The elder Kennedy says his dad and he discussed just once about his 1969 vehicle accident that killed the passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne of his dad.
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Ted Kennedy – despite backlash from his family.
For example, he recently told “60 Minutes” that his late father, Ted Kennedy, refused to acknowledge his alcohol addiction when Patrick and his siblings approached him about it years ago.
Also timed with the book’s release was a brief from the Kennedy Forum, the organization Patrick started past year that aims to recast the infrastructure around behavioral healthcare.
The ideas all sound pretty straightforward, but what is yet to be determined is whether Patrick-no longer a politician-can drive an agenda like that exclusively from his advocacy position. Anything you say, it’s disloyal.
Their efforts, he writes, were met with anger, and the senator explained that he had been working to address the problem himself, in consultation with his priest.
Patrick, the nephew of President John F. Kennedy, told The Globe he does have one important supporter: his mother Joan, who has fought her own addictions over the years. So chilly that he made a decision to run for Congress in 1994 without speaking with his dad first.
Kennedy’s brother, Ted Kennedy Jr., issued a statement Sunday saying he was heartbroken by that he called an inaccurate and unfair portrayal of their family.
“My brother’s memories of family occasions and especially our parents are very not the same as my own”, he wrote, although he failed to give details.
The book opens on Kennedy’s 2006 vehicle crash outside the U.S. Capitol – which his father downplayed as “a little fendah bendah” in his Boston accent – that he blamed on a mixture of Ambien and Phenergan.
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Kennedy remained in politics until 2010, when he decided not to run for Congress again, fearing the job would kill him. In his book, A Common Struggle: A Personal Journey Through the Past and Future of Mental Illness and Addiction, not only does he detail his own struggles, but that of members of his family. He writes that he has been sober for more than four years, and now lives with his wife, Amy, in New Jersey with their children. Feeling vindicated, the eulogy was presented by Kennedy, having a shaky voice, .
