Ted Kennedy: Fare Thee Well

Teddy may be the last of the old Irish pols. He drank well, perhaps a wee bit too much. But that’s what God made good whiskey for, did he not? In the Senate they called him the “liberal lion”, but actually he was more of a Nineteenth Century urban Democrat than a modern “liberal”.
His causes showed the man—health care for those who couldn’t afford it, not a far step for a man whose ancestors built political machines by distributing patronage and sacks of coal (or getting a poor lad paroled from a protestant jail cell) to immigrants who couldn’t afford to meet their own needs . Or education—for a poor lad looking to better himself.
He was a last bridge to an era and a type of politician that no longer really exists today. They were bare knuckle political infighters (none of the finesse we associate with Ivy league trained lawyers and politicians today. They kicked you and gouged you until you couldn’t get back up.)
Nixon learned in 1960. It left him so paranoid that he committed a “high crime and misdemeanor” in 1972 at Watergate just to figure out what they were planning this time around. They outmaneuvered Tammany Hall during the primaries of 1960 and left a shattered DeSapio in the dust.
Hubert Humphrey went back to his campaign bus in West Virginia and wept when he realized how many more votes the Kennedys (the Irish Mafia they were called) could afford to buy than he could. Who else but a Kennedy in-law (Steve Smith, who ran the Kennedy fortune after Joe got too old) could forget a suitcase full of ten dollar bills (for buying votes) in a barber shop and have to wire Boston for another case of tens.
Joe Kennedy sent it—along with one of the more immortal telegrams in American political history—“I’m not buying a landslide”! Lyndon Johnson learned what Boston Irish kicking and shoving was all about that same year. He’d been planning on being president since the 1930s. When the Kennedys were through with him, he settled for Vice President.
Johnson was no slouch at kicking and gouging—but the “Irish Mafia” was a different league altogether. They had tons more money, and they wielded it like a Shillelagh. They had connections—in the Mafia, in Chicago city hall—and there was no rule against clipping from behind in their kind of football.
Joe, father to Ted, Bobby, Jack and Joe Jr., was far enough removed from the “shanty Irish” that he went through Boston Latin and Harvard. He made his money investing in stocks, real estate and commodities (there are unproven hints that some of these “commodities” may have been bootleg liquor). There is no question that when Prohibition was repealed, Kennedy was ready with vast stocks of liquor from European distilleries.
He also made lots of money reorganizing and financing Hollywood studios—beginning a dynasty long love affair with movies and movie starlets. He bought the largest office building in America—Chicago’s Merchandise Mart. This gave the family their in with powerful people in the midwest.
As ambassador to England during the Nazi blitz of London, Joe remained Irish enough to let his anti-English and pro-German bias show. After the election of 1940, Roosevelt (who had been a friend of Joe’s since World War I) was forced to remove him.
He had one major ambition politically—to have one of his sons be the first Irish Catholic president of the United States. The eldest, Joe Jr., was killed in World War II. Joe then groomed his second son, Jack, for the job. They kicked and scrabbled their way into the White House.
Jack did have to meet with a group of Baptist ministers and promise them he would not, as a Catholic, subvert our very Protestant/Calvinistic constitution. But he made it. He made his brother, Bobby, Attorney General.
Two years later, 30 year old Teddy wanted to run for Jack’s old Senate seat in Massachusetts. The other two boys were not thrilled. They felt it might produce a feeling in Washington of too many Kennedys. Joe told them, “You’ve got yours; now it’s Ted’s turn.”
He ran and won in 1962—picking up the last two years in Jack’s term. By the time he ran again, Jack was dead; Johnson was president, and Bobby had moved quickly to New York to run for senator there. Ted was nearly killed in a plane crash in 1964, but he won anyway.
Johnson did get a bit of his own back in ’64. He dangled the Vice-Presidency (which Jack and Bobby had made him accept in 1960) in front of various Kennedy family members and friends. Sargent Shriver nibbled at the bait. It was a trap.
Needless to say a serious offer never materialized (Johnson resented the Kennedys far too much for that!), but Johnson had opened a wedge in the once formidable Kennedy front that took a while to heal. (I learned this from one of Ted Kennedy’s former staff members.)
In 1968 Bobby made his try for the White House—after Gene McCarthy had shown Johnson could be beaten. Johnson pulled out of the race two weeks later and another Kennedy march to the White House seemed to be on. Bobby was assassinated immediately after he won the California primary. Richard Nixon, Jack’s old opponent, went on to win the election.
People immediately began to pressure Ted to take up the Kennedy banner and run for president in the next race. I sensed very strongly that he did not want to. One) he was comfortable in the Senate, a more collegial environment. Two) he had watched three brothers die violently and had a strong sense that he had a lot of orphaned nephews and nieces to help raise. He may even have had a most understandable personal fear for himself. There was real hatred for Kennedys out there.
Whatever his private feelings, the incident at Chappaquiddick in which a female aide, Mary Jo Kopechne, mysteriously drowned and Ted got a suspended sentence, ended presidential speculation for a few years. He was induced to try the primaries in 1980, ran an inept campaign, and settled down to the Senate for the rest of his life.
Here, securely at home—the last of the Kennedys—he became a giant. He worked across the aisle, with the Republican enemy and against the Republican enemy. We may not quickly see his like again. For me it is a shock to know he’s dead—the Kennedys have been part of my political awareness since 1953 when the “Saturday Evening Post” ran an article on Jack—“the most eligible bachelor in the Senate”.
Of course, telling everyone that he was already engaged to Jackie when the story came out would have spoiled it. So, as the Kennedys were so skilled at doing, that pesky little fact was ignored and never mentioned.
It may indeed be Teddy—the one for whom daddy had to say, “It’s his turn now”—that leaves the most significant legacy. Jack, Joe, Joe Jr., Bobby have all been dead so long it’s almost hard to remember them. But Ted passed some laws that changed lives.
For Teddy, I finish with the old blessing: May ye be an hour in Heaven before the Devil knows you’re dead.