A few thoughts on Teddy Kennedy

This blog is rapidly becoming a parade of thoughts on the recent dead. What can I say except welcome to middle-age, Mike!

Teddy Kennedy was to his brothers what Wings was to The Beatles; an attenuated, not-quite-satisfying echo of the real thing, but vastly better than nothing at all. He was Seventies Liberalism incarnate, a consolation prize handed out to the survivors, not so much doomed to fail as doomed to suspect that success carried with it inevitable failure...and perhaps outright destruction. This poisoning fatalism is the final legacy of the assassinations, and nobody embodied that more than Teddy Kennedy.

Had Teddy existed without his antecedents (an impossible thought), he would've come out looking a hell of a lot better. Like Jack he was a consummate operator; like Bobby, committed to improving Americans' lives through government. What he lacked was their magnetism, which sprang from a kind of reckless courage. That's not necessarily a bad thing--the reckless courage of Jack and Bobby Kennedy got them (and us) into some trouble. But it did consign Teddy to Triple-A ball. Perhaps he had a smaller portion from the beginning--or perhaps it was forcibly excised by circumstance.

Was he a drunk? Seems so, and a philanderer, too. But most of all, Teddy was a big, fat target for all those faux-populists who hate the Kennedys and everything they say they stand for: privilege, noblesse oblige, sloppiness. Funny thing, all the Kennedy haters I've met have been supporters of other politicians guilty of the same sins. The difference is that the Kennedys had the temerity to inspire people in between bed- and bar-hopping. That's what Kennedy-haters are really angry about--or more accurately, frightened of. Inspired citizens cannot be controlled. They can't be soothed by consumerism or cowed by phantom enemies. The personal behavior of the Kennedys is moot; it is their ability to activate people that made them important, and Teddy parlayed his borrowed glory into a 47-year career in the Senate, which included things like the Americans With Disabilities Act. Hard to argue with that, unless you're a Cro-Magnon.

The psychological damage wrought by the public slaughter of his relatives--not to mention the crushing burden of their legacy, a legacy Ted Kennedy did not want, nor was particularly well-suited to shoulder--had to have been crippling. Adding to this Chappaquiddick (probably a Nixonian dirty trick), and it's a wonder the guy survived at all, much less racked up a lifetime of public service. In his trauma, and hauntedness, and determination to make the best of reduced expectations, Teddy Kennedy stands in for all of us who never believed in Ronald Reagan or his fatuous, fradulent "revolution." Perhaps the end of Teddy Kennedy means the end of the boundaries and burdens forged in the Sixties. I hope so, and I'm sure he would, too.