Ken Regan Oral History

This is an interview July 8th with Ken Regan, in New York. We’ve been having a little discussion in advance. I didn’t need to remind Ken of the no-holds-barred stricture by Senator Kennedy. What I should add is that nobody except the people in the program will have any knowledge of what you say until after you have reviewed the transcript. So if you over-speak, you can redact or amend at a later time.

Sure, OK. Let’s start in 1968. I was a very young photographer and I was trying to make inroads with magazines and newspapers and everything, and Bobby Kennedy announced that he was going to run for the Presidency that year. I knew a couple of people who knew some of the Kennedys and I said, I’d love to maybe work on the campaign as a volunteer. I can take pictures, et cetera.

Anyway, they brought me up one day to meet Bobby at the Carlisle, and some of his staff. They looked at me like, How old are you? Because I was so young, I lied about my age and they said, OK, we’ll give you a chance. You’re Irish. I was doing some volunteer work and taking some pictures, and that was when I first met Ted and Jean [Kennedy Smith] and Eunice [Kennedy Shriver] and Pat [Patricia Kennedy Lawford]. I remember we went up to the Bronx Zoo as part of the campaign. He took the whole family up there and it was just great. They were feeding the elephants, and one of the elephants almost grabbed Bobby’s hand, and then we did some family pictures on some rocks near where the elephants were. I brought these pictures back and I had to doctor them up at my home. I developed them and I was just so pleased and surprised at the quality and the look. I showed them to one of the magazines and they liked them. They published one.

About a week later, I got a call from a photo agency here in New York and they said, We saw your photograph in TIME magazine, of Robert Kennedy and his family. Are you a friend of the family? How did you get this access? I just told them what had happened and they said, Why don’t you come down to our office and talk to us and maybe we can help your career go forward and we can represent you and handle the photographs. So I went down there and there was this really sweet, nice German man by the name of Ernest Boehm, and he had a little office off 45th Street, and he handled a couple of other photographers. I said, Listen, in addition to doing my first venture into politics, I also have done some music, and this and that. I brought him down all my pictures and he became my agent.

You were doing sports then?

I was doing sports and music and all sorts of things. Anyway, I sought to move along on the Kennedy campaign a little bit more. I had showed my pictures to TIME magazine and Newsweek, and Newsweek called me, I think in May, and asked me if I’d like to go on the road with Bobby.

In ’68?

Yes, ’68. I said, Oh, my God, of course! So I went on the road with him for a while, came back to New York, and then the California primary was coming up and they sent me out to—I think we started in Phoenix and then went to California. The day of the primary, they called me that morning and they said, Listen, we’ve got more than enough material. We’re going to do a cover on Bobby. We’re sure he’s going to win the election tonight. There’s no point in you staying around. Why don’t you come back. 

So I left that day and I got back to New York and I got home. I was living with my mom. I go to my bedroom. She had the television or the radio on, and I hear them talking about the Kennedy assassination and I said, Why are they bringing that up again? This is Bobby’s moment. This happened five years ago. Well, my mother calls me out and she says, You’re not going to believe what happened. I think I went ashen white. 

They flew the body back to New York and I was at the airport and photographed that. Then, because of my somewhat connection, I was allowed to photograph the funeral in St. Patrick’s. And then I was one of three photographers who were allowed on the train, which was supposed to be a three-hour train ride down to Arlington. It took nine-and-a-half hours, and on the way down, thousands and thousands of people were at every station with signs and people crying. The train would slow down just to acknowledge the presence of all the people. Three people got killed on the way down.

On the tracks?

Two people got electrocuted on the third rail, and then another one, I think, tried to cross the tracks and got hit by the train or something. Anyway, we finally arrived at Arlington and it was nighttime, and they had this beautiful candlelight ceremony for Bobby. It was so moving and touching. 

After that night, when I came back to New York, my agent was overwhelmed with the amount of material we had. They placed things here in New York in magazines, and the pictures appeared in Paris Match, Stern magazine, Italian magazines—all over the world. I was just overwhelmed. I realized then that this is what I wanted to do the rest of my life. I really wanted to be a photographer, to be a photojournalist, to document things. After that, Teddy went through a whole series of—

On the funeral train, were you allowed to take pictures inside the train?

Oh, yes. There are photographs inside the train, of the family. Joe [Joseph Patrick Kennedy II], who at the time was probably 18—I might be off by a year or two. He went through car by car by car and personally shook everybody’s hand and thanked them for the support of his father, for coming to the funeral, for coming on the train and everything like that. It was a very moving moment. I documented all of that and then also took pictures on the way down, in between the cars, of all the crowds on the train station and everything.

Ted was very shook.

Oh, yes, very shook. He was so emotional, I mean, you could just see it in his face. I saw it in the church and I saw it even more on the train. 

Then, I wanted to continue my relationship with them, and in either ’70 or ’71, after Chappaquiddick, I was signed by TIME magazine to a contract. What had happened was they brought over a director of photography from Popular Photography. TIME magazine was always a words magazine, but the managing editor had a vision, or maybe he had some inside dope that LIFE magazine was going to fold pretty soon, and he wanted to make TIME into more than just a words magazine, to make it into a words-and-pictures magazine much like LIFE. 

He hired this man, and I had been up to see him when he was at Popular Photography, so he knew my work. He called me up and he said, Listen, I’m in charge of TIME magazine right now and I want to hire five photographers to be on contract. They never had contract photographers before, and they hired these four legendary guys and me. I was like the baby of the group. There was Eddie Adams, who was a legendary Associated Press wire photographer, who did that famous picture in Vietnam of the sheriff shooting the guy through the head; and another Pulitzer Prize winning photographer, David Kennerly, who in later years when [Gerald] Ford became President, was Ford’s personal photographer. I said to John [Durniak], I’m overwhelmed and honored by this, but why me? He said, Because I want somebody who is looking to do anything, who’s ambitious, who wants to become a well-known photojournalist. I can see that in you. I see you have that drive. I said, Fine with me.

The first thing he assigned me to do was Howard Hughes. I said, John, Howard Hughes hasn’t been photographed in 20 years. He said, I know, I know, I know, but here’s the plan. And we went through this whole rigmarole thing. It turned out to be a fiasco. That went on for months. I was in Vegas, I was in Paradise Island, I was in Florida, I was all over the place. Anyway, I came back and he said, What do you want to do now? I said, I’d like to photograph Ted Kennedy. He said, Why? I said, Well, I had this minor association with him and the family, and I have a great amount of admiration and respect for him. I think maybe in 1972 he might run for the Presidency. John said OK. 

He called Kennedy’s office, spoke to Dick Drayne, and said he had this young photographer who had a little bit of an association with the family before and that he’d like to have the photographer photograph Ted. Dick said, Doing what? He said, We’d like to come down and photograph him in his office, and doing various things, some speeches, if he’s going out on the road or anything like that, or any of the committees that he’s overseeing.

I went down and I met Drayne and he was like, God, who is this kid? I was really a little bit in awe of the whole situation, and Dick had this really rugged presence about him and he was very suspicious and he didn’t actually reach out to me for a while. Ultimately, we became really close friends. So I started coming down to Washington periodically.

You may have been the enemy.

Yes. 

Was this ’69?

No, it was ’70. It was after Chappaquiddick. I started coming down, doing some hearings and things like that, and then Dick said to me one day in the winter, The Senator is going out to the Dakotas and Arizona to oversee an Indian hearing. He’ll be out there for about a week. Would you like to go? I said, Yes, I would love to go. He said, Fine, talk to your editors. See if they want to send you. I did and they did, so I went along. 

It was my first trip with him out on the road and it was so cold out there I couldn’t believe it. We went to these Indian hearings and it was great because he went to these Indian villages and visited with these people who—He brought tears to their eyes because he reached out to them and they reached out to him and they saw a sign of hope, because Indians at that time were not very well-recognized. They weren’t very liked.

Bobby had made that an issue, too.

Yes. They were looked at as drunks, as alcoholics, as thieves, you know? We toured all these places and we had the hearings. He invited some of the people to the hearings. It was my first experience out on the road with someone like him, and it was just great. I was thrilled. 

I remember one night one of his aides, Jim Flug—We were driving in this blinding snowstorm and Flug was in the lead car. Ted never had much patience for a lot of things, one of which was getting lost. We go down this road and we’re supposed to be going to an Indian hearing and suddenly we’re at a dead end. There’s a big gate there. Kennedy gets out and he says, Jim, where are we? He goes, I don’t know. He says, What do you mean, you don’t know? You’re leading this group. It was very funny. Jim was like—he was beside himself. He ultimately found the way there. 

So we were in the Dakotas and then we went over to Arizona for a while and we spent some time there. I came back and TIME magazine ran a couple of photographs. 

The thing that I did with Teddy, and I don’t know why I did it but I just felt almost an obligation to do it. Once TIME gave me back the photographs, I went through everything and I made prints up for him. I sent them down to Dick Drayne with a note saying, Tell the Senator that I’m just overjoyed with everything, with the trip, with spending so much time with him, for being allowed to be in these personal meetings, and I just wanted to show some recognition of that and I thought maybe he’d like to see some prints. I sent him maybe a dozen, two dozen prints. Dick called me up and he said, Boy, the Senator really liked those photographs. He really liked the way you moved and operated, because you were never in his face, you never got in his way. You never interfered with anything. The Senator said you were like an Irish fly on the wall. I said, OK.

