The “patriarch” of the [Kennedy] clan, who went under surgery for a cancerous brain tumor in June, wants to live to see Barack Obama become the president, a position he, himself, had dreamed of being.
His speech at the Denver convention shook the Democrats. Ted Kennedy has always been true to himself and has a character that has never taken a stepp back…”Nothing, nothing will keep me away from this special gathering.” These touching words made people cry on Monday night at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. Nothing can prevent him from the coronation of the man he wanted to make king. Not even his serious brain tumor, discovered only three months ago.
Barely recovering from his surgery, Ted Kennedy triumphantly went one month later to the Senate to save, by his decisive vote on July 9th, the financing of medical insurance for retirees. In Washington as in Denver, he braved the opinions of his doctors and his family to make a heroic appearance at the service of what will remain his greatest battle for access to health–one of the major themes of the 2008 election campaign.
Barack Obama has pledged to continue the work of Senator Edward Kennedy, who had himself quit his presidential ambitions after the failure of his race for the Democratic nomination against the outgoing President Jimmy Carter in 1980.
The last representative of the mythical or cursed generation of the famous clan (a brother killed in a mission during the war, and two others killed) has focused on his legislative work, leaving an impressive record, saluted by Republicans and by Democrats after eight consecutive terms in the Senate.
“Ted, Ted, my dear friend, I love you and miss you,” said Robert Byrd, on stage with tears in his eyes, 90 years old, including 50 years in the Senate, when he heard about Teds cancer, his “young” colleague of 76 years. John McCain, the Republican candidate to succeed George W. Bush, has worked with Ted Kennedy on “bipartisan” texts: “He remains the most effective member of the Senate if you want to get results.” Hillary Clinton seemed to have forgiven him for supporting her opponent Barak Obama in the primary, paying tribute to “one of the greatest legislators in the history of the Senate.”
All these praises he has gleaned as of late, have been masking the shadows of his personal life, where gaps have interfered in the road to the White House, a promised moment.
The accident at Chappaquiddick put an end to those hopes: one July 1969 evening, the young senator’s car left the road that connected the island to Martha’s Vineyard, off Cape Cod. The beautiful secretary who escorted him, Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned and buried with her the presidential future of Ted who, for some unexplained reasons, did not rescue her and let eight hours elapse before notifying anyone of the accident.
Used to the ethyl and gallant escapades of Kennedy, the voters of Massachusetts regularly ignored the strange behavior which earned him a two-month prison sentence. But America never forgot. Ted realized this eleven years later by losing against Carter. He had probably destroyed his chance in 1968.
On June 5th of that year, his brother Bobby was murdered in Los Angeles, the same evening of Bobby’s victory in the California primary that would have led him to the Democratic nomination.
At the heated convention in Chicago that was going to nominate Hubert Humphrey against Nixon, Ted was tempted to carry the torch that Bobby could not inherit five years after the murder of their older brother, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, in November 1963 in Dallas.
But at 36 years, one year older than the threshold to become a legal candidate, he did not feel ready to share such a challenge with his family that had already sacrificed three of its four sons.
The first, Joseph carried the name of his father, ambassador of London, who was expected to fulfill a great destiny, had perished in 1944 above the English channel in the explosion of an aircraft, full of ammunition, that he was flying.
Ted, the youngest, was not prepared to fit into shoes of his brothers who had died as heroes. He was probably inspired by the outstanding feat of John during the war in the pacific when he enlisted for four years in Korea. But he ended up retreating, and thanks to his father, spent only two years under the flags, comfortably installed in the Paris office of the former supreme commander of the allied powers.
It was his family name’s reputation, rather than his grades, that admitted him to Harvard, where he was temporarily expelled for having paid a student to pass the Spanish exam in his place. His student life, during which his colleagues nicknamed him Cadillac Eddy, was punctuated by frequent violations for speeding, as well as alcohol, a habit that Uncle Ted, even years later, has retained: in 1991 the Senator was called to testify in favor of one of his many nephews, William Kennedy Smith, accused and then acquitted of raping a woman after an evening filled with alcohol “among men” of the family in a bar in Palm Beach.
In the meantime, “Uncle Ted” had admirably embraced the role of “patriarch,” which was imposed on him after the death of Bobby, forty years ago. He was a father to the children of his brother and the true pillar of a family that continually suffered tragedies, the most recent being the death of John Kennedy Junior, the son of “JFK,” in his the crash of his aircraft off of Martha’s Vineyard, again, in 1999.
After a carefree youth, Ted was quickly overtaken by responsibilities. Born in February 1932, he was only 28 years old when his oldest brother John left his seat as Massachusetts Senator by entering the White House in 1960. Ted had to wait until the legal age of thirty to take over as the provisional alternate. Since 1962, he is one of only three senators to have voted on more than 15,000 texts.
Not all of his points of view were in line with his reputation as an “old liberal lion” (Progressive): a good Catholic, Ted Kennedy was long opposed to abortion, before changing his mind when the Supreme Court authorized it in 1973. But he has remained true to his image as the best friend of the most humble among us, being the spokesperson of their right to health, education, a decent minimum wage, and a humane immigration policy. In foreign policy, history will remember that in October 2002 he was one of the twenty-three Democratic senators to have voted against the war in Iraq.
Illness, physical and moral pains have revealed his braveness. Ted Kennedy has continued with the after-effects of serious wounds form a private plane crash in 1964, where one of his staff and the pilot died. Before the detection of the tumor, two of his three children from his first marriage to Joan Bennett had successfully undergone cancer treatment.
It is consistent wit his temperament that he opted, on June 2nd, for a high-risk surgery. After a three and a half hour surgery that he suffered while being awake, he called his second wife, Vicky, on the phone to tell her, always optimistic, that he was eager to heal, to help Barack Obama win the White House. An old dream by proxy, so to speak. At Denver, all the Americans recognized themselves in his words if not in his cause: “The hope is reborn. And the dream continues.”