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How Kennedy Learned to Care
Despite his patrician upbringing, Teddy learned as a boy to fight for the less fortunate—a lesson instilled by his grandfather, John Fitzgerald
Aug 26, 2009
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Teddy Kennedy was 11 when he first got interested in real people who were down on their luck, sick, poor, or victims of discrimination—the people who dominated his nearly five decades of public life. He learned at the feet of his grandfather John F. (Honey Fitz) Fitzgerald, who had been mayor of Boston 30 years before, but who never lost touch with the city.
In 1943, Teddy was a lonely sixth grader at the Fessenden School in West Newton, Mass., and after Sunday mass he would often go to Boston to have lunch with his grandfather. Up in the Fitzgeralds' suite in the old Bellevue Hotel on Beacon Hill, Teddy would listen as Honey Fitz called people on the phone, asking how they were, offering condolences in the case of death or illness.
A scion of wealth and power, Ted Kennedy became the Senate's great lion by fighting for the poor and the dispossessed
When they went downstairs to have lunch, the ex-mayor made a point of going through the kitchen, saying hello to everyone working there, an instinctive political touch his grandson would adopt. While they ate in the hotel dining room, people would come up to Honey Fitz. "They would talk about what was happening in the North End, how are things with the Italians, what was happening to the Irish—problems of discrimination," Ted told me nearly 50 years later when I asked how someone as well off as a Kennedy came to focus on those who needed help. "Initially, I got a good dose of it from my grandfather," he said, "from a person who was not preaching."
From those Sundays with Grandpa came another important lesson. After lunch, Honey Fitz would take Teddy around his beloved Boston, walking the glory of its history. Teddy had been born in Boston, but he had lived in Bronxville, N.Y., and London, and had no real knowledge of the city that the Kennedys and Fitzgeralds had settled in when they came from Ireland. They would go to the Park Street Church, where William Lloyd Garrison preached against slavery, and the Old North Church, where the two lanterns that directed Paul Revere's ride were hung in 1775. They explored Bunker Hill and "Old Ironsides," the USS Constitution. They didn't go as tourists, visiting the sites just once to say that they had been there. They went as teacher and pupil, returning again and again, as Teddy learned the history and tried to tell the stories as well as Honey Fitz did. "Being a good Irish storyteller is a gift you hone," Teddy once wrote.
Ted Kennedy's family greatly influenced the future senator, from his mother's Roman Catholic faith, to his father's stress on the obligation of public service, to his brothers' competitiveness. But Honey Fitz gave him a sense of place and kindled the liberal causes he made his life's work.
Preorder NEWSWEEK’s Ted Kennedy Special Commemorative Issue
Clymer is the author of Edward M. Kennedy: A Biography
© 2009
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