Notes on a dropout

Joe Kennedy could never handle a media that built him up and tore him down

by Michael Crowley

At 1:30 last Thursday afternoon, a good half-hour before Joe Kennedy was scheduled to do what almost no one thought still possible, the scene outside the Allston VFW hall was chaotic.

Traffic on narrow Cambridge Street had slowed to a crawl, and pockets of curious onlookers were gathering along the sidewalks to gawk at the six white TV satellite trucks packed into the hall's grungy parking lot. Kennedy Inc. underlings milled about warily as adrenalized reporters jumped out of cars and taxis, and two Kennedy aides argued heatedly with three cameramen who intended to stake out the lot and film Kennedy's arrival. The aides, blocking access to the building's rear entrance, were clearly under orders to prevent this, apparently because Kennedy was nursing a bum ankle he'd sprained playing touch football with Teddy and John-John the previous week. Bad symbolism: the six o'clock shows would be sure to lead with footage of Joe hobbling, and a voice-over declaring Kennedy had "limped away from the race."

But the camera grunts had their orders, too, and they weren't budging. Profanities began to fly between a cameraman clad in jeans and T-shirt, camera on his shoulder and wires spilling down his back, and a burly, gray-suited Kennedy man with a careful coif.

"I don't see why you can't just film him when he's inside," said the aide, his tone growing increasingly patronizing and contemptuous.

"We will," replied the cameraman, his tone growing increasingly exasperated and resentful. "But we want to follow him in when he gets here."

When the aide threatened to call the cameraman's boss, the guy exploded. "Go ahead and call my fucking desk!" he shrieked. "Because my editor assigned me to film him when he comes into the building."

A few minutes later, most of the cameramen had been successfully expelled from the lot and were venting in a circle on the sidewalk. They'd been promised Kennedy wouldn't be slipped past them, but they also knew better than to take these people at their word.

"There's a wide-open door in the back," said one. "We've got it covered."

As griping about the control freaks of the Kennedy machine continued, one TV reporter muttered out loud to no one in particular. "There's a lot of anger," he said, shaking his head slightly. "They're angry at us."

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And so it was, up to the very last moments of Joe Kennedy's aborted campaign for governor: toe-to-toe confrontation between the media and Kennedy's handlers, who knew their man could never dismiss reporters with a quip and a quote the way Bill Weld had done. Kennedy was good at pounding the podium on the House floor, but he rarely handled hard questions well. Even before the scandal downpour, reporters had trouble gaining access to him.

For Kennedy's staff, moving him in public became something akin to transporting nuclear waste, requiring elaborate preparation and painstaking calculation. When Joe was on the ground, his handlers' anxiety was palpable. If Kennedy was ever unaware of a reporter hovering near him at a public event, an aide would hustle over to alert him, so as to avoid -- God forbid -- an unguarded moment.

That fear of a self-destruction was never more evident than in June, at the state Democratic convention in Salem, when the Sheila/Michael tsunami was cresting. It was one of Joe's first public appearances since the scandals had broken, and he was swarmed by a ravenous pack of TV crews as he worked the crowd of delegates. His press secretary, Brian O'Connor, appeared to be in a cold sweat, pale and harrowed like a man riding out a ferocious thunderstorm in a single-engine prop plane.

After Kennedy wrapped up the convention with a speech that included his fascinatingly hollow "apology" for his behavior toward Sheila, and for Michael's behavior toward the Alicia Silverstone next door, Kennedy's aides promised he would emerge for comments with reporters. Instead, he huddled in a small classroom (the convention was held at Salem State College) with his wife, Beth, and a couple of aides while more handlers guarded the door and offered conflicting information about whether and when Kennedy would be available for questions. After several reporters had wandered off, Kennedy slipped outside the convention hall to an obligatory clambake with union supporters. There, he succumbed to a few questions -- but didn't really answer any -- before diving into a van that peeled out like an ambulance.

