Vale Teddy, we may never see his like
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So the lion of the Senate will roar no more — and any number of DC cocktail waitresses can breathe a little easier today. The hand that steered an armada of bills through eight Senates and played a thousand games of grabass in between has been laid out at last. The death of Edward Moore Kennedy closes the door on an era reaching back to the end of the 19th century itself and taking in most of what we would consider to be the guts of the 20th. The marriage of his parents, Joe Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald, had been the uniting of two powerful Boston Democratic families — their grandfather John “Honey” Fitzgerald had been the first Irish-Catholic mayor of Boston, his nickname indicative of that distinctive voice, smooth, yet biting. Honey Fitz’s political career dated back to 1891, at which time barrels of beer, in place of pork, would be rolled out. They were leveraged into power by Joe, a man who made his first fortune from bootlegging during the Prohibition, and whose operatives are estimated to have murdered a dozen or more men in the brutal gang wars of the period — after which he decamped to Hollywood to found RKO (famous for producing Citizen Kane, among others) and bed Gloria Swanson and a host of lesser ingénues. Any hope he had for later public office himself was ruined by his disastrous term as Ambassador to the UK in the late 30s, when his fascistic nature, Irish resentment, anti-communism, and penchant for American isolationism, led him to relentlessly pro-Hitler sentiments at a time when FDR had swung firmly behind Britain — and his forecast of the UK’s inevitable defeat did not play well in the aftermath. By 1944, one son, Joe Jnr, had been killed in active service, setting the pattern to come, and the family mantle fell to John, seen as lightweight despite his naval service, beset by Addison’s disease, which treated officially and otherwise by testosterone and amphetamines. JFK made his bones on joining Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunt, accommodating the racism of southern Democrats, and winning a Pulitzer for a book he didn’t write (Profiles in Courage). His brother Robert lived long enough to have these conservative Democrat machine politics modified somewhat by the upheaval of the ’60s, but never got the chance to put them in practice. Joe Kennedy snr lived long enough — he died in 1969 — to see the mantle fall to his fourth son, barely an afterthought. That mantle sank in the waters of Lake Chappaquiddick. The death of a female political volunteer in a car he drunkenly piloted into a lake had a grim symmetry with JFK, who had floated his political career by piloting a boat. Teddy had sunk his by floating a car. Would he have won the 1968 election as the youngest President ever — aged 36 — had he taken up the suggestion that he be a draft-in candidate in the shoes of his dead brother Robert? Maybe not, but who knows? By the time he came round for another tilt — in 1980, against a sitting Democratic President, a rare occurrence indeed — Chappaquiddick had become part of the folklore, and the dark side of Camelot was beginning to cast a shadow over the American psyche. JFK’s gangster connections, his near-disastrous brinkmanship in the Cuban missile crisis, and his inauguration of full-scale commitment to Vietnam had worn off the gloss of the Boston Brahmins, and the great American retreat from a proud progressive “liberalism” was underway. Nevertheless, he was unassailable in a Senate seat in Massachusetts, and in American fashion, served for 47 years, from the end of the Jim Crow era to the election of Barack Obama, from the depths of the Cold War, to China rising. The Senate was the saving of him, and of the Kennedy family in general. As other members fell like Flanders recruits, Ted Kennedy powered on. The number of bills he introduced or co-sponsored is staggering — from removing racial quotas on immigration, the first disabilities legislation, bills mandating public funding for cancer care and AIDS, tightened sanctions on apartheid, and dozens of others, the most recent being the No Child Left Behind Act — an attempt to ensure that education in the US did not consist of kids being passed up the grades functionally illiterate and innumerate, and which was gutted by Dubya, and rendered as a mechanism for fixing grades. There are darker sides too — some will pick his vociferous campaign for Irish independence, even at the height of the PIRA armed struggle, and all the compromises that could have been fought through to a tougher win. And whatever credit one gives him, one has to wonder at the American desire for dynasty at the heart of democracy, its compulsive desire to re-establish all it fought to throw off in 1776. But whatever the verdict, you can’t help but feel as one does when watching a grand mansion come down, for apartments and a mall. What was this like at its height, you wonder? What world made it? And where are we now? *For more Kennedy commentary, try the crikey.com.au collection. |
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12 Comments
Rundle that sour grapes, bitter, sleazy article really shows you up in your true colours. Even today, Ted Kennedys bitter opponents both in and out of politics, have had the grace to acknowledge the enormous contribution he has made to the American way of life and Internationally was a respected public figure. Most of us who have followed the Kennedy dynasty are very aware of the failings within the male members of the family, most of us choose to also understand the price the family has paid in tragedy. While not excusing whatever Ted Kennedy did at Cappaquiddick, I feel it has been screamed at him from the rooftops countless numbers of times, he has never been allowed to forget it, and rightly so. However now is not the time to reopen that side of his life. The man did untold good for his constituents and America in over 40 years in Congress. Perhaps your demonising of his memory is more in keeping with your personal attitude and dislike of the Kennedy name. Millions upon millions would disagree with you. 80% of your article rips in to the Kennedys. Of course you are the perfect example of the puritan, led a a life of exempletory behaviour. I think not. Of course some of the raving right will lap up your words as they snort in agreement. Even the words of 2 President Bush, Nancy Reagan, senior Republican Senators speak more highly of Ted Kennedy than your slosh. You show you as you really are.
