What Teddy Can Teach Us

Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate sometimes liked to raise money by invoking Teddy Kennedy as a caricature of big, fat, out-of-control liberalism. Kennedy was not particularly bothered by these attacks; indeed he joked about them. He could afford to, because he knew that if a Republican senator wanted to get a law passed, sooner or later he or she would be in the office of Senator Kennedy, asking for help. For several decades, not much got accomplished in Congress without Edward Kennedy's active support.

 

What Teddy Can Teach Us

Evan Thomas

Dole on Kennedy and bipartisanship

Kerry on Kennedy, the Compassionate Friend

Lewis on Kennedy's Commitment to Civil Rights

Bradlee on the Youngest Kennedy Son

More on Ted Kennedy

 

Kennedy was the second coming of Daniel Webster not because he was a terrific speechmaker. His greatest flights of oratory, like his "Dream Shall Never Die" speech at the Democratic National Convention in 1980, were written by someone else and actually out of character. A funny and salty storyteller in private, Kennedy was often bombastic or inarticulate in public. Nor was Kennedy a visionary. For years, he propped up Democratic interest groups whose thinking hadn't evolved much since LBJ's Great Society or FDR's New Deal. His own ideology seems to have been rooted in liberal guilt: since the rich have a lot (like good health care), why shouldn't the poor? Kennedy's gifts were more of the heart than the head.

His career confounded the Kennedy Myth. For decades, the public has associated the Kennedys with drama, glamour, and celebrity. The Kennedy family has been our favorite public soap opera, lurching between triumph and tragedy. Yet the youngest son was not intellectual and debonair like his brother Jack, or intense and bold like his brother Bobby. For all the eulogies about his epic struggle with sin and redemption, Ted actually vindicated a more mundane truism: that half (or maybe as much as 90 percent) of success in life is just showing up.

In 1965, when both Robert and Edward Kennedy sat on the Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee, the two brothers found themselves waiting several hours during a committee meeting to question a witness. Robert passed a note to Ted: "Is this the way I become a good senator—sitting here and waiting my turn?" Ted wrote back, "Yes." Robert pressed: "How many hours do I have to sit here to be a good senator?" Ted scribbled: "As long as necessary, Robbie." RFK was too impatient to be a good senator, but EMK relished the minutiae and drudgery of legislation, along with the cloakroom camaraderie and the dealmaking and favor-swapping that are essential to passing laws. He possessed two qualities rarely found in our elected representatives: he did not hog the limelight, and he was never petty. For 47 years in the U.S. Senate, Kennedy patiently waited his turn, and by doing so accomplished more for the poor and dispossessed than any other senator, ever.

Kennedy contributed his own share of dark family drama at Chappaquiddick and in his late-night roistering in the watering holes of Capitol Hill before he settled down happily with his second wife, Victoria Reggie, whom he married in 1992. Part of just showing up for Kennedy was presiding as paterfamilias at endless family graduations, weddings, and funerals. Judging from the testimony at the rape trial of his nephew William Kennedy Smith in 1991, he also sometimes presided over family bar-hopping and skirt-chasing. But in the Senate, the party-boy Teddy—the onetime spoiled Harvard kid who got kicked out for arranging for a friend to take his Spanish exam—was a dutiful grind.