After that, I just started going out with him to all these various places. The buildup to ’72 was coming and everybody was anticipating that he was going to run, when in fact he decided not to. 

Then I photographed him for Ladies’ Home Journal, at a St. Patrick’s Day parade. He was campaigning. I went up there and he was out in the streets with Joan [Bennett Kennedy], in Boston, and I hadn’t been in Boston with the magnitude of the people that came out for this parade. Oh, my God! It was like the second coming of Christ. The people were waving and yelling, Yay, Teddy! And on and on and on and on, it was just an amazing scene.

This was his campaign for the Senate, for reelection?

For reelection, yes.

So this would have been?

Probably ’72. That was the first time I met Joan and she was lovely. She was so beautiful.

It must have been ’70.

Maybe it was ’70.

Because his first full term began in ’64.

Sixty-four and then ’70, yes. So it probably was ’70.

It was right on the heels of Chappaquiddick.

It looks like it was ’70, yes. Anyway, I met Joan for the first time and she was beautiful and lovely and all of those things.

Did you go around Massachusetts with him?

I did, yes, but not that particular day. After the parade was over, we went back to one of the hotels in Boston. He had a little gathering and a dinner, and I had a chance to talk to Joan. She was asking me all about my photography and how did I get started so young and everything like that. That was nice. After that, I would just go out with him periodically, to cover him wherever he was going.

Was this at your initiative or were you invited? How did you find out what his schedule would be?

Dick would keep me posted. I would call him every once in a while and say, What’s going on this month that you can tell me about, that I might be able to photograph? Then TIME would send me out to do these things. We just got closer and closer and closer. He invited me to do some family functions, so I’d come up and maybe photograph the family at Christmas, actually down at his house in Washington, or we’d do a Thanksgiving. I was doing a story on Rose [Fitzgerald Kennedy] for Parade magazine and we went down to Palm Beach. I’d never been down there. This was all very exciting. I was getting caught up in the whole Kennedy magnitude and magnetism.

Then, I guess it was ’73 or ’74, and I’d been following him for a couple of years, and Teddy [Kennedy Jr.] came down with bone cancer. That was, next to losing Bobby, one of his saddest moments. It was interesting because when it happened—I think it happened on a Wednesday. They brought him in and X-rayed him. He fell or bruised his knee or something and they found that he had bone cancer and that they had to operate immediately, and they were going to do it within 48 hours. The operation was scheduled for Saturday morning, and that was the morning that Kathleen Kennedy Townsend was to be married, and Teddy was giving her away. They were going to postpone the wedding and he said, No, no, no. I’ll be at the hospital, I’ll leave the hospital, and I will come to the wedding. 

I was there photographing the whole thing. In fact, there’s a silly picture of me on the back. They had one of those Model-T Fords they left the wedding in, and I was on the bumper photographing them. Somebody took a picture of me and sent it to me. 

That was a very tragic moment for Ted. Later that year, he went to Moscow, Romania, and Yugoslavia, and he invited me to go on the trip.

West Germany? 

No. We stopped in London to change planes, and he wanted to go out to the memorial at Runnymede. We went out there and we went back to the airport, got on the plane and we went to Yugoslavia first and we were the guests of [Marshal Josip Broz] Tito. We were staying at his summer house and he, himself, was there. I’m sitting at this table and Ted was there, and Tito, some of his family members, some of the staff, and I’m pinching myself. I’m saying, I read about Marshal Tito in high school and here I am. It was the first time I was out of the country and it was incredible.

Joan was with him?

Yes, Joan was with him, right.

Who else?

Joan was with him, Kara [Kennedy Allen] was with him, and Teddy Jr. was with him, with the prosthesis on his leg. Then we went to visit [Nicolae] Ceauşescu in Romania. I wasn’t all that familiar with Ceauşescu but before I went to any of these places, I would always do my homework. I read about him, so I knew a little bit about him. We were there for a couple of days, as his guest. And then we went to the Soviet Union and that was really extraordinary because we were picked up at the airport with these giant limousines and the KGB [Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti] were there and they brought us in. We stayed at the guesthouse of Catherine the Great. One of Teddy’s great, great advance men, whose father had worked for JFK [John F. Kennedy] and Bobby, Jimmy King—Did you speak to Jimmy, by the way?

No, I haven’t yet.

Definitely speak to Jimmy King.

Ted was showing me some pictures of this trip. I guess you took them.

First of all, Jimmy was like 6 feet 5 inches tall.

Who is that person trying to pick up the cannonball?

Yes, yes, yes. And Jimmy would, on any given day, have a dozen beers. It never affected him. Anyway, we were there, and we had been briefed and warned about conversations in places that might be bugged. I remember going to the American Embassy to meet with the Ambassador and his staff, and we were ushered through the embassy into a Plexiglas room that was totally encompassed in glass, so there was no way that a bug could be planted. You could see the ceiling, you could see the walls; everything was glass. It was one of the few safe places where we were told we could talk.

I think it was maybe the first or second night we were there, and we had been out touring all around. I’ll never forget this. Russia, especially Moscow, was not geared towards the handicapped, not even for a wheelchair. There were always these steps going up, going up, going up. Knowing Teddy and how macho he was, and yet a loving father, I could see that he wanted Teddy Jr. to do these things on his own without anybody helping him. Invariably, Teddy Jr. would fall back, and I would fall back without Teddy seeing me, and help him up the stairs, because he was in pain. He was really in pain. There were actually tears coming out of his eyes at some places where we went. That night, we were all sitting around talking about the places we visited.

We being the family?

Yes, and Jimmy King and the staff, just the immediate group who were traveling together. At that point, Patrick and Kara and Teddy were already in bed. We’re having a couple of beers and Jimmy leans back in this old antique chair. He leans back and the chair breaks, and we laugh hysterically. It shattered into pieces. And in the arm of the chair was a microphone. 

This was in the guesthouse?

This was in Catherine the Great’s guesthouse, yes, where we were staying. After that, we never spoke in that house again. If we had anything to say, we’d go out in the garden, go out in the street, wherever it was. 

The next day, we went to visit [Leonid] Brezhnev. This was historic. No major American politician had been over there and met with Brezhnev. We got out of these limousines because Teddy wanted to visit the eternal flame. He wanted to walk around a little bit before he went in the Kremlin. The people actually thought, some of them, a lot of them, that he was JFK. They didn’t know that JFK had been assassinated. It was the Kennedy mystique and they were just coming out of the woodwork. 

Then we go in the Kremlin and we’re in this kind of private room, and I was sure that I was going to be asked to leave. There were no members of the press there. There were no other photographers. The kids weren’t even there. It was just Robert Hunter, Kennedy, myself, some other staff members, and this woman who had grown up with Teddy, who you should also speak to, Grace Warnecke. Her father was George Kennan, Ambassador to the Soviet Union, so she grew up in the Soviet Union. He was the Ambassador there for 12 years. Teddy brought her to be interpreter because we were told that Brezhnev would say something and the interpreter would not say what Brezhnev was saying, and vice versa. So we brought Grace along and she was a God-saver because she said, Teddy, he didn’t say that. Or if the interpreter said something that Teddy said, she would correct the interpreter and say, Mr. Brezhnev, this is what the Senator meant to say. It was great.

Anyway, we’re in this room and I’m taking all the photographs of the meeting and then we’re getting set to go. The Senator gets up and shakes Brezhnev’s hand, and I take a picture of the two of them together. Then the Senator says, OK, Ken, historic moment—Irish kid from the Bronx and Brezhnev—I’m going to take your picture. I’m looking at him, going, Senator, Jesus. I give him the camera, and I pre-focused it for him because I didn’t want to lose this picture if it was going to come out, and I showed him where to press the button. I had motors on my camera. He pressed the button and ran through a whole roll! He took 36 pictures of Brezhnev and me together, one of which has been hanging on my wall in my apartment since 1975. Then we were invited to a luncheon by the Soviet Supreme.

This was after the meeting?

After the meeting with Brezhnev, yes. It was interesting because a lot of the high-end members of the Soviet Supreme were there, and the first woman cosmonaut who went into space. She was there and the family was there and we had this wonderful lunch. Then Brezhnev said, You should go on a tour of the Kremlin. He said something to the effect that he had to get back but he would have somebody take us around. He had this guy, Andrei Pavlov, who you should also speak to at some point.

I’ve tried. Larry [Horowitz] won’t give me his address.

Oh, he won’t, OK. It’s probably best.

He said, I will get in touch with him. He’s on Eunice’s—

We didn’t know that Andrei was with the KGB, and he had been with us all this time. But you know, in years to come, it turned out that Andrei was a great guy. He’s a very good friend of mine, a very good friend of Larry’s. He’s on the board of the Special Olympics. He may be retired now but he became the Deputy Minister of Science and Technology in the Soviet Union. And on trips here, he has stayed with me in my apartment three or four times.

So we go on this tour of the Kremlin, and I was always in front of Teddy, kind of backtracking, taking pictures. Like I’m with you, I’m going backwards, I’m taking all these photographs. He was walking in front with Teddy Jr., and he was holding in his left hand a bouquet of flowers that I think the woman cosmonaut had given him, and little Teddy had this cane. As he walked, his leg would kind of turn in, and I said to myself, This is a very nice picture but I think it’s going to look better from behind. I let the Senator and Ted walk past me, and then I jumped in between the line of people and kind of slowed everybody down, and I took this photograph of them walking down the hall. As a photographer even back then, there are certain moments in the camera that you look through and you think, Wow, this is a very special picture. I knew it was.

