Lion of the Senate Passes Away

deception · Aug 26, 2009

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/27/us/politics/27obama.html?hp

President Obama praised the life of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, whose endorsement during the epic Democratic presidential primary of 2008 provided a critical lift to Mr. Obama’s candidacy.

“Even as he waged a valiant struggle with a mortal illness,” Mr. Obama said, “I’ve profited as president from his encouragement and wisdom.”

Aides woke Mr. Obama up with the news shortly after 2 a.m. as he vacationed on Martha’s Vineyard, just across the Nantucket Sound from where Mr. Kennedy died at his home on Cape Cod. The president conveyed his condolences in a telephone call to Mr. Kennedy’s wife, Vicki, about 2:25 a.m., said Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary.

“An important chapter in our history has come to an end,” Mr. Obama said in a statement early Wednesday, as world leaders began to express their condolences. “Our country has lost a great leader, who picked up the torch of his fallen brothers and became the greatest United States senator of our time.”

The funeral arrangements for Mr. Kennedy have not been announced by his family, but aides said that Mr. Obama is expected to deliver a eulogy for his former Senate colleague, whose encouragement and counsel three years ago helped persuade Mr. Obama to take a long-shot bid for the White House.

“I valued his wise counsel in the Senate, where, regardless of the swirl of events, he always had time for a new colleague,” Mr. Obama said in a statement. “I cherished his confidence and momentous support in my race for the presidency.”

The decision by Mr. Kennedy, the patriarch of the Democratic Party, to support Mr. Obama’s candidacy served as a critical moment in the long primary fight with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. For weeks, the Clintons had implored Mr. Kennedy to stay neutral in the race, but on Jan. 28, 2008, he said he grew troubled by the tone of the campaign and issued his endorsement before campaigning across the country on Mr. Obama’s behalf.

His decision to back Mr. Obama created a significant rift with former President Bill Clinton, associates of both men have said, which forever changed their relationship. Mr. Kennedy appeared with Mr. Obama at American University in Washington, asking Democrats “to turn the page on the old politics of misrepresentation and distortion.”

“He will be a president who refuses to be trapped in the patterns of the past,” Mr. Kennedy said that day, interrupting his speech more than once to embrace Mr. Obama. “He is a leader who sees the world clearly without being cynical.”

Mr. Obama told friends that appearing with Mr. Kennedy and other members of the family at American University was among his favorite moments of the campaign.

As Mr. Kennedy’s battle with brain cancer wore on in recent months, he would occasionally speak by telephone to Mr. Obama. There was considerable speculation that during Mr. Obama’s vacation to Martha’s Vineyard this week, he would visit Mr. Kennedy and his family, but aides said the senator’s condition was too grave and a presidential visit would be too disruptive.

“For five decades, virtually every major piece of legislation to advance the civil rights, health and economic well being of the American people bore his name and resulted from his efforts,” Mr. Obama said in his statement on Wednesday morning. He added, “The Kennedy family has lost their patriarch, a tower of strength and support through good times and bad.”

Mr. Obama is scheduled to vacation on Martha’s Vineyard through Sunday. Aides said that there were no immediate plans for him to visit the Kennedy family, but his schedule was pending until funeral arrangements for the senator were announced.

Others across the political landscape, both in the U.S. and abroad, echoed the president’s sentiments early Wednesday.

Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada and the Senate majority leader, said: “The Kennedy family and the Senate family have together lost our patriarch... . The liberal lion’s mighty roar may now fall silent, but his dream shall never die.”

Nancy Reagan, wife of former President Ronald Reagan, said: “Given our political differences, people are sometimes surprised by how close Ronnie and I have been to the Kennedy family. But Ronnie and Ted could always find common ground, and they had great respect for one another. In recent years, Ted and I found our common ground in stem cell research, and I considered him an ally and a dear friend. I will miss him.”

Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain lauded Mr. Kennedy for his devotion to public service, even in the face of adversity. “Even facing illness and death he never stopped fighting for the causes which were his life’s work,” he said.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of Australia said Mr. Kennedy had “made an extraordinary contribution to American politics, an extraordinary contribution to America’s role in the world.”

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain called Senator Kennedy “a great and good man” who had inspired “admiration, respect and devotion, not just in America but around the world.”

He lauded Mr. Kennedy for his efforts to promote peace in Northern Ireland: “I saw his focus and determination firsthand in Northern Ireland, where his passionate commitment was matched with a practical understanding of what needed to be done to bring about peace and to sustain it. I was delighted he could join us in Belfast the day devolved government was restored. My thoughts and prayers today are with all his family and friends as they reflect on the loss of a great and good man.”
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deception · Aug 26, 2009

at about the 4 minute mark he touches on extending healthcare to those without

[video=youtube;3IDN4b58pTU]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IDN4b58pTU[/video]

maxiep · Aug 26, 2009

It's a sad day for this country. I would never have voted for him after I became old enough to vote, but a period of history stretching back to the late 50s is over. The original Kennedy dynasty has finally died out.

¹²³ · Aug 31, 2009

Senator Ted Kennedy, 1932-2009 [41 photos total]

RipCity · Sep 1, 2009

The obituary writers have had a fine old time, disagreeing with each other and sometimes with themselves about the Edward Kennedy legacy. It was an American wit, though I cannot remember which, who amended the Latin tag de mortuis nihil nisi bonum - speak only good of the dead - to de mortuis nihil nisi bunkum.

And bunkum has been in season.

No one has gone so far as to excuse Kennedy his shameful crime at Chappaquiddick. No one denies that it was the Kennedy tribe's money and political power over the police and the judiciary that saved him from the prison sentence he richly deserved. There was also a useful pay-off to the family of the drowned Mary Jo Kopechne.

The episode cast a lurid light on 'family values'. It also conjures up some reflections on the fact that the Kennedy fortune was founded on bootlegging during prohibition.

But the theme of serious repentance has been at large among the obituaries. This is despite the later aggressively lecherous business at Palm Beach, which showed how little had changed, indeed how little Ted Kennedy was prepared to change since his expulsion from Harvard for cheating in exams.

The family got this initial misdemeanour covered up for ten years as they planned his political advance.

Kennedy's life story does, however, raise the ancient question pondered by philosophers: can a bad man be a good king (or, in this case, a beneficent legislator). The answer is yes, of course.

Among our own Prime Ministers, Lloyd George was lecherous and financially corrupt. But it was a good job he was around. On the other hand it is hard to recall any reflections on the private life or probity of Neville Chamberlain. We could have done without him.

In the Victorian era, Lord Palmerston, who was supposed to have been so strait-laced, had quite a reputation for promiscuity - to the Queen's horror. But he was an admirable Foreign Secretary, Home Secretary and Prime Minister.

As for Ted Kennedy's supposed good work as a Senator: it depends on one's political point of view. It is the easiest thing in the world to demand laws which transfer money from one group of citizens to another when it wins acclamation from the 'liberal' establishment and has gains in general popularity.

Kennedy, while allowing his personal vices full rein, was never slow to cotton onto the public issues which made him sound virtuous. Bad men often like to make up for their private sins with displays of public virtue. Thank goodness, many a charity must mutter.

It is even easier to be a champion of the poor if you have never done a proper job but have a $10 million trust fund and a family who can see to it that you are always elected.

It is said he was a remarkably effective Senator in the Byzantine manoeuvrings of the legislative process. Perhaps he was. It may say something about the other senators.

