The Senate's Fighting Liberal

Sen. Ted Kennedy passed away after a long battle
with brain cancer on August 25, 2009. This 2002 profile by the late
Jack Newfield captures the essence of what this legend meant to the
progressive movement.

When Ted Kennedy arrived in Washington at the close of 1962 as the
freshman senator from Massachusetts, he was welcomed with derision and
low expectations. Just 30 years old, the President's kid brother, he
had accomplished nothing in his life to earn the prize of a seat in the
US Senate. Most pundits saw him as a dummy who had cheated on an exam
at Harvard to stay eligible for football and who was dependent on an
excellent staff to compensate for his inexperience.

Now, forty years later, Ted Kennedy looks like the best and most
effective senator of the past hundred years. He has followed the
counsel of his first Senate tutor, Phil Hart of Michigan, who told him
you can accomplish anything in Washington if you give others the
credit. Kennedy has drafted and shaped more landmark legislation than
liberal giants like Robert Wagner, Hubert Humphrey, Estes Kefauver and
Herbert Lehmann. He has survived tragedy and scandal, endured
presidential defeat, right-wing demonization, ridicule by TV comics.
Now, at 70, he has evolved into a joyous Job. His career has become an
atonement for one night of indefensible behavior, when he failed to
report the fatal 1969 accident in which he drove off the bridge at
Chappaquiddick, leaving a young woman to drown in the car. He has
converted persistence into redemption.

In 1985 Kennedy forever renounced seeking the presidency,
declaring, "The pursuit of the presidency is not my life. Public
service is." By abandoning higher ambition, he found a form of
liberation. He had nothing left to lose. The weight of the
country's--and his family's--expectations was lifted from his
shoulders. His motives were perceived as less calculating and
self-aggrandizing. He could settle into the Senate for the long march.
He could become a patient and disciplined legislator without feeling
like a failure. When the GOP won control of the Senate in 1994 and some
Democrats, like George Mitchell, quit after losing their leadership
posts and committee chairmanships, Kennedy stayed and fought in the
trenches.

Now, as the chairman of the Education and Labor Committee, and as
the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, he is at the center of
the action. Soon his domestic economic priorities, which were on the
front burner prior to September 11--raising the minimum wage, enacting
a patients' bill of rights, creating jobs and "passing national health
insurance, bit by bit"--will come around again.

Kennedy's zeal to "get something done," and his aisle-crossing
friendships with Republicans, have led him into a puzzling, limited
partnership with President Bush. They negotiated the details of the
education bill together and are now talking about a compromise on the
patients' bill of rights.

"I like Bush, personally," Kennedy told me in December. "He has an
excellent sense of humor, and I can communicate with him. He's a
skilled politician. I would say we are professional friends." The two
dynasts also privately share a feeling of having had their intelligence
underestimated.

Bush has gone out of his way to court Kennedy, recognizing his power
in the divided Senate. Bush named the Justice Department building for
Robert Kennedy last November, despite opposition by conservative
Republicans in the House. And on the day the education bill was signed,
Bush told the crowd at a rally in Boston that Kennedy had been with
Laura Bush when the first word of the September 11 terrorist attacks
arrived; he thanked Kennedy for "providing such comfort to Laura during
an incredibly tough time.... So, Mr. Senator, not only are you a good
senator, you're a good man."

Kennedy thought he got more than half of what he wanted in the
education bill when it was announced and celebrated. But five weeks
later, when the devilish details of Bush's budget request to Congress
were disclosed, Kennedy felt betrayed. Money promised to repair
dilapidated schools and reduce class size in poor districts was not
actually in the budget.

Fortunately for Kennedy's progressive pedigree, he had not pulled
his punches in criticizing Bush on domestic issues during the prolonged
education negotiations. Kennedy vigorously opposed John Ashcroft's
nomination, attacked secret military tribunals for resident aliens and
helped defeat Bush's economic stimulus package, which was biased in
favor of the rich. He has forged a Democratic consensus behind a bill
protecting pensions, a rival to Bush's.

Kennedy and his allies will try to increase spending on education
above what Bush allocated. From 1996 through 2002, federal outlays for
education expanded an average of 13.4 percent a year; Bush has now
proposed a minuscule increase of 2.8 percent for 2003. "The President's
budget fails to provide resources that were agreed to," Kennedy said.
Today, Kennedy is more skeptical about Bush's intentions, calling his
budget "a severe blow to the nation's schools." But he says he will
attempt to "pry him away from the far right on some limited issues."