That next day—and we were in the Soviet Union for a couple of days at least, maybe a week. Of course, I was working for TIME magazine, as well as documenting the Senator’s trip for him—I went to the TIME bureau and I gave them my film to send back to New York, because they were on deadline. The day we were leaving, I called the bureau and I said, Did everything go all right? And they said, Just a minute, and they put the bureau chief on, and I said, Is something wrong? He said, The film got lost. I said, You must be kidding. What do you mean, it got lost? It was sent in a diplomatic pouch. We arranged this with the embassy so there wouldn’t be any hang-ups in customs or anything like that. He said, I don’t know what to tell you. It got lost. I was nearly in tears. It wasn’t the stuff from Yugoslavia or Romania, but it was the important stuff from Russia with Brezhnev and all these things, and that picture I described to you. I couldn’t tell the Senator.

So I got back and about two weeks after I was back—and I had so many phone calls and conversations—I called Kennedy’s office and I told him what happened and I said, You’ve got to get in touch with the embassy. You’ve got to track this down. Well, a week later, the film turned up mysteriously. Nobody knew where it had been, where it went, how it got delayed or anything. I got the film, had it processed, and all the images—

Was everything there?

Everything was there. There wasn’t a thing missing. Nothing was fogged. Everything was there. Of course, what’s worse than old news? It was too late to put in the magazine because the trip had happened two or three weeks before. The photo editor looked at the pictures and said, Oh, my God, I can’t believe we missed this. He said, We do a year-end issue and I’m going to include some of these photographs in the year-end issue. I said, Great. LIFE magazine was out of business at that point as a weekly, but they were a monthly. He said, I’m also going to share this with LIFE, because I want these pictures to be in print. So at the end of the year, TIME magazine ran that picture of Teddy and Ted from the back, and a couple of pictures with Brezhnev and a few other things, and then LIFE magazine ran that picture a full page.

In the spring of the following year, I guess it was ’75, TIME magazine called me and they said, All these contests that take place every year are coming up: Missouri School of Journalism, the World Press International, blah-blah-blah. I’d never entered a contest. I had no desire to. We’d like to put in your photographs of the Senator’s trip. I said, Well, let me just make sure this is OK. I called the Senator’s office and they called me back and they said, Yes, he said it’s fine. Lo and behold, I win first prize in the Missouri School of Journalism and the World International Press. I had never won a prize in my life. Most of my Cracker Jack boxes were empty. They didn’t have any prizes in them.

Getting back to the trip, Melody Miller told me, You’ve got to ask him to tell the story about— Maybe you have already told it. Maybe it was Catherine’s guesthouse. It was about some music or something. Was it this trip or the next trip?

No, it was that trip.

Teddy saying, Turn it up, turn it up.

It wasn’t at Catherine’s house, but I can’t tell the story, I’m sorry.

She said it would be—Oh, come on.

That’s a story Larry would kill me for, so we’ll move on from there.

Oh, that’s too bad.

Anyway, TIME magazine called me to say that we had won these prizes, and they wanted to do what they used to call, in the days of magazines, a pub memo. Every week or every other week, they would do one, and it was basically about someone on the staff, one of the writers. TIME had won in photographs, four or five major awards, and it was all the contract photographers, myself and two of the other four guys. I said fine.

I checked with them and it was fine and they said, We want to run that picture of you and Brezhnev in the pub memo. I said, Wait a second, guys, no, we can’t do that. I’m too embarrassed about that. They said, Come on, it’s a really good picture. Who took that picture? I said, The Senator took it. And they said, Oh, we’ve got to run it, we’ve got to run it. I said, OK, hang on, hang on. I put a call in. I got Drayne on the phone and I said, Listen, Dick, I’m sorry to bother you again. Now they want to run the picture of me with Brezhnev that the Senator took. I just want to make sure this is OK. I get a call back from Drayne and he said, Just a second. I thought he was putting me on hold because he had another call coming in. The Senator gets on the phone and he goes, Well first of all, I just want to congratulate you. That picture you had sent to me—I loved it and I’m so glad it got published and so glad you won an award. So they want to run the photograph that I took of you and Brezhnev together? I said yes. He said, How much are they going to pay me? I said, Gee, Senator, I don’t know if they pay for that. He said, Well, look into it. And he said, What about a credit? I said OK. My company’s name was Camera 5. I said, Suppose I have it read, ‘Photo by Senator Kennedy, Camera 5?’ He said fine. And they ran that.

Did you go to the [Mr. and Mrs. Aleksandr] Lerners’ apartment, on that trip, when he went?

We went to visit [Andrey] Voznesensky, who was a very famous Russian poet, who actually Grace knew. He did a reading. It was amazing because every one of these places that we went to visit were like the apartments I grew up in, in the Bronx. I grew up in very poor, almost tenement-like surroundings. These people had nothing and yet they’d offer us cheese and wine and even in some cases caviar. 

That was another funny thing, because at all of these other places we went to, the banquets and the meetings and the dinners and the luncheons, you’d sit down and there would be five different-sized glasses in front of you, each of which they filled with vodka, or something as potent, and I was never a big drinker. Also, they would put a bowl of caviar in front of you. The first one we went to, I didn’t touch the vodka and I didn’t touch the caviar. I wasn’t going to go near that with a ten-foot pole. 

The next one we went to, the Senator said, Don’t you drink? I said, Yes, but I’m working and I don’t want to cloud my vision or anything like that. He said, What about the caviar? I said, No, no, I wouldn’t touch caviar. Well, about the third or fourth dinner, he force-fed me caviar. I became a caviar addict. To this day, I have caviar in my refrigerator all the time. So that was kind of a nice little learning experience for me and something that I probably never would have adapted to had it not been for him and our trip to Russia.

One of the things he did on that trip, and I think also on the China trip, which you can talk about later, was he had a list of people he would like to try to get out.

Yes, the refuseniks.

The refuseniks. And he had a night visit to the apartment of Alex Lerner.

Yes, I went to that. Right. Who told you about that? Melody?

No. He’s talked about it.

Oh, he did? OK. Well, that was interesting, because obviously—

Were you in the room?

Oh, yes. I took photographs, yes. And [Andrei] Sakharov was there. Obviously, the people in the Soviet Union did not want us to visit these people, and they did their damnedest to make sure we didn’t. So we made an arrangement with the American Ambassador, that we would visit the embassy—the American Ambassador was freaking out—and we would go out the back door and we’d get into a car. Of course, the KGB were not allowed to come into the embassy with us. So we went out the back door, we got into a car, and went to the Lerner apartment.

That was at night, wasn’t it?

It was at night, yes. It was probably eleven or twelve o’clock at night. We walked in and they were all in this room, you know? We were there maybe a half-hour at most, and the KGB showed up. He was trying to get some of those people out of the country. I don’t remember how successful he was or he wasn’t.

He was.

I think he got some of them out.

But he couldn’t announce it until he got back.

No, no. I guess the following year—Let’s see, what were we doing? There was a lot of Senate stuff.

A big Rose birthday party that year.

We went to a Barbra Streisand benefit concert in Washington. We were at a joint economic meeting with [Hubert] Humphrey. One of the things that he started to do in the mid to late ’70s—He instituted this camping trip from Hyannis Port, and I went on every one of these camping trips. Twenty-six grandchildren. We would meet at Hyannis Port and we would get into these campers and vans. I’ll give you two names that you should speak to if you haven’t. Gene Dellea.

Yes, we’ve spoken with him.

And Don Dowd. They were his kind of western Massachusetts advance men, so they were in charge of putting this camping trip together, because we’d always go to the Berkshires. We’d get into these vans, and sometimes Teddy would drive the camper. We’d stop at an amusement park on the way over and we’d go on all the rides. Teddy would go on all the rides, the Ferris wheel, the roller coaster. I took pictures of everything. It was so much fun. 

Then we’d go to the Berkshires and we’d generally spend about three days there. Whenever he had the kids along, whether it was his, or the nephews, he always found time to educate them wherever we went. We went to the Berkshires and we went to the [Norman] Rockwell Museum, and he told them all about Rockwell and his history in Massachusetts and how he was the premiere cover artist for Saturday Evening Post, and all these things. And then we went to the Red Lion Inn, which is a historic inn that was owned and run by the [John] Fitzpatrick family. John, the husband and father of the girls, was the Republican Senator from Massachusetts, so there was always this funny dialogue between the two of them. And then we went to this old, historic firehouse in back of the Red Lion Inn.

That was in—?

In Stockbridge. John and his wife’s daughter, one of his daughters, Ann [Fitzpatrick Brown], had turned this into a candy factory. She was making candy castles and candy railroad cars out of gumdrops and everything, and wafers. Well, the kids didn’t want to leave this place. They were eating her out of house and home. It was a lot of fun and we had a good time. Then we went to a campsite. The first night we were out there, getting the kids to bed was a real venture in patience and parenthood and everything like that. We were out in the woods and the kids would find frogs and they’d put them in our tents, and snakes, and everything like that.

