The Steadfast Wind In the Senator's Sails

"She has had a tremendous impact on his life in an extremely positive way," said Rep. Bill Delahunt (D-Mass.), who has known them both for years. "Let's just say she was the woman for Ted Kennedy."

The surviving brother of Camelot had spent most of his adult life beset by expectations and burdened by bad choices and personal misfortunes. He became a surrogate father to both John F. Kennedy's two children and Robert F. Kennedy's 11. A year after Robert Kennedy's assassination, Ted Kennedy drove a car off a bridge to Chappaquiddick Island, causing the death of a young woman riding with him. The accident destroyed his own chances of becoming president, and he dedicated himself to legislating. But his personal life was never-ending fodder for the tabloids: a divorce, a young son's cancer, reports of womanizing and hard drinking, and his painful involvement in nephew William Kennedy Smith's rape trial.

As Kennedy was preparing to testify at the sensational trial in Florida in late 1991, he felt compelled to publicly take stock of his life. His Massachusetts approval ratings were startlingly low, and for the first time in 30 years, he seemed in danger of losing his Senate seat. "I recognize my own shortcomings," Kennedy said in an extraordinary speech at Harvard's Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School of Government. "I realize that I alone am responsible for them, and I am the one who must confront them."

What went unnoticed that dramatic day was Kennedy's guest: Sitting in the packed audience was 38-year-old Vicki Reggie, a Washington lawyer he had been quietly dating for four months, during a period when daily details emerged about Kennedy's drinking with his son and Smith over that Easter weekend in Palm Beach.

Like her husband, Vicki Reggie grew up in a large and very political family. Her father, Edmund, a retired Louisiana judge and lawyer, helped deliver his state for vice presidential candidate John F. Kennedy at the 1956 Democratic convention and developed a close social relationship with the family.

Their paths crossed several times over the years, but 22 years his junior, Vicki was from another generation. And then, she invited him to a 40th anniversary dinner she was having for her parents. At the time, she was a successful banking lawyer and partner in her firm, a single mother with an active life and many friends.

They soon began dating, and her friends report a very old-fashioned suitor.

"He did a very chivalrous courtship," said friend Barbara Smith. "He called, he always showed up at the door with flowers." And most importantly, friends said, he lavished attention on her two young children by a previous marriage.

The couple married a year later, in July 1992, and they went from their honeymoon straight to the Democratic convention, where Vicki's first act as a political spouse was to greet 500 people at a party the couple hosted for the Massachusetts delegation. She gave up practicing law by 1997, reportedly to ensure that she would never be faced with any conflicts of interest, and advocates for many of the social issues her husband champions, particularly gun control.

Washington friend Pam Covington surmised that Vicki's "upbringing made the transition easy -- she's from a close family herself, she's political, she shares his faith."

Friends describe Vicki as a well-informed mother hen, the premier "go-to" in any crisis.

"I was having a surprise birthday party for my husband about 20 years ago and I was baking a cake. I had young kids and I was in such a hurry that I frosted the cake too soon and it fell apart," Smith recalled. "The first thing I did was pick up the phone and call Vicki, and she showed up with three cakes -- of different varieties."