Victoria Reggie Kennedy - First Marriage

First Marriage

After law school, Reggie 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. She 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.

Reggie and Raclin had two children, Curran (born 1982) and Caroline (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.