Kennedy Rising

"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose."

--Me and Bobby McGee

Kris Kristofferson

He Sits there, listening to testimony at a routine committee hearing, pushing his hair out of his eyes, looking a little like Jay Gatsby. Rich, sensual, Irish-handsome, just turned 41, inheritor of the myth--the last Kennedy.

He appears so sure of himself, so in control. The other Senators seem unimportant. All the cameras focus on him; the reporters take down his remarks; the spectators can't keep their eyes off him. At the crowded press table, we try, futilely, to imagine what it's like to be Edward Kennedy and contend with all those ruins of memory.

First the public murders of two of his brothers. Going alone to Arlington cemetery at daybreak last November 22, coatless in the wind-chilled 30-degree dawn, and shivering in silence for 15 minutes--head bowed, arms folded across his chest--in front of his brother John's grave. Then kneeling, making the sign of the cross, walking four steps to another mound of earth and placing one small, white rosebud next to his brother Robert's grave.

And other ruins of memory.

There is the dull, endless ache at the base of his corseted spine from the 1964 plane crash that nearly finished him. There are the indelible images of that July night in the waters off Chappaquiddick. And more private recollections: of a visit to India and the sight of a skeletal Bengali refugee, soon to die, saluting him and begging for help; of the petition from GIs on duty at Fire Base Pace near the DMZ, outlining their opposition to the war and asking him to do something. Memories of being so mobbed by the touchers and seekers after a speech in Denver that he suddenly found himself being rushed out of a hotel--through the kitchen pantry; of noticing a letter to the editor in The Boston Globe, asserting that only George Wallace or Ted Kennedy could save America; of listening to one of his closest friends warning him that if he runs in 1972, he will be killed. And there are the responsibilities--the burden of being a surrogate father to Bobby's bruised and troubled children. The gnawing, unanswered question of whether to make a move toward the Presidency this year.

So he sits up there, one moment giving his whole body over to laughing at a joke, the next asking a tough-minded question, with his broad-A Massachusetts twang. Slouched a little now, he drums his freckled, stumpy fingers impatiently on the table. He's struggling with his own chaotic life, just trying to get through the day.

• • •

Martin Nolan is a savvy political writer for The Boston Globe. He has covered Ted Kennedy for a decade, through each cycle of crisis and comeback, and he believes the current Kennedy is not the same person who went to the Senate in 1962.

"He was a rich punk then," says Nolan, "a spoiled, immature brat. His brother was President. He was the youngest guy ever elected to the Senate. Nothing bad had ever happened to him."

Ted Kennedy seemed, during the mid-Sixties, to be the most conventional and least serious of the brothers. He played by the rules of the Senate's inner club. He worked hard, attended all the committee meetings, was attentive to the small courtesies, made his contribution on little issues and deferred to his elders. He got along with everyone; even Lyndon Johnson liked him. He didn't challenge powerful economic interests. He graciously let Arkansas' John McClellan and Georgia's Richard Russell tutor him in the ethos of the establishment.

Then came Dallas, Los Angeles, Chappaquiddick. After each trauma, Kennedy withdrew deep into himself, brooding, ducking friends, sailing alone day after day, tempted to retreat from public life.

"It's been one hell of a way to grow up, but the kid has done OK," says his funky brother-in-law Stephen Smith.

One night in April of 1971, it became clear to some of us just how much the man who went to Washington as a favored insider was developing an instinct for the outside. Kennedy had believed in our war in Southeast Asia; he had gone to Vietnam late in 1965 and come back enthusiastic about the prospects there. Only when Robert turned against the policy did he change his mind. Now the Vietnam Veterans Against the War were encamped, in defiance of John Mitchell, on the green Mall near the Washington Monument. They had come, some lacking arms or legs, to protest the war and to hurl their honors and medals over the White House fence. Uptight Washington did not welcome them and the Attorney General went into Federal court to evict them. Even dovish Senators--Philip Hart, Jacob Javits--were put off by their bitterness and complained they were giving the peace movement a bad name. They could bivouac in the mud near Da Nang but not in their nation's capital.

