Reflections on Ted Kennedy
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When I traveled briefly with the press corps covering Ted Kennedy’s abortive run against Jimmy Carter for the 1980 Democratic Presidential nomination, one of the stops was in Los Angeles for a campaign speech to MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund. The Kennedys had considered this constituency to be in their pocket since 1968, when Bobby made Caesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers part of his coalition and cause. On this particular evening in 1980, therefore, Teddy talked to his Hispanic audience as if they were family. At one point in his speech, he even tried a few sentences in Spanish, but they came out deformed by the Massachusetts accent. As the audience snickered, I heard someone in the press section behind me say in a scornful stage whisper, “Well, what do you expect? He couldn’t even pass Spanish at Harvard.â€
The faint undertone of skepticism that defined coverage of Kennedy twenty nine years ago (this was, it must be remembered, the candidate who became tongue-tied and incoherent when Roger Mudd lobbed him the softball question of why he wanted to become President) was based not only on post-Watergate cynicism about politics, but also a sense  that Teddy was too small a man to occupy Camelot, a mythic structure whose foundation had been very intentionally laid by Jackie after Jack’s death and enlarged in grand epic style after Bobby’s assassination. In part, Teddy was undone by the success of the Kennedy machine in making JFK and RFK into something more than mere political figures: heroes who had not only died for America’s sins but perhaps in fact been killed not so much by lone, crazed gunmen as by America’s dark nativism and the large conspiratorial forces pulling the levers behind the scenes. Who could follow such acts? Who could be more than Rosencranz and Guildenstern in the presence of such epic drama?
The reporters covering Teddy’s doomed run in 1980—an effort that his brother-in-law Steve Smith, political consigliere of the Kennedys since they stormed the White House in 1960 and came to regard it as their own private property, considered hopeless from the beginning, a looting of the family treasury that would produce little more than “therapy†for the younger brother who had always been the dangling modifier of the Kennedy narrative—derisively played “Hail to the Chief†on kazoos when he made an appearance. But they were also protective, not so much of Teddy himself, perhaps, as of the Kennedy Dream which was then a-borning.
There might be scoffing in the back of the Kennedy campaign bus, but there was not much in the way of investigative reporting on Chappaquiddick, an event so filled with craven irresponsibility that it was a prima facie case not only for unfitness for office but also for a felony charge never made. (It was left to a  journalistic outsider, Leo Damore, would finally do he work on the death of Mary Jo Kopechne that the mainstream press should have undertaken.)  Other aspects of Teddy’s career were also elided. The revolving-door sex that made his wife into a haunted creature, and the recreational drugs (according to a book later published by top Senate aide Richard Burke) that made his personal life look more Caligula than Camelot. And more damning even than this, the fact that in spite of  his much ballyhooed “adoption†of his brothers’ fatherless children, Teddy was a figure of moral chaos whose own excesses gave the younger Kennedy males tacit permission to turn Hyannis into a sort of homegrown version of Lord of the Flies.
This journalistic safe conduct pass offered tenuously in 1980 is today a sort of active collaboration. And this is why The Last Kennedy is now widely eulogized as The Last Lion. It was never Teddy himself who was off limits to the press, but the Kennedy Dream itself whose shaky curator he became and which he made inseparable, in his most significant accomplishment, from the Liberal Dream. The moral of his tale is taken to be that his failure to become president benefited the country because it allowed him to shape a generation of humanitarian legislation in the Senate. Personally flawed, perhaps, but possessed of a certain defaced magnificence. So at the end of his days, the media helped Teddy acquire his own minor myth as tribune to the underclass that in time may, with careful tending, warrant him a place in the unique political afterlife occupied by his brothers. And perhaps this myth, in time, will get the clear-eyed examination that it deserves.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNaasFvvFlE
One of the lowest moments in American politics of the last 25 years. Probably won’t be shown in Chris Matthews’s slobberfest tonight.
Ted was a freaking womanizing drunk who should be in prison right now for the untimely death of Mary Jo Kopekne in 1969. Lets not try to polish up his image. Call a scotch soaked liberal what he was , HD.
It is difficult for me to respect a person who uses religion merely as a tool for power.
He and Mario Cuomo led the public charge against the religion they called their own by denying it’s moral and ethical tenets, thus encouraging other Catholics to abandon them as well.
But abandonment wasn’t enough. They had to be destroyed. In fact, all moral and ethical norms and standards had to be destroyed in order to bring about the New World Order where man is his own god and God be damned.
Kennedy would not know that many people who never abandoned the true Catholic faith will be praying for his soul. But they must also wonder if God’s mercy can be or should be equated with his perfect justice.
With the left now blaming his absence/death on the demise of Obama’s health plan, how can he RIP?
I have nothing good to say about him but hope that in his very last moments that he took his religion seriously because according to how he lived his life it was obviously a moral disaster. What is he a lion of now? Probably nothing.
I am not going to cry for him. He screwed military personnel out of the ability to turn in accured leave in the late 70s. Up till that time military personnel could turn in 60 days of leave that they had accured every time they renlisted. Good old Teddy caut that back to 60 days for a entire 20 years of service. Let’s don’t even mention the lawyer scam that the ADA bill has become or the damage that Title IX has done to mens sports in college. Any of the bill that this idiot touched didn’t work. But he as one of the Kennedy Royals, of a bootlegger father, that was a NAZI lover under that Communist FDR.
The Kennedys. from the father to the children, were corrupt to the core; womanizers, drunks, Mafia associates, self-promoting politicians who acted like royalty .. all scum, and that’s only the sons of the Nazi-loving ambassador to Britain who hated the English!
It is said you shouldn’t say anything bad about the dead. He is dead, GOOD!
I’m glad to see some sober assessments here (pun intended!) of Ted Kennedy and his failings as a human being. Then, when you stack up some of the disastrous legislation (anti-American & anti-national security) he either authored or fought for, that adds more fuel to the fire. As well, his disgraceful treatment of Robert Bork is in a demented class all its own (joined by the hapless, clueless Joe Biden as well). Finally, I had not realized his disgraceful role in trying to undermine Ronald Reagan and his pro-American policies so perversely and with the intent of a traitor at worst, power-mad asshat at best. SO, some anti-jihadists claim that the only good terrorist is a dead terrorist, to paraphrase for Kennedy, the only good Kennedy is a silent and totally inactive one. Yes, his failed bid for the Presidency was, for him AND the Kennedy power trip, some measure of justice for his inhumane and unacceptable behavior re the negligent homicide of Mary Jo Kopechne.
not of this clan was worth sweat on a pigs anus. but mr. ted he the worse. feel no sorrow for any of this so called Camelot crew. More like Halloween sequeled too too many times, please let the rest stop reproducing anymore like him or them. English citizens were killed because of fadder Joe Kennedy the rum runner. What idiots these Democrats and liberal are, they are ruining the country fast.