The next night we moved to another site. I think Jean was with us on that trip, as she was on many of the others, and Ted said to me, You have a house up here, don’t you? I said yes. He said, Well, after we put the kids to bed tonight, why don’t we go over to your house? I said, Fine by me. I’d rather sleep there. I have a pool. He said, OK, we’re going, we’re going. So Jean and Ted and I went over to my house at about eleven o’clock at night, sat by the pool, had a couple of beers, talked, swam, went to sleep. My house is just filled with antiques, so I have all these old antique alarm clocks that would wake up the dead. We set the alarm clocks for like 4:30, got up, got dressed, got in the car, went back to the campsite, jumped in the tents. Nobody ever knew we didn’t sleep in the tents all night. The media would come in, in the morning and we’d come out of the tents. It was great.

Those things were just so enjoyable for everybody. We’d go out on a lake and they’d have water fights in the canoes. It was great for the kids, it really was, especially for the Robert Kennedy kids, who didn’t have a father. They so looked up to Teddy. 

Those things continued for a good five years or so. Every year we’d stop at the amusement park, and every year we’d go to a different campsite. Once, we went to a place called Umpachene Falls, in New Marlborough, and it was a beautiful, picturesque site with all these rocks and waterfalls. We were bathing in the falls and swimming and having fun, and then it was time to go to dinner. We rounded everybody up and went to the Red Lion for a dinner that night. We were invited there by the Fitzpatricks. We got there and Ted said, Where the hell is Jean? Don Dowd and Gene Dellea look at each other—He was talking about his sister Jean—and they go, I don’t know, maybe she’s asleep in the van or the camper. No Jean. And Kym [Smith], her adopted daughter, was with her. No sign of them. They go back to Umpachene Falls, which is an hour drive, and the smoke was coming out of Jean’s ears. They left her behind! Oh, my God, did she give Teddy hell about that, to say nothing of what she did to Gene and Don. She made their life miserable. But it was fun. It was really fun.

Another camping trip, we were down along the Housatonic, or the Farmington, and Eunice was with us. I don’t think she had been on any of the camping trips. She was just so athletic and aggressive. We found this tree that had a rope in it, a long rope that came to the shore, and you could swing out on the rope and drop in the water. Well, she did this. It was like Jane [Porter] from Tarzan. She was, Ooohhhhh! and she drops in the water. The pictures I took of her were so funny, but I knew I could never release them because she would have killed me. Then Willie Smith, one of Jean’s kids, did it, and he fractured his ankle. There was always some kind of an incident where we had to take somebody to the hospital.

As I said, those trips went on for five or six years, and it was a shame when they came to an end. Maybe it was ’97, ’98—It might even have been after 2000—I got a call from Rory Kennedy. I think it was after 2000. I had become like the big brother to all these kids and we always stayed close, and they would always call me for tickets for the Rolling Stones or whoever was in town. Rory said, Hey, Ken, guess what? And I said, What? She said, We’re going on a camping trip. I said, Rory, you’ve got to be kidding. You guys are all adults now. No, we’re taking our kids! I go, Oh, God, can I go through this again? I did. We went to Hyannis Port, and a lot of the younger kids were older and they had kids themselves. We went on this camping trip and it was great. Caroline [Kennedy Schlossberg] came with us and John Kennedy came with us. 

After we put all the kids to bed, Teddy came to me and said, Let’s go to your house. We took Caroline with us, and John, and I think Max [Greathouse Allen] was with us. It was a little bit earlier, so we went down to a local restaurant and bar in Otis, and I walked in with these people. The people there knew me, but they were speechless. They didn’t know what to do; they didn’t know what to say. We had a couple of sandwiches and some beers, something like that, and the Senator said, How much is that? They said, I don’t know. It’s $50 or $60. Don’t worry about it. No, no, no, we have to pay, we have to pay. 

Of course, Teddy never had any money on him. In so many places throughout—I remember we went to the GUM in Moscow once and he bought about two or three hundred dollars worth of souvenirs to bring back. Forgot his credit cards. I had to pay for it. I mean, he always reimbursed me.

John had a checkbook with him and he wrote out a check and he gave it to them and they never cashed that check. They put it up on the wall. I used to go in there and see it and I said, Are you guys ever going to cash that? No, we’re never going to cash that check. I don’t know what ever happened to it, because they’re out of business now. 

Anyway, to jump back to the mid-’70s, the next trip we went on was to the Middle East.

What year was that? We’ve never been able to—

I think that was ’75. 

He made a number of trips there.

May of ’75. They called me and asked me if I wanted to go on this trip with them to the Middle East.

You went to Iran. Was this the trip?

Right. I said to them, When is this going to happen? They said, We’re going to leave in May. I said, I need the exact dates when we’re leaving and when we’re coming back, because I had just signed on to do this 1975 epic Rolling Stones tour. They gave me the dates and it fit in between the Stones rehearsals and the start of the tour perfectly. I couldn’t have asked for better. 

I was out in Montauk with the Rolling Stones, at Andy Warhol’s house. They used to rehearse starting at midnight, so I was up until six or seven o’clock in the morning, drove to JFK, met the Senator at the airport, who said, Where the hell have you been? You look like hell. I said, I told you, I’m working with the Rolling Stones. He said, Oh, you’ve got to tell me all about it. He was like a little kid. You’ve got to tell me who’s doing this, who’s doing that, what’s going on.

We got on the plane and we flew to Tehran. I think I slept the entire flight. It was like twelve-and-a-half hours. I was out cold. We went to Iran first. We were the guests of the Shah [Mohammed Reza Pahlavi]. He had this beautiful wife. She was absolutely gorgeous. We stayed in the royal palaces, the royal guesthouse, and we did tours all over the place. They sent us out to see all the historic monuments and everything like that. Then we had a dinner with the Shah the night or the day before we were going to leave. It was one of the most regal, palatial dinners I’ve ever attended. 

Whenever the Senator went on these trips, he would bring some small token, a gift, to give to Tito, Brezhnev, whatever. It was always something that was like—It might be a Bobby Kennedy medallion, you know, something of that nature. So he presented something to the Shah and then the Shah clapped his hands and all these guys come out of the woodwork with these amazing Persian rugs to give to each one of us, and there were like 12 of us. This had to be sixty or seventy thousand dollars worth of Persian rugs. The Senator said, Your Highness, I’m sorry. As a member of the United States Senate, I’m not allowed to accept anything over $50, and that goes for my family and my staff. I said, Ted, I’m not on the staff. I’ll take the rugs. He said, No, no, you can’t do that. So in lieu of that, the Shah gave us each a tin of Iranian caviar. I tell you, it must have been four ounces. I’ve never seen so much caviar in one tin in all my life, and that is the best caviar in the world. It’s even better than Beluga from Russia.

Anyway, we did that and then we went off to Iraq after that and we were there for a couple of days. Then we went to Saudi Arabia.

In Iraq, he was scheduled to see Saddam Hussein.

But we didn’t, no.

You didn’t. And President [Ahmed Hassan] al-Bakr.

Right. From there we went on to Saudi Arabia, and we were the guests of King Khalid [bin Abdul Aziz]. Let me just see if I have any notes about that. No specific notes, but again, we were in these royal palaces.

What was the purpose of this trip? Why was he going?

Well, the purpose of all of these trips that he made was just because—I personally think he wanted to go as an Ambassador from the United States, and he wanted to bring his family to see these places. And he wanted to see them because he’d never been there before. You know, there was some conversation, but nothing really heavy, no real big issues.

I was thinking also, he’d be running for President.

Right. Oh, sure, sure. It was a buildup to what he wanted to do ultimately. At the time, the oil minister was Sheikh [Ahmed Zaki] Yamani, and he invited us to a traditional desert camp dinner. Of course Ted accepted. We got in these limousines and, I swear to God, it was like a scene out of Lawrence of Arabia. There were like ten limousines, and Jean was with us, and Eunice and Pat and the kids, driving across the desert, endless and endless, just sand and sand. And Ted’s going, Where are they going? Are we going to another country? 

We come over this horizon and we see—It was like an outdoor Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus—unbelievable tents, all handmade. They were the size of football fields. We got over there and we’re greeted by Sheikh Yamani. He’s got camels there for us to ride. The kids went on the camels. Ted and I said we’d take a pass. As Irish males, we want to preserve our.…[laughs] Then we went inside and it was right out of a movie. Everything was on the floor, all these beautiful Persian carpets, and just food and food and food, and drinks of course, which—That’s against their religion but you always know that behind closed doors they do have drinks. And they had dancers and all this stuff. It was amazing, really amazing. 

We left the next day or the day after that and we went to Israel. We had to do it in that order because we couldn’t do the reverse. If we went to Israel first, they wouldn’t have allowed us to go into any of those Arab countries. We were in Israel for a couple of days. It was kind of—After being in these other three places, it was kind of a fait accompli, and we certainly didn’t have the tent dinners and the palaces and all that stuff, but it was a great way to end the trip. 

That was in ’75. In ’76 he was running again—Well, he was proposed to run again for the Presidency.

But he had to run for the Senate again.

Yes. He had run for the Senate already. There were all these rumors and then I started traveling with him all over the place, I mean, we went everywhere during that year. I was spending more time in Washington and it was nice because we had become such good friends. I would stay at his house. He had a beautiful house down in Maryland with a pool and a hot tub, and there were many, many guest rooms. 