At dusk on April 20, with a police bust imminent, the vets caucused around a campfire and voted 480 to 400 not to leave voluntarily. They would stay and dare arrest. That night, Ted Kennedy's instinct told him he belonged with the veterans of the war his brother had begun and he himself had supported so long. He had been thinking about them earlier that evening, as he partied with Hubert Humphrey and Ed Muskie at a $500-a-plate fund-raising dinner.

"I was sitting there at this dull political dinner," Kennedy recalls, "and I couldn't get the vets out of my mind. I had talked to John Kerry that day, and his words kept coming back to me. I was thinking about how little support the vets had in this town after what they had gone through. I thought how comfortable and warm it was at the dinner and how cold and lonely it must be out on the Mall."

Kennedy returned to his McLean, Virginia, home around midnight, still brooding about the veterans. He was having a drink with his house guest, New York lawyer William vanden Heuvel, when he suddenly exclaimed:

"Do you know where we belong now? We should be with those vets."

"I tried to talk him out of it," remembers Vanden Heuvel. "It seemed crazy. It was one in the morning and getting colder. But Ted changed his clothes [from tux to John Kennedy's Air Force flight jacket with the Presidential seal] and we drove right over there. On the way, he said to me, 'I just feel right doing this.' " They alerted neither Kennedy staff nor press.

Arriving at the Mall, Kennedy and Vanden Heuvel groped in the darkness, stumbling over men in sleeping bags, looking for the Massachusetts delegation. Eventually, they found John Kerry and were invited into a tent.

Kennedy stayed with the vets for two hours, singing antiwar songs and drinking cheap red wine from paper cups. The singing was emotional and off key. There was a lot of good talk and even some arguing about a volunteer army. The feeling of camaraderie ran very deep. When Kennedy left, he avoided the clot of reporters who were waiting for police sirens that never came.

• • •

In the intervening months, Ted Kennedy has acted like the freest man in American politics.

"Sure, I feel more relaxed these days," he says. "Everything that can happen to me has already happened. Everything has been said about me. I can't be hurt anymore."

So Kennedy, responding to the promptings of intuition, defends the unpopular May Day tribes from the Government's dragnet arrests and is vindicated when fewer than 100 of the 12,000 arrests stand up in court. He takes on the most entrenched of special interests--the A. M. A. and Blue Cross over his national-health-insurance bill; the oil industry over import quotas, depletion allowances and special tax favors; the National Rifle Association over gun-control legislation. Without fear of offending this group or that one, since he's not a candidate courting or counting delegates, Kennedy swings from issue to issue: leading the fight on the Senate floor to abolish the sugar quota for South Africa, demanding the withdrawal of all British troops from Northern Ireland, opposing capital punishment, pushing a bill through the Senate to fund lead-poisoning treatment.

On September 27 of last year, Kennedy gave an uninhibited and virtually unreported speech at the Harvard Law School. ("I like to save my best speeches for Massachusetts," he says.)

"Richard Nixon lives in a Skinner box," Kennedy said to laughter that dissolved into standing applause. "He responds only to rewards and punishments that his senses can appreciate....

"The war in Indochina remains a monstrous outrage...we have only changed the color of the bodies.... Today we have a Commander in Chief who goes out of his way to support both Lieutenant William Calley at My Lai and Nelson Rockefeller at Attica."

In ordinary conversation, Kennedy isn't that verbal. He talks, for the most part, in a rush of sentence fragments and South Boston slang, accented with shrugs and gestures. Press him on why he acts liberated and he says little you can quote. It's like a parody of Casey Stengel: nouns in search of verbs.

But his friends and staff seem to agree on the basic factors behind his new freedom: the lack of inhibition that comes with not being an announced candidate for President; the fatalism that comes with a run of bad luck; the special responsibility that comes with being the senior Kennedy male of his generation; the maturity and confidence that come naturally with age. There is, in fact, an axiom in Washington that says: "The Longs go crazy at 35 and the Kennedys grow up at 35."

