A Liberal Endures

A Liberal Endures

M. Kazin reviews Ted Kennedy’s True Compass

THE UNITED States Senate is the most potent legislative body in the Western world. It is also one of the least democratic. Under the Constitution, it has the exclusive power to ratify treaties, to consent to or reject cabinet and federal court appointments, and to throw a president out of office for committing “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Yet the vote of a senator from Wyoming—whose population of 540,000 is smaller than that of Las Vegas—equals that of one of his colleagues from California, who represents more than thirty-six million people. By Senate rules, three-fifths of its members can be required to pass a bill of any significance.

The Democrats’ current majority in the upper chamber is their largest in three decades, but it gives them only a slight advantage when faced with a disciplined Republican minority eager to defeat them at every turn. As the wrangle over health care reform has revealed in agonizing detail, a couple of preening “moderates” from small states have the power to decide whether the United States will finally move toward a humane, inclusive health care system or remain captive to the notion that universal coverage is a Leninist plot to destroy the republic.

It is thus rather odd that a senator became the preeminent liberal of the past four decades. But during his forty-six years of continuous tenure, Edward Kennedy did more to preserve the social reforms of the New Deal and Great Society and to promote newer ones than any other American.

IN TRUTH, there was no serious rival for that honor—inside or outside the federal government. In the years immediately following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968, social movements on the left fragmented into a welter of identities and causes; no insurgent figure has emerged since then to take King’s place as the effective advocate of a social democracy that dares not speak its name. Jesse Jackson and Ralph Nader proved to be mere pretenders to the title—and in Nader’s case, a witless ally of the right. The 93,000 votes he won in Florida, after all, made it possible for Bush and Cheney to capture the White House in 2000.

So, almost by default, Kennedy became the prime and exceedingly visible champion of liberalism during its era of fading strength and vanished glory. Aided by one of the largest and most skilled legislative staffs in Washington, he championed such measures as national health insurance and tried to prevent the nation from lapsing into bad habits—such as when he led the successful efforts to deny a place on the Supreme Court to Harold Carswell and Robert Bork, right-wing appointees who had opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In the early 1970s, Kennedy was also a prominent voice for cutting off funds for the wars in Indochina, and, a decade later, for freezing the nuclear arms race. In 1998, exploiting his stature as the unofficial prince of Irish America, he helped broker the Good Friday agreement, along with his sister Jean, who was then U.S. ambassador to Dublin. Compared to the triumphs of the New Deal and Great Society, these were modest achievements. But amplified by Kennedy’s hearty rhetoric about keeping “the dream” alive, they allowed liberals to believe that the era of Reagan and his epigones too would pass.

So it was no surprise that every notable left-of-center politician and journalist in the land attended Kennedy’s funeral last August or that crisply printed “Thanks Ted” signs lined the roads leading from the family estate on Cape Cod to the Mission Church in Boston, seventy miles away. As I write this five months later, Time still has a link at the top of its webpage to stories about him, and his memoir continues to ride high on the New York Times best-seller list.

But Kennedy was also every conservative’s villain of choice. Through the 1970s and 80s, the right used Kennedy’s heavy drinking, his seductions, and the image of his puffy features to condemn what a liberal life could do to a man and, by extension, to a society. Only after Kennedy married Victoria Reggie, his second wife, in 1992 and became a paragon of connubial bliss did the tactic gradually fade from use. Victoria, “the woman who changed my life,” also helped him reduce the toxicity of his public image, enabling him to become the figure he was at death: both a liberal idol and a legislator admired even by the arch-conservative Sen. Orrin Hatch, the stiff Mormon from Utah, who teared up at his memorial service.

Before that change occurred, his identity as a misbehaving rich man’s son helped to fuel two decades of populist fervor on the right. Ted Kennedy could never be a man of the people. His first election to the Senate in 1962 resembled the creation of a life peerage, and his great wealth enabled him to outfit several houses, to hire some of the sharpest policy intellectuals in the land, and to indulge, throughout his life, in the affluent sport of sailboat racing. After he was diagnosed with brain cancer in the spring of 2008, Kennedy escaped to the waters of Nantucket Sound as often as possible. He even entitled his memoir with a nautical expression—a metaphor for steadfastness in stormy weather.

