It may not be true that we’ll never see his like again, but we don’t see it at the moment. Ted Kennedy took a lot with him when he died.
He wasn’t a perfect man. His enemies still mutter the word “Chappaquiddick,” and there’s no gainsaying that if the man in that car that tragic night hadn’t been a Kennedy, he would hardly have gotten off so lightly. His best friends couldn’t say his drinking and other irresponsible behaviors didn’t get out of control sometimes.
But Massachusetts always stood behind Kennedy, and it’s not hard to understand why. There was a grandeur to his vision and a consistency beyond reproach in the way he followed up on it. Health care; civil rights; environment; education; clean energy; less white-centric immigration policy; peace in Ireland; the list of causes he championed, the litany of things he accomplished, goes on and on. The lives of people far outside the constituency that kept him in Congress, the character of the country itself, were influenced by his values, and these were as broad as that constituency. He was beloved by Protestant and Jewish voters, for example, at least in part because, though he was a staunch Catholic, he didn’t try to use the force of federal law to curtail pregnancy termination rights for those with other beliefs.
In Western Massachusetts Kennedy maintained a presence out of all proportion to the number of votes he could get out here. In 1964 he barely survived a plane crash near Barnes Municipal Airport in Westfield; he broke his back and was in pain from those injuries off and on for the rest of his life. Yet he continued to fly out to this part of the state, keeping in touch with his constituents here and winning their enduring loyalty.
More and more, as the costs of contesting seats in Congress rises, we feel that the Capitol is dominated by wealthy people who are out of touch with what’s happening to ordinary citizens. Yet the memory of Kennedy complicates that tempting generalization because no one was more in touch with what was happening to ordinary people than the privileged senator from Hyannis Port.
We learned that on two occasions when he granted the Advocate, the weekly alternative paper from Western Massachusetts whose readership was miniscule compared to the Boston papers and the national publications that courted him, exclusive interviews. He knew that elderly people on fixed incomes ate cat food when the choice between food, heat and medicine got tough. He knew that right-wing welfare reform measures requiring people to work for benefits were Catch 22s when there was structural unemployment. He didn’t need aides to prompt him about those things, or about the details of legislation he’d sponsored. He had his sleeves rolled up and his hands in the dishwater of public service.
He had the old-school notion of public service, not the opportunistic attitude of the age of the revolving door. He wasn’t afraid to advocate for something like universal health care even when he sounded like a lone voice in the wilderness, or an eccentric. In the face of family tragedies and internal upheavals, he let his pain teach him about other people’s pain, and he used his advantages to fight for those who didn’t have them.