After forty years, Ted Kennedy's name, or
imprint, is on an impressive array of legislative monuments, including:
the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for which he delivered his maiden Senate
speech; the Voting Rights Act of 1965; the expansion of the voting
franchise to 18-year-olds; the $24 billion Kennedy-Hatch law of 1997,
which provided health insurance to children with a new tax on tobacco;
two increases in the minimum wage; the Kennedy-Kassebaum bill, which
made health insurance portable for workers; the 1988 law that allocated
$1.2 billion for AIDS testing, treatment and research; the 1990
Americans With Disabilities Act; the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act;
and last year's 1,200-page education reform act, which he negotiated
directly with President Bush and his staff.

Kennedy has also helped abolish the poll tax, liberalize immigration
laws, fund cancer research and create the Meals on Wheels program for
shut-ins and the elderly.

In 1985 Kennedy and Republican Lowell Weicker co-sponsored the
legislation that imposed economic sanctions on the apartheid government
of South Africa. The bill became law despite opposition from Bob Dole,
a filibuster by Jesse Helms and a veto by President Reagan. Only
Kennedy could have mustered the votes to override by 78 to 21 a veto
from Reagan at the height of his power.

Kennedy also ignited, and then led like a commando, the successful
resistance to Robert Bork's Supreme Court nomination by Reagan in 1987.
Kennedy's passionate opposition from day one helped keep abortion legal
in America. If confirmed, Bork would have provided the fifth vote to
repeal Roe v. Wade.
Instead, Reagan was forced to nominate Anthony Kennedy in Bork's place,
and Justice Kennedy has supported the retention of legal abortion as
settled precedent.

The Senator has been influential under Republican Presidents, and
when liberals were in the minority in the Senate. He has made himself
into a skilled parliamentary strategist, wielding power as the
third-most-senior member of the Senate, after Strom Thurmond and Robert
Byrd.

The key to Kennedy's effectiveness has been his remarkable capacity
to form warm, genuine friendships--more than mere working
alliances--with GOP senators. He's done this with conservatives like
Orrin Hatch and Alan Simpson, as well as with moderates like John
McCain, Bill Frist, Lowell Weicker and Nancy Kassebaum, before she
retired. He has also established enduring ties with centrist Democrats
like Robert Byrd and North Carolina freshman John Edwards, whom he has
privately recommended to friends as a potential presidential nominee in
2004. Kennedy's wife and Edwards's wife, both lawyers, are close
friends.

Perhaps the only senator Kennedy does not have cordial relations
with is the cranky caveman Jesse Helms. Kennedy even co-sponsored and
passed a law against church burning with Helms's North Carolina
protege, Lauch Faircloth, in 1996.

Kennedy has found a way to be both bipartisan in his affections and
alliances and partisan in his belief that government has an obligation
to make America a more equal country. This apparent paradox is
Kennedy's paradigm. He can shout, pound a table and turn red in the
face while giving a stemwinder that stirs up the party's base. And the
next day he can be jovial while making a legislative deal over cigars
with the Republican barons of the Senate. Kennedy always wants to "get
something done" at the frontier of the possible.

I asked Arizona Republican John McCain (co-sponsor with Kennedy of
the patients' bill of rights) to illuminate Kennedy's ability to reach
across the divide of party affiliation and form intricate human bonds.

"Ted always keeps his word," McCain responded. "This is essential in
a small group of people like the Senate. There is no bullshit with Ted.
You know exactly where he is coming from. He does what he says he will
do. He is a great listener in a body of poor listeners. This makes it
easy to deal with him. Look, I've had my fights with him. We disagree
on a lot of things. But Ted doesn't have a mean bone in his body. He
likes people. And he doesn't hold a grudge."

Even Trent Lott, the conservative Republican leader in the Senate,
has warmed up to Kennedy after years of pressuring GOP senators not to
partner with him on legislation. In 1998 Lott sent Kennedy a
handwritten note that is now framed in Kennedy's office. Lott wrote:

Your thoughtfulness truly amazes me. First the print from Cape Cod. Then the special edition of Profiles in Courage. I brought it home and re-read it. What an inspiration! Thank you, my friend, for your many courtesies. If the world only knew.

During the 1980s Kennedy spent too many nights drinking too much,
chasing younger women, trying to postpone the times when he was alone
with his ghosts. He put on weight and seemed almost an Elvis Presley
figure in premature, irreversible decline.

Kennedy's silences during the Judiciary Committee's 1991
confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas, who was accused of sexual
harassment by Anita Hill, were a low ebb for him, drawing rebukes from
liberals and feminists for the first time. Anna Quindlen wrote in the New York Times that Kennedy "let us down because he had to; he was muzzled by the facts of his life." The hometown Boston Globe,
usually loyal to Kennedy, editorialized that his "reputation as a
womanizer made him an inappropriate and non-credible" critic of Thomas.