Then, too, losing his post as Senate whip to Robert Byrd turned out to be a blessing. It freed Kennedy from his old illusion that he was accepted by the club and it released him from the dull, time-eating chores of what is essentially a clerk's job. Now he has the time to roam around--holding health hearings in Appalachia, visiting an Indian reservation (continued on page 244)Kennedy Rising(continued from page 110) in South Dakota and the refugee camps of Bangla Desh.

Many wise observers believe these trips are political and that it's out of cynicism that Kennedy is building a constituency of casualties. My hunch is that Kennedy's passion for the victim is largely authentic. Showing sympathy for poor whites and Indians is not how Presidents are made in this middle-class country.

The best simile illuminating Kennedy's behavior this past year may have come from his former advisor, David Burke: "I guess it's like that old Alec Guinness movie in which the man goes to the doctor, is given the wrong set of X rays and thinks he has only a year to live. He stops worrying and starts taking chances and suddenly he becomes a great success because he's so loose."

• • •

Most of politics consists of public ceremonies that tell you nothing about the character of a man. He reads a speech drafted by others. At a press conference, he answers questions he has answered 50 times before. He travels to political dinners and committee hearings inside a bubble of unreality. His staff briefs him, programs him with names, facts and questions, all neatly summarized on index cards. But once in a while, there are moments of spontaneity, when the politician does or says something to suggest the private character behind the public mask, moments when he's on his own.

In October 1971, Kennedy went to New York to speak at the Queens County Democratic dinner as a favor to his old Infantry bunkmate Matt Troy, the new county leader. Julie Baumgold, a reporter for New York magazine who was writing a piece on Kennedy, met him at the airport and went along to the dinner. Julie is a small, fragile woman. The Queens dinner was a typical, old-fashioned brawl, oversubscribed by 500. People started drinking early. There was a lot of pushing and elbowing by important local politicians, scuffling for a chance to stand next to Kennedy, to be seen in the same room with him, to get into a picture with him that would be proudly displayed on the walls of their small, crowded offices for the next 20 years.

At one point, several goons led Kennedy into a quiet private room, shutting Miss Baumgold out. Suddenly, Kennedy realized what had happened. Abruptly, he turned his back on the three men with whom he was posing for a picture, walked over to the door and told the goons to let Miss Baumgold in. Julie, astonished at the kindness, remarked that John Lindsay was never so considerate of the people traveling in his chaotic wake.

• • •

Kennedy is not an ideologue; he has a sense of fair play that can override the most abstract notions of ideological purity. Last autumn, William Rehnquist's nomination for the Supreme Court was before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Rehnquist's hard-line conservatism was obviously distasteful to Kennedy, and he would later vote against him. But when Joseph Rauh, longtime spokesman for the A. D. A. and countless liberal causes, began to allude in his testimony before the committee to rumors that Rehnquist had once been a secret member of the John Birch Society, Kennedy started to frown and fidget. Rauh, a courageous opponent of McCarthyism in the Fifties, continued to speculate--without offering any evidence--about the nominee's "possible associations" with the Birch Society, and Kennedy exploded. Without pausing to confer with his staff aide, Jim Flug, who was in the hearing room, he interrupted Rauh in midsentence:

"I think your suggestion is completely unwarranted and completely uncalled for," Kennedy said in plain anger. "I don't think you are serving the cause of those of us who have some very serious reservations [about the nomination] to make this kind of charge.... I don't feel that you are serving the cause of enlightenment with this kind of suggestion.... You have left an atmosphere which I think is rather poisonous.... This is a misleading type of suggestion and I think you ought to have a good deal more evidence to back up the kind of suggestions you are making here."