Given what we know about Kennedy's temper (there was, after all, "a lot of anger"), he actually handled scenes like these with surprising restraint. But his self-control plainly had been slipping away in recent weeks. Trying to reestablish some sense of normalcy, Kennedy began calling press conferences to tout nickel-and-dime legislative proposals. One such appearance was to announce a smartly conceived bill to help mom-and-pop businesses install affordable burglar alarms. But the event was dominated by questions about John-John's baffling George essay.

"Guys, c'mon," Kennedy pleaded, shrugging off one question after another. But a sharp, menacing edge was creeping into his voice, the tone of a long-taunted schoolkid ready to shove back. "Come on, guys." He was reaching his limit.

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Was Kennedy the victim of disastrous luck? Sure. But that's part of the business of politics, and when firecrackers go off in your face (figuratively or literally), a true political player has to handle it with skill and aplomb. Kennedy didn't.

The manufactured regrets Kennedy sputtered in Salem -- getting them out of the way left him so relieved that he shifted without pause to perhaps his most spirited and enthusiastic speech of the year -- deserve to go down with Richard Nixon's "Checkers" speech in the annals of craven political oratory.

About the booze-fueled lechery of his cousin Michael, it is often said that Joe was unfairly condemned by association. But the media explosion surrounding Michael did teach us something about Joe, who dissembled about what he knew of the affair and what he did to stop it. Those bumbled self-contradictions may have been attempts to keep his cousin out of jail. Nevertheless, Joe's approach unsettlingly echoed the way he handled another poisonous -- and now seemingly forgotten -- issue, his relationship with Clinton-scandal kingpin John Huang. (Kennedy returned thousands of dollars in suspect campaign contributions from Huang. Worse, though he initially claimed to know him only from a single fleeting handshake, he admitted later that they'd had two personal meetings in which Huang sought political favors.)

More than any one scandal, though, what felled Kennedy was a media culture in which the invincibles are set up only to be destroyed. There is no organized conspiracy (even if the excessive attention devoted to his son's fireworks accident suggests otherwise). The ebb and flow of the news tide simply demands backlash. Once Story A, the success story, is established, editors want something new. Thus, Story B: downfall.

Consider Al Gore: in winter, he's the darling of reporters who proclaim his divine right to the White House throne; by spring, he's become the whipping boy for a bored Washington press corps.

By the end of last year, Kennedy -- with the help of hard spin and a $1 million media blitz for a cakewalk of a reelection -- had engineered an image of himself as unstoppable force. But Kennedy's personal political skills couldn't support that image, and when his backlash struck, he folded.

He might have done well to wait out the media cycle. Barring further scandal in the wake of a cataclysmic new revelation (there were recent hints of shady finances at Citizen's Energy, the company he founded; or perhaps Sheila is saving something for her paperback edition), Kennedy would likely have benefited from a contrite media's focus on his legislative record, marking the arrival of Story C: "He's back!" He needed to look no further than the example of his Uncle Ted, who stared political oblivion in the eye three years ago and is now almost single-handedly keeping the Democratic left alive. Even Dick Morris, once excommunicated from polite society, is now inching back -- again respectfully quoted in the New York Times and the New Yorker.

Kennedy did know enough to recognize that the traditional media dead zone of Labor Day weekend would at least partially stunt the hype surrounding his departure, a story of national proportions. What he couldn't have known was that the death of a princess, perhaps the biggest international news story since O.J.'s acquittal, would explode two days after his announcement, and provide even better cover for his escape.

An ironic footnote: during the Michael Kennedy saga, a British tabloid photographer faced criminal charges for running Michael's wife off the road while chasing her for a photograph. The media may have helped drive Kennedy out of the race. At least in this case they didn't drive anyone to her death.

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Now we are left with Paul Cellucci, Joe Malone, Scott Harshbarger, and whichever new Democrats get into the race. In the collective consciousness, the governor's race has suddenly gone from being a big-screen Technicolor epic to a crummy B-movie flickering on a rabbit-eared black-and-white.

A few weeks ago, political writers were laughing at Ray Flynn. Now we are praying for him. A Harshbarger-Cellucci debate might be policy-wonk heaven, but let's face it, most people would rather watch their leftover fried rice spinning in the microwave.

