Radio Australia Today Editorial

Senator Ted Kennedy. A bad boy made good.

27 August 2009

With the news of U.S. Senator Edward Moore Kennedy dying yesterday, the long-running dynasty that held influence in the highest reaches of American politics also comes to an end.

Not quite. He does have a son in the U.S. House of Representatives and several nephews in politics, but when it comes to the original clan, Ted Kennedy was the last.

It all started ingloriously with a father, Joe Kennedy who was reputed to have made his fortune through some dubious connections in liquor dealing in the notorious thirties, but who, with his wife Rose, instilled a spirit of public service and liberalism in their many children.

The eldest of the children and the great family hope, Joe junior, died in the second world war. His next brother, John Fitzgerald Kennedy almost died in that same war, but of course went on to become a young president in a white house dubbed Camelot. He served barely a thousand days before being killed by assassins on that notorious November afternoon in Dallas, Texas in 1963. His Attorney-General was his brother Robert who, shattered by the death of his brother, vacillated over whether to put himself in the firing line and run for president. It was not long after he made the decision to run in 1968 that he too was killed, this time by a young Palestinian who has always claimed that he did it because of RFK’s policy towards arabs. In recent years conspiracy theories have surfaced about the murder too.

With RFK gone, that brought the world’s eyes to Ted Kennedy, the last surviving brother. The weight of liberal expectation was placed on Ted’s shoulders, and there was never any doubt that he would run for president. He was already a senator, and had been one since he was 30.

An incident the next year involving a young woman drowning in a submerged car driven by Ted Kennedy ended any presidential hopes he may have had, and to many Americans, and not just conservative ones, the words of his father weighed on him with some truth. Joe Kennedy had said that Ted was the one Kennedy who was most likely to get caught. Ironically, Ted Kennedy never served jailed time over the drowning incident, but he indeed was caught and guilty in a large part of the public mind.

It is a testament though that Ted Kennedy spent the next 40 years atoning for the death by working almost purely for the American people as the leading voice of the left in the Senate. He worked hard for health care reform. Although he didn’t succeed in getting the changes that he wanted and the country needed, he died with the moniker as the most influential senator in the last fifty years.

And that’s not a bad legacy for anyone, let lone a Kennedy.

– Phil