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In a Kennedy campaign, the dark and light sides shimmer together in a radical instability. Robert's headlong drive through the 1968 primaries often threatened to turn into something like the riot at Rudolph Valentino's funeral. Even now, in his noncampaign, Ted Kennedy knows what superstar's confusions he can cause. Oregon's Republican Senator Robert Packwood remembers a trip he took with Ted to some hospitals and health centers in Chicago and Cleveland as part of their work for the Senate health subcommittee of which Kennedy is chairman.
"It's the first time I've had such an experience in my life," says Packwood. "It wasn't political. It was regal. People wanted to touch him—not just 21-year-old student nurses but 45-year-old orthopedic specialists. It was astounding and a little frightening. I've never seen that reaction to anybody in my life, in politics or out. The closest thing I can remember was when I attended an Elvis Presley concert a long time ago."
One former Kennedy aide recalls a Boston antiwar parade in which Kennedy, one of the marchers, came up to a group of hardhats waving BACK OUR BOYS IN VIET NAM signs. "The hardhats cheered Ted and waved at him, and after he'd passed by, they continued waving their signs." To some extent the Kennedy mystique is nonideological.
On his cross-country forays, he starts early, often before dawn, and caroms through political ceremonies until late at night. He opens his speeches with familiar, self-deprecatory laugh lines, some of them borrowed from Bobby and Jack. "I'm awfully glad to be here today," he says, "especially since I am just a young Senator out to make a name for himself." At a fund raiser in St. Paul, he began: "I've often dreamed of addressing a major convention in a major city. But, unfortunately, this is the wrong convention in the wrong city and a year early."
His standard theme, the "broken promises" speech, is a litany of charges against the Nixon Administration, which offers a series of accusations but few answers. "Not since the Great Depression 40 years ago has the spirit of America been so depressed," he declares in his familiar flat Boston baritone. "All that this Administration has given the American people is a shopping list of problems that grows longer every day." If it is not a campaign speech, none was ever delivered. After reciting the issues —Viet Nam, the economy, welfare reform, crime, Nixon's 1968 promise to "bring us together"—he limns "the kind of society we want," with peace, safety, no generation gap. "For the sake of our party, for the sake of our future, I ask you to march again as we marched before." Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke declares flatly: "Kennedy is running just as hard as Nixon is at this point."
Is he indeed running? The answer is complicated, depending upon 1) Kennedy's own psychology and decision to run some time in the next six to eight months; 2) whether a candidate, especially Edmund Muskie, can win enough of the primaries next spring to purchase a lock on the Democratic nomination; and 3) how vulnerable Richard Nixon looks from the perspective of the Democratic Convention in Miami Beach next July.