Of course, Kennedy's would-be opponents aren't a bit sorry about Joe's exit. He may have been damaged, but they feared him nevertheless. And with the State House press scrambling from one press conference to another, they were tossing out celebratory sound bites Thursday afternoon.

From a podium in a 20th-floor room at the McCormack state office building, where wall-to-wall windows offer a sweeping view of Boston, Harshbarger did an admirable job of maintaining attorney general-ish decorum, even though we all know that his Inner Scott was dancing like Deion Sanders after a diving touchdown catch.

As if the day hadn't already underscored the way the press beast must be fed, Harshbarger's attempt to refuse questions after his brief and gracious comments was met with such a swift and certain chorus of defiant "Oh, no"s, you might have thought the reporters were the law-enforcement officials in the room. Finally, Harshbarger, fleeing the unabated barrage of goading questions, tripped over a cameraman and nearly face-planted on his way to the safety of an adjacent private office.

(Welcome to front-runnerdom, Scott: three days after Kennedy's departure, the Sunday Globe ran a pointed article, headlined TENACITY MAY HAUNT HARSHBARGER, on his zealous prosecution of leading state politicians, plus two unfriendly items in its insidery "Political capitol" column.)

Across the street, a glowing Joe Malone was less subdued. He entertained a long series of questions, explained that he had bet a dollar with his press secretary, Eric Fehrnstrom, that the rumor of Kennedy's withdrawal was false, and cheerily referred to Paul Cellucci as an "acting employee" -- a line that left his aides at the back of the room wearing half-stifled smirks.

Cellucci has stayed nicely above this fray, and he has probably become the new front-runner in the race. But the honeymoon smooches he's getting -- like a cuddly Sunday New York Times profile -- don't capture his early stumbles and flashes of discomfort.

For instance, Cellucci stutter-stepped in the heat of last week's area-code chaos, uncertain whether to go for a quick political win (by allowing a few towns to retain their old codes) at the risk of widespread confusion. And he might think twice about such mean-spirited projects as revoking the right of prison inmates to vote, which resulted in a recent search of several inmates' cells by prison guards for political-action materials. Cellucci's charming predecessor might have pulled that off without alarming independent voters. But that was Weld, this is now.

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The Allston VFW hall is a bleak, echoing little place, with striped linoleum floors, bad lighting, and low ceilings. A strange setting for high political drama. The fact that Kennedy hadn't shown up more than 30 minutes after the slated 2 p.m. start of the press conference did prompt some chuckling speculation that he might have backed out of backing out -- at that point, anything seemed possible. (One perky television producer spent much of the delay on a cell phone saying, "He's in the building," as if a covert operation were under way -- and even though the building is so small it was plainly evident he wasn't.)

But when Kennedy finally appeared, fighting a losing battle against his limp, he delivered a flat and forgettable speech. Facing perhaps a dozen cameras, and with twice as many reporters crowded on his right, Kennedy was nervous, and began saying he wanted to run for governor "in 1988" before correcting himself.

After fielding and not really answering one more round of questions, Kennedy fled the scene through the back door and hopped into a green minivan. As an aide urgently shouted "Go!" -- like a marine sergeant dispatching parachuters -- a blue Coupe de Ville that had been parked to block access to the lot was rolled out of the way. The minivan took off, and Kennedy, looking a little stunned by it all in the passenger seat, was gone.

It had not been a good afternoon for Joe Kennedy. But had he heard it, Kennedy might have appreciated some commentary from the back of hall as he took the podium.

At that moment, the throng of reporters, which until that moment had respected duct-tape boundaries on the floor, surged forward for a better view of the defunct candidate.

It was then that one unshaven, black-T-shirted Joe Sixpack of a guy, who appeared to have wandered in off the street for the spectacle, captured what the Kennedy camp had long been feeling but could never actually say.

"They all come in like locusts," he sneered. "Like rats in a garbage dump."

Michael Crowley can be reached at mcrowley[a]phx.com.