The President We Never Had

If only there had been a guard rail on that road by the sea. If only he had drunk a little less. If only a girl had not drowned on the seat of his car.

If the ghosts of three brothers had not overwhelmed him, today we would write the obituary of a former president of the United States, dead at 77.

It is not the requiem of a dynasty that fades away with him. This is just a farewell to a man who was, basically, but not entirely, the Kennedy who did not make it; neither to die as a martyr, nor a hero –like the first born, Joseph, who died in war. He remained the first unfinished piece of American history of the 20th century. This is the tiny, melancholy requiem for a extra large family; this good-bye to “Ted,” who died naturally in his house in Hyannis Port by the Atlantic. To him are tied the story and the name that, for half a century, represented the mystery, the greatness and the charm of America.

In the ‘60s, Europe fell in love with America again because of the infinite drama of the “Kennedy story,” just the way, after second world war, the old continent fell in love with the nation that had rescued it from fascism. The magnificent paranoia of Richard Nixon was right when he saw a Kennedy under every stone of political power. One of the terrible boys who, from the dirty profundities of a catholic and Irish Boston of broke immigrants, climbing with the nails of a waterfront ambition and outrageousness, arrived to occupy the main altar of the America cathedral. No other clan, not the Bushes, nor the Roosevelts, nor the Rockefellers, would ever have the certainty of its providential mission, of its fatal call to lead the entire nation like the Kennedys had, guided by the “godfather,” old Joe the patriarch, and the matriarch Rose, who warned the children not to cry “because a Kennedy doesn’t cry.” No other clan would have either the capacity of selling that certainty to us insatiable consumers of myth and legend.

Rose, who gave birth to nine children, Joseph, John, Rosemary, Kathleen, Eunice, Patricia, Robert, Jean and, at 42, Edward, and buried four before dying at 105, knew, like every devoted catholic and pessimistic Irish person, that the blessing and the curse of every big family and every long life is the logic of the great numbers that guarantee several funerals and several baptisms. Big families are founded on the unbreakable conspiracy of silence of “all for one, one for all,” the strength that sustains, supports and can kill. It killed John Jr., JFK’s son, when he fell into the ocean in command of the Piper he was flying without being able to see, afraid to be late to one more family wedding. Obviously, on the beach in front of the house in Hyannis Port, where his granddaddy and the grandma died.

The curse of the Kennedys was not the spell of a naughty and vengeful witch. It was their spreading visibility and our curiosity, captured by those unmistakable teeth, charmingly equine, the thick and indestructible hair that, with big white locks, still covers the head of Ted’s corpse, the mystery of the regicides we always want to consider unresolved in order not to surrender to the irrationality of history, the skill of human relations that all of them possessed and that determined JFK’s luck.

Republican Pat Buchanan, someone who did not love him, said that Jack was the first politician in color, referring to his charm, even though the famous duel with Nixon was shot in black and white. The curse was simply the consequence of being many and cumbersome. Joe and Rose had 47 among them, counting children, cousins, relatives, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and only an extraordinarily indulgent fairy could have spared them from the tragedies and bitterness of the common people.

Yet, when you are a Kennedy, you look for tragedies and triumphs with voracity, because they are the inevitable implications of the imperative of always excelling, as the father commended the boys in Irish sweaters of chain wool and locks who were playing on the beach, reminding them that a Kennedy plays always to win. Even if you have to make a big mistake, like trafficking with Cosa Nostra, then buying the primary elections in West Virginia with big bucks made by trafficking molasses and alcohol during Prohibition. Or begging the mayor in Chicago “to give a hand to my boy,” as the father did during the counting of the ballots against Nixon, prayer that produced the miracle of 160,000 votes from the cemeteries.

Ted, the nickname for Edward, in this legendary saga of funerals and coronations, was the black sheep, the one who would always have to live with the metaphoric short pants and the jackets dismissed by his older brothers. Neither the mother superior of the clan, Rose, the one who accepted, without a tear, that her daughter Rosemary was lobotomized and then buried alive in a nunnery because she was embarrassed by her weird head, nor the father foresaw that the steel cloak of the legacy would fall over their last born.

He had to accept that, because you can never resign from being a Kennedy. The madness of the night in Chappaquiddick in July 1969 and the car falling into the sea with the innocent secretary on board, sealed his future. Two electoral campaigns for the White House, led in a disorganized, almost unwilling way, only to be destroyed in 1976 by his adversary, Carter, could not cancel that night either. In a clan of magnificent egoists motivated by the sense of history, Ted was a normal man, with normal vices.

To begin with, he absorbed alcohol in huge quantities. The confidence in raising funds, not only for himself, but also for that anti-British Irish guerrilla that he not-so-secretly supported. He was a man moved more by the political passions of the “left-wing” as he was generously defined, rather than personal passion, like the eternal and vain search for a sanitary plan. This passion that produced the last fruit of the now dying tree of the Kennedys, Obama’s investiture, in contrast to a furious and humiliated Hillary Clinton, when Obama became the brother the Kennedy brothers never had, truly the first “colored Kennedy.”

I saw the last of the boys close, in a trial court in Florida, swollen, spry, candid, terribly charming, seated like a wonderful walrus on the witness stand to defend his daughter Jean’s son from the accusation of raping a woman in the house in Palm Beach where he, uncle Ted, was sleeping. I heard him say that he had accompanied two brothers who sacrificed themselves for the nation; I heard him tuning his profound voice and the women of the jury had tears in their eyes. The audience and us journalists bought his words without asking ourselves what the hell Oswald’s bullets had to do with the seduction of a naïve woman. It was the last time he had to play the “Kennedy card” to win the table and protect the clan that ended with him. Not with a “bang” like T. S. Eliot wrote, but with the sigh of an old, ill man. Their deadly enemy once furiously said that they would never again have a Nixon to kick. Now his prophecy applies, ironically, to the Kennedys. We will not have a Kennedy to worship anymore.