Eulogy for Ted Kennedy from Jerome Maryon, President, Saint Paul Lay Committee on Contemporary Spiritual and Public Concerns (a Center for Catholic Social Policy), Boston, Mass.
Edward M. Kennedy: Requiescat in Pace
Sometimes the rich facts of a person’s life, the public accomplishments of a very public person, leave us overwhelmed at his or her loss. We’re far too desolate to “do the math” - to account properly for his or her greatness. Today, more than any day this decade, we face that challenge. For the person whom we have lost this day is not only one of the greatest legislators, but one of the greatest leaders, in American history. It is a testament to Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s unrivalled legislative accomplishments that we scarcely advert to the public leader as a whole, to what made him great, or, for that matter, in this counterfeit age, the Age of Celebrity, to what greatness itself demands.
It was just two weeks ago that we lost Eunice. When Ted could not make her funeral Mass, we knew then that the end was near for him as well. If this had been old Ireland, we would have heard the banshee wail.
Some would say that that would be all too appropriate, for it is the end of an era. Ted would be the first to correct them, quietly, humorously, affectionately. (Nancy Reagan attests to the warmth of his relations; so does Orrin Hatch; and so, for what little it’s worth, do I.) For the end of his life is but the beginning of his legacy.
First thing this morning, as I read the statements from the Kennedy family and from President Obama – and from around the world – I was reminded of three moments in the Kennedy legacy – our legacy. The legacy that formed and was formed by Ted, and that now empowers us all. For it is now, without equivocation, our turn to pick up the fallen standard.
I. What was the special gift of the Kennedys?
The first of the three moments in the Kennedy legacy was one that I’d only read about, in college, while researching a senior paper on Presidential psychology. Somewhere I turned up a fact that had escaped the attention of most commentators on President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. A Peace Corps volunteer (the Corps being, of course, one of the President’s great legacies), was serving in an African city, somewhere along the coast, when a tribal chief walked into his quarters, bearing a portrait of the fallen leader. The volunteer was stunned: for this chief had been walking for days, all the way from his village, well in the interior, walking with little but that photo. What was it that had so moved the man? It wasn’t TV: they had none in the interior. It wasn’t charisma: the chief had never met the President. And it certainly wasn’t the grease that moves so much of Washington – lobbyists’ grease!
No, it as something else entirely. I stopped reading, and started thinking. TV personalities, like lobbyists, are too much with us; we’re too familiar with them, their pat lines, and their every fault. (For again, this is not a cerebral age, this is the Age of Celebrity.) A classic instance: Everyone in Poli Sci knows that the TV and radio audiences disagreed as to who won the first of the Kennedy-Nixon debates in 1960, with the radio listeners thinking it was Nixon, whereas the TV viewers, faced with Nixon’s scowl and sweat and five o’clock shadow, were won over by the Kennedy charisma. Well, yes, Kennedy was very cool – and never more so than when under pressure – but the fact of the matter, the invisible fact, the fact that had nothing to do with who shaved when, was that Kennedy had challenged the complacency of the nation – and survived. Kennedy had defied the mind set of the nation, the manic conformity of the 50’s – and this young upstart had not only survived, he scored an upset!
Now that really set me thinking. What was it about Jack Kennedy that could get a “nation moving again” – and not only move America, but move the world? What could bring Irish nuns and African chiefs, the Prime Minister of Britain, the President of France, and all of West Berlin, to tears?
What was it that Jimmy Carter had forgotten? That the speechwriters of George W. Bush had never even dreamt of?
Of this I was certain: whatever it was, that “x” quality which Jack Kennedy had summoned in the Presidential Debates and perfected in the Cuban Missile Crisis, was the same spirit that animated Bobby Kennedy in those last great primaries of ’68. And it was that self-same “x” that propelled Ted through one of the greatest legislative careers in America – and the world.
II. How did that special gift play out in Ted’s greatest primary?
That “x” came back this morning, and now again, at late lunch. As I read those moving statements from the Kennedy family, and the Obamas, and the world, my mind flashed back to a second moment in the Kennedy legacy, my own moment. I suppose that folks who are really good with Google or happen to be working in Ted’s archives will find me there – a much slimmer me, the cross country beanpole me!
For every day, as soon as I got out of class, I would go and volunteer at Ted’s primary headquarters in Manhattan. It was the New York State Democratic Primary, in the spring of 1980 (April, I think), and Ted was conducting what many commentators considered to be a quixotic campaign.
