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I had no idea that Ted Kenendy's wife, Vickie, is a Theta. Thank you for the head's up.
Victoria Reggie Kennedy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Victoria Reggie Kennedy
Victoria Reggie Kennedy in March 2009.
Born Victoria Anne Reggie
February 26, 1954 (1954-02-26) (age 55)
Victoria "Vicki" Reggie Kennedy (born February 26, 1954) is an American lawyer and the widow of U.S. Senator Edward Moore "Ted" Kennedy.
Early life and education
The second of six children, she was born Victoria Anne Reggie in Crowley, Louisiana to Louisiana judge and banker Edmund M. Reggie and Doris Ann Boustany Reggie, a Democratic national committeewoman. She is of Lebanese descent, as all her grandparents were Maronites from Lebanon, who immigrated to the U.S. and settled in Louisiana. Her grandparents became important players in the local Roman Catholic church and later their children became involved in business and politics.
Her immediate family was wealthy because of money from her mother's family's interest in the Bunny Bread baking concern in New Orleans, Louisiana. She was raised in a family that was constantly involved in politics and campaigns. At the 1956 Democratic National Convention, her father helped deliver his state for John F. Kennedy's unsuccessful bid for the vice-presidential nomination. Over time, John Kennedy developed a close social relationship with the family. Her mother cast the only Louisiana delegate vote for Ted Kennedy at the 1980 Democratic National Convention, although State Senator Tony Guarisco may have also been recruited to vote for Kennedy.
She attended parochial schools growing up and was a straight-A student. She attended Newcomb College at Tulane University in New Orleans, where she graduated with a bachelor of arts in English, magna cum laude was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and was president of the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority.
She then received her Juris Doctor degree, summa cum laude in 1979 from Tulane University Law School. There she was a member of Tulane Law Review. Her education at Tulane, along with twenty years of other Tulane tuition for her brothers and sisters, was paid for by scholarships awarded by a political ally of her father.
Early career and family
After law school, she clerked for Judge Robert Arthur Sprecher at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago. As an attorney, she specialized in bank law.
Reggie met her first husband, Grier C. Raclin, a telecommunications attorney (who later became a senior executive at Charter Communications in St. Louis, Missouri), when they clerked together at the Everett McKinley Dirksen Federal Courthouse in Chicago. Their 1981 church wedding was in Crowley and "feted 400 guests with a week's worth of parties."
Following marriage, the couple moved to Washington, D.C., where she practiced banking and savings and loan law and restructuring and bankruptcy law for Keck, Mahin & Cate. She was made partner there, and was known to be "charismatic and hard-driving" and a tough negotiator in settlement talks and "as a real star" for her ability to work on complicated financial transactions.
She and Grier Raclin have two children: Curran Raclin (a son, born 1982) and Caroline Raclin (a daughter, born 1985). They were divorced in 1990. Upon her divorce, she was left to juggle her career as a lawyer with her role as a single mother of two young children.
Remarriage and later career
While the Kennedy and Reggie families were friends for many years, Vicki remembers (but Senator Kennedy did not) their first meeting when Vicki was a summer intern in his Senate office's mailroom the year following her college graduation. They began dating after meeting again in June 1991 at a party celebrating her parents' 40th wedding anniversary. Ted Kennedy said of this meeting, "I had known Vicki before, but this was the first time I think I really saw her." The relationship became serious in September 1991. They were engaged in March 1992, and married July 3, 1992, in a civil ceremony at his home in McLean, Virginia. His political career had suffered from a long period of womanizing, drinking, and adverse publicity, and she is credited with stabilizing his personal life and helping him resume a productive career in the Senate. Kennedy was devoted to her two children.
In Kennedy's 1994 senatorial re-election campaign against Mitt Romney, she was credited by The New York Times with "giving him a political advantage in a difficult contest." For a Boston, Massachusetts, reception she organized, 1,200 influential New England women met five of Kennedy's Senate colleagues. In his campaigns and his senatorial work, she became his principal assistant and closest political advisor. By 1997, she no longer practiced law. She came to the aid of the greater Kennedy family following the 1999 plane crash that took the life of John F. Kennedy, Jr.
She is president and co-founder of Common Sense about Kids and Guns, an advocacy group begun in 1999 which seeks to reduce gun deaths and injuries to children in the U.S. She is a member of the board of trustees of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, and has served on the board of Stop Handgun Violence in Boston.
Following her husband's May 2008 diagnosis of brain cancer, she became his primary caregiver, dealing with the Kennedy clan along with Ted's political connections. She assisted him in planning his course of treatment. Reports indicated that he expressed the wish that his wife would succeed him in office, and speculation towards that possibility continued during his illness. However, upon his death she indicated no interest in assuming her husband's Senate seat, even temporarily.
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