EXCERPT: The Kennedy Legacy, by Vincent Bzdek
27 August 2009 12:11 am by Taylor Marsh
–see “The Liberals’ Liberal” on Huffington Post–
The courage of life is often a less dramatic spectacle than the courage of a final moment; but it is no less a magnificent mixture of triumph and tragedy. – —John Fitzgerald Kennedy
PROLOGUE
THE LAST HURRAH
August 25, 2008: With just two hours to showtime, Ted Kennedy and the speech of a lifetime languished uncertainly on a hospital bed. Exhausted, experiencing excruciating pain, Kennedy waited in a nondescript room at the University of Colorado Hospital in East Denver as the setting sun torched the sky behind the Rocky Mountains. He was just a few miles away from the convention hall, but it was beginning to feel like a million. He lay unnoticed by hospital workers, hoping against hope that doctors would clear him to make the speech. His wife, Vicki, was with him, and the last-minute ironies of their long, difficult trek were not lost on them. A very sick, 76-year-old Kennedy, fighting an arduous fight against brain cancer, had secretly made it all the way across the country in a chartered plane to be at the Democratic National Convention. During a long summer of chemotherapy and radiation treatments, he and his former speechwriter, Bob Shrum, had worked diligently on the speech he wanted to give. He’d endured a sleepless night after his arrival in Denver and fought off the effects of the altitude only to have the excruciating pain of a mysterious new ailment stop his last-ditch dream in its tracks.
After successful surgery in June to remove the tumor from his brain, Kennedy had called family members together at his white clapboard house in Hyannis Port to tell them all that he was determined—no, hell-bent—on giving his speech in August. Family members remember emotional, difficult conversations about the wisdom of such a trip. Kennedy’s wife, his doctors, his children and his aides warned that the speech could very well kill him. Some pleaded with him not to go to Denver at all, even for an appearance. They argued adamantly that the risk to Kennedy’s health wasn’t worth it. After two seizures in May, Kennedy had been diagnosed with malignant glioma, which is fatal for 50 percent of its sufferers by the end of a year’s time. If he went to Denver, family members feared, it could be his last speech. Everyone close to Kennedy sensed that a curtain was slowly closing on both his life and a 50-year-long political drama in American history. And they did not want him to hurry that finale. They had been making their case for rest and caution for eight weeks, all during the “shock and awe” phase of his treatment. Kennedy repeatedly acknowledged his family’s concerns about his health during those two months, largely agreed with them that going to Denver was reckless, and then vowed that he was going to do it anyway. “It was a risk to his health,” said Shrum, “but he really wanted to do this.” Said another friend: “He gave every ounce of courage to attend that convention.”
Doctors were at first concerned that the pain he was experiencing after his arrival on Sunday, August 24, was due to his cancer or the chemotherapy and radiation treatments. Radiologists were reluctant to let him fly during treatment because the pressurized air in the plane cabin can wreak all sorts of havoc on the immune system of a weakened body. Kennedy’s doctors were also concerned that Denver’s mile-high altitude might complicate his condition, making his lungs and heart work harder as they coped with the reduced oxygen in Colorado’s thin air. One of Kennedy’s close associates said the senator had suffered a serious setback in July after he flew to Washington to cast a crucial vote on a Medicare bill. Doctors had pleaded with him not to make that trip, either.
Kennedy had been taken straight to the University of Colorado Hospital from the plane for a routine check. At the hospital Sunday night, less than 24 hours before he was scheduled to give his surprise speech, doctors discovered what was causing Kennedy’s pain. In addition to all his other health concerns, the senator had a case of kidney stones. The new ailment had nothing to do with his cancer, it was just bad luck and worse timing. The pain of passing kidney stones, it is said, feels something like childbirth, and doctors were almost certain the speech was off. Kidney stones are typically treated with morphine or other powerful painkillers—drugs that make it difficult to stand up, let alone deliver a rousing speech.