As years went by, it almost became like a museum of my photographs, because I used to give him all these photographs. After the first overseas trip, I gave him this beautiful leather-bound album with 8x10 photographs, and he went through it and he said, OK, I want this one for the wall, I want that one for the wall. So I made him more prints and he would frame them, so this is like a gallery of my photographs of Ted Kennedy on all these trips. I did the same thing when we went to the Middle East, and when we back to Russia. We went back to Russia in ’79, I think.

Well, ’78. It may have been you left in ’78 and the actual visit was in ’79. Maybe it was the end of the year.

It was ’78, yes, you’re right. I’ve got to tell you this story because it’s really funny, and I think it was in ’76. We flew out to Chicago for a meeting with [Richard J.] Daley, who was a big honcho in the Democratic Party, and anybody who had any aspirations would always cater to Daley. We flew out there and the plane lands. We’re on a commercial flight. The plane lands and suddenly stops on the runway. We didn’t know what was going on. The back stairs go down and Daley comes up on the plane and takes us off and puts us in these cars, and we’re on the way to this luncheon. He had shut down the entire freeway from the airport to the luncheon in downtown Chicago. Cars were backed up for miles on all the entrances and people were waving hands and Teddy’s like, Don’t let anyone see me. He slumped down in the chair so nobody would see him, because he didn’t want to be blamed for this. It was pretty funny.

Anyway, we continued to travel together and I was on the campaigns, and I just started to do a lot of the family stuff. I would do Christmas with them at the house and do Christmas photographs. You know, I almost became part of the family. It was nice for me because I was an only child. My dad died when I was two, so I didn’t have any siblings or anything like that, and Ted knew that and I think he kind of tried to bring me in as a little member of the family. It was always nice and every time I went down they always had a present for me, which was very generous of them.

One of the other things we did up in Hyannis Port was the 85th birthday of Rose, and it was a gala event. Oh, my God, they had been planning this for months, I think, and they had a big barbeque outside and everybody came. Jackie [Onassis] came, all the kids came, family, friends. We went into the main house, where Rose still lived. In the living room, which was huge—The living room was twice the size of this room, filled with—Every room in any Kennedy house had photographs all over the place, great memorabilia. We sat there, and every one of the remaining children of Rose’s, the three sisters and Ted, and all the grandchildren, had either made card illustrations for her birthday or they read things to her. It was great. It went on for hours and hours and hours. It was just such a beautiful night. 

Then I put together, which I had so wanted to do for such a long time, an entire group for a family photograph. Five minutes before we were about to do the photograph, Patrick had an asthma attack and Teddy had to take him home. So I have all these Kennedys, and Ted and Patrick are not in the photograph. Jackie’s in there, Jean’s in there, John’s in there, Caroline’s in there, Rose is in there, everybody. It broke my heart. But Patrick always had asthma attacks and in many cases, he couldn’t take him overseas for that reason.

That was one of the great highlights of the trips to Hyannis Port, of which I had made a lot. You know, Teddy loved to race and we would go out on the boat a lot. I remember going out one November, and I think Eunice was onboard and Jean and Ted and a bunch of people. The temperature in the water had to be 40 degrees. They jumped in and went swimming and they’re yelling for me, Come on in, Ken. I said, No, no. I’m here to take pictures, I’m not here to swim. [laughs] They loved doing things like that. They loved to push the needle a little bit and do things that were adventurous, that most of us wouldn’t do.

Challenging.

Anything that was a challenge. In years to come, when Teddy Jr. became a teenager and started to adapt to having half of a leg, he was amazing. The kid was skiing on one leg. We used to go up to the Berkshires and he was skiing down that hill and doing all these things, swimming and playing tennis and everything.

I was in London the end of—Let’s see, when was it? It would have been ’78. I was producing a feature film with a friend of mine who was directing it. It was the first time I’d been involved in something like that. I had a call from the Senator’s office and they said, Ted wants to speak to you. He knew I was over there. I said, What’s up? And he said, Hey, Teddy Jr. has been nominated as one of the ten best handicapped athletes in the world, and they’re having this big celebration in London and we’re coming over. I’d love to see you. I said, Great. 

So they came over. We were in pre-production at that point. I met him at the airport. In pre-production we were involved in everything, so I arranged with this limousine service to give him a Bentley for free, for four or five days, to take him all around. I met him at the airport. We took him to the Grove, and we had a dinner that night. I took him after dinner to Tramps, which was the big disco at the time owned by this man by the name of Oscar Lerman, who was married to Jackie Collins, the famous trash novelist. Jackie had written the screenplay for the film that I was producing, which was about Georgie Best, the famous soccer player. It’s the only thing Jackie ever wrote that her kids could read. 

We were going to Tramps all the time. I had carte blanche there, so I took Ted there. And who’s there when we walk in, lo and behold, but Bill Wyman from the Rolling Stones, who I knew because I had traveled with those guys so much. We sat down with them and we had the best time. It was really great.

The next day, Ted says to me, I want to go out to Runnymede. Remember, we visited that on our way.… I said, Fine. The producer of the film owns the home on Runnymede. He said, You’re kidding. I said no. He said, Do you think we could go see it? I said, Absolutely. This guy’s name was Elliott Kastner and he was in awe of Teddy. When I told him Teddy was coming over he says, Anything you need, anything you need. I called Elliott up and I said, Is there any chance that we could come out for dinner, maybe tomorrow night? He said, Sure, sure. Is there anything special the Senator likes to eat? I said, Whatever meat you have.

Elliott was in some respects a Howard Hughes type. He was a cleanliness freak. You would go into Elliott’s office and he had this huge glass table, and if you put your hand on the table, from underneath the desk he would take a shammy cloth and wipe out the spot. And you could not smoke around Elliott. He was a complete anti-smoker. Anyway, we go out to the house. Of course, it rained like hell, and we’re traipsing through the mud to get to the front door. Elliott’s there to greet us and he said, OK, if you’d all just take off your shoes, and here are some slippers. I thought, Oh my God. Anyway, we all do that. I had told Ted about Elliott’s fetishes.

We go in and we’re having some cocktails before we sit down to dinner, and Ted goes into his pocket and pulls out a Montecristo cigar and lights it up. I go, Oh my God. I mean, he knew all about Elliott. And Elliott, I thought his eyes were going to pop out of his glasses. He disappears for a moment and he comes back with an ashtray. Ted purposely let the ash on the cigar get longer and longer, and Elliott was following him around so the moment the ash fell, he would grab it. It was very funny. 

The next day, Ted wanted to go out to Devonshire.

How were relations with Elliott after that?

Oh, they were great. I just said, You know, the Senator was just teasing you with that. He said, Yes, I thought so. I’m sure you told him about my anti-smoking thing. So then Ted wanted to go out to Devonshire, which was about three-and-a-half hours outside of London, and it’s this very famous place. The Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, [William and Georgiana Cavendish]—Their son was married to Kathleen, Teddy’s sister.

Yes, that’s right.

She was killed in a plane crash. So the son was married to Kathleen. Both of them are long gone. But Teddy wanted to go out and visit them. We went out, and they owned one of those great estates in England, I mean it was beyond belief. They had 12 gardeners to take care of the property. We drove up this driveway, and the only thing that I’d ever seen comparable to this was the Hearst Castle. That’s what it reminded me of. The driveway up was a mile-and-a-half long and there were deer out there and sheep and everything. We went in and met the Duke and Duchess, and this guy was a feisty, spry old guy. He was a marathoner. He would run marathons around the world. He was like in his eighties. 

They showed us the whole place. There were probably 30 to 40 rooms in the place, and during the winter they would have to shut half of them down because they couldn’t afford to heat them. In the summer months, they would open everything up and they would have tours through it to help pay for the estate taxes, which were very high in England. Anyway, we had this luncheon in this dining room that went on for blocks, and all around us were these easels, and on the easels were [Amedeo] Modiglianis, [Pablo] Picassos, and [Pierre-Auguste] Renoirs. They couldn’t keep it in certain wings because it was too cold, so they put them in the kitchen where it was always nice and warm. We spent the better part of the day there and then we drove back that night. Again, it was just another special experience in my life with him and people who were close to him. Teddy didn’t win the award but we had a great time.

Did Ted ever talk to you about Kathleen, his sister?

No.

Or about Joe [Kennedy Jr.], his oldest brother?

No. He never talked about any of the family members who were deceased. Every once in a while something would come up that would remind me about Bobby or something that had to do with Bobby, and I mentioned it to Ted and he kind of acknowledged it but he didn’t want to talk about it. He’s probably still like that. 

So then we go back to Moscow.

He talks a lot about his brother Bob and his brother Jack.

Oh, he did talk about them a lot, yes.

A lot in this, but not in emotional terms.

Right. We went back to Moscow. I think it was ’79.

Seventy-eight.

Before we went there, we went to Asia.

That’s right, you went to China, Christmas Eve, ’77.

Right. This was kind of a last-minute trip and they could not get a visa for me for China. I was so bummed out. I couldn’t go to China with them, but I met them in Japan. So we were in Japan together. We were in Hong Kong together. One of the funny moments—We stayed at a place in Kyoto that was called the Three Sisters Inn, and we had Eunice, Jean, and Pat with us. I investigated to see if there were really three sisters and there were. We photographed the three Japanese sisters and the three Kennedy sisters together. That was a lot of fun.

Then we went to see a sumo-wrestling event. Teddy would always kid me—There were certain moments that he’d say, OK, I don’t think we want any pictures of me and the sumo wrestlers. [laughs] I always took them anyway, but a lot of this stuff never—I have a locked file here.