One night last summer, Kennedy went to Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan to meet informally with some 50 radical nurses, residents and interns. There was no press in the room and the evening was a totally unstructured contest of ideas. For about an hour, the new medics went at Kennedy from the left, pointing out the limits of working within the system, the futility of piecemeal reform of health care. Finally, one of the young physicians rose to make a speech, attacking Kennedy's failure to support the exemption of doctors from the military draft.

"What kind of a question is that?" Kennedy snapped. "What about all the civilian casualties in Vietnam? You're all supposed to be such great humanitarians. Why don't you go over there and treat the refugees dying in those camps in Laos and Cambodia? What's so special about a doctor? What about the guys in Dorchester, guys who are nineteen and will never go to college and are working in a factory? Why should they have to go die in Vietnam, so some doctor can make a lot of dough on Park Avenue? There are a hell of a lot of civilian casualties over there. Are you guys so special you can't heal them?"

• • •

Kennedy's reference to "the guys in Dorchester" is an insight into the chemistry that, for all his immense personal wealth and luxurious life style, exists between him and the ethnic working class of factory workers, waitresses and truck drivers--the Wallace people. His former advisor, David Burke, is an off-the-corner product of the Brookline proletariat who did construction work after college. Kennedy knows all the words to Boston's shanty-Irish anthem --Southie Is My Home Town--and loves to sing it in Boston pubs or at Washington parties. And although the pollsters and sociologists predicted that Chappaquiddick would damage him most with moralistic lower-class Catholic families, it hasn't worked out that way. In his campaign for re-election in 1970, Kennedy won his biggest margin from the same district that sent Louise Day Hicks to Congress--and, in 1968, had given George Wallace his biggest Massachusetts vote.

In October of 1971, Newsweek published the results of a Gallup Poll of 1700 new voters between the ages of 18 and 23, and Kennedy did even better among those not in college than he did with reputedly more liberal campus types. Kennedy, with 59 percent, was first among all politicians, and his hold on the less educated, less affluent youth helped cut the Wallace strength to six percent.

Perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of Kennedy's rapport with the white working class took place in September of 1970, when he visited the Jo-Gal shoe factory in Lawrence, Massachusetts--an old mill town, once a bastion of the I. W. W., now demoralized by unemployment. Kennedy was the only Massachusetts politician who opposed an import quota for shoes; this position could have led to the closing of the Jo-Gal factory and the laying off of its 300 workers. The signs already pointed in that direction when Kennedy went to Lawrence; nevertheless, the minute he entered the plant, the workers--mostly female--went berserk. Women in their 40s and 50s climbed up onto tables, squealing and jumping wildly. They forgot their tedious jobs and their dead-end lives and filled the dingy plant with a symphony of sound.

After a while, Kennedy invited a few questions.

"What about the shoe quota?" a man in his 50s asked.

"I have trouble with that," Kennedy answered.

"I know," said the man, "but I'm for you anyway, Ted."

One afternoon, flying between New York and Washington, I asked Kennedy to explain the almost tribal alchemy at work between him and the ethnic proletariat.

"It's hard to say," he began slowly. "It's not the issues so much. I have a feeling it's more a matter of shared values. Church and family, especially. My brothers. Patriotism, too; my family has all been in the Service. A sense of toughness. I'm not really sure what it is. I guess it's because I really like them."

• • •

Every day, no matter where he is, Kennedy telephones his 11-year-old son, Teddy, Jr., to reassure him that everything is OK. Last autumn, on the day Kennedy was due in town, police in Des Moines arrested a man distributing Kennedy: wanted for murder leaflets and found a pistol in his pocket. When Dick Drayne, Kennedy's press secretary, got home from a day with him last year, Drayne's nine-year-old son greeted him with "Have they shot Senator Kennedy yet, Daddy?"

Kennedy receives 10 or 15 death threats, warnings of attempts to complete the symmetry of assassination, in the mail every month. Once a week, men from the FBI and Secret Service come by his office to pick them up and feed them into a computer. His receptionist, Melody McElligott, has an alarm system under her desk and a bunch of photographs--of faces to watch out for--in her drawer. Wherever Kennedy goes, a couple of unobtrusive plainclothesmen pick him up at the airport and stay with him until he leaves town. When you're with Kennedy, it's impossible not to think about the ghosts.

