Ted and me

"The danger as a legislator is that you get involved with just passing the bill. You can lose the context of what passing the bill means, and then you're just shuffling papers, and you lose that emotional contact. Maybe some people could do it. I think I'd run dry pretty quick."---Senator Edward M. Kennedy in an interview with Charles Pierce of the Boston Globe, January 2003.

According to my old college pal Gary, it's my fault Ted Kennedy wasn't elected President in 1980.  Gary insists it was an op-ed piece I wrote for a nationally distributed newspaper that sunk Kennedy in the Democratic primaries and got Jimmy Carter re-nominated.

In my defense I never expected the piece to get published.  I was just venting.  My point was that I saw no point at the time in Kennedy's challenging Carter.  I understood people were disappointed with Jimmy, but it looked to me that part of what was fueling their disappointment was nostalgia and I thought their wish to have Teddy run was really an expression of their sublimated wish that Jack and Bobby were still alive.  I'm pretty sure the only reason the paper printed it was that it was an anti-Kennedy piece written by a member of what the editors thought was Kennedy's base, a college student from Boston.

Actually, most of the college students I knew were for Jerry Brown or John Anderson, if they were for anybody.  I did some campaigning for Brown.  One day I was going around downtown Boston putting up notices for a rally for Brown and I noticed I was being followed by a short, squat South Boston Irish type with a thick wave of dark hair arcing from his forehead very much like Ted Kennedy's own at the time.  He was busy tearing down the flyers as I put them up.

"Pardon me, sir.  May I ask why you are committing this wanton act of vandalism?" I asked, although not in those exact words.

"I could ask you the same thing, young man," he replied, although again I'm paraphrasing.  I've forgotten the details of our short conversation.  Possibly the words asshole and fuck you were bandied about, but as I said it's a little hazy after all these years.

What came out of our exchange, though, was that he worked for "the Kennedys"---that's how he put it; he saw himself as a retainer for the entire clan and the clan was an institution like the Church, Harvard, or the Red Sox---and every light pole and blank wall space and community bulletin board, anywhere you could tack a sign or a poster belonged to the Kennedys and what I was doing was a form of trespassing, theft, and public insult.

That's when I learned that Edwin O'Connor hadn't been making it up .

It's also when I realized that for all the talk of the Kennedys being American royalty, what they were were throwbacks, products and champions of the old order of urban Democratic politics, Ted especially.  Right now across the western side of the bandwidth, we're mourning the death of one of the nation's last great Progressives.  But Back in Boston, in Southie and Dorchester, Charlestown, Eastie, Roxbury, Mission Hill, Brighton, Allston, and Jamaica Plain, Revere, Everett, Chelsea, Lawrence, Lowell, and, oh yeah, Cambridge, they're grieving for the loss of their very own.

At any rate, my op-ed piece ran in January just before the Iowa caucuses and Carter clobbered Kennedy there, which was pretty much all she wrote for Ted that year and forever after.

Gary still blames me.  Some days I feel guilty about this.  Some days I'm actually proud of it.  If Kennedy had beaten Carter and then defeated Reagan in the fall, no sure thing, and if he'd served two terms, he'd have just died in the 20th year of his former-Presidency, and while I'm sure he'd have been a credit to former Presidents, even the greatest of former Presidents can't accomplish what a great Senator can accomplish in 20 years.  If he'd been President he wouldn't have done half the great things he did.

Of course, had he been President we probably wouldn't have needed him to do some of those great things since they involved thwarting and undoing the Reagan-Gingrich Revolution.

One of those things we'll never know and not worth arguing about---until the next time I see Gary.

What we know is that Ted Kennedy spent the last three decades making himself one of the best legislators in American history by saving the country from the worst of what Reagan and Gingrich and W. Bush wanted to do to it and by keeping liberalism alive in spirit and in law and, most important, in effect in the lives of millions of people who needed help.

I met the man only once, and it was thanks to Gary.  Gary was in law school at Harvard at the time and one night Kennedy showed up to speak to a group of law students.  Gary got me in and we wound up sitting on the floor right at Ted Kennedy's feet.

It was late in the evening.  The Senator had just flown in from some fact-finding mission in the far west.  He was clearly exhausted.  Considering when this was, he might also have been drunk.  His eyes were pink and bleary, his face was bright red.  Maybe it was a sunburn.  He'd spent all day on an Indian reservation, I think.  Whatever.  If he wasn't in the bag or half in it, he was just as desperately in need of a bed or twelve pots of coffee.  It wore you out, just to look at him.  And he was still on top of things.