KENNEDY WOULD need this steadfastness for unlike FDR, who was the leader of liberalism in triumph, he spent most of his career struggling with its decline. His early years may have prepared him for such a fate. This memoir, completed just before his death, makes clear that Edward spent the first half of his life careening from insecurity to humiliation to disaster. He was born in 1932, the last of nine children in a Catholic family so prominent that he received his First Communion from Pope Pius XII. His father spent as much time with the boy as he could; Kennedy particularly recalls long horseback rides on the beaches of Cape Cod. But, in the 1930s, the wealthy patriarch was busy regulating Wall Street, as the first chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and then bumbling through two years in London as the U.S. ambassador who essentially advised Churchill’s government to surrender to Adolf Hitler.

Meanwhile, the prepubescent Kennedy matriculated at nine different boarding schools on two continents and several different states. He was afflicted with an abusive dormitory master, older students who killed his pet turtle and then hid the corpse in his bed, and many days of paddling to punish him for “boyhood pranks.” But it was at Harvard that the young Edward brought big trouble on himself. Fearing a bad grade in Spanish would make him ineligible to play on the football team, he let a friend take the final exam for him. The ruse was discovered immediately, and both men were expelled. “There are people who can mess up in life and not get caught,” his father angrily—and prophetically—reminded him, “but you’re not one of them.”

After spending two years in the army, Edward was allowed to return to college. But the press was quick to recall the cheating episode six years later when he ran for his brother John’s Senate seat. The contest famously smacked of a dynastic succession. “You never worked for a living,” asserted his primary opponent, Edward McCormack, Jr. “If his name was Edward Moore his candidacy would be a joke. Nobody is laughing.” Although Kennedy easily won both the nomination and the general election, he had to spend much of the 1960s regarded mostly as the “younger brother.” Of course, in that capacity, he presided over two unexpected family funerals that were broadcast around the world.

In romantic legend, young Edward—mournful, yet confident—would have swiftly taken his place in the family tradition of selfless service to his country after the assassinations of one brother in 1963 and a second less than five years later. The tragedies did call on his gift for rhetoric; his eulogy for Robert—“He should be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it”—is among the more memorable speeches of the American half-century.

But the sudden deaths left Kennedy “shaken to my core”; a quick, heroic rebound was clearly impossible. His brothers had been his main advisors and mentors, icons as much as siblings. Jack, fifteen years his senior, was also his godfather. The only flash of anger in Edward’s memoir is a rebuke to those who have prowled through JFK’s intimate life: “A lot of it is bullshit.” That may well be a comment on tales about the writer’s own promiscuous, liquored past.

After burying Robert, Edward spurned Hubert Humphrey’s offer to run for vice-president and spent a good deal of his time sailing, drinking, and seducing younger women. His first marriage to Joan Bennett had seldom been a close one. In a portent of their unhappy, too public life to come, the couple spent their brief 1958 honeymoon on Lord Beaverbrook’s estate in the Bahamas. “We ate every meal together,” he recalls. “For him—and therefore for us—that meant a baked potato, and only a baked potato, for lunch. Dinner was not much better.” The press baron suggested the couple visit a “completely deserted” island close by—but never arranged to get them there. Soon, the marriage devolved into one of those discretely autonomous arrangements that, before the advent of the cyber-paparazzi, politicians were able to manage with relative ease.

Then on July 18, 1969, the still grieving senator had an auto accident on Chappaquiddick Island, off the Massachusetts coast. Whether out of political venom or empirical suspicion, many will always doubt Kennedy’s story about how he behaved on the night he crashed an Oldsmobile sedan in which the only passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, a former aide to his brother Robert, got trapped and drowned. But the most famous car accident in history, much like the assassination of JFK, resists a full and completely satisfying explanation. Kennedy did not provide one at the time, and that reluctance inevitably sparked a cottage industry of rumors and partial truths.

