Edward Kennedy: A Strong Finish
by Judy Bachrach
AUGUST 26, 2009 TAGS:
“I have lived a blessed time,” Ted Kennedy recently informed a large adulatory audience at Harvard University. It was the very school from which he was expelled for cheating on a Spanish exam almost six decades ago, a dismal moment – one of several -- that defined Kennedy’s early life and provided the template for what his detractors were certain would be an indifferent future. Yet from Harvard on, nothing was predictable about him. In the end he was readmitted and did graduate. In the end, too, he pursued a political career that alternated consistently between the illustrious and the disastrous.
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In a way, the last big speech of the senior senator from Massachusetts, delivered in a shaky voice as he was battling brain cancer, was emblematic of his entire life. It was brave – and yet (given the grueling nature of his illness) it was also foolhardy. It was a thin shard of hope illuminating a last tragic act. And it was a stab at redemption.
As is classically the case whenever a Kennedy speaks, his last oration was cheered by a crush of famous well-wishers. In attendance were Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, the brilliant cellist Yo-Yo Ma, Vice President Joseph R. Biden, his damp-eyed niece Caroline Kennedy and hundreds of youthful admirers. Harvard gave him an honorary degree to celebrate his “lifelong commitment to public service and tireless efforts as a champion for a range for social services.”
Somehow or other, in other words, Kennedy had managed to transmute even his darkest passages into the stuff of eulogy. Had he failed, this obituary would have begun not with a last moment of triumph, but rather a 40-year-old incident of manslaughter. Chappaquiddick, a shocking episode that resulted in the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne, a young female friend of Kennedy’s, would have been his most vivid legacy – largely because Kennedy, unwilling to admit to the world that he had been in the company of an attractive woman, never sounded the alarm to save her.
For years thereafter everything Kennedy had hoped and worked for was dashed: his pursuit of respect and respectability, his desperate need to get out from under the shadow of his more brilliant brothers, and his own feverish presidential ambitions.
Edward Moore Kennedy was by the time of his death the sole surviving son of the Rose and Joseph Kennedy, at once the luckiest and the most unfortunate male of their wealthy and powerful family. From earliest times he’d been the classic youngest brother outdazzled by not just Jack the golden president, but also the heroic young Joe Kennedy, who fought and died during World War II and the brilliant and mercurial Robert Kennedy, whose pursuit of the presidency ended in death. “The disadvantage of my position is being constantly compared to two brothers of such superior ability,” he once complained.
By contrast, young Ted was a consistently mediocre student whose father, a ruthless businessman and onetime ambassador to the Court of St. James, always managed to smooth his path, however rocky. Old Joseph Kennedy was the reason Ted never saw action in Korea at the height of the war, but did get readmitted to Harvard. Early scrapes while attending the University of Virginia Law School – Ted was charged with reckless driving and with driving without a license – were treated with the same indulgence. Even the young man’s turn in politics was his father’s doing. In 1962 Ted became a Massachusetts senator at age 30 only because by then old Joseph had convinced everyone – older brother the president, the Massachusetts governor, Foster Furcolo, and assorted Democratic operatives – that the office by rights belonged to his least promising son.
At the same time he was forging ahead, Ted was working hard to undo his own victories. In 1958 he married badly: As time went by, Joan Bennett, a shy young woman with no great love of politics, grew troubled by Ted’s perpetual womanizing (an age-old Kennedy characteristic) and turned to alcohol for company. Tragedy in those early years was everywhere and consolation in short supply. In November 1963, when John Kennedy was assassinated, Ted learned the news while sitting in the House of Representatives.
When Robert Kennedy was murdered in June 1968, the young Massachusetts senator alternated between depression and frenzy. He wondered if he was next on a hit list. “He spent a lot of the summer on his boat at the Cape,” Anne Taylor Fleming wrote in the New York Times magazine a decade later. “People came and went, friends, women, one after the other. He could not share his mourning with his wife. What solace he took, one friend said, was from ‘the freneticism of booze and sex.’ Afterward, there were times of great guilt.”
One year after his second brother’s murder, Kennedy drove off from a party late at night ; by his side was a young woman who had once been Robert Kennedy’s secretary. That passenger was Kopechne. It was observed that night that Kennedy drove in none too steady a fashion; before long his Oldsmobile Delmont 88 toppled off Dike Bridge straight into a pond by Chappaquiddick Island. Kennedy managed to extricate only himself. He called neither the police nor an ambulance that night. The only call he made was to a family attorney the next morning.
Kennedy would insist the next day that he had tried in vain to save Kopechne – “repeatedly dove down to the car in an attempt to see if the passenger was still alive” was how he phrased it to local police after the girl’s body was found. But the Washington Star, in a famous series, proved the implausibility of his tale. The strong current would have drowned Kennedy had any rescue attempt been made.