So you never got to China with him?

No. They were in China for about a week and then I met them in January, in Japan. We did a great tour of Japan. One of the places we went to, which was so sad and so depressing, was Hiroshima. We went to the hospital where there were still burn victims from the atomic bomb. It was just really sad to see these people there. It was very sad. I think Larry was with us on that trip.

He wasn’t on the China trip. Larry? 

I don’t know if he was in Japan. Maybe he was in Russia later. He was in Russia later, that’s right, because there’s a funny story about that.

The second trip to Russia.

Right. So we went to Kyoto, we went to all these temples, we went to geisha houses.

We always had to take our shoes off in Japan, every place you went. I remember the Senator going, If I have to take my shoes off one more time, I’m not going to put them back on, I’m just going to walk around every place with no shoes on.

Later that year, we did another camping trip in July, and then we did the Special Olympics, which was up in Buffalo. It was somewhere up in that area. The Governor of New York came, Hugh Carey, and Patrick Moynihan came. Boy, having these three Irish guys together, I tell ya. Rip-roaring stories, lots of good fun and good drinks and everything like that. And it’s funny because the Special Olympics at that point hadn’t been that well-received or recognized, but after that it just took off and became a national event.

That summer in Hyannis Port, there were all these rumors going on, one after another after another, and I kept saying to this person, What’s going on? What’s going on, all these private meetings? Well, three months later in November, at Faneuil Hall, he announced he was running for the Presidency. From that day in November of ’79, until May when he dropped out finally, I was with him every single day except for 18 days in February of 1980, when I went to the Olympics.

But he didn’t really drop out.

Well, he just kind of faded out. It seemed apparent that—

That’s not the way some people tell it. He had lost the delegates even before that, but he kept on.

Yes, he kept going. He did keep going and, I don’t know, I guess he never thought that he would lose, you know? Kennedys aren’t losers and they’re not quitters, and I think that’s why he kept going. But we were just all over the place, my God. We’d start in Washington in the morning. We’d fly to Des Moines in January, where it was 35 below zero, to visit some farmer. Cold beyond belief. I remember I took this funny picture of [Robert] Shrum, who was so cold that he put gloves on his feet. It was great. The Republicans did everything imaginable to sabotage his campaign, all the stories about Ted’s philandering and his drinking. There were places where we arrived at the airport and these Republicans would have stuffed dolls hanging from a stick, of Mary Jo Kopechne. It was awful. They did everything imaginable to beat him, because I think they felt that [Ronald] Reagan could beat [Jimmy] Carter but not Kennedy that year.

As I said, I was with him all the time except for the Olympics. Caroline Kennedy was my assistant at the 1976 Winter Games in Innsbruck. Then I came back and joined up with the campaign again, and we went from city to city. Sometimes we were in three different climates in one day. You never knew what clothes to wear or bring or anything like that. One of his best friends joined us a lot on the campaign trail, especially out West, John Tunney. 

That summer maybe, or the summer before, we did a whitewater raft trip down the Grand Canyon, and that was a lot of fun. I had been down there a lot. Teddy, Teddy Jr., Patrick, and Caroline were with us, some of the Robert Kennedy kids, and Senator Tunney and his son, who is also named Teddy. We would camp out every night along the banks of the Colorado, you know, cook out. There was this group—they were actually friends of mine—that ran a river company out there, which I introduced to Ted. It was called the Holiday River Company, and they planned the whole trip for us. It was great. They took us on a helicopter ride over the Grand Canyon, at which point Patrick and Max threw up in the back seat.

After the campaign was over, we—

You’re talking about the ’80 campaign?

Yes. But we had been to Russia before that, in ’78, and that was just a Russia trip. Brezhnev was still alive and we met with him.

But he was not well.

Not well, not well at all. That was the trip—We changed planes in London. We’re sitting there after the flight takes off, for about an hour or so. Ted was here and I was here and I think Larry was with us, maybe Shrummy—I can’t remember who. Larry was definitely with us.

Jan Kalicki was on that trip?

Yes, Jan was on the trip. Larry gets up to go to the bathroom and he was gone for like a half-hour. The Senator looked down the aisle and said, Where’s Larry? I said, I don’t know. He said, Well, maybe we should look for him. At which point I was about to get up, and the co-captain, one of the pilots, comes walking by me with a wrench, a screwdriver and a hammer. So I followed him back. Larry got locked in the bathroom! They had to take the door off. That’s all Ted needs is to find out something like that about somebody. Oh, my God, he gave Larry such grief. Then when we got to Russia, we were visiting some hospitals in Tashkent and they took Larry downstairs to an area that hadn’t been advanced for Larry to see, so we could bring the Senator down there, and they got stuck in the basement.

The door locked behind them.

Yes, the door locked behind them.

This was the time that he went to an international healthcare conference in Alma-Ata.

Well, before we went to Russia, that’s right. We went to two other places in the Soviet Union, which had now been renamed. I’m trying to think what the hell they were called at the time, because this is a very funny story. Let me see if I have that in here.

Was Samarkand one of them?

Samarkand was one of them.

And Tashkent.

Tashkent, you’re absolutely right. We went there and Jan had forgotten, or Larry had forgotten, to bring gifts for Brezhnev. OK, we’re out wandering around in this huge market, and the Senator says, Let’s get some local cheeses and we’ll bring those with us and present them to Brezhnev with some fruit. He’d probably love that. [Richard E.] Rick Burke was with us at the time, too. We said fine, and we buy all this cheese and fruit and off we go to Moscow. They pick us up as usual and we go to the hotel. 

The next day we come to visit Brezhnev. We go into the same room we had been in five years before. Brezhnev comes out and even though he wasn’t healthy, he’d always give a big bear hug. It was like being grabbed by a wrestler, you know? He presents us with some little gifts and the Senator says, Oh, I have something really special for you. Rick brings these things in. The KGB were freaking out because they didn’t know what the hell was in these things, and because it was Kennedy, they wouldn’t ask to open the boxes. Anyway, he puts them on the table, he opened the boxes, and everything went bad. I thought Brezhnev was going to die from the smell right there on the spot. He just reeled back, and the Senator went over and he reeled back.

That was actually a brief meeting with Brezhnev. He gave out.

Yes, it was very brief because Brezhnev wasn’t well at the time.

Did you photograph that meeting in his office?

I did. Quite frankly, there was never anything, at least that I can talk about, that when I was with him, he didn’t allow me to photograph, because he trusted me implicitly. He always knew that even though something might have been a photograph that he wouldn’t want published, that I would never put him in that situation. I would never release it. I always used my own judgment and if I ever had a question I would call and see what he said about it.

That’s very important to him.

Oh, yes, very important.

I can tell, over the years. I’ve been interviewing him since 2005.

Oh, really?

He was the first one to be interviewed, and it takes time. Even though he selected me to do this project, you know, you have to interview him and after a while he began to tell all kinds of stories that he may take out of the record, but I’m not sure he will.

One of the last camping trips we went on—I think it may have been that summer of ’79. We went to Hyannis Port, stopped at the amusement park and went to a couple of places in the Berkshires. Linda Ronstadt, who he had never met, was playing at Tanglewood. We would always go to Tanglewood. Maybe Yo-Yo Ma was there, or John Williams. It was always a nice event, educational, for the kids. This is one of the few times, if not the only time, that there was ever a pop star there that the kids could relate to, so he thought it would be fun. We went there and then afterwards we went backstage and we went to see Linda. At that time, she was drop-dead gorgeous. I think she was maybe dating [Edmund Gerald, Jr.] Jerry Brown, or had just finished dating Jerry Brown, and she was beautiful. She had the shortest shorts on that I have ever seen in my life. I swear they couldn’t have been longer than this. 

Anyway, we’re in the dressing room and there are introductions. Also, I noticed on her legs she had all these black and blue marks. Anyway, I was taking pictures and then after we left, Ted comes over to me and he says, Did you see those black and blue marks on her legs? I said yes, and he said, Were they in the photographs? I said, Well, Ted, how could they not be? He said, Kill file. I said fine.

Every September at Forest Hills, they would have the RFK [Robert F. Kennedy] tennis tournament in honor of Bobby, and all these celebrities would come in: Walter Cronkite, Roger Mudd, and the Kennedys, and everybody would play tennis. The night before, Friday night, they would always have a reception at the Waldorf Astoria, to greet all the people who were donating, and who were going to participate in the tournament. As you come in, there would be a greeting line and it would be Ted, Ethel [Kennedy Skakel], Joe, and some of the other kids. The greeting line is here, and over here is a red velvet rope, behind which are all the photographers, radio reporters, TV people, everything like that. I didn’t have to be there because I had free rein of everything, so I was always taking pictures from a different angle. 

People are coming through and shaking hands, Hello, how are you? This and that. This woman comes in, and she goes over and she gives Ted a hug and a kiss on the cheek. Well, the explosion from the flashbulbs, the chaos that went on was beyond belief. After it calmed down she said, Very nice to meet you, and then she said, Ethel, Joe, and walked on. Ted leans over to me and goes, Who the hell was that? And I said, Ted, you didn’t know who that was? He said, No, who was that? I said, That was Renee Richards. He goes, Oh, my God. Do you know who that was?

I don’t.

Renee Richards was a very famous male tennis player who had a sex change and became a woman. So he said, Oh, my God, maybe we should release the Linda Ronstadt pictures. It was pretty funny. 