“We got there, and we went through a perilous period,” said Shrum, who had flown out with Kennedy. “I mean I stayed in my hotel room basically for 24 hours in case he needed me, eating room service food, playing with text and trying to figure out what we were going to do.” When Shrum heard about the kidney stones, he cut the speech Kennedy had planned to deliver in half to make it easier to get through, and he also wrote a three-sentence version, which he sent over to Kennedy’s hospital room. Kennedy told Shrum that he wasn’t going to let a few kidney stones keep him from speaking. “He said, ‘I’m not getting up in front of the Democratic Convention to deliver three sentences.’” They had been working together in Hyannis Port for three weeks on the speech, and Kennedy had something he wanted to say.
Kennedy was treated for the kidney condition early Monday, the day of the speech, but the pain didn’t abate right away. The problem didn’t resolve itself until the middle of the night Monday. At about 5 P.M., two hours before the speech was scheduled, family and friends were not at all sure he had the strength to give it. Kennedy still “just wasn’t feeling well,” and “there was a second round [of discussion] about ‘is he going to be able to do it?’” Caroline Kennedy said. Kennedy finally told his wife that he was going to deliver the speech regardless. He rested until the last possible moment, then got up out of his hospital bed at 5:15 and rode by ambulance to the Pepsi Center.
“There was nothing that was going to keep him away,” said Caroline, who knew her uncle was determined to follow through despite concerns of his friends and family. “He knew it all along. There was no way he was not going to do it.” After the ambulance ride, Kennedy was taken by golf cart through the convention hall to a VIP room backstage. There he waited as Caroline took the stage to introduce a video tribute to her statesman uncle. Out on the floor, word was filtering through the hall that an army of Kennedys would take the stage at the end of the tribute, including the revered matriarch of the family, Bobby’s widow, Ethel Kennedy. Convention-goers were quizzing each other about which Kennedys might show up, jogging their brains to remember the names of all of Bobby’s 11 children. Word had started to leak out that Ted was in Denver, but thousands of people in the hall still didn’t know.
An elaborate, two-tiered stage that looked as if it consisted almost entirely of video screens jutted far out into the floor space at the Pepsi Center. That meant the floor was more crowded than usual, and conventioneers were packed tightly against each other as they listened to Caroline. More than 15,000 members of the media—10,000 more journalists than delegates—were in Denver for the convention as well, and many of them were crowded into the lower seats just above the floor. Ten rows of giant blue risers, all bristling with video cameras, stair-stepped up the stands facing the stage. More than 100 cameras watched as Caroline made her usual graceful entry to sustained applause and the strains of Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline,” a song that had been written for her.
JFK’s last child had been left alone by America after the tragedies that had befallen her father, uncle and brother. For once in a celebrity-crazed country, a public figure was granted her privacy. As a consequence, she had preserved a kind of quiet dignity about her. This expressed itself as an unspoken moral authority as she took the stage in a simple blue dress.
But in 2008, Caroline assumed a high profile in the country’s political slipstream. After Barack Obama won the Iowa caucus, she made an enthusiastic endorsement of his candidacy, saying she hadn’t been as excited about a politician’s potential to lift the country’s sights since her father had run. She penned an editorial for the New York Times explaining her rationale back in January, and it stood as a strong testimonial to the little-known candidate at just the time he needed it the most. She went on after that to campaign vigorously for Obama, and she and Ted became perhaps his most visible high- profile supporters early in the campaign, anointing him the newest standard-bearer of the Kennedy legacy. When Obama won the nomination, he tapped Caroline to lead his efforts to pick a running mate. And here she was, again in the public eye she had shied away from for so long, paying homage to her uncle at what was likely his last Democratic convention ever.
The floor suddenly blossomed with hundreds of Kennedy signs. Delegates pumped them up and down enthusiastically, creating a blue spray of “K-E-N-N-E-D-Y”s above their heads. “I am here tonight,” Caroline began, “to pay tribute to two men who have changed my life and the life of this country: Barack Obama and Edward M. Kennedy. Their stories are very different, but they share a commitment to the timeless American ideals of justice and fairness, service and sacrifice, faith and family.”
