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Kennedy joked afterward about the defeat. Said he at a Washington dinner:
"I want to thank the 28 Senators who promised to vote for me—and especially the 24 who actually did." But he was nonetheless shocked by the loss. He pulled himself together and became a very energetic Senator. At one point, he served on about three dozen committees and subcommittees, more than any other Senate member, and too many to be efficient, as he later learned. Senators on both sides of the aisle have come to respect him as an able legislator, on the Senate floor and in its hearing rooms. Republican Majority Leader Howard Baker calls him "one of the half-dozen most effective people in the Senate." Many of his colleagues agree.
Says Wisconsin's Nelson: "Early on, he frequently wasn't prepared. He took on too many issues. That's not so the last half-dozen years. He works hard. He does his homework."
Since Kennedy became chairman of the Judiciary Committee last January, he has impressed other Democrats by his ability to get along with the committee's ranking Republican, former Segregationist Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. They were able to compromise, for example, on the testy question of whether nominees for federal judgeships should be required to resign from private clubs that discriminate against blacks. The problem arose over Carter's nomination of a Tennessee jurist, Bailey Brown, to the U.S. Court of Appeals. Brown had a strong pro-civil rights record as a district court judge, but he stubbornly refused to resign from the all-white University Club of Memphis. Thurmond and Kennedy worked out a compromise: Brown agreed to stop participating in club activities, and Kennedy and Thurmond cosigned a letter suggesting vaguely that it was "inadvisable" for a judicial nominee to belong to a club that "engages in invidious discrimination."
Kennedy spends an unusual amount of his time at Senate committee hearings.
On one typical day this fall, he started work at 7:30 a.m., going over a briefing book with three staffers at his home, a rambling, 16-room gray-shingled house in McLean, Va., that overlooks the Potomac River and is surrounded by five wooded acres. The subject was immigration, and as Kennedy flipped through the pages, he read questions he had scrawled in blue ink the night before. He kept asking for obscure facts, almost as if he were probing to make certain that the aides knew what they were talking about. Says one:
"He wants to be told how the hearing will go, almost minute by minute, so he knows what he is going to get out of it." Adds another: "Heaven help you if you are unprepared. He has a very sharp temper, and he uses it very effectively." The questioning continued as Kennedy and two aides rode in a Secret Service black limousine (driven by an agent) on the 20-min. trip to the Dirksen Office Building.
As Kennedy strode toward his six-room corner suite on the second floor, accompanied by half a dozen dark-suited Secret Service men, TV crews in the corridor snapped on their lights and correspondents crowded around to ask questions. All they got was a three-second glimpse of him closing the door. After a quick huddle with more aides, Kennedy popped across the hallway—on went the TV lights—and into the paneled Judiciary Committee hearing room. There was a hush in the audience and then an excited buzz. Kennedy walked quickly to his seat and rapped the committee into session. With his half-rimmed glasses perched on his nose, he read an opening statement in a sure, powerful voice, but lapsed into the stammering, wandering style that sometimes makes his questions or unrehearsed remarks seem relatively incoherent. Said he at one point to the witnesses: "The case we, uh, that has to be made, and I'd like to see what each of you has to say on this, is uh, why should we do it for Mexico and why not others?" (Kennedy at times seems uneasy with statistical charts and figures, jumbling them and obfuscating his points. He also has a disconcerting habit of leaving sentences unfinished, though this has the advantage of allowing his listeners to finish them, in their own way.)