Some would say that the Kennedy family story is all too apt at a time when the U.S. is trying to foist its democratic model on other countries. The U.S. presidency has long been a quaintly dynastic affair.
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RipCity · Sep 1, 2009

Earlier this week, ABC, CBS and NBC all noted the tenth anniversary of the death of John F. Kennedy, Jr. That Kennedy was an “icon” according to CBS’s Harry Smith, and “the Prince of Camelot” to ABC’s Chris Cuomo, a former cousin-in-law. Today marks the 40th anniversary of the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, killed July 18, 1969 after leaving a party with Senator Edward Kennedy. That night, Kennedy drove his car off a bridge, and left the scene with Kopechne still in the submerged vehicle; he did not call the police until the following morning.

Over the course of the past four decades, the media elite have touted Kennedy as a “liberal lion,” spending far more time celebrating his ideological agenda than reminding people of his behavior that night in 1969. As my colleague Brent Baker noted in an op-ed back in 1999, the media have come to refer to Chappaquiddick as a “Kennedy tragedy,” not a “Kopechne tragedy.”

Perhaps the most egregious example of the liberal media planting a pro-Kennedy spin on Chappaquiddick came in a January 5, 2003 Boston Globe Magazine profile of Kennedy:

“If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age,” wrote the Globe’s Charles Pierce. The quote was recognized as the worst of the year at the MRC’s DisHonors Awards in 2004.
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If you’re interested in how a writer could build up to such a quote, here’s a lengthy excerpt of “Kennedy Unbound,” Pierce’s largely sympathetic profile of the senior senator from Massachusetts. Pierce salutes Kennedy’s liberal accomplishments — blocking Robert Bork, for example, and expanding government regulation and the welfare state — and paints the Senator as as much a victim of his name as someone who has personally benefitted from it. (The entire piece appears to still be available online here.)

What if his name had been Edward Moore?

It was a great line, a defining line. Against any other candidate, and especially in this age of endless political reiteration, it would've been the knockout line. It became a cheap trope for easy newspaper columns. On August 27, 1962, at the close of their first debate prior to the Democratic senatorial primary, Edward McCormack looked at Edward Kennedy and said, "If his name was Edward Moore, with his qualifications -- with your qualifications, Teddy, your candidacy would be a joke."

It bit so deeply because of the essential truth of it -- the truth that, among other things, would doom Eddie McCormack. Back then, with Jack in the White House and Bobby as attorney general, Teddy Kennedy's candidacy for the Senate was an act of raw dynastic power. An obscure family retainer named Benjamin Smith held the seat until Kennedy was old enough to be elected to it. Once he was, he was sworn in, not at the beginning of the term in January 1963 but almost immediately after his election in November 1962, which is how he got the jump on seniority over Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, who was elected the same year. None of this would have happened if his name were Edward Moore.

If his name were Edward Moore . . .

He would not have served so long, if he'd served at all. He might not have served with more than 350 other senators. He would not have served with all three men -- Everett Dirksen, Richard Russell, and Philip Hart -- after whom the Senate office buildings are named. He would not have had his first real fight over the poll tax and his most recent one over going to war in Iraq. None of this would have happened if his name were Edward Moore.

If his name were Edward Moore . . .

If his name were Edward Moore, Robert Bork might be on the Supreme Court today. Robert Dole might have been elected president of the United States. There might still be a draft. There would not have been the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which overturned seven Supreme Court decisions that Kennedy saw as rolling back the gains of the civil rights movement; the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act, the most wide-ranging civil rights bill since the original ones in the 1960s; the Kennedy-Kassebaum Bill of 1996, which allows "portability" in health care coverage; or any one of the 35 other initiatives -- large and small, on everything from Medicare to the minimum wage to immigration reform -- that Kennedy, in opposition and in the minority, managed to cajole and finesse through the Senate between 1996 and 1998, masterfully defusing the Gingrich Revolution and maneuvering Dole into such complete political incoherence that Bill Clinton won reelection in a walk. None of this would have happened, if his name were Edward Moore.

If his name were Edward Moore . . .

