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In his nine Senate years, Kennedy has compiled a strong liberal record. His greatest achievement was the key role he played in the passage of the 18-year-old-vote amendment. Also, as chairman of the health subcommittee, he became the top congressional expert on health, leading the development of a massive amount of legislation, notably the proposed Health Security Act of 1971 to provide almost total national health insurance. His work for health care earns him a large constituency among the elderly. Since 1966 he has been working for draft reform, although he is against an all-volunteer army; he argues that it would create a "ghetto army," manned heavily by the poor and minorities. Kennedy prefers a draft that equalizes risk for all, with no deferments.
His strong support of liberal positions on gun control, open housing, aid to American Indians and civil rights has earned him a 100% rating from the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education. His ratings from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action average 90%. Those same political stands earned Kennedy some of the lowest marks for any legislator from the conservative Americans for Constitutional Action. At the same time his strong opposition to key White House proposals—the ABM, the SST, the Carswell and Haynsworth Supreme Court nominations—has won him the Administration's unfailing hostility. Nixon's Director of Communications, Herb Klein, accuses him of "childish tantrums, demagoguery at its worst."
He has been called "the hottest mimeograph machine in town," and sometimes he is led to excesses, as when he suggested earlier this fall that he would be willing to "crawl on my belly" to the Paris Peace Talks to gain release of U.S. P.O.W.s. More recently, together with Connecticut's Abraham Ribicoff, he called in the Senate for the withdrawal of British troops from Northern Ireland and for Irish reunification, a proposal that earned him the distinction of being condemned by the British Prime Minister.
In an interview with TIME Correspondents Bonnie Angelo. Simmons Fentress and John Austin, Kennedy talked about the country, President Nixon and the potential strength of the opposition in 1972:
THE MOOD OF THE COUNTRY: "It's one of fear, really—fear of the worker's losing his job, fear of businessmen for the collapse of their companies, fear of the wealthy losing their resources, fear of the blue-collar worker that he may lose his job to a black, the fear by whites of blacks, the fear of older persons that they won't have sufficient resources to live. There is a sense of apprehension among young people as to whether they can do anything about the problems that they see in the country. There is fear about ending the war, about the Middle East, and now the India-Pakistan crisis.