You are born into a family that’s already on the way up. You have eight brothers and sisters; you will survive seven of them. Your life will careen between the charms and the perils of being the youngest: By the time you’re sixteen, you will lose a brother and a sister, one to war, one to a plane crash. Another sister will be locked away following disastrous surgery. Your family will always swirl around you, celebrate with you in good times, make things easier in bad times, and expect of you everything that their fallen sons cannot provide.
You are an unlikely achiever. As a child and teenager, you bounce between schools and study only lightly, but you take football very seriously. You get into Harvard on the strength of your name, and get expelled a year later. Told — not for the last time — that you need to demonstrate good behavior before you can try again, you enlist in the Army. It is your father’s influence — and probably his worry, having already lost his oldest son to war — that keeps you stationed safely in Paris while the Korean War flares. You leave the military in 1953, after two years of service, honorably, Private First Class Edward M. Kennedy.
You try Harvard again. You are moderately successful, a star on the football field and a mediocre but improving student. Your mind is elsewhere: By 1956, your oldest living brother (and your godfather) is a senator from Massachusetts. He publishes a book that year, Profiles in Courage, and narrowly misses becoming the nominee for Vice President; you head to the University of Virginia to start your apprenticeship in the law. You are already talking about politics.
Still, you are the devil-may-care baby of a daring family. Four times in law school, you are caught driving recklessly, once going 90 with your lights off down a residential street. You keep your license, because the name on it is Kennedy.
You meet a girl, a college girl, a model. Maybe she’s taken by your charisma; maybe you’re taken by her beauty. You get engaged and married within a year, at your father’s urging. Perhaps they think this will settle you down. You come from a big family and your brothers are settled: Robert has five children already, and in 1957, Jack and Jackie have a baby girl. You marry Joan Bennett in 1958, and maybe you are happy for a while, but nothing really changes.
In 1958, Jack needs a campaign manager for a foregone conclusion of a Senate race. He has smarter, sharper aides to handle everything, but he gives you the campaign manager title. You show a talent for connection with “regular folks,” with your handsome face and easy smile, your broad football shoulders, your hearty laugh. Maybe they see in you what they don’t in your brother — an affable man who likes to sing when he drinks, a man with the flaws already floating to the surface. You’re a Kennedy, but you’re human. You’re a hand-shaker, a rough-and-tumble athlete, a man with a booming laugh. You’re 26 and already a politician.
Graduation is as assured as John’s win in 1958, and in 1959 and 1960, you travel the country campaigning for your brother. He’s going to be president. You take charge of the Western states, and far from home you woo delegates through feats of athleticism and daring. You ride a bucking bronco. You work your heart out.
Jack wins. He’s sworn in as the 35th president. Robert — Robbie, to you — is made Attorney General. And you take Jack’s Senate seat as your own, with your father’s blessing. You bide your time — you’re only 28 — with an appointment as an Assistant District Attorney, until you turn 30 and can run for the seat yourself. You beat a primary challenger who says you’re inheriting instead of earning the seat, and a Republican whose name is nearly as famous as your own.
What must you have thought, in 1962, when you were sworn into a job for which you were barely qualified? Did you believe you’d earned it, or was it just something you wanted? Were you proud? Scared? Did you have any idea that this would be both the beginning and the end for you, that this was as far as your star would ever rise? How promising, and warm, and safe the world must have seemed that year, when you were settled at Jack’s desk — your desk — and the future was laid out before you, perfect, already formed, conquerable. You must have had visions of a dynasty. President Edward M. Kennedy. Did you think it, even then? Did you think it every day?
In 1963, you’re presiding over a dull, half-empty Senate when the word comes in: Your brother, the untouchable president, has been shot. Robbie calls and gives you what must, at that moment, seem like the worst news you’ll ever hear: Jack is dead, killed in a car in Dallas.
This begins a wave of tragedy and accomplishment. Your life will never even out. You stand with your brother’s widow in the November cold of Washington, D.C.; seven months later, you are pulled from the wreckage of a plane crash by a fellow Senator and nearly die yourself. You convalesce for a year; your wife campaigns in your absence and you’re re-elected, finally returning to the Senate in 1965, where you join your brother Robert, the new Senator from New York.
