His Dream Shall Never Die

The "careless rich." at times in his life, Edward M. Kennedy seemed to embody the type. Like many scions of wealth, he did not carry money—other people had to pick up the bill. If he drove too fast, there was someone to pay, or fix, the ticket. He was, after all, a Kennedy—"the most exclusive club in the world," the proud patriarch, Joseph Kennedy, liked to proclaim. Kennedys, including Teddy Kennedy, could come off as entitled to the point of irresponsibility, certainly in their messy personal lives.

And yet, Edward Kennedy, perhaps more than any United States senator in the past half century, cared about the poor and dispossessed. Though he was relentlessly mocked by the right as a tax-and-spend liberal, he kept the faith. "For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die," he said in his most famous speech, at the Democratic National Convention in 1980, and he stayed true to his words.

 

Edward M. Kennedy, 1932 - 2009

Evan Thomas

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He was hardly the first rich person to care. Oblige has gone with noblesse for ages; Franklin Roosevelt, creator of the New Deal, was a rich aristocrat. But there was a seriousness, a doggedness, to Kennedy. He was no dilettante, no limousine liberal. He was a prodigious worker, the strongest force in the government for women's rights and health care, civil rights and immigration, the rights of the disabled and education. He was effective: in the Senate, to get something done, you went to Ted Kennedy.

He was, in some sense, fulfilling his family duty. The Kennedys have been almost a sovereign state: as a little boy, Teddy took his first communion from the pope. It was his destiny to do the work of the Last Son, to be honored as the "Last Lion," as he was called in his most recent biography, a thorough and fair-minded job by the staff of The Boston Globe. At one level, his story is a familiar one to the many students of Kennedyana, a tale of sin and redemption, triumph and tragedy. But like all good human stories, his is not so easily reduced to cliché. Kennedy's saga is at once more complicated and more intriguing. And it begins with a personal mystery: how someone born into a life of wealth and privilege, into a family that defined itself by its greatness, could be made to feel like a nonentity.

In the dining room of the Kennedy mansion in Bronxville, N.Y. (where Joe Kennedy had moved to escape the anti-Catholic prejudice of Boston), there was a large mahogany table. There was room at the table for Joe and his wife, Rose, their nine children, and various nuns and family retainers. At the head sat the patriarch and his three eldest children—Joe Jr., John, and Kathleen. They were "the golden trio"; they carried the father's ambitions for success and acceptance by the Protestant elite. During dinner, Joe would quiz them on world events and invite sharp, teasing banter. Farther down the table sat three more daughters and Robert, as well as mother Rose. Young Bobby was defined by his almost desperate efforts to get the attention of his father and glamorous siblings, status he eventually achieved by playing the role of tough guy, willing to do the nasty jobs and allow the others to float above.

The last born, Edward, wasn't even at the dining-room table. As a little boy, far younger than his older siblings, he was relegated to an alcove off to the side, often with his next-youngest sibling, Jean, and an assigned older sibling. Joe Kennedy liked to point out Edward's auspicious start: he was born on Feb. 22, 1932, the 200th anniversary of the first president's birth. Instead of naming him after Washington, though, the infant was named after one of the retainers, Edward Moore—a servant, in effect. In a family that took itself seriously, little Teddy seemed to be a bit of a joke—an overweight boy called "Biscuits and Muffins" and "Fat Stuff" by his siblings.

He dealt with the put-downs by playing the clown. While Bobby brooded—Jack called him "Black Robert"—Teddy was jolly, sunny, a kidder. He kept any hurt well concealed. In a family of overachievers, he was regarded with low expectations, which he met. As a freshman at Harvard, he was tossed out for two years for cheating on a Spanish exam. His father chided him, not for moral failure, but for stupidity. "Don't do this cheating thing; you're not clever enough," Joe wrote with cold-blooded condescension. Teddy joined the Army—a healthy exposure to the less cosseted—but his influential father intervened to keep him far from the front lines in Korea. He served comfortably as a NATO honor guard in Paris.

He married, but not happily. His beautiful wife, Joan, was later shown a film of their wedding. Older brother Jack, who was wearing a microphone, could be heard advising his nervous kid brother not to worry—marriage did not require fidelity. Teddy worshiped Jack and, during JFK's 1960 presidential race, was put in charge of rounding up votes in the Western states. JFK lost almost all of them. Teddy used humor as a defense: CAN I COME BACK IF I PROMISE TO CARRY THE WESTERN STATES IN 1964? he wired his family.