Anyway, on through the campaign.

Was the visit to the Lerners’ apartment—There was another one.

That was another one, yes.

Was that any different?

It was in a different place, yes.

But in substance or in atmosphere, was it any different? From the first one, I mean.

Yes. What we did—One of the children of one of the refuseniks was very ill, and they would not allow this medicine to be used in the Soviet Union, so we snuck it in and we gave it to the kid and it was administered and I think the kid came out of whatever he had.

She, Jessica Katz.

Oh, was it? OK, yes.

It was one of the Katz children.

That was a very important meeting, really important. Again, all these people were there and we took photographs of everybody.

The KGB tried to stop it again.

Again, always, yes. Andrei, again, was our host on this trip. It was invariable that so many times when we were on trips, either the drivers would get lost, like the thing with Mayor Daley, or we’d get a flat tire or something. We were on the road someplace in Russia and we got a flat tire, and the Senator gets out of the car, What’s the matter now? We’ve got a flat tire. Andrei gets out of the car and Ted goes over to Andrei, and he had a tie on, and he takes him by the tie and lifts him up like this. The picture is so funny. Years later, when Andrei came here, I went to the file and I pulled out the picture. He was on the floor laughing. He said, I must have that picture, I must have that picture. I said, It’s yours.

And then I guess in the ’80s, after the Presidential race, things started to change a little bit. I would still do some things with them. Just let me jump ahead to the ’80s. He started doing more and more health hearings, and I was always in attendance for that. Would it have been in the ’80s that he would have run? When was the next campaign for the Senate?

Eighty-two.

Eighty-two, yes. They opened up the campaign headquarters.

The big problem campaign for him was ’94.

Yes, yes. I did a lot of local stuff around Boston and in the Berkshires with him, and we’d also go out and do some trips out of state. We did his 50th birthday party up in Boston, which Robert Redford came to. He and Redford were good friends.

Did you do any of the Christmas parties?

Yes, some of the Christmas parties, and then also, in 1982, he announced that he would not run again for the Presidency in 1984. We did the reelection in ’82, and we did a nice Easter Sunday family dinner down in Palm Beach. Rose was there and the sisters came down. We had a really lovely dinner at the house, and then on Easter Sunday we went to church. You know, Rose went to church seven days a week. Even after she had the stroke, the priest would come to the house up in Hyannis Port and do Mass and give her communion.

Then he started going to interesting places in the early ’80s. He did a big dinner here for [David] Ben-Gurion. He did a dinner with Jerry Falwell, of all people. On one trip we went down South and George Wallace was with us, and that was after Wallace had been shot and was in a wheelchair. It was just, I’m looking up at the stage and I’m seeing George Wallace, and I’m seeing Ted Kennedy, and I think, Something’s wrong with this picture. 

Then in late ’84 they called me and they asked me if I wanted to go to Africa with them, and I said, Absolutely. We left in January. He always did these trips when the Senate was in recess and it was holiday and right after Christmas. He loved to take the kids on these things. We flew to South Africa first and we were the guests of Bishop [Desmond] Tutu. This was a political trip. He went over there and challenged the South African leaders about apartheid. I was in the room, again just so fortunate, for these private meetings, and boy, he had some really fierce arguments with these guys about apartheid. They, and most of the other people we met in South Africa, the white people, just reeked of Nazism. They really did. It was scary. 

Tutu was great. He had a church there where there was an auditorium adjacent to the church that Teddy spoke at, and there must have been 30,000 people in the audience. Oh, my God, it was just cheering and yelling and screaming. Then we asked permission to go see [Nelson] Mandela and they refused to give it to us. He went out to the area where the prison was and they had their secret police all over the place. They made Kennedy stand in a position, because there were South African journalists traveling with us too, where, when he was photographed, you would not be able to see the prison in the background. 

The next day, we went to visit Winnie Mandela, who was living in a little village outside of either Cape Town or Johannesburg. I think it was outside of Johannesburg. The rumor got out that Teddy was coming to visit. People were standing on top of cars that caved in, standing on top of shacks that caved in, just to see him. We went in, and the only people in that meeting, to my memory, were Winnie, the Senator, and myself. I took pictures of the two of them together. Whenever I felt that my usefulness was over, I would leave. I wouldn’t want to intrude on something. Ted knew that and sometimes he’d give me the high sign and sometimes I’d just leave on my own. Sometimes I was so mesmerized, I’d stay through the whole thing.

Then we went to visit one of the saddest things that I’ve ever seen, and maybe that he’s ever seen, at that time anyway. We went to Soweto and it was just, I mean, no running water, no toilets, all these shacks, people living in poverty and dirt. It was just awful. It was really awful. I think we went from Johannesburg to Cape Town, and then we went to Namibia and went over to see Victoria Falls, then we went to Sudan. We spent a little time in Sudan and then we went to Ethiopia.

The famines.

Yes. We went to Addis Ababa and we stayed at the Hilton Hotel, one of the finest places in Addis Ababa at the time, and then we went out to the camps. Again, it was as sad, if not sadder, than Soweto.

Kara and Teddy were with you?

Oh, yes. Kara, Teddy and the Senator just got on the food lines and started passing out food and trying to help, and wash people, do all these different things. Just the faces of the little kids were so riveting and so depressing. If I remember correctly, we stayed one night in a camp, just one night, and the next day one of the kids died during the night and it was just awful. 

We also visited, in one of those countries, and it may have been there, Mother Teresa’s place. She wasn’t there but we went to visit her camp. After we left that camp, the Senator was outraged. We went back into town and we went to the embassy and he was just demanding answers: Why are these people going through this? Why isn’t there food out there? Where are all the supplies? 

The food that was sent over from around the world to feed these people—We went and visited—was sitting in these hangars or warehouses, piled to the top, food that could feed people for six months to a year, probably, and it was just going to waste, because when this first started, they tried to drop the food by helicopters and people were dying in the riots to get to the food. Then they started sending them out by trucks and there was a rebel war going on there, which still is, you know, and they were knocking over the convoys and stealing all the food. So they had no way of getting them out there. It was a very frustrating trip for him because he was hoping to accomplish more. These people were just so rigid. They just didn’t want to help in any way or listen to what he had to say.

Later that year, we went down to the South again. We went to West Virginia and Missouri for a couple of things. We did some more hearings, Health Committee hearings. My work was starting to increase a great deal for magazines and advertising people, and I started to work in film and things like that, so there started to be a distance between us. He wasn’t doing the camping trips a lot. He stopped doing those and he wasn’t campaigning. I always touched base with him and if something came up, he’d call me. If it was a special birthday or something like that, I’d be there. I’m going to drop whatever I was doing and be there.

In the early ’90s, he called me, and they hadn’t done this in about ten years or so. They were having a big, big family reunion. Everybody was going to be there, including his sister.

Rosemary [Kennedy]?

Rosemary, yes. He wanted me to come up and spend the whole weekend to document everything. They were going to do a picnic, a boat trip, they were going to do all these things. He wanted me to do a big family shot. I arrived, and in order to do this family shot, it was a big deal. I mean, we had to do it on a large format camera. It had to be done outside. There was no place inside we could do it. Even so, you had to put up strobe lights, because I didn’t know what time of day we were going to do it. I don’t know if we’re going to be in sun or shadow or shade or whatever. I had to bring two of my assistants who worked with me full-time, up there.

Anyway, I come up, and Teddy was sitting on the porch, and it’s the only time in our almost 30-year relationship I ever heard him get angry at me. It wasn’t anger anger, but it was just—I could feel it in his voice. He said, What are those other people doing here? You know this is private. I said, Ted, they’re my assistants. They work for me. They’re in the office all the time. They’re the people who catalog and protect your photographs. I had to bring them up for the big family shot because I couldn’t do this myself. I have to put up lights. We have to put a big format camera on a tripod. I just wanted to talk to you about this now, and then they’re going down to the motel and hang out, sit by the pool, you know? They’re not going to be around until we do that shot. And he said, OK, I wish you had told me about this. I said, I didn’t think that it would bother you. But it was fine after that. They went, did their thing, and we went out and just had a ball. They were all out water skiing.

They planned a picnic. There’s a little stretch of land off Hyannis Port, maybe five or six miles, and for four or five hours a day, the tide goes out and it’s maybe a half-mile. They liked to do funky things like that. Well, the tide wasn’t listening to us. We went out on this thing and suddenly this tide started to come in early. You never know with the ocean. We had to get everything off there and we had to get in the boat. And everybody was there: Caroline, John and his wife Carolyn [Bessette Kennedy], Jackie, the whole crew was there. They didn’t bring Rosemary out on the boat. The usual antics and water fights and everything like that.

I’ll never forget this. We were about three miles from shore and John Kennedy jumped off the boat and he said, I’m swimming back. Carolyn, not his sister but his wife, was just really nervous because that time of the year you’ve got speedboats going around. Who can see a head coming in and out of the water, you know? We got back and we all went to the beach, waiting with much anticipation, and then finally he showed up and there was a big cheer. Carolyn said, Don’t you ever do that again.