Thanks Guy, I’d forgotten that No Child Left behind started out well and I didn’t know that it was a Kennedy bill originally.
Raymond
we can always tell a lunatic by the absence of apostrophes - can’t even draw breath to put them in. Still, at least you didn’t type it IN CAPS. Take your pills and have a lie down, you headcase, the article was obviously positive about Ted Kennedy the man.
Ah the typical reaction from someone such as Mr Rundle, who feels he should have the right to burst into print and have his every word accepted as Gospel, forget it. I repeat, 80% of your article was an attack on the Kennedys and Ted Kennedy. Your attempt at being the smart alec only confirms your lack of ability. A small part only of the article was pro Kennedy. Do you know what you are writing or just fill in the lines? Judging by your ‘how could you criticise me’ reaction, you haven’t a clue.
I thought it was RFK, rather than JFK, who “made his bones on joining McCarthy’s witch-hunt” as counsel (alongside the odious Roy Cohn, whom he detested) to the HUAC.
jeez Ray! take a pill
It is as well that Ted Kennedy did so some solid work in the US Senate, if for no other reason to offset the tawdry behaviour of the male Kennedys-including Ted Kennedy himself.
A dynasty of bog-Irish trash, where the females did their duty by having as many children as the traffic would bear, whilst allowing the men to root and screw anything that moved. But hey, they were a democratic lot. The father, Joe Kennedy, competed with his sons to have the hottest chick in the business. And poor Rose, every time father Joe made the going a little too willing, could always be fobbed off by yet another papal award.
Bobby’s sanctimonious carryings-on with the truly abominable senator Joe McCarthy sat with a curious ambivilence about sharing his brother’s women.
Only in America! If they were so lacking snob fulfillment as to need a ‘royal family’ why couldn’t they have chosen a family with class?
Dunno ‘bout cocktail waitresses breathing easier but Mary Jo didn’t.
She asphyxiated in an air bubble quite some time after the car submerged.
In other words she could, as well as should, have been saved.
In Britain or Australia or New Zealand or Canada or even Ireland, he would have gone to jail. The only salient question would have been whether for 1 year or more than a decade. In Massachusetts it didn’t even lose him a Senate seat.
In the Senate moreover, like so many liberals policies that he self righteously and shortsightedly “fought for” actually cause more human misery than they alleviate.
Loony Democrats are now calling for the public option health insurance care reform a.k.a. Obamacare to be named the Kennedy bill.
Socialists have no shame.
GreigW is correct, it was RFK, shameless & unprincipled, who was also a Nixon (then VP) gofer at the time.
Guy writes from the heart, with head playing catchup and without the safety net - man for all seasons pre Google - what he knows is internal not cold fascts, which is why we love him - better passion than pragmatism as the last two “Labour” regimes have proved (or Blaahhhh in the UK) coz that can at least be seen for what it is and corrected or modified.
Imagine the sugar coated “Happiest Kingdom of All” that would have resulted had he become Prez! Thank you CIA sleeper Sirhan.
I’m waiting to see mad Mark Steyn’s vitriol - his hatred of all things decent is exceeded only by his paroxysms of rage at the Kennedys as exemplars of all that his constipaterd psyche precludes.
In the Senate moreover, like so many liberals policies that he self righteously and shortsightedly “fought for” actually cause more human misery than they alleviate.
Loony Democrats are now calling for the public option health insurance care reform a.k.a. Obamacare to be named the Kennedy bill.
Socialists have no shame.
seriously lollin over here
“Socialists have no shame” … whereas “Capitalists” are a picture of virtue and prudence? Not the best time in history to be pushing that line.
Thanks Guy for a balanced perspective; always an interesting read.
Guy
Raymond: “… the article was obviously positive about Kennedy the man”.
Really? Maybe a third. The rest is a potted history of the Kennedy clan, examples of which can be found elsewhere.
That crack about the cocktail waitresses resting easy now that Teddy’s dead? A real thigh-slapper.
But not as funny as your thin-skinned replies to Raymond. If all you can muster is lunatic, headcase and apostrophes, why bother?