In 1994, a BBC documentary, Inside Story: Chappaquiddick, speculated that Kennedy had not been in his car at all when it dove off a narrow, unlit bridge into tiny Poucha Pond. Somehow, the film’s producers neglected two separate medical reports which disclosed that Edward had suffered an “acute muscular spasm” and a concussion. The latter could have hampered his ability to recall what occurred on a night he claimed to have escaped from the submerged vehicle and then made several attempts to rescue Kopechne.(1)

Of course, the accident gave the surging right a new argument to use against the tarnished liberal lawmaker. It reinforced the idea that Kennedys did not have to live by the same moral standards as everyone else. “We read daily of men who perform magnificently under the utmost stress in Vietnam,” one woman wrote to the Chicago Tribune. “There are others whom stress does not seem to affect in the same way.” Several years later, a conservative college paper ended an obituary for a famous actress who died in a boating accident with the tongue-in-cheek remark, “We deplore the foul rumor. Ted Kennedy was not on Catalina Island when Natalie Wood drowned.”

In his memoir, Kennedy clearly hoped to avoid reigniting the controversy. “From my forty-year vantage point,” he writes, “what I am left with now are mostly memories of memories, and even those older memories lacked clarity, as records of the time show.” While he denies he had a “romantic relationship” with Kopechne—that did not lessen his sense of guilt: “Atonement is a process that never ends…Maybe it’s a New England thing, or an Irish thing, or a Catholic thing. Maybe all of those things. But it’s as it should be.”

The tragedy made it easier—as well as politically mandatory—for the chastened senator to try to lead a more sober and politically consequential second life. Kennedy schooled himself in health care reform, inviting physicians and other experts to “semi-regular policy dinners” and seeking a compromise between the “single-payer” bill he preferred and one that private insurance companies would stomach. He considered running for president in 1976, came quite close to doing so in 1984, and campaigned unsuccessfully for the nomination against Jimmy Carter, the incumbent, in 1980. But his separation and then divorce from Joan, and the opposition of his children—two of whom were recovering from cancer—kept him from mounting the kind of bravura, expensive efforts his older brothers had made. By 1992, when he married Victoria, he had lost all desire to compete for the main prize. Still, the possibility he might run compelled most Democratic contenders to lean, whether anxiously or happily, to the left.

KENNEDY WAS never a successful presidential candidate, but he did gradually learn how to work the Senate. With the help of his staff, he mastered the fine details of every issue he cared about, often cajoling powerful allies in the opposition party to sign onto one of his initiatives. Kennedy became known as an eager compromiser, a dealmaker who believed “we were elected to do something,” even if it required sidling up to the likes of Hatch and George W. Bush and passing only a rather small fraction of the changes in health care or education or the minimum wage which he desired. At the same time, he stayed rhetorically loyal to “the principles Jack had stood for” and believed they were “deeply imperiled” by every Republican president from Nixon through Bush the Younger—and neglected under Jimmy Carter.

While Kennedy’s memoir offers no explanation of his legislative methods, a crude one can be gleaned from the little narratives he offers about his career. Republicans once loved to brand their opponents as “Ted Kennedy liberals.” But, inside the Senate, many admired his political intelligence and enjoyed his company.

Affability, his career suggests, is underrated as a political skill. Kennedy tells a string of fond anecdotes about his fellow legislators and several of the men who succeeded his brother in the White House. Those about ideological foes are particularly revealing. When Ted first came to Congress, James O. Eastland, a Mississippi cotton baron and one of the last of the Senate’s unapologetic racists, had the power to assign new Democratic members to committees. He invited Kennedy to his office. “Do you drink bourbon or scotch?’ the conversation began. An aide poured each man a sizeable highball; then Eastland got down to business. “You’ve got a lot of Eye-talians [in your state]. Now, the Kennedys are always talking about immigration and always talking about Eye-talians and this kind of thing. You drink that drink there, and you’re on the immigration committee.” This tit-for-tat continued for almost two hours. Upon his release, Kennedy had secured a seat on each of his chosen committees. He returned to his office “weaving a bit and reeking of alcohol.”

