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Thus the weight of two unrealized lives dropped onto Robert's shoulders. He added a deeper dimension: a mission of compassion to go along with the steel and the wit and the will to win. And then, with a gunshot in a Los Angeles hotel, everything fell to Ted the youngest, the mama's boy, the slipstreamer.
This was a young man who scored the only Crimson touchdown in the 1955 Harvard-Yale game, who won the moot-court competition at the prestigious University of Virginia School of Law, who became the youngest majority whip in Senate history. And yet, because success was never enough among those brothers, Ted Kennedy cast the shadow of an underachiever. There was always someone faster, smarter, more powerful, more glamorous, ruthless or suave. Perhaps, as the youngest, he didn't realize that the same had been true of his brothers before the mantle had fallen on them. According to Leamer, Rose Kennedy couldn't imagine that her smaller, weaker second son could be the equal of her first: "I didn't think you could have two in one family," he quotes her as saying. Publisher Henry Luce reported a conversation with Joseph P. Kennedy: "He told me once that he didn't think Jack would get very far, and he indicated he wasn't very bright." As for Robert: "In the high stakes of inheritance, Bobby seemed to have drawn the worst card," Leamer writes. "Unlike his brothers, he wasn't a handsome child ... scrawny and small, always struggling to keep up."
In his memorable eulogy for Robert, Ted Kennedy seemed to cherish the possibility that what was real about his family might possibly be enough. "My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life," the young Senator said in a voice cracked by grief. But by that point, he was arguing against a hurricane. Death, normally the great leveler, had become the ennobler of the Kennedys. One by one, they had passed into immortality, leaving Ted alone among the men of the family to live a full span. His brothers became the sweetened distillate of their best days and handsomest poses, while he made his way through more-mottled seasons, merely human, with all that humanity entails the mistakes, misjudgments, weaknesses, appetites and fears. Could it be that the real Kennedy curse was not early death but long life, suffering by comparison to a mythical might-have-been?
It certainly looked that way in the harsh light of Chappaquiddick, a scant year after Robert's assassination, when the weight of expectations seemed to have broken him. Or during the worst of his bouts with the bottle. Or when changing mores turned the family tradition of skirt-chasing from a mark of virility to the sign of a cad. While the Senator grew fat and seemed to fall apart, his brothers remained ageless and timeless, slim, breeze-kissed. If he was reality, then we wanted no part of it.
But in the end, it will be said by all but his fiercest critics that Ted Kennedy walked tall and far, given his superhuman burden. There was something genuinely noble about his refusal to give in, the way he picked himself up from the canvas, even when he had knocked himself down maybe especially when he had knocked himself down. It was his fate to prove that the Kennedys weren't storybook princes conjured to life, and his triumph lies in the fact that he didn't let the myth stop him. His sister Eunice, who died two weeks before Ted (only Jean survives from the nine Kennedy children), did something similar with her great creation, the Special Olympics. Her father had tried to erase the blemish of a handicapped daughter; this younger Kennedy chose instead to reveal the glory behind the blemish.
Ted might have gone early. In 1964 he was dragged, critically injured, from the wreckage of a plane crash. Had he died that day, he too would have remained forever young and dashing. No Chappaquiddick, no divorce, no boozy indiscretions. But also no antiapartheid campaign, no Americans with Disabilities Act, no Family and Medical Leave Act. Ted Kennedy survived to the ripe age of 77 and in the process brought the family saga full circle, back to the vital, urgent, messy clutch of the real. Back to America, a land of common people, not of princelings, where even our marble monuments celebrate lives molded from clay.