You put your head down and work. You support the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and are key to the passage of the Hart-Celler Act, which equalizes immigration quotas by hemisphere instead of encouraging immigration only from wealthy Western hemisphere countries. This eventually changes the ethnic make-up of the United States and allows thousands of people to reunite with their families in America. You do this. This is your legacy.
You make mistakes: you support expansion in Vietnam, then change your mind. You tell your brother not to run for president, then change your mind. You’re in California, campaigning for him, when he’s shot in Los Angeles; you make it to his bedside before he dies.
You are 34 and all of your brothers are dead. You have three children of your own and thirteen nieces and nephews without a father. You decline running in your brother’s place and, instead, go back to the Senate. You take a leadership post, but your heart is elsewhere. You know, now, it falls to you to run.
What are you thinking, that year? How do you function?
The answer is, badly. You make more mistakes: terrible mistakes. You drive off a bridge with a woman in your car, and as has always been true, you escape. You cheat death again. She does not. Maybe you are dazed, maybe you are terrified, maybe you are drunk, maybe you are all three — but you tell no one until morning, when it is far too late. Nothing can be done to save her. This night, this bridge, this woman — they will never leave you. People will speak of Chappaquiddick in your obituaries. You will be forgiven by the people of Massachusetts, but no one will ever forget. No one ever should.
This is enough. For nearly anyone, this would be enough. The narrow escapes, the horrible haunting guilt of surviving, of perhaps causing, death — it would be enough. It would be a life done, a reason to quit.
But you are a Kennedy. You survive. You go back to the Senate; you go back to your family. Your son loses a leg to cancer; your wife is hospitalized for alcoholism. Twice, you turn down opportunities to run for president as a favored candidate. You speak of spending time with your family. You end the decade separated from your wife, isolated from your party, bereft, reckless, ineffectual.
In 1980 you run for president, and you really learn how to lose. It is an important lesson. You lose to a president you don’t respect, within a party that you love and must feel you deserve to be loved by. Chappaquiddick makes this impossible. Your over-developed sense of inevitability makes this impossible. Your behavior, the person you are in private, makes this impossible. You lose, and in losing, you are more elegant than you have been in years.
But really, you are a mess. You and Joan divorce. You drink. You carouse. You return to your college habits, recklessness and abandon. Despite being an advocate for women on the Senate floor, you are, perhaps, something of a terror for them at the bar. You become fodder for paparazzi. You become something of a clown.
And then, as always, you rally. You meet another woman, Victoria, and you soon become serious. You marry. You fight an actual battle for your usually safe Senate seat, and beat Mitt Romney by 11 points, the narrowest margin of your career. Maybe this reminds you of what you are there for; maybe it is just time, after all these years, to settle down.
Now you come into your own. You spend the 90s fighting the good fight, sitting at the head of the family table, seeing the country and the Kennedys through times good and bad. You fight for better public education and all kinds of public health care. You inspire a new generation simply because you’ve been at it for so long.
When the end comes, it is neither swift nor sudden. You are, after years of recklessness, not felled by something from without, but by something within. A brain tumor. You defy the odds. Again, your name — your wealth, your standing — provide you a softer cushion than most, better surgeons, better hospitals — but there is only so much they can do. You live to see a new, young president sworn in, a man who might remind you of your brothers but also, perhaps, of yourself. You live to see him start a fight you’ve always wanted to win, but you cannot hold on to see it ended.
You die in the company of your family. You die after a summer of sailing and singing, after a year of watching the country turn back in your direction. You die and the papers print your praises; you die and your enemies cheer. You have lived long, and well, and fully, and deeply. You have been loved and loathed and have deserved both, sometimes at the same time.
You will be missed, not just for your name, not just for the legacy that is retired as you are interred by your brothers, but for the actual good you have done. You will be missed by those for whom you fought; you will be missed by those who looked to your leadership in the darkest days as a reminder that a better America is always worth fighting for.
It’s hard to say good-bye, because you are as much an idea as a man. So I quote, as you did, Tennyson:
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Thank you, sir, for never yielding.
SATURN SMITH 