Ted Kennedy remembered

“Rose didn’t have triplets,” Texas political operative Robert Strauss famously said in 1980, nastily suggesting that Ted Kennedy fell short of the standards set by his two older brothers.

It’s probably true he lacked the intellectual heft of John and Robert, and for many years he seemed to display the spoiled temperament of a very wealthy and very coddled young man, a man for whom all obstacles, even obstacles of his own making, were cleared, and for whom all problems were magically solved. He was thrown out of Harvard for cheating on an exam, but somehow subsequently readmitted. With no experience of elective office and no other obvious qualifications, he was essentially handed his eldest brother’s senate seat the moment he reached the constitutionally mandated minimum age of 30 (the seat had been kept warm by a family political retainer named Benjamin Smith on the understanding that he wouldn’t seek re-election once Ted was able to run). His major speeches were written by others. He developed a reputation as a womaniser—a reputation he of course shared with his two brothers—but also, after his brothers’ assassinations, as a problem drinker. And then there was Chappaquiddick; not only did he behave with appalling irresponsibility in the immediate aftermath of the accident, but he then convened his brothers’ familiar brain trust—including Ted Sorensen and Robert McNamara—to craft an eloquent mea culpa for him to deliver on national television. Even his putative expressions of deep personal remorse were the product of other hands.

President Kennedy once called Ted “the best natural politician in the family,” but there was initially plenty of reason to doubt this assessment.  He was frequently stumbling and inarticulate on the stump and in debate. He showed himself incapable of explaining his presidential candidacy in 1980 when asked about it by a sympathetic journalist (and close friend). The campaign itself was oddly ill-timed and badly conceived; he probably could have had the nomination for the asking in any of the three previous election cycles, but instead waited to challenge a sitting president of his own party, an undertaking almost certainly doomed to failure (and almost guaranteed to make enemies of many natural allies). His behaviour after losing the nomination was uncharacteristically graceless and unprofessional.

Still, if one looks more closely, JFK may have been right: signs of extraordinary political talent were there from the start. He had the gregarious bravura of his legendary maternal grandfather, “Honeyfitz” Fitzgerald, the mayor of Boston. Neither of his two older brothers had this hail-fellow-well-met quality;  both were uncomfortable in crowds, and neither liked to be touched. But Ted seemed to thrive, and to exult, in the messy business of personal campaigning. And more tellingly, although he arrived in the US senate with the sort of reputation, political and personal, that traditionally would have consigned him to impotence and isolation in that clubby institution, he managed to win over the old right-wing southern dinosaurs who actually ran the place, the Allen Ellenders and Richard Russells and John Stennises, and make them supporters and allies. Most tellingly of all, he forged a productive working relationship with President Lyndon Johnson, and succeeded in sustaining it when brother Robert was carrying on his vendetta against the White House, and even after he challenged Johnson for the Democratic nomination in 1968. This required political and interpersonal skills of a very high order.

And as a result, once he realised that he was never going to be president, he was able to redirect his energies to become perhaps the most effective legislator of his time. There is no aspect of American social policy that remained untouched by him, not civil rights, women’s rights, education, transportation, care for the developmentally challenged, energy and the environment, or, most notably, health care. He had an almost uncanny ability to make alliances with ideological opponents across the senate aisle; the same people who vilified him in their fundraiser mailings co-sponsored bills with him. He had the stature—and the political security—to remain an unapologetic liberal champion throughout the Reagan and Bush eras, when such was no longer fashionable and when many of his former comrades-in-arms cowered pusillanimously. His opposition to the second Iraq war showed courage and vision during a shameful period when many of his Democratic senate allies were manifesting a notable absence of both. And astonishingly, this indifferent scholar and presumed mediocre intellect who had cheated on a Spanish exam for which he had not studied, transformed himself into an assiduous, passionate, and able student. On matters close to his heart, he was said to be better informed than any other member of the senate.  Tom Daschle, the former Democratic leader of that body, once described with awed amusement how quickly and completely Ted Kennedy could review the language of a proposed health bill, flipping the pages at lightning speed and unerringly parsing its abstruse language.

Over the course of an almost 50-year senate career and an enormously complicated 77-year life, he proved himself to have reserves of character and skill that no one would have predicted. And it may fairly be said that while he possibly lacked the brilliance of his two older brothers, his ultimate impact on American society was greater.  He never gave up.  And he always stood for something beyond himself.