Chappaquiddick was by no means the only reason Kennedy never attained the nation’s highest office in 1980. “Why do you want to be president?” Kennedy was asked by the CBS journalist Roger Mudd, who got the interview because he happened to be a family friend.
“Well, I’m … ummmm…,” Kennedy began, and it went downhill from there. Most of the interview was packed with “ummmms.” He had no notion of why he wanted to defeat Jimmy Carter, a standing Democratic president, in the primaries. As bad, Kennedy’s campaign, as I discovered when I covered it, was riddled with unprofessionalism and eccentricity. Journalists were loaded onto campaign buses dubbed (by Kennedy aides) “the Magical Mystery tour.” The candidate drank heavily; his nighttime excursions continued apace; there were rumors he tried, loudly and unsuccessfully, to gain entry into the hotel room of a resistant network journalist.
But after that defeat everything changed. Within two years, Kennedy divorced Joan. A decade later he married the Washington D.C. lawyer Victoria Reggie, a happier union. As senator, Kennedy found the purpose that had eluded him as a presidential candidate – especially in the field of health care. His young son Edward (now a health care lawyer) had his leg amputated above the knee after a malignant tumor was discovered; his other son Patrick (now a congressman from Rhode Island) had a benign spinal tumor removed, and Kennedy always said that the same kind of excellent medical care that was extended to his family should be the right of every American.
To that end, in 2007 Kennedy co-sponsored the establishment of a national childhood cancer database and in 2008 the Birth Defects Prevention Act. Six years ago, Kennedy signed an open letter to the administration of George W. Bush, begging it to prod states into purchasing pharmaceuticals in bulk so prices would go down. He co-sponsored an act to alleviate the disastrous nursing shortage – and another against limiting welfare for immigrants. Kennedy staffers, as I learned when I wrote about the senator in the early ’80s, were constantly peppered with health questions from the desperate phoning in: especially parents who had children with cancer but no money for doctors or life-saving procedures. Many of these calls came from non-constituents. Kennedy was their touchstone, someone they would consult when luck ran out.
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Last year he was at his most remarkable. “For me, this is a season of hope, new hope for a justice and fair prosperity for the many…,” Kennedy said, abandoning his sickbed to support Barack Obama for president. “And this is the cause of my life,” he added. “New hope that we will break the old gridlock and guarantee that every American -- north, south, east, west, young, old -- will have decent, quality health care as a fundamental right and not a privilege.”
Word had it that Kennedy’s wife had begged him to stay at home, but the senator overruled her. He was always at his best when fighting for others, when self no longer intruded. When the speech was over, he fainted.
In a way, the last big speech of the senior senator from Massachusetts, delivered in a shaky voice as he was battling brain cancer, was emblematic of his entire life. It was brave – and yet (given the grueling nature of his illness) it was also foolhardy. It was a thin shard of hope illuminating a last tragic act. And it was a stab at redemption.As is classically the case whenever a Kennedy speaks, his last oration was cheered by a crush of famous well-wishers. In attendance were Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, the brilliant cellist Yo-Yo Ma, Vice President Joseph R. Biden, his damp-eyed niece Caroline Kennedy and hundreds of youthful admirers. Harvard gave him an honorary degree to celebrate his “lifelong commitment to public service and tireless efforts as a champion for a range for social services.”
Somehow or other, in other words, Kennedy had managed to transmute even his darkest passages into the stuff of eulogy. Had he failed, this obituary would have begun not with a last moment of triumph, but rather a 40-year-old incident of manslaughter. Chappaquiddick, a shocking episode that resulted in the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne, a young female friend of Kennedy’s, would have been his most vivid legacy – largely because Kennedy, unwilling to admit to the world that he had been in the company of an attractive woman, never sounded the alarm to save her.
For years thereafter everything Kennedy had hoped and worked for was dashed: his pursuit of respect and respectability, his desperate need to get out from under the shadow of his more brilliant brothers, and his own feverish presidential ambitions.
Edward Moore Kennedy was by the time of his death the sole surviving son of the Rose and Joseph Kennedy, at once the luckiest and the most unfortunate male of their wealthy and powerful family. From earliest times he’d been the classic youngest brother outdazzled by not just Jack the golden president, but also the heroic young Joe Kennedy, who fought and died during World War II and the brilliant and mercurial Robert Kennedy, whose pursuit of the presidency ended in death. “The disadvantage of my position is being constantly compared to two brothers of such superior ability,” he once complained.