The video tribute that followed was a poignant voyage through the Kennedy legacy, beginning and ending with images of Ted Kennedy at sea. The highlight of the eight minutes was footage of a much younger Ted Kennedy, grizzled at the temples, pounding the lectern during one of his rafter-ringers on health care. “Long as I have a voice in the United States Senate,” Kennedy intoned from giant screens throughout the hall, “it’s going to be for that Dem- (pound) ocratic (pound) plat- (pound) form (pound) plank (pound) that provides decent (pound) quality (pound) health care (pound) for NORTH AND SOUTH, East and West, (drowned out by cheers) FOR ALL OF AMERICA . . . as a matter of right (pause for effect) and not privilege.”
The 20-year-old speech still got a standing ovation. As the tribute wound down, people there had the sense of being present at a monumental kind of ending in America’s political history. “It kind of felt like this grand finale,” said Kennedy’s son Patrick. But it was a different kind of ending for many of those in the hall who had been affected by the Kennedys. This ending was tinged by sadness, as so many Kennedy endings are, but it was also undergirded by a satisfying sense of completion. Finally, it seemed, the life of one of the sons of Camelot had not been cut short.
And he still had enough fire in his belly to deliver a rousing valedictory.
With Vicki holding him by his left arm, Kennedy shuffled gingerly out to the podium for his twelfth Democratic convention. The crowd erupted out of their seats as he came into view, and he acknowledged their “hurrahs” and applause by hoisting his left arm crookedly up in the air. Dozens of teary-eyed delegates claimed they were utterly surprised when Ted walked out. He let a wide Irish smile take over his swollen face as he arrived at the lectern. The delegates all stayed on their feet as they slapped their hands together, and the blue Kennedy sign garden bloomed again. With the spotlights occasionally revealing patches of his scalp where he’d lost hair during radiation treatments—as if he were proudly displaying, just for this one night, the visible scars of a lifetime of battle—the last Kennedy brother began his speech. “My fellow Democrats, my fellow Americans,” he began. “It is so wonderful to be here.”
***
The Kennedy brothers have delivered many memorable addresses in the 50 years they have been part of the landscape of American politics. “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” “The torch has been passed to a new generation.” “There are those who look at things the way they are and ask why, I dream things that never were and ask why not?” “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” “Ich bin ein Berliner.” “Like my brothers before me, I pick up a fallen standard.” “The work goes on, the cause endures, hope still lives and the dream shall never die.”
Eleven of the top 100 American speeches of the twentieth century were delivered by the Kennedy brothers, according to a ranking by several historians. They are words that have stood the test of time. Yet for pure grit alone, Ted Kennedy’s speech to the 2008 Democratic convention probably has to be counted among the brothers’ most dramatic. Democratic operatives had sworn that, if he were by some miracle to show up for the convention, it would be for a wave and a smile, not a speech. Instead, Ted Kennedy gave a full-throated rallying cry for Barack Obama and the reinvigoration of the Democratic Party. His tone wavered a bit in the upper registers at times, but otherwise the instrument that had brought the Senate down so many times was its usual basso profundo.
“For me, this is a season of hope,” he declared despite his ill health. “I pledge to you that I will be there next January on the floor of the Senate,” offering support to the new president, a promise he kept. Occasionally, as he has in the past when evoking the memory of his brothers, he teared up a little. In the crowd, monitors repeatedly caught his niece Maria Shriver crying during the speech, and tears could be seen on the faces of hundreds of delegates. Other family members in the hall—his children, Edward Jr., Patrick
and Kara; his brother Bobby’s widow, Ethel Kennedy; Bobby’s son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.; and a raft of fourth-generation Kennedys—all held their collective breath as Ted delivered his speech. The looks on many of the faces in the wings seemed to say, Hurry, get through this, and just make it to the end. Shrum made sure the 10-minute version of the talk was loaded into the teleprompter rather than the 20-minute one, a concession to the kidney stones. But Kennedy delivered all 10 minutes in full voice, and almost every sentence was met with cheers.
