The Blog to Be Named Later returns for commentary on the news of the day, the passing of Ted Kennedy.In 1968, at the funeral of Robert Kennedy at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City, Senator Edward Kennedy said, "My brother need not be idealized or enlarged in death what he was in life." Today, admirers will disregard Teddy's words as they mark his own passing. Detractors will bite their tongues because it lacks grace to denounce the recently deceased. And a great many Americans, disengaged from the world of politics and preoccupied with their own lives, will simply shrug at the news and go about their day.
For forty years, John and Robert Kennedy have, in fact, been idealized, and in a sense that is unfortunate. Not because they are unworthy, but because it's unworthy of them. What John F. Kennedy achieved is far more impressive when he is viewed as a flawed, imperfect human being, much like you and I. His life is more compelling as a person than as some remote idol or icon. President Kennedy is remembered for his youth and vitality. Yet a majority of the days he spent on Earth were ones of severe physical pain. His back was so weak from football and war injuries that he could not lift his children. After his death, aides wrote of Kennedy arriving for a public appearance, painfully making his way into the venue on crutches, agony etched on his face. At the edge of the stage, he would cast the crutches aside and stride confidently onto the stage as if in perfect health.
I suppose that your reaction to that story depends on your point of view. To me, it's a display of courage and triumph over adversity. To others, perhaps, it is an unworthy deception. However it is interpreted, it is nonetheless illuminating, because it's real. Similarly, I vastly prefer the real Robert Kennedy to the two competing images of him that are recorded in history. He was not a villain, he was not a messiah. He evolved during the course of his public life from someone primarily concerned with law and order to someone who was an advocate for the weak and suffering. This process was slow and difficult, and he made mistakes along the way. He was real. He was gifted, and he was flawed.
It is dangerous when a society fails to understand its own history. That is the country in which we live today. This is so partly because a vast majority of Americans live in ignorance of our nation's story and how it fits into the history of the world. Then there are those who read history, but misinterpret it. When public figures pass from the scene, as Ted Kennedy did today, it is important to see past the idolatry of the media, but also to disregard the whispered criticism, and find the middle ground in between, where some semblance of the truth resides.
Edward Kennedy spent more than half his life in the United States Senate, holding his seat from 1962 until last night. That is an enormously long career in public service, yet in some ways that reality is overshadowed, as ever, by the controversies provoked by his private life. That he endured enormous personal tragedy is well known, but perhaps not fully appreciated. It is not "merely" that John and Robert Kennedy were assassinated; Ted Kennedy buried sisters and nephews prematurely, endured his father's stroke and incapacitation, his son's cancer, a plane crash, and finally cancer of his own.
Just as he was defined by tragedy, Kennedy was known for a personal life that was, by all accounts (including his own), not up to the standard one might expect. There were episodes of womanizing and excessive drinking, but of course they all pale to what happened on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969.
All of these things obscure the daily grind of Ted Kennedy's life. He was no dilettante, no absentee senator. For forty six years he trudged up Capitol Hill to countless committee and subcommittee meetings. He was the last living symbol of the glory years of the Kennedy family, but there was nothing glamorous about the grind of paperwork and negotiations and drudgery of legislative work.
Why did he do this into his seventh decade? It could not have been ambition. Teddy long ago renounced any notion of the presidency. It wasn't to hold on to his Senate seat. Could he ever have been defeated in Massachusetts? No. He certainly didn't do it because he had to. He need never have worked a day in his life if he chose not to.
I can only conclude that his motives, in this instance, were pure. He wanted to help people. Kennedy was described this morning on NPR as a fine senator and a compassionate human being. I suspect he would be content to be remembered that way.
