The last time I saw Ted Kennedy he was, in Tom Wolfe’s phrase, “A man in full.” It was Labor Day, 2007, on Cape Cod, and he was singing and laughing hugely through one of those parody songs that folks compose for friends’ birthdays. He was great. He lit up the place.
He was free at last, I thought.
He had the right job and the right wife. He was free of the presidential ambitions forced on him by others, especially by his dead brothers. He was free of being a Kennedy. He was what he was meant to be, a great senator. The great senators stand for something, and they stay a long time and get things done. He had a mission, making health care an American right, and too many friends to count.
I followed him in the 1970s, at a time when people still thought he would be president one day. I was not one of those people; my gut told me that he believed the job would crack him — or get him killed. Looking back at my notes then, this is what I found:
“No scholar, he has people to do that for him. BUT … on any given day he can absorb two 20-pound briefcases of memos and background papers, take a couple of dozen verbal briefings ranging from 30 seconds to an hour, handle a dozen confrontational situations with other senators, reporters or bureaucrats trying to make their bones by trapping him, juggle the egos of 50 talented staffers and ex-officio advisers, interrogate the presidents of four drug companies and their counsel about their business, debate Sen. John McClellan about the death penalty and Sen. Jesse Helms about handgun production in the South, read a half-dozen newspapers, remember 500 faces and names and be canny and witty at dinner. You try it.”
He had many faults, too, and because of who he was we learned a great deal about them. He tended to feel sorry for himself, particularly when he was younger, telling me once he had to work four times as hard as anyone else because he was a Kennedy. But I always remembered and agreed with something another senator – a Republican – said to me in those days: “Whatever you think of Teddy’s personal morality, he is a publicly moral man.”