And, as he has in nearly every major speech for the past 30 years, Kennedy spoke again of “the cause of my life,” the delivery of “decent, quality health care as a fundamental right and not a privilege.”
He compared 2008 with 1960, when his brother called Americans to higher purposes. “We are told that Barack Obama believes too much in an America of high principle and bold endeavor, but when John Kennedy called of going to the moon, he didn’t say it’s too far to get there. We shouldn’t even try. Our people answered his call and rose to the challenge, and today an American flag still marks the surface of the moon.
“This is what we do. We reach the moon. We scale the heights. I know it. I’ve seen it. I’ve lived it. And we can do it again.”
His passion rose and the crowd revved as he barreled toward another memorable finish. “He actually got stronger as his speech went on,” said his son Patrick, who was on stage with him just as he had been as a 12-year-old in 1980 when his father delivered his best-remembered line, “the dream shall never die.” In his closing, Ted Kennedy echoed both that speech and his brother’s 1961 inaugural address. “This November,” he said, “the torch will be passed again to a new generation of Americans, so with Barack Obama and for you and me, our country will be committed to his cause. The work begins anew. The hope rises again. And the dream lives on.”
***
“The man never quits,” said a longtime friend, retired senator Alan Simpson (R-WY). “He’s indefatigable. He’s a fighter.” Dogged perseverance—whether it’s fighting political battles, overcoming personal shortcomings or coping with family tragedies—has become something of Ted Kennedy’s signature after a half-century in the political limelight. Ted was only 12 when his oldest brother, Joe, died in a warplane explosion during a secret mission over Europe. Ted lost his sister “Kick” in a plane crash when he was 16. His brother, the president, was assassinated when he was 31. He himself broke his back and nearly died falling from a crashing plane when he was 32. And Ted was only 36 when Bobby, the would-be president, was slain. A year after that day in California, just after a party to salute some of Bobby’s campaign workers, Ted Kennedy’s car went off a bridge and the woman in the passenger seat drowned.
The catalogue of death and suffering didn’t stop there for Ted Kennedy. In the decades that followed, Ted’s oldest son lost his leg and nearly his life to cancer. Ted lost three of his nephews: one to a heroin overdose, another to a freak skiing accident, and JFK’s son, John Jr.—the next generation’s brightest hope—to yet another airplane crash. And now, after years of desperately fleeing from death much of his life, the last Kennedy brother is facing his own. But there is something about the Kennedys that, after 50 years and all that misfortune, simply refuses to fade. There is still something fierce burning at the heart of the Kennedy legacy.
Patriarch Joseph Kennedy Sr., the father of John, Bobby and Ted, first sculpted that legacy three generations ago. His political clout helped Franklin Delano Roosevelt win the presidential nomination in 1932 and usher in the New Deal. John Kennedy’s public service idealism in the 1960s drew an entire generation of inspired young people into politics. His invocation of a New Frontier restored the country’s optimism about itself and led directly to a man landing on the moon nine years after he was elected. Robert Kennedy
broadened the legacy into to a deep compassion for the disenfranchised. And then Ted Kennedy struggled for 46 years to make the Kennedy legacy a permanent piece of America’s superstructure.
“The younger brothers Bobby and Ted were infected by one particular aspect of John, which was his idealism. . . . Bobby was the suffering idealist. And Ted became over time the pragmatic idealist,” said Joe Klein, a columnist with Time magazine. Generally, Americans are much more familiar with the enormous toll the task of being the surviving Kennedy brother has taken on Ted than with his own contributions to that legacy. Chappaquiddick, numerous affairs, drunken outings, and arrogant tirades most defined Ted Kennedy during a long fall from grace during the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1990s he was dismissed as an arcane throwback to old-school liberalism, out of touch with today’s politics.
