Lion in winter: why Teddy ran

National Review, June 16, 2008 by Michael Knox Beran

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THE press notices that followed the announcement that Sen. Edward M. Kennedy has been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor were, quite properly, sympathetic. You don't kick a man on whom the shadow of death has just fallen.

But the instinct of candor rebels against the constraints of hagiography. Such was the delicacy of some of the encomiasts (among them Robert Kaiser of the Washington Post and Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times) that, with the exception of oblique references to "personal tragedy" and a dynasty's "tragic epic," they failed to mention the central event of the senator's public career. Newsweek's Sarah Kliff went so far as to express doubt about what the central event was. "Pinpointing the moment that defines Edward M. Kennedy's 45-year Senate career," she wrote, "is, to say the least, a bit of a challenge."

On the contrary, the defining moment is so obvious that probably only a Newsweek reporter could fail to see it. Leave Chappaquiddick out of the reckoning, and the route by which Kennedy mounted to liberaldom's Olympus appears a bizarre deviation from his family's traditions. Tell the story with a reasonable respect for the facts, and his progress becomes not only comprehensible but perhaps inevitable. For the fourth and only surviving son of Joseph P. and Rose Kennedy, the path to liberal lionhood began on Dike Road on the night of July 18--19, 1969.

The salient political consequence of the drowning (or suffocation) of Mary Jo Kopechne in a 1967 Oldsmobile Delmont 88 was never seriously in doubt. When the sun rose over the channel at Poucha Pond the next morning, it was as clear as any thing could be that Ted Kennedy would never be president of the United States. The circumstances of the death were too cruel. John Farrar, the diver who recovered the body in the morning, deduced, from the position in which he found it, that there had been a dwindling pocket of air in the car after its submersion. If help had been summoned in time, she might have lived.

It was one of those incidents (to borrow Joseph Conrad's words) that show "in the light of day the inner worth of a man, the edge of his temper, and the fiber of his stuff." In his otherwise self-serving and insincere televised speech on July 25, six days after Mary Jo's death, Kennedy confessed the weakness of mind that had left him unequal to the emergency. "I was overcome, I'm frank to say, by a jumble of emotions: grief, fear, doubt, exhaustion, panic, confusion, and shock." You can't succumb to a mental palsy of this kind and expect to remain what the Romans called capax imperii, worthy of the first place.

Ten years after the death of Mary Jo, Kennedy did of course seek the presidency. But his heart was not in it; to his credit, he was not inwardly persuaded by his own excuses. His campaign, lackluster and uninspired, dissolved in an agony of self-doubt. Not until the convention did he manage to give a good speech. By then he was safely out of it, and Carter safely in.

Had Chappaquiddick never happened, Kennedy would have had every incentive to try, as his older brothers did, to arrest the leftward lurch of the Democratic party, which weakened Democrats' ability to compete for the White House. JFK, eager first to obtain the presidency and afterwards to hold it, challenged emerging liberal pieties by taking a hard line in the Cold War, exploiting a phony missile gap for electoral advantage, and proposing tax cuts for the rich. RFK, who cut his teeth in Joe McCarthy's school of anti-Communism, fought corruption in the labor unions and questioned the efficacy of Great Society welfare programs.

Ted, after Chappaquiddick, had to find another path to glory, one that did not include a sojourn at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. His choice revealed a certain native shrewdness: Morally debarred from the presidency, he would be the liberal lion that the older brothers--who valued possession of the White House more than they did the whimsies of the Left--could never be. The older boys were retrospectively endowed with liberal halos, as a concession to their martyrdoms; the kid brother would obtain the same crown in life.

By hewing with so little deviation to the liberal line, Kennedy has been able to maintain his dominance in the party. Only a Democratic president can challenge that dominance. Ted's fidelity to old-school liberalism has made it difficult for Democratic presidents to emerge. He is not, of course, the only reason for the party's leftward drift. But he has played a part in exacting pounds of flesh from prospective presidential candidates in the name of the liberal "dream" of which he is one of the party's principal custodians. In the Democratic lexicon, "pivot" means the effort of the party's nominee to extricate himself from the bargains he made during the primaries to win over hard-line liberals like Kennedy. The result: Only three times since Chappaquiddick has a Democrat won the White House.

With the exception of the anomalous Carter, no Democrat succeeded in negotiating the gauntlet Kennedy helped set up until the Nineties, when Bill Clinton rose to power. Clinton won the White House, but he failed to re-orient the party; its soul continued to belong to the senior senator from Massachusetts. Kennedy, though he was not the head of the party, prided himself on being its "conscience." He worked assiduously to undermine reformist efforts inspired by the success of moderates like Clinton and Tony Blair. In 1995, John Kerry--anxiously contemplating a presidential run of his own--expressed doubts about raising the minimum wage. "Supporting this will make small business unhappy with us," Kerry said. Kennedy shut him down. "If you're not for raising the minimum wage," he shouted, "you don't deserve to call yourself a Democrat." The Democratic party remains stuck in a McGovernesque time-warp in part because Kennedy likes it that way.