Inevitably some will regard Sen. Edward “Ted” Kennedy, the only Kennedy male of his generation to experience old age, as a tragic figure. If only, they will contend; if only he had joined Herbert H. Humphrey on the 1968 Democratic presidential ticket that came within an eyelash of denying Richard Nixon the White House. If only, a dozen years later, in contending for the soul of his party, the final Kennedy brother had run a more coherent campaign against Jimmy Carter. If only, above all, he had avoided Chappaquiddick, where a young woman’s death by drowning in the senator’s car posed questions of character that would haunt Ted Kennedy like Banquo’s ghost through a seemingly rudderless middle age.
For most public figures the story would have ended there. Certainly few of Kennedy’s countrymen in the summer of 1969 could have envisioned the legislative giant eulogized since his death last week. Next to Richard Nixon, no one equaled Ted Kennedy in disproving Scott Fitzgerald’s maxim that in America there are no second acts. During his half century on Capitol Hill, Kennedy secured passage of more than 300 bills, the lion’s share directed toward those with no other champion to argue their cause. For his tireless efforts to make American democracy more inclusive Ted Kennedy deserves to rank alongside such Senate legends as Webster, Clay, LaFollette and Norris.
Would he have defeated Nixon in 1972? Reagan in 1980? It’s an intriguing parlor game, albeit one which overlooks the tectonic shifts already occurring as the lunch-bucket liberalism of Franklin D. Roosevelt and, yes, John F. Kennedy, yielded amid the cultural upheaval of the ’60s to a counter-revolution embodied in Nixon’s Silent Majority and Reagan’s more enduring one. In any event, to label Kennedy “The Man Who Might Have Been” is to overlook his true vocation. Indeed, one can argue that his loss to Carter in 1980 was actually liberating. Released from the crushing expectations imposed by history, he was free to chart his own course in the Senate.
As often as not he sailed against the wind. A lobbyist for those who couldn’t afford one, for most of his Washington career, Kennedy belonged to a philosophical, if not numerical, minority. Even Bill Clinton, an activist by temperament, and an unabashed admirer of the Kennedy mystique, was driven by political necessity to declare the era of big government over. Which only makes Kennedy’s legislative achievements in civil and women’s rights, health care, medical research, education, nutrition, labor law, workplace issues and protecting the elderly all the more impressive.
Truth be told, Kennedy was always more complex than the liberal caricature his detractors on the right exploited in fundraising letters. In the ’70s he lent his name to trailblazing legislation that decontrolled the trucking and aviation industries. He worked closely with President George H.W. Bush to enact the Americans With Disabilities Act, and with President George W. Bush to pass the No Child Left Behind Act. His unlikely partnership with Sen. Bob Dole made a national holiday of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. As it happened, Dole shared a birthday with Kennedy’s formidable mother Rose, to whom he sent an annual bouquet of flowers. According to “Teddy,” she wished Dole well in his presidential campaigns — but not too well.
There were limits to Kennedy’s bipartisanship. He was, after all, a conviction politician who relished nothing more than a good fight. Something about the U.S. Supreme Court, in particular, brought out the lion’s claws. Kennedy’s verbal assault on Judge Robert Bork in 1987 did not begin the politicization of the confirmation process; a generation earlier Republican opposition had prevented Abe Fortas from succeeding Earl Warren as chief justice. But the savagery of Kennedy’s language against Bork went beyond Washington hardball. It contributed to a process of mutual escalation, turning highly qualified nominees from left and right into pawns in a game as stylized as Kabuki theater.
Kennedy’s absence from the current debate over health-care reform led many to speculate: Could the old dealmaker have somehow forged a compromise? Given their claims about the existence of government-run “death panels,” one may question how many opponents of reform would actually vote for any package reflecting Ted Kennedy’s values. Ironically, there was a final service the senator from Massachusetts could have performed for the Obama White House. Kennedy the incrementalist might conceivably have used his unique credibility to persuade his liberal brethren to accept an imperfect bill and declare victory. Like any good sailor, Kennedy understood that the longer the voyage the more tacks required before one reaches safe harbor.
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Richard Norton Smith, formerly director of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and executive director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, is a scholar in residence at George Mason University.