His glimpses of once mighty Republicans are remarkably congenial as well. Kennedy thanks Ronald Reagan for being kind to his mother when she stopped by the Oval Office in the early 1980s. He also pauses to marvel how the conservative idol could make naïve whimsy sound like insight. He lauds George W. Bush for helping to pass the No Child Left Behind education bill and seems to regret that the debacle in Iraq made further cooperation between the two men impossible. He even remembers the young Richard Nixon as “both interesting and entertaining.”

The only elected officeholder upon whom Kennedy bestows no grace notes at all is the Democrat he sought to replace in the White House. “President Carter was a difficult man to convince—of anything,” he writes. “One reason for this was that he did not really listen.” Kennedy, the avid sailor, also could not abide the parsimonious Carter’s decision to sell off the magnificent 104-foot wooden yacht used by every chief executive since Herbert Hoover. The Southern Baptist, he observes, was so starchy that he would not allow liquor to be served in the executive mansion.

Unlike Carter, Kennedy always saw politics as much as a reciprocal, democratic passion as a battle of ideals and interests. “Being in a crowd, looking into new faces, shaking hands, laughing, swapping stories, singing some of the old songs – I love it all.” It was an inherited trait. His maternal grandfather, “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, was the most powerful Democrat in Boston during the early twentieth century and “wished he could get to know every single person in town.” After Fitzgerald retired, he would motor down to an expensive hotel in Florida where, according to his grandson, his “idea of fun was to sit in the lobby and wait to meet new people.” Kennedy too was a great “enjoyer” whose favorite songs came from musical comedies—America’s most convivial art form, and like his grandfather, he had many opponents but few enemies.

That Kennedy enjoyed listening, even to those with whom he disagreed, does not diminish the relevance of his political faith. After he was diagnosed with brain cancer, the notion that he was the “last liberal” quickly curdled into cliché. It is quite wrongheaded. While his vision and policy wishes do hark back both to the welfarist New Deal and to the rights consciousness of the 1960s and 1970s, they also continue to define what those who now call themselves “progressives” want and believe. Liberal blogs and pundits still espouse the same goals Kennedy struggled to achieve: reforming immigration laws, protecting legalized abortion, equalizing the power of unions, advancing freedom for gays and lesbians, safeguarding the rights of racial minorities, shifting from military adventurism to diplomatic solutions, and providing medical care to all who need it, regardless of income. American progressives, like their counterparts in Europe, yearn for a society that would combine the benefits of markets with the security and solidarity once associated with the labor left. Until that is realized, the old liberalism will still seem new.

In True Compass, Kennedy embraces another tradition as well. “My faith, and the love of following its rituals, has always been my foundation and my inspiration…It is the most positive force in my life and the cause of my eternal optimism.” Conservative Catholics scoff at such words from a politician who was an unwavering supporter of gay rights and legalized abortion. But many clergy and devout laymen also have a long history of employing Church doctrine to justify progressive causes. In 1891, Pope Leo XIII proclaimed, in the encyclical, Rerum Novarum : “Some remedy must be found, and found quickly, for the misery and wretchedness pressing so heavily and unjustly…on the vast majority of the working classes.”

Whatever its faults, the Church has never been comfortable with the ethos of libertarian capitalism and has smiled on Catholics who sought a non-socialist way to guarantee what Pope John XXIII called the “right to life, food, clothing, shelter, rest, medical care, education, and employment.” Hundreds of labor priests blessed the sit-down strikes of the 1930s, Dorothy Day and her pacifist Catholic Worker movement sustained a network of homeless shelters in major cities, and nuns marched in full habit for civil rights in the 1960s. That is the Catholic tradition to which Edward Kennedy belongs.

Many American politicians boast about their religiosity to demonstrate they are guided by a higher purpose, even as they finagle at the lower depths. Kennedy usually kept his piety to himself. Perhaps he thought that brandishing his faith in public would appear to be a scheme to minimize his personal flaws. Or, perhaps, the evangelical style of “witnessing” that comes naturally to Sarah Palin and George W. Bush is simply alien to a Catholic liberal.

