Ted Kennedy wasn’t just a tormented drunk!
He was also an awful absentee dad who ignored his desperate kids’ pleas to check into rehab!
That’s the shocking claim in a new tell-all book by Ted’s son Patrick — and the charge is ripping the late senator’s powerful clan to shreds!
Family members are attacking Patrick, 48, for breaking the Kennedy “code of silence” and revealing the inner workings of the dynasty. But Patrick, a scandal-scarred former Rhode Island congressman, is sticking to his guns.
Patrick said his book, “A Common Struggle: A Personal Journey Through the Past and Future of Mental Illness and Addiction,” was written to help him cope with his troubled childhood.
His father was scarred by the 1960s murders of his older brothers, President John F. Kennedy and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. Ted lavished more attention on the fatherless children of JFK and RFK than his own three kids — late daughter Kara, who died at 51, and sons Ted Jr., 54, and Patrick.
Ted never really recovered from his brothers’ grim deaths, Patrick wrote.
“My father went on in silent desperation for much of his life, self-medicating and unwittingly passing his unprocessed trauma onto my sister, brother and me,” added Patrick, who has battled drug abuse and depression for much of his life.
“My dad never got to grieve. He had to be there for the country. He had to be there for my family. He had to be there for my Uncle Bobby’s 11 children, and John [JFK Jr.] and Caroline.”
By the early ’90s, Ted’s drinking was so out-of-control that his concerned relatives staged an intervention to convince the patriarch to get help.
After his kin gathered for the showdown, Patrick wrote: “I remember him closing the sliding doors. And then sitting down in his big, blue suede chair and we all said, ‘We’re worried about your drinking. You need to get help. And he stood up, you know, opened the sliding door and walked out.
“And then he wrote me a letter. And he basically said, ‘For the time being, you know, don’t think of coming by to visit.’
“He felt we really had no place, no place whatsoever to question him. Go mind your own business. Back off! That was the message.”
Now, the Kennedys are delivering their own message to Patrick — that he’s a traitor to the family!
His big brother, Ted Jr., called Patrick’s book an “inaccurate and unfair portrayal of our family” that left him “heartbroken.”
Patrick concedes his stepmother, Vicki, 61, who is the senator’s widow, feels the same as Ted Jr.
Patrick also revealed his 79-year-old mom, Joan — who has battled booze and divorced Ted in 1982 — is the only family member who is siding with him!
A family insider told The ENQUIRER: “It’s an all-out war inside the family. It’s the first time a member of the Kennedys has broken away and spilled family secrets!”