By contrast, young Ted was a consistently mediocre student whose father, a ruthless businessman and onetime ambassador to the Court of St. James, always managed to smooth his path, however rocky. Old Joseph Kennedy was the reason Ted never saw action in Korea at the height of the war, but did get readmitted to Harvard. Early scrapes while attending the University of Virginia Law School – Ted was charged with reckless driving and with driving without a license – were treated with the same indulgence. Even the young man’s turn in politics was his father’s doing. In 1962 Ted became a Massachusetts senator at age 30 only because by then old Joseph had convinced everyone – older brother the president, the Massachusetts governor, Foster Furcolo, and assorted Democratic operatives – that the office by rights belonged to his least promising son.At the same time he was forging ahead, Ted was working hard to undo his own victories. In 1958 he married badly: As time went by, Joan Bennett, a shy young woman with no great love of politics, grew troubled by Ted’s perpetual womanizing (an age-old Kennedy characteristic) and turned to alcohol for company. Tragedy in those early years was everywhere and consolation in short supply. In November 1963, when John Kennedy was assassinated, Ted learned the news while sitting in the House of Representatives.
When Robert Kennedy was murdered in June 1968, the young Massachusetts senator alternated between depression and frenzy. He wondered if he was next on a hit list. “He spent a lot of the summer on his boat at the Cape,” Anne Taylor Fleming wrote in the New York Times magazine a decade later. “People came and went, friends, women, one after the other. He could not share his mourning with his wife. What solace he took, one friend said, was from ‘the freneticism of booze and sex.’ Afterward, there were times of great guilt.”
One year after his second brother’s murder, Kennedy drove off from a party late at night ; by his side was a young woman who had once been Robert Kennedy’s secretary. That passenger was Kopechne. It was observed that night that Kennedy drove in none too steady a fashion; before long his Oldsmobile Delmont 88 toppled off Dike Bridge straight into a pond by Chappaquiddick Island. Kennedy managed to extricate only himself. He called neither the police nor an ambulance that night. The only call he made was to a family attorney the next morning.
Kennedy would insist the next day that he had tried in vain to save Kopechne – “repeatedly dove down to the car in an attempt to see if the passenger was still alive” was how he phrased it to local police after the girl’s body was found. But the Washington Star, in a famous series, proved the implausibility of his tale. The strong current would have drowned Kennedy had any rescue attempt been made.Chappaquiddick was by no means the only reason Kennedy never attained the nation’s highest office in 1980. “Why do you want to be president?” Kennedy was asked by the CBS journalist Roger Mudd, who got the interview because he happened to be a family friend.
“Well, I’m … ummmm…,” Kennedy began, and it went downhill from there. Most of the interview was packed with “ummmms.” He had no notion of why he wanted to defeat Jimmy Carter, a standing Democratic president, in the primaries. As bad, Kennedy’s campaign, as I discovered when I covered it, was riddled with unprofessionalism and eccentricity. Journalists were loaded onto campaign buses dubbed (by Kennedy aides) “the Magical Mystery tour.” The candidate drank heavily; his nighttime excursions continued apace; there were rumors he tried, loudly and unsuccessfully, to gain entry into the hotel room of a resistant network journalist.
But after that defeat everything changed. Within two years, Kennedy divorced Joan. A decade later he married the Washington D.C. lawyer Victoria Reggie, a happier union. As senator, Kennedy found the purpose that had eluded him as a presidential candidate – especially in the field of health care. His young son Edward (now a health care lawyer) had his leg amputated above the knee after a malignant tumor was discovered; his other son Patrick (now a congressman from Rhode Island) had a benign spinal tumor removed, and Kennedy always said that the same kind of excellent medical care that was extended to his family should be the right of every American.
To that end, in 2007 Kennedy co-sponsored the establishment of a national childhood cancer database and in 2008 the Birth Defects Prevention Act. Six years ago, Kennedy signed an open letter to the administration of George W. Bush, begging it to prod states into purchasing pharmaceuticals in bulk so prices would go down. He co-sponsored an act to alleviate the disastrous nursing shortage – and another against limiting welfare for immigrants. Kennedy staffers, as I learned when I wrote about the senator in the early ’80s, were constantly peppered with health questions from the desperate phoning in: especially parents who had children with cancer but no money for doctors or life-saving procedures. Many of these calls came from non-constituents. Kennedy was their touchstone, someone they would consult when luck ran out.
Last year he was at his most remarkable. “For me, this is a season of hope, new hope for a justice and fair prosperity for the many…,” Kennedy said, abandoning his sickbed to support Barack Obama for president. “And this is the cause of my life,” he added. “New hope that we will break the old gridlock and guarantee that every American -- north, south, east, west, young, old -- will have decent, quality health care as a fundamental right and not a privilege.” Word had it that Kennedy’s wife had begged him to stay at home, but the senator overruled her. He was always at his best when fighting for others, when self no longer intruded. When the speech was over, he fainted.
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