The seeds for Sen. Edward Kennedy's deep and abiding liberalism may have been planted one afternoon nearly a century ago at Harvard. Joseph P. Kennedy, the senator's father, who was attending the college at the time, watched three wealthy, well-dressed students palling around before they entered Claverly Hall. Joe would always recall this unremarkable incident, which had no obvious point save this. He envied the boys' wealth, their easy camaraderie, their self-confidence and sense of entitlement. One might say that Joe Kennedy spent a good deal of his life molding his own family in the image of these rich young men. In time he succeeded, perhaps even beyond his wildest dreams. The Kennedy family attained a kind of esthetic perfection. It was a big, happy, handsome gaggle in which the father encouraged competition and demanded excellence (Ted said his father would "keep the blowtorch on you") while the mother, Rose, encouraged discipline and faith. What one might not have seen was the way in which it inspired the politics of its youngest member.
In some ways the Kennedy liberalism was a minor aberration. Despite the fervent Democratic politics of Mrs. Kennedy's father, John (Honey Fitz) Fitzgerald, a gregarious, backslapping Boston Irish pol who was elected to Congress and twice to the city's mayoralty, and Mr. Kennedy's father, Patrick, a more subdued but no less fervent Democrat, it wasn't entirely clear that their descendants would toe the party line. Indeed, after he had accumulated his wealth, Joseph Kennedy briefly flirted with the idea of joining the Republicans.
The Kennedy children seemed less ambivalent, if also somewhat restrained. For John F. Kennedy the Democratic Party may have been a legacy, but his liberalism was not bred in the bone, and he was always looked on askance by the more liberal elements of his party. When, as president, he decided to champion civil rights, his detractors saw it as political calculation. Bobby came by his liberalism more personally and devoutly. As a young man he had been a staff member of Joseph McCarthy's Senate investigations subcommittee, but his brother's death had such a profound effect on him that it seemed to radicalize his politics. It was if he had suffered some deep, irreparable wound that suddenly connected him to everyone else who was also suffering. His liberalism was a function of that empathy—of his own tortured soul and the feeling that it was his job to represent the afflicted and powerless. The epigraph, from Keats, in the commonplace book he kept read: "None can usurp the height but those to whom the miseries of the world are a misery and will not let them rest."
But Ted Kennedy was a different sort—less detached than Jack, less passionate than Bobby. Ted was the ever-smiling, happy-go-lucky Kennedy: the family pet who seemed to take it on himself to jolly everyone up. Ted entered the Senate cautiously, appreciating the pecking order and hoping to become a clubman. After Jack's death he saw his mission as fulfilling his late brother's legacy—his maiden speech was on the Civil Rights Act of 1964—but even so, he trod lightly. His politics might have been described as liberal centrist. On Vietnam, where Bobby turned against the war fairly early, Ted was a late convert, and he tried to talk his brother out of running for the presidency. It was a far cry from the liberal lion he would famously become. Even after Bobby's death, which hit Ted as hard as JFK's had hit Bobby, he did not return to the Senate as a liberal firebrand, though he did understand that, as he put it, he had to pick up his brothers' fallen standard.
What turned Ted Kennedy into the very personification of American liberalism was less personal trauma or obligation than family. This wasn't just a matter of inheritance. Ted was very much his grandfather Fitzgerald's boy, but it was the old man's affable political style that rubbed off on him, not political ideology. And it wasn't just a matter of his father's sense of civic duty, though Joe inculcated in his children a strong belief that to whom much is given, much is expected. Rather, it was how the family functioned that seems to have had the deepest effect on Ted's political philosophy.
The first thing that one has to know about the Kennedys is that they were a product of Joseph Kennedy's own deep sense of alienation and umbrage. He never got over the sting of being an Irish Catholic in a Protestant Brahmin-run order. He bristled that he was debarred by his religion from the most prestigious final clubs at Harvard, that his daughters wouldn't be accepted as debutantes in Protestant society, that he'd been snubbed by the Cohasset Golf Club where he had summered. All the Kennedys grew up with this sense of grievance. "It's us against the rest," one Kennedy friend described the family grit. It was one of the things that linked them to the unfortunate and the powerless. They understood what it was like to be disrespected, and in some ways their political success was a form of vengeance.