Now comes the time of the group shot and we’re assembling everybody. It was a big ordeal because they’re all over the Cape. There’s different houses here and there. Myself and my assistants are running around, Come on! You’ve got to come now. Everybody’s there except for John and Carolyn. Teddy says, Are we ready? I said, John and Carolyn aren’t here. He said, Well, you know where they are. [laughs] He sent one of the kids up to the house and brought them back down, and you could see they were red in the face and a little embarrassed. We took this photograph and it was just—Maybe since it was never published, it didn’t have the historical value of a lot of all my photographs of various people, but for me it was one of the most amazing photographs I ever took, I mean, just looking down and seeing 106 members of the Kennedy family there. It was great. It was just brilliant.

That was before he married Vicki [Reggie Kennedy]?

No, no, it was after.

So he had already married her?

Vicki was there, yes. And then all the families came up and said, Oh, would you do our individual portrait? So for the next three hours, we were doing Maria [Shriver Schwarzenegger] and Arnold [Schwarzenegger], and the kids, and Teddy Jr. and his wife and family, and Kara, and on and on and on. It was great. They put out a calendar. Vicki put together this calendar the next year that was sent just to the family members and everybody. That was nice. That was really nice.

And then I did a story on Ted for LIFE magazine, with Vicki, and we went up to the—Well, we shot in a number of places. We shot in Washington, but we did some really lovely pictures up on the beach in Hyannis Port, in one of which he has his arms around her and you can see the whole beach in the background. In fact, the publisher who is doing the book sent that photograph over the other day and said, This is one of the Ted’s favorites. When was this taken? And the photo editor, who was obviously new to the business, said, Do you have any other photographs beside this one? I said, Probably 149,999 more. So, she’s going to come up and spend a lot of time up here.

The last big thing that I did was Teddy Junior’s wedding. That was on—Where the hell was that? It was up in Rhode Island, on Block Island, I think it was.

Block Island, yes.

It was on Block Island. It was one of those weeks where I had all these things going on, but I said, Fine, I’ll come up and do it. It was great because Teddy was like my little brother and to see him marry this amazing woman, Kiki [Katherine Anne Gershman Kennedy], who had been his psychiatrist, which is how he met her.... Everybody was at the wedding. The big deal was that Jackie was not very fond of one of John’s dates. She was an actress and she just wasn’t very fond of her and tried to avoid having me taking pictures of them but we took a few. 

There had been an interesting incident with Jackie maybe nine or ten years before that. I was asked by Money magazine to photograph Mike Nichols. Mike had retired from directing films and doing Broadway and comedy, to raise Arabian stallions, and he bought a horse farm in Connecticut and he was about to sell the stallions. He was going to have an Arabian horse stallion auction and go back into the entertainment business. Money magazine wanted to do a cover story on him and they asked me to do it. 

I went up and met Mike on a Friday and he showed me the whole place and told me what was going to go on. He was very anal about everything. We shot the cover in his living room, by the fireplace, with all these beautiful portraits of the horses. Then he said to me, You will be the only photographer here on Saturday and Sunday. You can do anything you want, take any pictures you want, but do not take any pictures of Mrs. Onassis. In fact, don’t even go within 30 yards of her with your camera. I said, OK, fine. I never told him about my relationship with the family, because I never really spoke about that a lot.

The next day they had the preview of the auction. I said to Mike, Listen, is there a reason that you don’t want Mrs. Onassis photographed? Is she not well? I don’t want to bring this up again, he said, but she’s going to be with somebody, and I don’t want you to be photographing them. I said, OK, fine. 

Sunday comes, there’s the big auction, and everybody’s there, all these celebrities, and I see over in the corner, outside the tent where the auction is going to take place, Mike Nichols. I don’t know if he was with Diane Sawyer then. I’m not sure, but he was with a woman and Mrs. Onassis and her date, and I realized why he didn’t want me to photograph them. It was Warren Beatty. I start walking over to them, and I’m within about ten yards and Mike Nichols looks up and he sees me, and his eyes start going really wide, and his face was getting red. 

I get closer, and just as Mike is about to burst out of this foursome and throw me off the property, Jackie sees me and she goes, Ken, what are you doing here? And she gave me a big hug and she says, Mike, do you know Ken? He goes, Yes, I know Ken. He’s here photographing me for the weekend for Money magazine. She goes, Well you know, he’s our photographer. Caroline was his assistant for a year. Later when I saw Mike he said, You bastard! Why didn’t you tell me all that? I said, Well, I just don’t like to talk about things like that. It was pretty funny.

Anyway, the end of my photography with him was at the wedding. I did the wedding for them.

Now, which wedding?

That was Teddy Junior’s wedding. After that, I’d go up to Hyannis if I was up in the area. He always loved my girlfriends because they were always young and beautiful and actresses. I had an open invitation to come to any of the parties there. If I’d hear about a party, I’d say to whoever it was, Hey, you want to go to Hyannis Port this weekend? That always impressed the women.

The last time I saw him, because I used to—He would go to the Berkshires almost every summer. He loved it up there and it was the western part of the state and he had a lot of constituents there. He went up there two summers ago. He was going up and the Governor of Massachusetts was going to be there and they were having this big event that John Williams was going to be at, and Yo-Yo Ma, and a whole bunch of people. I wanted to have breakfast with him, so I went out to the Pittsfield Airport and met him there and we had breakfast. My house is very close to there. I met them for a picnic later that day, and Vicki was there and Don and Gene and a couple of other friends. 

His back was really starting to hurt him. I saw him when got off that plane and Don and Gene had to help him off the plane. That back has always been problematic for him. On the campaign trail, we were going all the time, getting out of planes and cars, and the Secret Service would prop up a chair with a back like this, just so he could lean against it. That came from the plane accident that he had. But he just didn’t look good, which he always did. He would always get a little bit too heavy in the summer because he’d be eating all that wonderful food up in Hyannis Port. That was the last time I saw him.

What year was that?

That was two summers ago, up in Pittsfield and at Tanglewood. Then they contacted me about the book, which suddenly got put on hold because of his illness. I’ve been emailing Vicki back and forth, just to see how he’s doing, and I always talk to Larry and Shrummy because they’re so close to him, just to see how he is. I expected him, and I hope he still does, to outlive Rose, who lived to 101 or 102. She was an amazing woman, too. Even in her later years, she still had that—I remember we were going out on the boat once with her, and she had to be in her nineties, and she started giving Teddy some grief about birth control, because he was in favor of it. 

I was up there one weekend and Jean was sitting on the porch and I went over and I said, Hey, Jean, how are you? Fine. How’s your mother doing? Well, she’s not doing too well today. She thinks she’s in Palm Beach. Well, I know that feeling. My mom just had a stroke about four months ago and she’s 91, never been sick a day in her life, graduated from college seven years ago with a Masters in English. I was actually in Mexico, Texas, and Arizona with Rory Kennedy, working on a documentary that she’s doing for HBO called The Fence, on the Texas/Mexico border. We were out of touch, and we came back from Mexico and I had a message that my mother had a stroke, and I had to leave. I walked into that room and I just totally lost it. I just, you know, I’d never seen her that way. She was totally independent, did everything for herself—cooked, cleaned, wouldn’t have any help come in. But that’s going to happen to all of us one day unfortunately. 

I don’t know, is there anything else I can tell you?

I want to hear that story. I know you have at least four.

Well, one of them was the Linda Ronstadt story.

You can take it out. You can even take it out of the stuff that won’t come out for 50 years.

Right.

You know, I have a lot of good stories on the tape and it’s not right to have people on tape saying, I’m not going to tell you. I can’t tell you some of the stories Teddy’s told.

All right, I’ll tell you that one Russia story.

OK.

We were invited to this dinner party at one of the Russian—I think it was a dignitary. It was somebody important; otherwise, we wouldn’t have gone to the dinner. There were half a dozen people there, and there was a woman there, a very attractive woman, blonde, and she was introduced to Teddy. After dinner, they put some music on and there was dancing going on and Teddy said, Turn the music up really loud and turn the lights down low. Because we had had that experience with Jimmy King and the bugging, he wanted to be sure that whatever dialogue went on between the two of them, nobody heard and nobody saw it. So I turned the music up really loud and lowered a lot of the lights, and it turned out later that she was in the KGB.

Well, he had his head screwed on right about that.

Oh, yes. But I must say, I feel so incredibly lucky and fortunate that as a very young photographer, and as a young person with little or no experience around the world, that he took me under his wing. One of the things that he said during the 1980 Presidential campaign was so true. One of the reporters said to him, Aren’t you afraid of being assassinated? He responded to the reporter without blinking an eye. He said, Ken’s always in front of me. He’ll get the bullet first. I said, Thanks Ted, I’ll remember that from now on. 

I take it it did bother some of his children?

Yes.

That prospect.

Oh, my God.

He always had a doctor travel with him anyway, didn’t he?

We were going through a kitchen once and there was a loud bang. Oh, my God, it was just so frightening, really frightening. You know, what I can do, once you give this to me to hear and to edit—I don’t think there’s really anything I’ll edit, but what I was hoping to do today was just to go through all this stuff and maybe look at the CD and bring back memories. So, if there’s anything else that I suddenly remember, I’ll give you a call.

Yes. You can always do a follow-up.

OK, fine, right.

We’ll be glad to do that.

I hope this was informative and interesting.

It was very good, and you were very conscientious about it.

Yes.

Well, thank you.

He was, and he still is, such a very close, dear personal friend and I’ll always be indebted to him because, probably, if he hadn’t taken me under his wing and allowed me all these opportunities, my career would have moved really, really slowly.