Kennedy tries hard to kill the dread by ignoring it. In Washington, he often walks alone to and from floor votes. Twice while I was working on this piece, he flew to New York on the shuttle, without staff or security precautions. He tries not to let the ghosts inhibit his actions. But he will confess, "When a tray drops, I guess I jump higher than the next guy."

Another specter that haunts Kennedy is The Bridge. He has said publicly that his conduct at Chappaquiddick was "indefensible." But the gossip persists, after he leaves a room, at the edges of crowds, in bars and beauty parlors.

When Roger Mudd asked him on television if Chappaquiddick was the reason he said he wouldn't run this year, Kennedy swallowed and replied, "No ... other circumstances ... before that." Meaning the other ghosts.

Of Chappaquiddick he says, "I've come to terms with myself about that.... I can face it in a campaign if I have to. I can take whatever they throw at me about the accident. I'm aware of all the rumors. Only what actually happened hurts.

"Look, eleven people were involved in that evening. If there were some secret, some hidden thing, it would have come out. Eleven people in this world can't keep a secret. Two people couldn't keep it. How could I possibly remain in public life if there were some secret eleven people had?

"Now I just think about it as one of a long list of tragedies."

Last November, Kennedy went to New York City to speak at a dinner honoring reform Congressman William F. Ryan. Kennedy's speech was about the Supreme Court, and at one point his text read that Louis Brandeis was nominated for the Court in 1916. But Kennedy said 1969 instead of 1916.

He kept on reading as the audience started to murmur about the slip. Suddenly, Kennedy looked up, an odd, hurt look on his face, and blurted out:

"Did I say 1969? It was 1916. I remember something else from 1969."

One of the survivors of Chappaquiddick was in the audience at the dinner.

• • •

The other side of dread is desire. Kennedy obviously wants to be President someday. He talks with genuine anger about what Nixon and Mitchell and Connally are doing to the country. And patience is not part of his nature. But 95 percent of the time, Kennedy is sure he won't run this year. He doesn't think Nixon can be beaten. It would take a deadlocked convention, the threat of Humphrey and Wallace, a desperate party and an honest draft to make Kennedy a candidate.

There was plenty of pressure on Kennedy to jump into the primaries this year. Mayor Daley and Bella Abzug were for him. Labor leaders and blacks wanted him, although the blacks also feared for his life. From September to December of last year, he was ahead of Muskie in most of the public-opinion polls. Finally, when Kennedy's friend John Tunney endorsed Muskie, the professionals began to believe he wasn't going to run.

Still, he kept getting information that Iowa was his, that the Utah delegation backed him, that he was unbeatable in Pennsylvania and California. There were even days when he seemed ready to run. In early November, he made a frenetic five-state, three-day swing from Salt Lake City to Minneapolis, climaxing all his speeches with the line:

"I ask you to march again as we marched before."

And the crowds would roar back, "Yes" and "Run!" and "When?"

He had endless, agonized conversations with family, friends and journalists about the pull between dread and desire. But the bottom line always sounded the same:

"It doesn't feel right in my gut.... I feel certain responsibilities to my family, my mother, my wife, my children, Bobby's children.... I have to think about running in terms of other people.... If I should run and get hurt, I would want my children to be older."

• • •

At 41, Ted Kennedy remains a mythic figure--a flawed and vulnerable hero. His failures are all public, from cheating at Harvard to panicking at Chappaquiddick. He is still waiting for the chance to win something on his own, without leaning on the legend of his family.

My intuition is that Ted Kennedy is goaded by a vision of vindication. He has something to prove to himself. He is grappling with ghosts out of a need for redemption. He could wait until the year 2000; or he may seek the prize suddenly, this year. But he will seek it--because it is his fate.