During the deep recession of the early 1980s, Kennedy did quote Matthew 25 in an effort to stop Ronald Reagan from cutting programs that supplied food to the poor: “For I was hungry and you fed me, thirsty and you gave me drink…inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of my brethren, you have done it unto Me.” The verse, a favorite among left-leaning Christians of all denominations, remained at the heart of his beliefs. “It’s enormously significant to me that the only description in the Bible about salvation is tied to one’s willingness to act on behalf of one’s fellow human beings.”

The last major political act in Kennedy’s life was his endorsement of Barack Obama in late January, 2008, at a time when most pundits still believed Hillary Clinton would probably win the Democratic nomination. Kennedy made the decision right after hearing the “inspiring” speech Obama delivered after the Iowa primary. Here was “a young man so compelling, so electric, his mind so alive with good ideas, that before I knew it, I was hopscotching around the western states for him like a fellow half my age, pumping my fist and telling wildly cheering crowds, ‘I smell change in the air!’” It felt to him like 1960, all over again.

But Obama’s style of liberalism is distinct from the Kennedy brand—and not only because the president, like every other contemporary Democrat who aspires to the White House, eschews the label itself. A full-throated, if sentimental, concern for ordinary wage-earners and the poor came naturally to Kennedy, who grew up during the heyday of the New Deal order. Union audiences responded to his speeches with unfeigned ardor; I recall hearing one address he gave to a labor audience in Portland, Oregon, during the otherwise hopeless 1972 presidential campaign, that was interrupted by yells of delight and perhaps a dozen standing ovations.

Obama, despite his oratorical talents, seems more comfortable explaining than exhorting. While he had a brief stint as a black radical and spent three years organizing in a community humbled by deindustrialization, Obama displays an erudite calm that, to critics, appears as a lack of empathy. The first black president is also the only one whose parents were both intellectuals who earned graduate degrees. And both in the primary campaign and in his arduous first year in office, Obama had great difficulty attracting the kind of white working-class Democrats who, even in the aftermath of the Chappaquiddick debacle, still stayed loyal to Edward Kennedy.

LAST DECEMBER, as the Senate lurched toward passing a health reform bill, supporters and critics of the legislation both invoked Kennedy’s example. John McCain argued that his deceased colleague would have sought out “members on the other side of the aisle committed to working together.” Democrats pasted his photo on the wall of their cloakroom for inspiration; his widow, friends, and former staff members filled the gallery to hear the final speeches and witness the climactic votes. Harry Reid, an awkward speaker, closed the debate by quoting a far better one: “With Sen. Ted Kennedy’s booming voice in our ears, with his passion in our hearts, we say, as he said, the work goes on, the cause endures.”

When the measure finally received the necessary sixty votes, President Obama made his first congratulatory call to Vicki Kennedy. The Senate bill was not the universal, federally financed bill her husband would have wanted. Still, given his penchant for taking a partial victory rather than a total defeat, he doubtless would have celebrated its passage.

This celebration, however, would have been short-lived. A month later, Massachusetts voters elected a conservative Republican to fill Kennedy’s seat in the U.S. Senate. Scott Brown has the athletic good looks and relaxed manner of his predecessor. He also had the immense good fortune of drawing an opponent who shared Kennedy’s views but completely lacked his zest for the quotidian labors of campaigning. Thus, with “only” forty-one seats in the Senate, Democrats feared they would fail, once again, to end the cynicism about “big government” that has sustained the hegemony of the right since the end of the 1960s. Liberals will continue to warm themselves at the shrine of Edward Kennedy’s personality and his real, if limited, achievements. But the best way to honor his political legacy would be to surpass it.

Michael Kazin is co-editor of Dissent and teaches history at Georgetown University. His most recent book is A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan.

1: See http://www.crimemagazine.com/05/tedkennedy,1017-5.htm

(Homepage photo: Kennedy Brothers / US Senate / Wikimedia Commons)