bordered notices marking the deaths of John F. and Robert F. Kennedy. A press aide sits to one side.

The “fact that these interviews were conducted at the compound indicate that his staff and he are quite aware of that reservoir of goodwill,” Carragee said.

Whether he’s a different man, said Kennedy, “is really up to people’s perceptions. It’s really up to them.”

The criticism “goes with the territory,” the new Mrs. Kennedy said. “I just focus on how he really is.”

She said she intends to be “as available as possible” to help her husband’s reelection bid. A lawyer with the Washington firm of Keck, Mahin & Cate, she spent much of the summer accompanying Kennedy on visits around Massachusetts and has registered to vote in the state.

Kennedy and Reggie knew each other’s families for years, but were reintroduced at her parents’ 40th wedding anniversary and were married in a private ceremony in Virginia on July 3.

His wife portrays the senator as a model father to her children by her first marriage--Curran, 9, and Caroline, 6.

“He’s the flame and they’re the little moths to the flame,” she said of Kennedy, who has three children from his first marriage.