Victoria Reggie Kennedy

Victoria Reggie Kennedy

Victoria Reggie Kennedy is of Lebanese degeneration as her grandparents were actually from Beirut and were Maronites who settled in Crowley after migrating to the United States. The grandparents of the Victoria Kennedy had become the important role player in the local church of Roman Catholic but their children did not adopt this line and they got involved in politics and business. After completing her education from the law school, Victoria Reggie Kennedy joined Judge Robert A. Sprecher who was the judge in Chicago of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, for a prestigious post. Being an attorney, Victoria got her specialization in banking law. Grier C. Raclin was her first husband who was a telecommunications attorney. She got married with Grier in a church of Crowley, Louisiana in 1981 in which around 400 guests were invited. Victoria Reggie Kennedy has two children from her first husband Grier C. Raclin. The first meeting between Ted Kennedy and Victoria was when she got a summer internship in the senate office of mailroom the year after completing her graduation. They got engaged in March 1992 and married on 3rd July 1992.

Victoria Anne Reggie Kennedy was born in Crowley, Louisiana on February 26, 1954. She is the widow of late Ted Kennedy and a lawyer. She was born to Edmund M. Reggie who was a banker and judge of Louisiana and Doris Ann Boustany Reggie who was a national committee woman for the Democrats. She was 2nd of the six children of the couple. AGE — 77; born Feb. 22, 1932, in Boston; died Aug. 25, 2009, in Hyannis Port, Mass. Bachelor’s degree, Harvard University, 1956; law degree, University of Virginia Law School, 1959. First elected to the Senate in a 1962 special election to fill the vacancy left when his brother, John F. Kennedy, became president. Sen. Kennedy was re-elected to six-year terms in 1964, 1970, 1976, 1982, 1988, 1994, 2000 and 2006. Married to second wife, Victoria Reggie Kennedy, in 1992; children, Curran, Caroline, Kara, Edward Jr., and Patrick. Divorced from his first wife, Joan, in 1982. “For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.” — Addressing the 1980 Democratic National Convention.

Vicki Kennedy

Vicki Kennedy

Edward Kennedy turned to his wife for help. In two cases 30 years apart, his first wife and then his second wife — opposites in personality and strengths — both rallied to his cause. In 1964, when Kennedy spent months in the hospital recovering from a broken back, it was his first wife, Joan, then 28, who hit the campaign trail to push his re-election to the Senate. Kennedy had won the Massachusetts seat, once held by his older brother John, two years before in a special election. In 1994, when Ted Kennedy's political career had crested short of the White House and his reputation was tarnished by years of hard living, another woman stood by him. Vicki Kennedy campaigned for the senator in a tough re-election fight against businessman Mitt Romney, in a strong anti-incumbent year. To Vicki, politics has come so naturally that she has been spoken of as a possible successor to her husband. To Joan, political life came less easily — and at great personal cost.

Ted Kennedy met Joan Bennett in 1957. She was a student of piano, a part-time model, and a college friend of his sister Jean. John Kennedy called her "the dish." Blond and stylish, she joined Ethel and Jackie as Kennedy wives: fashionable, attractive, pitching in on the Kennedy political agenda and publicly ignoring rumors of frequent infidelity on the part of their husbands. "What she was up against with Ted Kennedy was not easy," says J. Randy Taraborrelli, author of Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot. The course of Joan and Ted Kennedy's 24-year marriage included the assassinations of his brothers John and Robert; the bone cancer of their son Edward Jr., then 12 years old; multiple miscarriages; rumors of Ted's philandering; and Joan's battle with alcoholism.Throughout, Joan was open about her own demons: trying to fit in with the Kennedy clan, fearing for her husband's safety. She went to a psychiatrist when it was taboo in Washington, and admitted it. When she joined Alcoholics Anonymous, she revealed that, too.

"My personality was more shy and retiring," she said in her 1985 biography, Living with the Kennedys: The Joan Kennedy Story. "And so rather than get mad or ask questions concerning the rumors about Ted and his girlfriends, or really stand up for myself at all, it was easier for me to just go and have a few drinks and calm myself down as if I weren't hurt or angry." In July 1969, on the way home from a party, the senator's car went off a bridge at Chappaquiddick on Martha's Vineyard, drowning Mary Jo Kopechne, a young woman who worked on his brother Robert's presidential campaign. Ted Kennedy, who did not contact the police until eight hours afterward, pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident. It was an incident that irreparably damaged Kennedy's reputation, but in the manner of some political wives, Joan Kennedy stood by him and traveled with her husband to Pennsylvania for Kopechne's funeral. A month later, she suffered her third miscarriage.