He fielded question after question, patiently and attentively.  He answered thoughtfully and thoroughly.  Some of these questions were on what seemed to me very obscure issues and arcane points of policy and those were the questions that he jumped on and responded to most completely.  The longer he was there, the more revved up he got, and by the time his aides made him call it a night, I wouldn't say he'd revived, but he'd definitely recharged enough that he could have gone on for another hour or two.

I got to shake his hand at the end of the night.  It was a huge hand.  A hand that large could pick up and carry quite a load all on its own, and in a way, it did.  It carried all of us.

Photo by Stephen Crowley of the New York Times.

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Be sure to read all of Charles Pierce's profile of Kennedy in the Globe---in which one of the things we learn about Kennedy is that he didn't like profiles---Pierce doesn't shy away from the bad stuff.  Mary Jo Kopechne is in there.  But the bad stuff's too much a part of the good stuff to be left out of the story.  The piece was done at the height of the Bush Administration's success and arrogance.  I don't know if Pierce was thinking it, but at the time he might have been writing Ted Kennedy's Last Hurrah.  The thing is, Kennedy himself wasn't thinking it or wasn't letting himself think it.  He was thinking he had work to do.

A taste:

If his name were Edward Moore, Robert Bork might be on the Supreme Court today. Robert Dole might have been elected president of the United States. There might still be a draft. There would not have been the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which overturned seven Supreme Court decisions that Kennedy saw as rolling back the gains of the civil rights movement; the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act, the most wide-ranging civil rights bill since the original ones in the 1960s; the Kennedy-Kassebaum Bill of 1996, which allows "portability" in health care coverage; or any one of the 35 other initiatives - large and small, on everything from Medicare to the minimum wage to immigration reform - that Kennedy, in opposition and in the minority, managed to cajole and finesse through the Senate between 1996 and 1998, masterfully defusing the Gingrich Revolution and maneuvering Dole into such complete political incoherence that Bill Clinton won reelection in a walk. None of this would have happened, if his name were Edward Moore.

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At Buck Naked Politics, they've posted an extensive round-up of obits, tributes, eulogies, and reminiscences.

Comments

[Dennis Perrin]

After EMK lost to the rightward-drifting Carter, I worked for Anderson, as did several Kennedy supporters I knew. Carter was awful and deserved to lose. Unfortunately it was to Reagan.

I remember Jerry Brown's brief candidacy that year. Francis Ford Coppola tried some multi-media happening for Brown (I believe in Wisconsin), and it failed miserably. Fitting.

Nice post, Lance. There are a handful of Dems I can honestly, if critically, celebrate. EMK was one.

[Davis X. Machina]

If you think they're mourning in Southie, you don't get to Southie much, or stick to that part of it east of L Street.

[Rana]

Right now across the western side of the bandwidth, we're mourning the death of one of the nation's last great Progressives. But Back in Boston, in Southie, Charlestown, Eastie, Roxbury, and Jamaica Plain, Revere, Everett, Lawrence, Lowell, and, oh yeah, Cambridge, they're grieving for the loss of their very own.

Yes. Speaking as someone from the other side of both the generational divide and the geographical divide, I've been bemused by the coverage and various peoples' reactions to the news. I get, in my head, why his death is such a big deal, and I can respect the feelings of those who are emotionally caught up in the moment, but my heart is indifferent. It's just that... well... he's never really been a person to me, but rather an Iconic Figure of Importance, and I don't - for whatever reason - tend to react emotionally to those most of the time. It'd be nice if I could just blame it on being on the wrong side of the divide.

[Victoria]

Anyone interested in knowing that Ted Kennedy was, in fact, a person can read the many personal recollections of the man at the National Journal Online.

[Lance]

Davis, Well, I haven't spent any time there in a long while. My four years in Boston came not that long after the busing crisis and there was still a lot of resentment, but it probably depended on what bar, what parish, what local. And knowing Boston, I'm sure old grudges are still being nursed. But we'll see what they do in Southie when the funeral procession passes through.

[actor212]

I'm betting even Southies can respect the man's longevity and what he's done for Massachussetts (arguably the hardest state in the union to spell) and will miss him.

Even Southies.