A worshipful mystique forever surrounds his slain brothers, despite their flaws, but Teddy has lived long enough for the nation to see a Kennedy at his best and at his worst. Despite tabloid headlines and the sneers of conservative pundits, though, he still managed to keep the Kennedy legacy relevant. And today, it seems we are in another Kennedy moment. The traditional liberalism he has long stood for has made a comeback. Of late, standing ovations in the Senate are what define Ted Kennedy. For 50 years, in a life filled with tragedies, embarrassments, controversy and triumph, he has done the one thing his brothers never got the chance to do: He has persevered.
Perseverance may well be Edward Kennedy’s crowning contribution. He has been the only real constant in the half-century construction of the Kennedy legacy. In stubbornly keeping on, he has managed to keep alive something many of JFK’s and then Bobby’s contemporaries thought died with those men in the 1960s. “When Bobby was killed, my generation was almost critically wounded,” Senator Walter Mondale said five years after that night. “As a matter of fact, I don’t know, we may never get over it.” What those kinds of sentiments about JFK and Bobby deny is all the good that’s been done in their names since. More than anyone else, Ted took their deaths and tried to alchemize something positive out of them. For 49 years, Ted’s guiding purpose has been to keep aflame the torch of sacrifice, optimism and public service that JFK first lit in 1960. What they dreamed, he built, law by law. And he’s been helped by legions of people inspired by his brothers, an entire Kennedy Generation.
Yet in the Kennedy pantheon, Ted is still the overlooked son, “the runt of the litter,” “the baby of the family,” the one who has never quite risen to the stature of his martyred brothers. It may be finally time to rethink that legacy. John and Robert captured the country’s imagination, but it has been Ted who has most improved people’s reality. If Ted himself had ever been elected president, his influence would not have lasted so long. In many ways, because of his longevity and single-minded dedication to the memory of his brothers, Ted has become a greater politician and left a greater legacy than either John or Bobby. John always called Ted the best politician of the family. In nearly five decades of behind-the-scenes Senate work, he has finished much, though not all, of his brothers’ unfinished dreams. “This is the most consequential legislative career in the country’s history,”6 said Thomas Oliphant, who as a correspondent and columnist for the Boston Globe has chronicled Kennedy’s career. “It probably had more impact on more people than many presidents. In actual, measurable impact on the lives of tens of millions of working families, the elderly and the needy, Kennedy belongs in the same sentence with Franklin Roosevelt.”
Whether you agree with Kennedy or not, he has made flesh the progressive idealism of John and Bobby—and he has made that idealism last. Political commentator Molly Ivins said, “To tell the truth, Ted Kennedy has had a greater impact on this country than either of his famous brothers.” No other Kennedy can claim a 47-year legacy. Few senators can, either—he’s currently the second-longest-serving senator, and the third longest in the history of the chamber. JFK had his 1,000 days in the White House. RFK had his 82 days on the campaign trail. Ted Kennedy’s days in the Senate number more than 17,000—and counting. Political columnist David Shribman put it this way: “His brothers’ words are in large letters on the sides of buildings and in the hearts and memory of a nation. But the youngest brother is the fine-print Kennedy. His words are in the fine print of the nation’s laws.”
Kennedy has cast more than 15,000 votes and written more than 2,500 bills. His fingerprints are on most of the major social programs that have been launched in the last 40 years. “He has done more for human happiness than anyone in Congress,” said Carol Chodroff, a human rights attorney who works closely with Kennedy. He made his maiden speech in the Senate in support of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed segregation in theaters, restaurants, hotels, swimming pools, libraries and public schools. He continued as a strong advocate for civil rights during the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and the current decade, helping to ensure passage of the Voting Rights Act and substantially improving the rights of the handicapped, women in the workplace, immigrants and refugees. He introduced the bill that created the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. He got 18-year-olds the right to vote.
He has campaigned for universal health insurance for 30 years, and from his hospital bed last year was orchestrating efforts to pass a bipartisan healthcare reform plan in early 2009. Along the way toward his elusive goal he has dramatically increased cancer research funds, created portable health insurance for workers, hammered through a patient’s bill of rights and instituted closer government supervision of health maintenance organizations.
