In October 1957, a twenty-five-year-old law student at the University of Virginia named Edward Moore Kennedy drove to Purchase, New York, to deliver a speech at Manhattanville College. The occasion was the dedication of a new gymnasium named in honor of his late sister Kathleen, who had died in a plane crash nine years earlier. Ted was the youngest of the Kennedy brothers. He had been expelled from Harvard for cheating, served in the Army, and was now trying to build a career in the shadow of his famous family. After the ceremony, he attended a tea reception and scanned the room. His eyes landed on a blonde student named Joan Bennett, a senior music major from Bronxville who had grown up in a comfortable Catholic family and worked as a teenage model in television advertisements. He turned to his sister Jean Kennedy Smith, a classmate of Joan’s at Manhattanville, and asked, “Who’s the blonde?” Jean introduced them. Within minutes, Ted was talking to Joan, and by the end of the evening, he had her phone number. He returned to Charlottesville the next day and called her that night. What followed was a long-distance courtship conducted by telephone and airplane. Ted phoned Joan every night from law school and regularly flew to visit her on campus. They went on heavily chaperoned dates at his family’s home in Hyannis Port, took ski trips to Stowe, Vermont, and spent weekends at each other’s schools. During her Christmas vacation, Ted took Joan skiing for the first time. She later said that was when she fell in love with him. The courtship was a whirlwind, and by the spring of 1958, they were engaged. The engagement, however, was not without hesitation. Joan, twenty-one years old and about to graduate, was nervous about marrying a man she did not know well. Ted had his own doubts. But Joseph P. Kennedy, the family patriarch, insisted that the wedding proceed. On November 29, 1958, Ted and Joan were married at St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church in Bronxville, New York. The ceremony was a small family affair, held just weeks after Ted’s brother Jack had won reelection to the Senate. Cardinal Francis Spellman, the Archbishop of New York, personally blessed the couple. Joan wore a gown designed by Priscilla of Boston, and Ted’s brother Robert served as his best man. The reception was held at the Bennett family home, after which the newlyweds left for a honeymoon in the Caribbean. They moved to Charlottesville, where Ted completed his law degree, and later to Boston, where he took a job as an assistant prosecutor. Joan, a classically trained pianist who had once imagined building a life around music, became the wife of a man who would soon be elected to the Senate. She was married to the youngest brother of a president and became part of a family that would endure tragedy after tragedy. The young man who had asked, “Who’s the blonde?” at a college tea in 1957 had married her just over a year later. Their marriage would last twenty-two years. 🌹