Ted Kennedy

Ted Kennedy is presented through brief encounters that turn political visibility into concrete objects and social obligations. The diary offers no sustained account of his life or political views; instead, it records his campaign posters, the people who handled them, and the small gap between a public campaign and the private encounters around it.

Campaign Posters and Publicity

On February 4, 1980, Jean Kennedy Smith and Kerry Kennedy came to Warhol’s office to choose Ted Kennedy campaign posters. The visit drew a full press contingent, and Warhol himself had to be photographed. The campaign thus entered the diary not as a speech or policy debate but as a carefully publicized selection of images, with the Kennedy family and the press gathered around the posters.

The Signing Without the Candidate

On March 3, Warhol went to the Brewster Gallery on Madison Avenue for a Ted Kennedy poster-signing event. He had spent the afternoon signing, but Ted Kennedy was in Massachusetts and did not appear. Warhol considered the event worthwhile only if the candidate himself had been there to sign as well. The absence made the posters’ purpose especially visible: they were campaign objects whose value depended, at least in part, on the candidate’s physical presence.

The event still gathered members of the Kennedy family. Kerry Kennedy and one of her sisters were there, as was Pat Lawford, who was paired with Warhol for photographs. Warhol noted that Kerry Kennedy sold the posters, priced at $750 and $2,000. The scene joined political promotion to celebrity-style staging: family members, posed photographs, a public signing, and expensive campaign material occupied the same afternoon.

A Telephone Call and the Campaign’s Purpose

By May, Ted Kennedy appeared in Warhol’s account in a more personal, though still fleeting, form. The senator called Warhol at the office, and Warhol found himself unable to end the call while also unsure what to say. His guess that the senator had nothing else to do was explicitly just a guess; the diary records the awkwardness of the exchange rather than revealing Kennedy’s reason for calling.

Warhol also recorded Fred Hughes’s explanation for why Kennedy had stayed in the race: to raise money for the U.S. Democratic Party. The observation places the campaign within the practical work of fundraising, while distinguishing the explanation from anything Kennedy himself said in the diary. Across the poster visit, the signing he missed, and the phone call, Kennedy remains a public figure glimpsed through other people’s preparations and Warhol’s brief, sometimes bemused observations.