By now you’ve probably seen Ted Jr., Sen. Kennedy’s son, a lot. He’s been on TV talking about his dad’s memoir. But when I met him for a "60 Minutes" interview a week or so ago, all I knew about him was that he’d lost his leg to bone cancer when he was 12 and that he’d given one hell of a powerful speech at his father’s funeral. So when I went to Hyannis Port to meet him for the first time, I didn’t know what to expect.


There are no fences.

In the past, when I thought of the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port, I always imagined a fortress, castle walls, a real Cape Cod Camelot, maybe even a moat. And yet here sat those famous Kennedy houses looking exposed and vulnerable. They even had next-door neighbors. I liked this famous family all the more for not living behind barbed wire.

As Robert Frost – who spoke at John Kennedy’s inaugural – wrote in one of his most famous poems:

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.

The walls of prejudice are what brought the Kennedys to Hyannis Port in the first place: Way back at the beginning, it had the only nice golf course that allowed Catholics to play.


The Kennedy houses are huddled together like players huddling up in long-ago touch football games on the lawn. Teddy Kennedy’s house, which is on the water, almost rubs shoulders with JFK’s house, which isn’t. None of them are estate-sized mansions, just comfortably large.

When Ted Jr. learned his father had brain cancer, he bought JFK’s house so he could live next door to his father during the last months of his life. Ted Jr. tells us this house is where Jack learned that he had been elected president. Bobby Kennedy’s house was next door.

As I sat opposite this young man (well, not that young: he’s 47), he would look nothing like a Kennedy one minute, and then he would! I’d be wondering: Who does he look like, sound like? And then, suddenly, he’d be the image of his father, with a voice right out of old Irish Boston.

In one of those almost eerie moments — there in the Kennedy compound — I heard myself ask the inevitable question: "What about you?"

"What about me?" he asked back.

"Politics? Family business? Ever?"

"You know, I’d be lying to you if I told you that I never thought about going into politics," he said. "I think everybody in my family at one point or another thinks about politics. And it’s something that I’ve thought about."

Clearly alluding to his own childhood, he said his daughter, 15, and son, 11, were too young for him to spend the time away from them that a life in politics would inevitably require. "I’m told there will be a day where they won’t want to hang out with me anymore. And maybe after then I’ll choose to do something."

Sitting there in what felt like an active compound – Ethel was next door playing in her yard with a slew of her grandchildren – I thought it was a place with more history to make. I was left with the impression Ted Jr. would run for public office someday.


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