Remembering Ted Kennedy, An Unremarkable Survivor

Conrad Black: Remembering Ted Kennedy, an unremarkable survivor
Posted: August 26, 2009, 7:26 PM by Ron Nurwisah
Conrad Black, U.S. Politics


The death of Edward M. Kennedy at 77, after 46 years in the U.S. Senate, appears to be the end of the Kennedy dynasty, which has been a prominent factor in American public life for half a century or more. Mr. Kennedy was a personally well-liked and reasonably assiduous legislator, whose notorious carousing and womanizing was generally indulged as the lusty Irish errantry of the youngest man in a family where he came by it honestly, and after his three older brothers and two of his sisters had died tragically.


Despite efforts to portray him as the “Lion of the Senate,” there is nothing for which Teddy Kennedy will be particularly remembered as a law-maker, though he was always a reliable vote for almost any leftist cause. He is complicit in the shambles of American public education by his endless truckling to the teachers’ unions. He was perhaps most closely identified with his long championship of universal medical care, and it may be assumed that in the immense current controversy on this issue, some effort will be made by the administration to retrieve some of its mismanagement of the debate by billing this beleaguered concept as “winning one for Teddy.”


Teddy Kennedy’s merit was that, compared to his older political brothers — President John F. Kennedy, whose place in the Senate he filled, and Senator Robert F. Kennedy — he was uncontroversial, and he was a survivor. It is generally thought that when he drove off a bridge on Nantucket Island in the summer of 1969, and his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned, and he left the scene, it was at least a case of negligence or driving under the influence of alcohol. But the combination of the connections of the Kennedys in Massachusetts and a widespread desire not to heap more sorrow on a family that had already endured two barbarous assassinations in six years caused the incident to recede without serious legal consequences. He did retire as Democratic whip in the Senate, and never held a leadership position after that.


He ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for president in 1980, against the incumbent, Jimmy Carter. If he had deferred this to 1984, 1988, or 1992, he might have been nominated, though he certainly would have lost badly to Ronald Reagan in 1980 or 1984.


The next generation of Kennedys has not been politically successful. Bobby’s son, Joseph Kennedy III, retired as a congressman. Esquire magazine’s famous deion of his qualifications for high public office — “Surviving childbirth” — could be equally applied to a number of his relatives. JFK’s daughter, Caroline, sought the Senate seat vacated by Hillary Clinton, but her initiative sank when she said “you know” 142 times in a one-hour television interview.


The Kennedy mystique was strong and durable, but it has passed.


The wonder is that it lasted as long as it did. Joseph Kennedy was a notoriously unethical but very successful financier. When Franklin D. Roosevelt named him the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (where he performed with distinction), he explained to guffaws from the press: “Set a thief to catch a thief.” As ambassador to the U.K. from 1938 to 1940, he was a disaster, a public defeatist and even a tepid Nazi sympathizer. His Kennedy Plan to deal with “the Jewish Problem” was a pretentious exercise in anti-Semitic banality. He was an overbearing father and his bullying a surgeon into performing an unsuccessful lobotomy on his slightly recessive daughter, Rosemary, would today be considered a criminal assault. He was an uncontrollable and braggartly womanizer.


Joseph Kennedy bankrolled his sons’ political careers and propelled them into public life. Jack and Bobby started out as overt collaborators of red-baiting, witch-hunting Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, Bobby serving on his staff with Roy Cohn. Richard Nixon was quite possibly defrauded of the 1960 election won by JFK. If the Alabama votes are counted properly, Nixon won the popular vote, and he was certainly cheated of Illinois’ electoral votes by the skulduggery of Chicago’s Mayor Daley.
John F. Kennedy’s 34 months as president are best remembered for the Bay of Pigs fiasco, his cool handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the beginning of the U.S. military build-up in South Vietnam, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the strong White House support for civil rights, and the tragic end in Dallas. He was a popular and stylish president, the youngest person ever elected to that office, and he was almost universally mourned. His record was perfectly defensible, but in no sense spectacular.


Robert Kennedy had been his brother’s attorney-general, and was engaged in fierce skirmishing with the ageless FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover. Bobby could not challenge the control of the Democrats of the elevated vice-president and former majority leader of the Senate, Lyndon B. Johnson. But he did parachute himself into New York and was elected U.S. senator, where he migrated ideologically from his McCarthyite past all the way out to the far left of that party, from being a Vietnam hawk to a cut-and-run dove.


Many doubted his sincerity in this metamorphosis, but to many others, his three-month campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1968 was a defining moment of their political lives, as he stirred the hopes of America in a terribly difficult year in which the country was riven by race riots and anti-war riots. Bobby was assassinated after winning the California Democratic primary, and two months after Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis. Teddy Kennedy inherited the family mantle that he retained until yesterday.


He was an amiable man who deserves admiration for persevering in public life after the horrible fates that befell his brothers. He provided a long Indian summer for a family that had an electrifying impact on the consciousness of America and the world, and he competently held and tended that light that has gradually but gently faded, these 40 years, and has now flickered out.


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