On the Death of Ted Kennedy

In his final months, he became the progressive anchor of the Barack Obama campaign. When I saw them together early in 2008, it was not easy for Ted Kennedy to oppose the party's favorite, Hillary Clinton, on behalf of a young tribune of hope. But he did. Ted Kennedy sailed against the wind.

Were he alive today, we would have a better health care bill than anything that will emerge from this Congress. Perhaps the Senate could be shamed into voting for a bill worth of his name, but I am doubtful. Were he alive today, he surely would have counseled the president to extract our troops from Afghanistan as rapidly as possible, just as his brother Robert in 1967 decided to separate himself from his brother John's earliest Vietnam policy. The president will miss Ted Kennedy's wisdom amidst all the current preening and chattering in the newest ranks of the best and the brightest.

Were he alive today, Ted Kennedy would recommend diplomacy toward our apparent adversaries, just as he supported a US visa to permit Gerry Adams to enter America in search of an Irish peace. Kennedy favored the visa against the counsel of the State Department and CIA at the time.

Were he alive today, the Democratic Party would be less likely to drift away from its progressive legacy in the name of victory at any price. He was too old and experienced, had suffered through too much, to fall victim to the latest fads of the ambitious. He knew that the winds of change always return, even in the slackest tides.

I first met Ted Kennedy in 1962, when he was the kid brother, yet already a US senator. I hated the system of perks and privileges when most young men of my generation were facing the grim reaper of the draft. I thought his brothers were full of progressive possibility, but too imprisoned in the Democratic machine, too ambitious for technical fixes. All that began to change when they were deceived by their own CIA and Joint Chiefs at the Bay of Pigs, and again in South Vietnam, which led them to consider withdrawal from Southeast Asia and the horrifying Cold War nuclear arms race. They awakened to the spirit of the civil rights and student movements too. Then came the Dallas assassination, then the King assassination, then Bobby's assassination here in Los Angeles.

The utter madness of it all surely contributed to Teddy's spiral downward. The miracle was his steady recovery and his eventual restoration and extension of the Kennedy family legacy. When I last saw him, during an informal get-together in his Senate office, it was as if much of his youth, his ironic humor, his fighting spirit, and his empathy for social movements, had returned.

If we understand Ted Kennedy as the most progressive and effective member of the United States Senate, whose politics are echoed generally across the whole Kennedy family, we must draw the conclusion for our generation and the country as a whole. If either of the earlier Kennedy brothers had not been murdered, the likelihood is that American would have evolved steadily in a progressive direction, without Vietnam, without the black uprisings and repressions, without Nixon and Watergate, because that was the trajectory where Ted Kennedy believed his brothers' legacy would be honored.

That is why, as Jack Newfield wrote in 1968, we would become not a generation of has-beens, but a generation of might-have-beens, while we were very young.

Ted Kennedy knew at the deepest level that only a new and hopeful generation of activists might lift America from the life of sorrows that he, and the rest of us, were forced to endure.

Comments

[watchTVgetSTUPID]

Tom Great post. You always bring the perspective of one who experienced the tricks and manipulations of the ever present conservative power brokers. You remind us of what is at stake and what happens when the deceitful conservatives win.

[PaulSpike]

Excellent post, Tom. Thank you. It will sound odd but you are one of the leaders of our Might Have Been Generation who still needs to Be Now, as much as you have always been throughout my lifetime (you knew my father, I first met you in Hamilton Hall on the first day of the strike). If Teddy Kennedy could rise from his despair, so, too, can all of us, especially now. I have a hunch that there is a new generation of activists in play, but their activism is taking forms we cannot immediately recognize. Hopefully, we can find a way to join with them in order to help Obama become the best president that he can be.

[William Bradley - Huffpost Blogger]

A very nice piece, Tom, but perhaps a bit on the morose side ...

[MrsFonebone]

It's not fair for Hayden to speak for Ted Kennedy. You do not know what he would have done.
Especially in the military matters.
Ted was clearly no saint; he modified immigration in ways that are coming back to haunt us and he chose to ditch Hillary because he too succumbed to style over substance and experience.
He was complex; Hayden has no right to put words in his mouth now that he cannot rebut them.

[demigod]

Let's not forget how Kennedy sabotaged the Carter re-election campaign with his petty, meaningless, and vicious primary challenge, he sat on his hands after losing, and helped to give us eight years of Ronald Reagan. Kennedy's workers did NOT unite with the party, but went off snivelling and carping. Carter was also abandoned by the Jews, who resented Carter's historic Camp David accords as the surrender of captured lands to Egypt. They closed their checkbooks, resigned from Democratic Party positions, and abandoned the Carter campaign, helping Reagan to win. The Kennedy people were right in the middle of all that. These are simple facts that no one wants to mention, now that Kennedy is dead. But I was there, and I remember it all. Let's keep it real, folks.

[Notrepublicrat]

Yes, the only thing that can save America is "activists".

