Remembering Ted Kennedy

There are politicians whose deaths make you sad. There are others whose deaths make you cry. Ted Kennedy belonged with those who make you cry.

His record in the Senate was extraordinary. The current struggle over the health care bill shows how essential he was to getting key legislation passed. But what made Kennedy stand out from other liberals of his time–such as Hubert Humphrey and George McGovern–was that he grasped, in a way they did not, what pain meant.

Forty-one years ago, at a time when my family lived in Cleveland, I watched Bobby Kennedy campaign for the presidency. At a small gathering on the city’s West Side, an elderly woman got up and, in tears, began moving toward him, seeming to speak incomprehensibly. The Secret Service, alarmed, stepped between her and Kennedy.

For a moment Kennedy was furious. “Let her go,” he angrily commanded.

Then he stepped forward and held both her hands until she calmed down. She was, it turned out, speaking in Polish. She had family in Poland who could not leave the country, and she wanted Kennedy, at the time a senator, to help get them to America. Kennedy’s staff had wisely brought Polish translators to the meeting, and after a number of minutes elapsed, the woman was able to compose herself enough to explain what she wanted.

I still cannot figure out how Bobby Kennedy grasped that the moment required holding the woman’s hands, but part of being a Kennedy was knowing such things. It was an ability Ted Kennedy had as well and watching him in action made that clear. Years ago, in West Virginia, he began a speech to a group of miners by observing, “They say I haven’t worked a day in my life,” and before he got to the next sentence, a voice boomed from the crowd, “You haven’t missed a thing.”

It was the mine workers’ way of saying he was one of them. They didn’t give a damn how much money he had or where he went to college. As far as they were concerned, he had crossed the line that makes where you come from irrelevant.

And so he had.

It is easy to forget that he was the baby brother, the Kennedy from whom little was expected. “Mr. Kennedy won nomination and election despite a monumental lack of relevant experience,” the New York Times wrote in 1962. “A dazzling smile, a tireless handshake and a great deal of native political acumen pretty much completed his arsenal of qualifications.”

How easy it would have been for Kennedy to let such patronizing treatment consume him, or to give into the fear that, like his brothers, he was destined for the assassin’s bullet.

He did neither. He followed his own conscience, refusing to play things safe and, in the process, turned out to be far more of a liberal than his older brothers. On civil rights, immigration, the minimum wage, and health care, he was always on the side of those who stood to lose if the status quo did not change. Had he lived longer, he might have done more. But not better.

Nicolaus Mills is professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and co-editor with Michael Walzer of the forthcoming collection, Getting Out: Historical Essays on Leaving Iraq.

Photo: Ted Kennedy first campaigning to the Senate in 1962 (wikimedia commons).