Ted Kennedy: Bringing the Myth Down to Earth
The patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy, spent a big part of his life in the movie business, so it's fitting, perhaps, to quote from a film as we reflect on the family he built. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance opened in 1962, when John F. and Robert F. Kennedy ruled Washington and young Edward M. Kennedy was winning his first of nine U.S. Senate elections. It is the story of a decent, but entirely human, fellow whose fame doesn't quite match the ambiguous facts of history. And there comes a point when the myth assumes a reality all its own. "This is the West, sir," says a newspaper editor. "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."
The Kennedy family saga is an epic tangle of true legends and legendary truths. The father, with his bottomless checkbook and flair for p.r., cast his clan in flawless Carrara marble, more beautiful than human flesh — but in the long run, less compelling. To his younger children — especially the youngest, Ted — fell the difficult job of reconnecting a family of statues, dead icons, to the living and the vital and the real.
That's where they belong: not up on pedestals but down among us, where the action is. The Kennedys of reality were as much a part of the tempestuous truth and hard action of the 20th century as any single family. It was an immigrant century, and Joseph P. Kennedy sprang from that soil. His father P.J. Kennedy was a prosperous saloon owner and ward boss in the hurly-burly of the Boston Irish. It was the urban century, long dominated by men like John (Honey Fitz) Fitzgerald, the machine mayor of Boston whose daughter Rose married Joe and became the Kennedy matriarch. It was the century of the Roaring Twenties, and no stock trader or reputed rum runner roared louder than Joe Kennedy did. The century of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who played a long cat-and-mouse game with Joe's bottomless ambitions. The century of Hollywood, where Joe and his older sons cavorted among the starlets.
Onward through the riffling pages of the century's calendar: Hitler, World War II, the Cold War, McCarthyism, civil rights, the space age, Vietnam. Scarcely a tide flowed through history without the Kennedys somewhere on its back, gliding downwind or beating against it. And yet reality wasn't enough — first for them, then for the rest of us. If their story is raw material for an American Shakespeare, then you might say unappeasable hunger was the fatal flaw.
One of the family's many biographers, Laurence Leamer, marks the hinge in the Kennedy history — where the arc swings from romance to tragedy — as the day when Joe secretly had his oldest daughter, Rosemary, lobotomized in 1941. Her retardation was a blemish that he thought he might carve away. But for the public, the shadow first fell in 1944, when the oldest, and perhaps the most promising, of the Kennedys, Joe Jr., volunteered for a dangerous combat mission in an experimental flying bomb. The plane exploded before he could bail out.
Quite a set of clothes had been laid out for that young man. In his mind and in the eyes of many others, he was flying toward the Navy Cross and, beyond that, a career in politics that would take the first Irish Catholic to the White House. With Joe Jr. gone, John Kennedy put on the outfit. He was a sickly, slight, half-crippled young man, but he managed to swell himself to size through cunning and courage and cortisone. Old-style politics, in the form of Chicago's Daley machine, boosted him across the Oval Office threshold. But as soon as he landed, the Kennedy myth-makers went to work vacuuming up the grit. The scaffolding of ward bosses was removed to reveal the polished image of a prince.
What John F. Kennedy was: cool under pressure, a shrewd decision maker, an inspiring speaker, a man who could learn from his mistakes. What he wasn't: a devoted husband, a vigorous athlete, a martyred saint, a budding King Arthur. With his sudden, shocking death, however, these truths were transmuted, through understandable grief, into the gauzy unreality of Camelot.
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.