The mountain of achievements he has compiled or played a significant part in include the creation of Medicare, the family and medical leave bill, national service legislation, worker retraining laws, freedom of access to abortion clinics, the lifting of the abortion gag rule, women’s health legislation including fetal tissue research, and student loan reform. Ted Kennedy helped create Meals on Wheels for senior citizens. He won greater justice for Native Americans, created a host of programs to combat hunger in the United States and abolished the poll tax. His immigration bill in the 1960s changed the very complexion of America, replacing a black-white divide with a multi-hued diversity of immigrants. He also has a strong history of gun control efforts—including early support for the Brady bill and opposition to the National Rifle Association dating from 1968.
His causes have been large and small and have crossed party lines. Working closely with President George W. Bush, he pushed through the controversial No Child Left Behind law intended to improve standards at public schools. In the 1990s, he and Republican Orrin Hatch cosponsored a bill to give health insurance to nine million uninsured children. Hatch and Kennedy rewrote the country’s sentencing laws, ending parole in the federal prison system. In the 1980s, he and Republican senator Alan Simpson crafted immigration reform together. He and Senator John McCain did it again in the 1990s. He forged a balanced budget bill, helped Ronald Reagan deregulate the airlines and single-handedly blocked the confirmations of two Republican nominees to the Supreme Court, G. Harrold Carswell and Robert Bork.
Some have called him the Imperial Senator, running a kind of shadow government out of the Senate. His involvement in foreign affairs, for example, is little known but broad. It was his activism that pushed the world toward a condemnation of apartheid in South Africa. He is the one who initiated the sanctions that eventually forced the end of second-class citizenship for blacks in that country. New York Times journalist Adam Clymer said Kennedy’s influence “has extended from Vietnam to the Soviet Union, from Bangladesh to Chile, from Biafra to China, from South Africa to Ireland.”
His persistence has kept the Kennedy flame burning long and bright enough to hand the torch off to Barack Obama. “I would not be sitting here as a presidential candidate had it not been for some of the battles that Ted Kennedy has fought,” Obama said in one of his campaign speeches. “I stand on his shoulders.” More than anything, the sanctity of that torch was the reason Ted Kennedy was so determined to make it to Denver. “He wanted to be here to demonstrate that this was another epic moment in the history of this
country, when there was a real passing of the torch to a new generation,” his son Patrick said. After bearing the torch for so long, Ted Kennedy had come to own it, and he wasn’t going to let anyone else pass it along.
***
Kennedy’s speech at the Democratic convention in 2008 marks the closing of a fascinating chapter in America’s political and cultural life. Many who were there believed they were witnessing the last major address a Kennedy would ever give at a national convention. It also means that, for the first time perhaps, the real measure of the Kennedy legacy can finally be taken. The brothers’ three stories can be seen as essentially one now, each successive brother striving to fulfill the interrupted promise and finish the unfinished life of the brother before. This book is the story of the birth of that legacy three generations ago, how it was built, when it nearly died, what caused it to spark again and to whom it is being passed. It’s a story of a brotherhood, really, in four acts. Act I charts Joe Jr.’s influence on the brothers as they were growing up. Act II is the road to John F. Kennedy’s inspiring presidency, as seen from Ted’s front-row seat; Act III is Robert Kennedy’s five brief years as the family standard-bearer, including his tenure in the Senate with his brother Ted and the memorable 82-day campaign that redefined what the Kennedy legacy was all about. And Act IV is Ted’s 40-plus years in the Senate as keeper of the flame. It is the story of how a flawed, sometimes self-destructive, death haunted man forever embedded into the country’s DNA the ethos of idealism treasured by all three brothers. In the final assessment, the last Kennedy brother, the one who was least likely to succeed, may have succeeded beyond any other.
Thanks to Palgrave Macmillan for this excerpt from THE KENNEDY LEGACY, by Vincent Bzdek. Emphasis above was added to highlight Edward M. Kennedy’s extraordinary legislative accomplishments.