Thomas was confirmed 52 to 48, and Kennedy was ashamed of his
inadequacy. But his failure also revealed that none of the other
Democrats on the Judiciary Committee had the stature to fill the void
he left. The weak performances of Joe Biden, Patrick Leahy and Howell
Heflin--none of whom had the internal inhibitions Kennedy had--proved
Kennedy was irreplaceable as an energizing leader. Nobody else could
derail Thomas the way Kennedy had stopped Bork.

In April 1991 Senator Hatch, the teetotaling Mormon from Utah, took
Kennedy aside and pleaded with him to stop or limit his drinking,
suggesting he was drinking himself to death and that Hatch didn't want
to "lose Kennedy as a friend or as a colleague." Hatch's lecture did
have an impact on Kennedy; two months later he met Vicki Reggie, and
ended his partying. They were married in 1992.

Kennedy's family and friends date his political revival to his
re-election victory over Mitt Romney in 1994. That campaign allowed him
to reconnect with his reasons for believing in public service. In
making the physical and emotional sacrifices necessary to win an
exhausting campaign, Kennedy recovered his dedication to remain in the
Senate, and he focused all his energies on the job.

In mid-September of that year the polls showed the race deadlocked.
Romney was attacking Kennedy as a burned-out relic and promising
voters, "I will not embarrass you." Then came the campaign's dramatic
first debate at Faneuil Hall in Boston. Some of his own campaign staff
didn't want Kennedy to debate. The Globe reported that debates "are widely seen as fraught with danger for the aging and sometimes tongue-tied Kennedy." The Boston Herald's
venomous, right-wing columnist Howie Carr described Kennedy as
"incoherent" and wrote that Kennedy's understanding of "'a sound
economic policy' means only buying every fourth round" at the bar.

But anyone who still harbors the illusion that Ted Kennedy is not
smart, or not fast-thinking, should study the tape of that
confrontation. When a panelist asked Kennedy how he coped with his
"personal failings," Kennedy answered:

"Every day of my life I try to be a better human being," he began,
"a better father, a better son, a better husband. And since my life has
changed with Vicki, I believe the people of this state understand that
the kind of purpose and direction and new affection and confidence on
personal matters has been enormously reinvigorating. And hopefully I am
a better senator."

Romney then accused Kennedy of a nonexistent financial conflict of
interest involving his "profiting" from a no-bid contract with
Washington's Mayor Marion Barry, under which minority ownership rules
were waived. Kennedy looked his rival in the eye and replied: "Mr.
Romney, the Kennedys are not in public service to make money. We have
paid too high a price in our commitment to public service." Romney's
response was to complain about Kennedy bringing up his family too
frequently.

Kennedy's debate performance transformed the election. He won with 57 percent of the vote.

Ted Kennedy is reluctant to be quoted directly
about the future direction of the Democratic Party. Like a veteran
ballplayer, he prefers to lead by example. He ducks questions about
factions and agendas, but his savvy staff points questioners to the
texts of two Kennedy speeches, delivered on January 11, 1995, and
October 24, 2001.

Together, these texts provide a basis from which to discern
Kennedy's road map. They sketch a combative alternative to the GOP's
anti-union, anti-poor, anti-urban biases. They are also a warning
against the compromising corporate alliances of Democrats like Terry
McAuliffe, who made an $18 million profit on Global Crossing stock, and
Senator Jeff Bingaman, whose wife made $2.5 million in six months as a
lobbyist for Global Crossing before it went bankrupt.

The 1995 speech came in the context of Newt Gingrich being sworn in
as Speaker in the wake of the GOP's gain of fifty-three House seats in
November 1994--the same day that Mario Cuomo was defeated in the New
York gubernatorial race and Tom Foley was trounced in the Washington
State House race.

In this sail-against-the-wind speech, given at the National Press
Club, Kennedy rejected the conventional wisdom that the 1994 elections
proved the country was veering sharply to the right. He argued that the
reason the Democrats lost so many elections was that they had
compromised too much and shed their distinct identity. Kennedy famously
declared: "If the Democrats run for cover, if we become pale carbon
copies of the opposition, we will lose--and deserve to lose. The last thing this country needs is two Republican parties."

Before Kennedy made this argument in public, he delivered it in private
to President Clinton, who was in a deep funk over the 1994 election and
being urged by pollster Dick Morris to compromise even more and embrace
portions of the Gingrich-Dole agenda.

Kennedy told Clinton to fight for incremental national healthcare,
jobs and an increase in the minimum wage, and to resist making any cuts
in education. He gave Clinton a memo that summed up his thinking on
what a Democratic Party in power should stand for. The memo said:
"Democrats are for higher wages and new job opportunities. Republicans
are for cuts to pay for tax breaks for the rich."