His brothers might be alive. His life might have been easier, not having mattered much to anyone beyond its own boundaries. His first marriage might have survived, and, if it had not, Joan Kennedy's problems would have been her own, and not grist for the public gossips. It might not have mattered to anyone, the fistfight outside the Manhattan saloon, the foozling with waitresses in Washington restaurants, the image of him in his nightshirt, during Holy Week (Jesus God!), going out for a couple of pops with the younger set in Palm Beach and winding up testifying in the middle of a rape trial. His second marriage simply would have been a second marriage, and Vicki Kennedy would not have found herself dragooned into the role of The Good Fairy in yet another Kennedy epiphany narrative.

All of this would not have mattered, if his name were Edward Moore.

And what of the dead woman? On July 18, 1969, on the weekend that man first walked on the moon, a 28-year-old named Mary Jo Kopechne drowned in his automobile. Plutocrats' justice and an implausible (but effective) coverup ensued. And, ever since, she's always been there: during Watergate, when Barry Goldwater told Kennedy that even Richard Nixon didn't need lectures from him; in 1980, when his presidential campaign was shot down virtually at its launch; during the hearings into the confirmation of Clarence Thomas, when Kennedy's transgressions gagged him and made him the butt of all the jokes.

She's always there. Even if she doesn't fit in the narrative line, she is so much of the dark energy behind it. She denies to him forever the moral credibility that lay behind not merely all those rhetorical thunderclaps that came so easily in the New Frontier but also Robert Kennedy's anguished appeals to the country's better angels. He was forced from the rhetoric of moral outrage and into the incremental nitty-gritty of social justice. He learned to plod, because soaring made him look ridiculous. "It's really 3 yards and a cloud of dust with him," says his son Patrick.

And if his name were Edward Moore, he would have done time.

He has spent so much of his professional life draining that line of its meaning -- the defining line, what would have been the knockout line if his name hadn't been Edward Moore Kennedy. He went to the Senate. He respected its traditions. He learned from its elders; his office today is in the building named after Richard Russell, with whom, according to Adam Clymer, Kennedy first attempted to break the ice by mentioning that Russell himself had entered the Senate when he was 36. Yes, Russell replied, but I'd been governor of Georgia by then, and Kennedy had had the good grace (and the good sense) to laugh.

"At that time, I think, there was less partisanship," Kennedy says. "There was less pettiness, and there were stronger personal relationships that stretched across party lines. Now we're so evenly divided that little things become big things. That demeans the institution and demeans our relationships, and, anyway, I think the public sees through that."

He developed a thick skin and learned to leave the heat of the argument on the Senate floor. That's how Kennedy learned to move past that day in 1991 when, during the debate over the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, his good friend Orrin Hatch appeared to summon up the Great Unmentionable. "Anybody who believes that," said Hatch, "I know a bridge up in Massachusetts that I'll be happy to sell to them."

To this day, Hatch maintains that any connection between his wisecrack and Chappaquiddick was unintentional. "I was really mortified," says Hatch. "A lot of my supporters loved it, and when I said I hadn't meant it, it drained some of the charm, some of the glory, out of it."

Of Kennedy, he says: "He's able to take criticism and let it wash off him like water off a duck. He's been praised so much and criticized so much that he just ignores it."

For his part, Kennedy plays his cards so close to the vest that, to paraphrase Groucho Marx, if they were any closer, they'd be behind him. "It's basically a result of understanding how the institution is working and how things get done and to know that intuitively," Kennedy says. "The other stuff is just part of the deal. If you don't learn it, you might as well not bother serving in the Senate. I can go down and fight with Orrin on fetal transplantation and then testify with him on religious restoration when both were white-hot, and then we can go out later.

"Unless you work on that, there's very little left you can do. You can just be an advocate, and there's nothing wrong with that, or you can just be an accommodator, and you're not going to be a leader if you do that."

And that's the key. That's how you survive what he's survived. That's how you move forward, one step after another, even though your name is Edward Moore Kennedy. You work, always, as though your name were Edward Moore. If she had lived, Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age....
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Lion of the Senate Passes Away

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