Ted Kennedy: Assessing a complex legacy

His death brought an end to “a nearly 50-year psychodrama that became one of the nation’s most riveting spectacles,” said Neal Gabler in the Los Angeles Times. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, who died last week of brain cancer at the age of 77, grew up in the shadow of two illustrious older brothers—a shadow that only lengthened after their assassinations. Kennedy nonetheless picked up the family’s progressive torch, fighting ferociously for “the powerless and the voiceless,” and eventually became one of “the greatest senators who ever lived.” Yet the record of his life is marred by a series of monumental mistakes and tragic flaws—including decades of “womanizing and carousing.” Kennedy’s greatest “moral collapse,” said Joan Vennochi in The Boston Globe, was the Chappaquiddick incident in 1969, when he drove his car off a bridge and left a young woman to drown. But following that tragedy, Kennedy “returned to the arena” and kept fighting for the values of social justice and equality that are the family legacy. It is for that simple resilience, not his triumphs or his tragedy, that we should remember Ted Kennedy, a man who “did not succumb to weakness, including his own.”

Can we please stop referring to Chappaquiddick as “Ted’s tragedy”? said Maureen Callahan in the New York Post. The victim that night was Mary Jo Kopechne, the 28-year-old campaign aide whose life was snuffed out by an “amoral” political opportunist, whose only concern was how the scandal would affect his presidential ambitions. After Kopechne’s body was fished out of Kennedy’s upside-down Oldsmobile, submerged in just 8 feet of water, the coroner concluded that she had lived for up to five hours in an air bubble. But Kennedy, rather than fetching help, returned dripping wet to his hotel, and soon after called the desk clerk to complain about a noisy party in the room next door. “Is there anything else I can do for you?” asked the clerk. “No, thank you,” replied Kennedy. The adoring liberal media insists Kennedy “redeemed himself with his ‘progressive’ agenda,” said Mark Steyn in National Review. But “how many changed lives justify leaving a human being struggling for breath for up to five hours pressed up against the window in a small, shrinking air pocket?”

Therein lies Ted Kennedy’s essential paradox, said Jean Marbella in the Baltimore Sun. Until he cleaned up his act after he remarried, his personal life was always at odds with the values and the goals he pursued so passionately in the Senate. Even after Chappaquiddick, he indulged himself in booze-fueled womanizing for decades—and at the same time, passionately championed women’s rights. But this rare knack for separating the personal from the political may explain his greatest strength as a legislator: the ability to reach across the aisle and make friends with conservative Republicans. Like his brothers, Jack and Bobby, Ted Kennedy was raised to be an “epic, charismatic” leader, said David Brooks in The New York Times. But Kennedy developed into something more effective. “He became a compromiser,” a man who knew how to make deals, find middle ground, and ultimately persuade.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

That will “come as a surprise to Robert Bork,” said Howie Carr in the Boston Herald. After President Reagan nominated Judge Bork to the Supreme Court back in 1987, Kennedy rose in the Senate and attacked the judge as a Neanderthal who wanted to return the country to a time when “women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters,” and “schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution.” This vitriol was nothing less than slander, and Kennedy viciously attacked Ronald Reagan as well. So spare me the twaddle about his “collegiality.”

So which is the real Ted Kennedy? asked Kathleen Parker in The Washington Post. The “liberal lion who fought for the greater good”? Or the self-indulgent, blustering hypocrite? He was, of course, both, said George Will in The Washington Post. But Kennedy’s many sins notwithstanding, what can’t be denied is the sheer scale of the man’s influence. He spent more years working effectively in the U.S. Senate than either of his famous brothers spent alive. He came to embody “the patience of politics,” pursuing his ideals through the accrual of small, pragmatic victories, often without much fanfare. In this way, long after his two inspiring siblings had receded into myth, Ted quietly became “the most consequential brother.”