Boston Magazine |
Life of the Party
Why you need to care about Ted Kennedy again.
By David Nyhan
- Kennedy campaigned with Kerry in 1972 and was at his side again 32 years later. Photo by Charles Ommanney/Contact Press Images.
It's the view from the back of the White House -- looking down from the Truman Balcony, across the sloping lawn toward the Mall -- that sticks in Ted Kennedy's mind. He's lived 43 years, more than half his life, since first kicking back there in a rocker with Jack, taking dinner on the balcony, the older brother on a break from running the country. Just Jack and Teddy, with the horseplay and the needling back and forth.
"You'd have the dinner prepared for just the two of us," Kennedy remembers. "They'd put it in this heater off the small dining room, and you'd go out on the Truman porch, and you'd eat looking out at the monument and the sweep of the lawn." For that idyll of a thousand days, with Jack in the White House and Bobby heading the Justice Department as attorney general, Ted had the run of the joint. "Not a day goes by that I don't think of my brothers," he says.
Now, at 72, Massachusetts' senior senator wants back on the Truman porch. And his best shot, maybe his last shot, at reclaiming a seat in that rocking chair is his senatorial bench mate -- another JFK: John Forbes Kerry.
When he reached out during the winter and yanked the sagging Kerry campaign by the collar, Kennedy, more than anyone else, revived a drowning candidacy. With his brotherly bear hug, his shouted appeals to fellow liberals, his decision to dispatch his chief of staff, his press secretary, his former speechwriter, and a bunch of other roustabouts culled from four decades of political wars, the senior senator managed to turn around the junior's primary prospects from likely defeat to decisive victory.
Kerry is Teddy's ticket back to Harry Truman's balcony and to the same kind of congressional clout you can have with a relative in the Oval Office. More than anything else, this explains why Kennedy has embraced Kerry's cause as his own and thrown into the fray everything he has to help. Never has any member of the Kennedy clan tried harder to elect anyone president who was not of the blood. In the process, the gaunt and nuanced Kerry -- nearly 11 years Kennedy's junior, more cerebral in private and more shy in public -- became the surrogate kid brother Ted never had.
What does Kennedy really think of Kerry? He's been outspoken about his colleague's virtues and confines his criticisms to private encouragements. In the matter of divining motives lies the real art of politics. Judging actions, not motives, is the safer course. But if Kerry beats George W. Bush -- whose family dynasty has now surpassed Kennedy's -- Kennedy will have the last laugh in a presidential process that has dominated his life for half a century.
President Richard Nixon crowed 35 years ago to his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, shortly after Chappaquiddick: "It marks the end of Teddy." Not quite.
"You'd have the dinner prepared for just the two of us," Kennedy remembers. "They'd put it in this heater off the small dining room, and you'd go out on the Truman porch, and you'd eat looking out at the monument and the sweep of the lawn." For that idyll of a thousand days, with Jack in the White House and Bobby heading the Justice Department as attorney general, Ted had the run of the joint. "Not a day goes by that I don't think of my brothers," he says.
Now, at 72, Massachusetts' senior senator wants back on the Truman porch. And his best shot, maybe his last shot, at reclaiming a seat in that rocking chair is his senatorial bench mate -- another JFK: John Forbes Kerry.
When he reached out during the winter and yanked the sagging Kerry campaign by the collar, Kennedy, more than anyone else, revived a drowning candidacy. With his brotherly bear hug, his shouted appeals to fellow liberals, his decision to dispatch his chief of staff, his press secretary, his former speechwriter, and a bunch of other roustabouts culled from four decades of political wars, the senior senator managed to turn around the junior's primary prospects from likely defeat to decisive victory.
Kerry is Teddy's ticket back to Harry Truman's balcony and to the same kind of congressional clout you can have with a relative in the Oval Office. More than anything else, this explains why Kennedy has embraced Kerry's cause as his own and thrown into the fray everything he has to help. Never has any member of the Kennedy clan tried harder to elect anyone president who was not of the blood. In the process, the gaunt and nuanced Kerry -- nearly 11 years Kennedy's junior, more cerebral in private and more shy in public -- became the surrogate kid brother Ted never had.
What does Kennedy really think of Kerry? He's been outspoken about his colleague's virtues and confines his criticisms to private encouragements. In the matter of divining motives lies the real art of politics. Judging actions, not motives, is the safer course. But if Kerry beats George W. Bush -- whose family dynasty has now surpassed Kennedy's -- Kennedy will have the last laugh in a presidential process that has dominated his life for half a century.
President Richard Nixon crowed 35 years ago to his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, shortly after Chappaquiddick: "It marks the end of Teddy." Not quite.
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