[Hoelder]

This is one of the saddest days I can remember. Who will stand up for the cause of the disenfranchised? Who will raise his voice for the common person? This is a very sad day!

[hasheville]

Ted always seemed sincere and so gave us at least one example of what a politician could be. Perhaps that's why his most fierce opponents respected him so much. I'm almost as old as Tom and the Kennedy brothers have always been there - speaking truth to power, expressing the best of this country, keeping the dream alive, Its really up to us now.

[Sportswoman]

Tom, I was working in the UW student union cafeteria as a politically jaded freshman, a year after working on Bobby's campaign as a high school volunteer. Watching that televised assassination was a horror that stayed with me in the form of cynicism, until Barack Obama called us all back to the table. (Actually, I had started to come back , registering voters for John Kerry because my disgust with Bush so superseded my cynicism.) I remember you coming in from anti-war rallies on the library mall, being far more polite than some of your counterparts. Thank-you for that!
Besides being a writer, I've taught in LA schools for many years and it's remarkable how much Ted Kennedy impacted public education, especially special education in the 1970s and 80s. In fact so many bills for the rights and opportunities of the disabled were Ted Kennedy's. He also authored the Elementary and Secondary Education Bill of 1968 that gave federal funding to the classroom. His encouragement of Title IX has enhanced genter equality and given opportunities to female student athletes all over America. Meels on Wheels has kept children from coming to school hungry and the elderly from eating pet food, as you may recall was a huge story in Santa Monica back in the day. We are a batter nation for Ted Kennedy's hard work in the SEnate.

[DietrichMoody]

How do you know what type of Health Reform Legislation is going to emerge from Congress. Try to have faith that maybe his spirt, not physical presence, might stand witness to a reformed Health Care Legislation. Distrust, really doesn't help here Mr. Hayden.

[CTtransplant]

As he so often fought for us, we must keep up his fight for health care for ALL!

We did indeed lose a great man in Kennedy yesterday - and one of our greatest champions of health care reform. It has become even more important than ever that we get this done! And rightfully call it the TeddyPlan in honor of the man who made this his life's work! He carried the torch for a long time...and now it is up to us to continue to carry it for him!

We cannot let the scare tactics dissuade us from reaching our goal!

While many of us are struggling to afford medical insurance/medical bills.
While Congress people try to stop healthcare reform.
While Congress people accept large contributions from lobbyists to prevent health care reform.

Our elected officials in Congress receive health care mostly paid for by us tax payers, yet many are trying to make it impossible for us to purchase an affordable plan of our own.

Please sign both petitions! Thank you!

http://www.petitiononline.com/PubOp676/petition.html

http://www.democrats.com/honor-ted-kennedy?cid=ZGVtczQ0MTA5OGRlbXM=

[mcmchugh99]

The Democrats are going to pass reforms in this decade in spite of themselves, since we're in the first reform wave since the 1960s. In the Second Gilded Age of the last 30 years, they have gotten into the habit of accommodating to conservatism, and reacting to the Republicans rather than letting the Republicans react to them. Ever since Reagan, the Republicans have had them on the defensive most of the time on virtually every issue in foreign and domestic policy, and they are almost hysterical right now, playing every card they have trying to block any change.

They will not be successful, once the Democrats finally shake off decades of timidity and deference to free market conservatism. Of course, that will also require some new blood in the Democratic Party, of which I hope Obama will be the harbinger.

[Halsey]

Ted made it to 77...with a brain tumor...strong to the VERY end..driving for people's rights (health care) to the very end. IF Obama wants to pick up the gaunlet (and respect and admire Barack..but fear his weak..like bill clinton)...but man..IF if DID...watch out bluedogswith fleas..or just bluefleas as I call them..your days are OVER...May the Strength from Ted be transformed (energy does NOT die..ask any mathematician..it's no religion..it's physics)...could enter our POTUS.... enliven him, boldend him...He COULD carry the torch of the Kennedy's...I mean it... thank you Tom

[MalleusMaleficarum]

The Kennedy legacy now passes into legend. The Kennedys embodied a dream of utopian progress. Last year, Ted Kennedy passed the baton very publicly to Barack Obama. JFK, RFK and EMK were as eloquent as they were passionate. While they may have passed beyond the golden horizon, their dream lives on, it breathes -- it moves; it sings; it speaks unto each and every man, woman and child of America.

[uneeda]

lets hope that we find a new generation of activists

[Angeltour]

good luck, the democratic party is also under the spell of the corporations...how can we become activists when the leader of our party is cutting secret deals behind closed doors with the drug and insurance companies and there is not a peep from even code pink as our new democratic administration expands the afghanstan war, this month the deadliest yet, and we remain in Iraq...who are we kidding?

[MegWe]

Once again, Obama ran on going back and finishing the job in Afganistan that George abandoned. We are leaving Iraq. Just not fast enough for some. But extracting our country from the obligations made by GW will take time. The mess is a tangled. complicated mess. It will happen. As far as the corporations, that is true. The Public Option will be the first break in its stronghold. Hope for it. Work for it.