But there was something else Joseph Kennedy managed to accomplish by investing his family with the idea that it was surrounded by people who thought they were its social betters. He created a powerful sanctuary. Family was the only institution in which Joe could place his faith. Nothing was tighter than the Kennedy clan. "The Kennedys are all in love with one another" was how the columnist Joseph Alsop put it. One observer recalled how at parties the family would all cluster together, a kind of scrum that excluded anyone who wasn't a Kenne-dy. "You would never see a Kennedy alone," she said. Kennedys never sniped at one another, even privately. Kennedys protected one another and leaned on one another for solace. As the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. analyzed it, Joe's devout family unity was reinforced by Rose's devout Catholicism. Catholics, unlike Protestants, felt they weren't in this world to venture alone. They were part of a larger system. For the Kennedys, that system was family.
In effect, the Kennedy family was a small welfare state, supported by the father's tremendous wealth but bound by a powerful sense of community in which each member was responsible for every other member. That this was more than a light commitment was underscored by their attitude toward Rosemary, their mentally challenged sister. The Kennedys were the "perfect family," Rose would write, but "God or 'destiny' just does not allow a family to exist which has all these star-studded adornments." Rosemary was the one "who must receive rather than bestow." Receive she did. Her family lavished attention on her, and her siblings incorporated her into their social engagements and activities. Ted considered her one of the major influences of his life.
All of this must have hit Ted with a frightening intensity when he was forced to assume the family leadership after Bobby's death in 1968. He had to become the paterfamilias to all the fatherless Kennedy children in addition to being father to his own. And he had to maintain the spirit of the Kennedy family as a haven of love and loyalty. Everyone says he discharged these obligations flawlessly. He was always there for all his nieces and nephews—for advice, consolation, support, love. But he did something else after he became the lone Kennedy brother: he began to reimagine his politics in the image of his family.
Though Ted was accused by Republicans of being an old-fashioned tax-and-spend, big-government liberal, his was, in fact, a different kind of liberalism. It was even different from Jack Kenne-dy's grudging liberalism or Bobby's re-visionist liberalism that eschewed the old New Deal alliances and shibboleths. Ted's liberalism was the liberalism of the family, rooted in traditional values and in progressive social Catholicism. What the Kennedys had done for one another, what they felt for one another, he seemed to hope to bring to the entire nation. For Ted, we were all brothers and sisters. We all had to take care of one another, especially those, like Rosemary, who were less fortunate than we were. Thus Ted Kennedy became America's national brother. As he had fought for his own siblings, he fought for those things that would make the national family fairer, kinder, more loving. America would be the Kennedys writ large.
Virtually all of Ted Kennedy's major legislative initiatives—from the Voting Rights Act, to national health care, to AIDS funding, to crusades for justice in Biafra, the former Soviet Union, and South Africa, to his opposition to the war in Iraq—can be seen as extensions of this idea. His goal wasn't to expand government but to make government more responsive and caring, and to make the nation itself gentler. He frequently spoke of "the voiceless and the powerless," saying, "I'd like to be their voice, their senator." There was virtually nothing doctrinaire or ideological about it, which is why he could push such seemingly heretical policies as airline deregulation and criminal-code reform with mandatory sentencing, or why, as early as 1979, long before Bill Clinton declared that the era of big government was over, he called for a "clean break" with the New Deal, saying that government intervention should come only as a "last resort." His politics was about feeling, not orthodoxy.
If the personal was his politics, his politics was also personal. He was the senator most likely to comfort a distressed colleague, since he considered the Senate his professional family. When he voted to censure Sen. Thomas Dodd, he made a point of visiting Dodd to express his regrets. He spent 14 hours with Joe Biden's family after Biden suffered an aneurysm. He phoned Sen. Gordon Smith when Smith's son committed suicide. Republicans, most of whom had turned Kennedy into the poster child for liberal excess and used his name to fundraise, made a point of separating the personal Ted, whom they said they admired, from the political one, whom they detested. But it was a bogus division. The two Teds were inseparable; the man was the politics.
Which, of course, may have been the great irony of Ted Kennedy's career. Derided as a wild-eyed liberal, he was really the most old-fashioned of men in his political values. That would also, in some ways, be the tragedy of his career. He had miscalculated that what he found in his family, Americans would want in their nation. But the Republicans found success by flogging their own version of America, one that saw the country not as a community but as a collection of self-interested individualists. In the end, this metaphor proved far more sellable than Ted's, perhaps because it demanded so much less of the citizenry. They had only to look out for themselves.
Ted didn't seem to be disheartened by the long, hard slog of almost every legislative battle he waged. In the Republican era, he knew that community was a tough sell because he knew how tough it was to be a Kennedy. But he believed that the rewards of being part of a big, loving family were so very, very great that he wanted the citizens of the country he loved to experience them, too.
Gabler, a Senior Fellow at the Norman Lear center at the University of Southern California, is working on a book on Senator Kennedy and modern American liberalism.