Edward M. Kennedy has been the too-easy butt of too many dismissive comments for too much of his career. The runt of the litter of the most complex, compelling, and complicated family in American public life, Kennedy found himself with leadership, if not greatness, thrust upon him in a clan where a father and three elder brothers either achieved or were born to it. And, with one major black mark, and that perhaps, when the full scorecard of his life is toted up, the deciding chapter, Chappaquiddick and the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, he has carried the better flag of American liberalism against all attacks and when too few others have been willing to do so.
Living in an overlapping set of spotlights, many of them particularly unpleasant, and living through and speaking for his family during a continuing series of tragedies that would have broken many of us long ago, Teddy Kennedy has emerged as a man of strength, eloquence, thoughtfulness, and a historically-based consciousness of the meaning and purpose of the American experiment.
I was raised in a family that was agnostic about the Kennedys, and often critical of them. My parents were Adlai Stevenson folks, even at his third run in 1960, and Eugene McCarthy supporters in 1968. Wealth and an East Coast sense of entitlement did not make the best impression on many others I knew who were from immigrant Jewish families who wound up in the Midwest and the South. I was just on the cusp of four years old when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and eight and a half when Senator Robert F. Kennedy was murdered, so my own life was fairly free of the “Camelot” business.
Living in Chicago, over the years I’ve met a number of Shrivers and Smiths -- posted to Chicago to run the family's longtime cash cow, the Merchandise Mart -- and their offspring, and I know Christopher Kennedy, Bobby's son and the current head of the Mart (no longer owned by his family), casually and think quite highly of him. I've met Teddy several times in Washington and Chicago, each time without any advance plan to have done so. Nevertheless, I think I've viewed them all more as a disinterested observer than as an acolyte or star-gazer. (The exception here certainly was and is Caroline Kennedy. When I was introduced to her in Chicago in 1998 at the opening of an education center at Orchestra Hall [since closed, alas] that her husband, Edwin Schlossberg, had designed, I was sure that I was going to pass out.)
So I think that my positive view of Ted Kennedy, his contributions, his consistency, his role in American politics, is one I've come by legitimately and even objectively. Much of it probably began when he took on the smug and sanctimonious Jimmy Carter in the Democratic Presidential primaries in 1980. While some said that the wounds Carter suffered in this primary challenge to a sitting President were a factor in his defeat by Ronald Reagan in the general election, I never bought that. And I thought Kennedy’s speech at the 1980 Democratic Convention (see photo above) in New York was an excellent challenge to a President and a party without a soul or a purpose.
Of course Kennedy has had his weaknesses and he’s sometimes painted things with a broader brush than necessary as in his positions on and grilling of some nominees to the Federal judiciary. But he’s been right much more often than he’s been wrong and he’s done hard work over decades, living a life devoted to public service when plenty of others of his class and wealth -- and age: he’s 76 -- have done much less -- or much worse. Long after it was fashionable to do so, he has never compromised on civil rights, women’s rights, and the rights of other minorities, including gay people. He has been a regular reminder of what the legitimate role of a U.S. Senator should be. He might seem an easy target of criticism for many, but I can’t imagine that anyone has ever wanted to trade places with him.
As he and his family now face the dire nature of an extremely serious illness, he is certainly in my thoughts and prayers.
Here are the last lines of Tennyson’s 1833 poem “Ulysses,” one often quoted from by John and Robert Kennedy and again by Edward Kennedy at the end of his 1980 Democratic Convention speech:
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
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