Kennedy's October 2001 speech on the Senate floor, opposing Bush's
stingy, elitist economic stimulus package, is another road map for lost
Democrats. In it, Kennedy asserted that any effective economic stimulus
should "target the dollars to low- and moderate-income families, who
are most certain to spend it rather than save it."

The key to Kennedy's politics is his belief that Democrats must
simultaneously advocate for the poor and the middle class at the
expense of the wealthy and corporate America. As someone whose policies
and politics are so well integrated, Kennedy knows that liberals win
elections when the poor and the middle class vote together. And
liberals lose when the suburban, indpendent middle-class votes with the
upper classes.

Kennedy made his populist thinking explicit on January 16, when he
became the first senator to urge postponement of $300 billion in tax
cuts for the affluent. He said the savings should be applied to
prescription drugs for the elderly, extending unemployment benefits and
protecting Social Security. Since January, only one other senator has
joined Kennedy--Paul Wellstone, the Senate's most progressive member.

What is not at all clear is how Kennedy's mentoring of John Edwards
fits into his broader thinking about what his party should stand for,
and who should be its nominee in 2004. When I asked a Kennedy friend
about Massachusetts junior Senator John Kerry, who is testing his own
candidacy for 2004, I was directed to page 565 in Adam Clymer's "definitive" biography of Kennedy.

That page contains an anecdote about a January 31, 1995, meeting of
Democratic Party leaders from both houses. It was convened to consider
whether to back Kennedy's bill raising the minimum wage, from a miserly
$4.25 an hour. Kennedy arrived late for the meeting, and as he walked
in, he heard Senator Kerry voicing his doubts about the bill. "If
you're not for raising the minimum wage, you don't deserve to call
yourself a Democrat," was Kennedy's angry response.

For whatever reason, Kennedy doesn't want to appear dogmatic or
overbearing about where Democrats should go from here. But this remark
makes vivid his thinking that higher wages, more jobs and more
healthcare are the foundations of the future.

Personal tragedy often provides the most
powerful training in empathy and compassion. Ted Kennedy has buried two
assassinated brothers he loved, a brother-in-law (Steve Smith) who
became like a brother to him, and three young nephews, including John
Kennedy Jr., whom he eulogized as another Kennedy who did not live long
enough "to comb gray hair." While Kennedy was still a teenager, his
older siblings, Joe and Kathleen, died. And his son survived cancer.

Kennedy has acquired both a tragic sense of life and what the late
Murray Kempton called "losing-side consciousness." He identifies with
hurt and loss. And he is able to translate his empathy into public
remedies and reforms. I realized this when I asked him to tell me the
story behind his eight-year campaign to pass the Family and Medical
Leave Act, a law he co-sponsored and managed on the Senate floor.

"In 1974," Kennedy began, "I spent every Friday in the waiting room
at Boston's Children's Hospital with my son, Teddy Jr. He was getting
experimental chemotherapy treatments. And other parents started coming
up to me and telling me how they had lost their jobs because they were
taking care of a child diagnosed with cancer, and missing work.

"That was the origin of it. Nobody should lose a job because of a
family medical emergency. I didn't lose my job because my priorities
were with my son. I just told Mike Mansfield [the Democratic leader in
the Senate] that I couldn't be there on Fridays. But less fortunate
fathers lost their jobs because they couldn't get a leave from their
employer."

Kennedy drafted a bill with Senator Chris Dodd that granted up to
twelve weeks of unpaid leave to deal with a family medical crisis,
protecting the job security of all workers with more than one year on
the job. The Kennedy-Dodd bill was originally introduced in 1985 and
passed the Congress in 1991, but it was vetoed by Bush the Elder. It
was passed again in 1993 and signed by President Clinton. But it was
conceived in those painful conversations with other desperate parents
in the waiting room of the Children's Hospital in 1974.

Because of his personal experience of tragedy, Ted Kennedy has
become America's national grief counselor. When the two planes were
hijacked out of Boston's Logan Airport last September 11 and
ninety-three residents of Massachusetts were killed, Kennedy personally
called about 125 family members to offer assistance and solace.

He was so moved by one conversation with a grieving father that he
sent the man a copy of a private letter his own father, Ambassador
Joseph Kennedy, had written to a close friend in 1958, upon hearing
about the death of the friend's son.

Ted Kennedy's ability to get up every morning and just keep going,
no matter what, is his defining quality. And this quotation of
consolation from his father sheds some light on Kennedy's credo of
perseverance. The letter says:

When one of your loved ones goes out of your life, you
think of what he might have done for a few more years, and you wonder
what you are going to do with the rest of yours.
Then one day, because there is a world to be lived in, you find
yourself a part of it, trying to accomplish something--something he did
not have time to do. And, perhaps, that is the reason for it all. I
hope so.

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