You’ll recall that he was running against Jimmy Carter, the sitting President, and the head of his own party, for the Presidential nomination in August (as it happens, also in New York). “Sitting” is the operative word – President Carter, who had initially benefitted (as Bush would benefit in September 2001) from a great national challenge, the taking hostage of the American diplomats in Tehran – spiking Presidential poll numbers, for in such moments of national shock everyone instinctively rallies round the Commander in Chief – had decided that his best strategy would be to re-assure the nation by showing it how diligent he was, how hard he was working on the crisis, chiefly by staying in the White House. This had backfired badly; what was now being called the “Rose Garden strategy” was not re-assuring us in the least. Folks had been flummoxed by the renewed surge of inflation, and infuriated by the renewed Arab oil boycott: there was a real sense that we were trapped in a recurrent nightmare, and the Rose Garden strategy was not showing us any way forward, any way out of the nightmare. Already, before the hostage taking, in the summer of ’79, Carter had misread the public mood three times over: he had convened a long summit at Camp David that was meant to show that he trusted the experts – but many people thought it suggested instead that he was casting about for answers he could not find himself; worse yet, he had sacked a handful of his Cabinet, so as to show that he was making a new beginning – but many people saw the sacking of relatively inconsequential politicians (who could name one of them today?) as scapegoating; and, worst of all, just before those firings, he had given a speech on our national “crisis of confidence,” in which he suggested that we were all of us to blame for our troubles (true), and that we would all have to pull together (also true), and that this might require a few sacrifices (true again, but how shall we be fired up for the sacrifice? – where was the energy, the passion, needed to lead a great crusade?) – that was a speech that so backfired in subsequent weeks and months that it was remembered, ever after, for a word he never uttered: the “malaise” speech. Three strikes…
So Ted ran. But not well. We all remember the botched interview with Roger Mudd, and the unprecedented back-to-back popular losses, for a Kennedy, in the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary. And so it was that, by the time the primary campaign reached New York, the commentators felt that Ted’s campaign was quixotic: he couldn’t win enough delegates now to get the nomination in August. So, wasn’t he tilting at windmills?
Most New Yorkers disagreed. So did I.
By being one of the many, many volunteers for Kennedy, I could help him win New York – and send a message to Carter. Get out of the Rose Garden!
Stop explaining. Start leading. Education and exhortation are only preliminary parts of a great Presidency, necessary but insufficient conditions. Necessary, indeed: when a President fails to educate the people as to the facts of a great undertaking, as Bush failed to educate the people as to the precious few facts we knew about Iraq, or about the need to make a full effort in Afghanistan, or to face up to the challenge of global warming, or to recall the horrors of unregulated, Wild West capitalism – last seen in the Roaring ‘20s – and to re-institute some of the firewalls of the New Deal, protections so obviously needed after Enron and yet still denied, … well, it is any wonder that his Presidency failed? So, education, yes. And exhortation, too – but Bush carried right on exhorting the public long after it had ceased to give credence to his beliefs. So exhortation is clearly no panacea. Something else is needed. Education, exhortation, and – there it is again, “x”…
It’s “x” that put me there, right alongside the Senator, in his talks at Primary HQ in Manhattan. I liked to watch the interaction of the press with the candidate. Even more, I loved to watch the candidate’s repartee – this was, after all, just what we expect of a Kennedy: no note cards from aides, no promptings from the VP at private lunches, and certainly no spending of days practicing how to read a State of the Union Address – can you imagine Jack practicing reading? No, no more so than we can imagine him strutting up to the platform!
No way. A Kennedy knows his mind – and every bit as importantly, he knows how to consult, how to inform that mind. Not flagrantly, but thoroughly and effectively: just contrast the secret, thorough, world-saving deliberations of the ExComm in the Cuban Missile Crisis with poor President Carter’s ten days at Camp David – that gave us the “malaise.”
And a Kennedy carries conviction. Not always – Ted’s interview with Roger Mudd was a study in poor preparation and even poorer self-confidence (the demon of Chappaquiddick compounded all the pressures on the ninth and last child, the slowest, heaviest, and most ungainly of the four brothers, and now the heir of his assassinated brothers). Not always, but in the key moments.
For me, then, those key moments were off-camera. When Ted would enter HQ, his instinctive reaction was always twofold. First, he oriented toward his staff and volunteers; he didn’t indulge himself in nasty labels – “Turd Blossom” – for them; instead, he prided himself on knowing them and their lives, their concerns. Ted was confident enough not to put down others; no, instead, he got down with them. Quietly, humorously, affectionately. If there was precious little brilliance in the NY campaign – no echo of Los Angeles 1960 – still, there was absolutely no braggadocio; this was a moment of bravery, and for everyone.
It hit me: that’s part of “x” - he really identifies with his staff! No wonder he has, by all accounts, the greatest staff on Capitol Hill!
It’s not just education and exhortation that makes a leader; empathy must be there – and Ted, like Bobby, had empathy to spare. (I think he got it in part from having to move so often as a boy: ten schools!)
So, empathy is a crucial component of “x” – but it isn’t the final part. We don’t elect Mother Teresa to Congress, much less to the White House.
Again, I noticed that when Ted entered Primary HQ, his reaction was twofold. As soon as he let people know how much he remembered them, valued them, he’d turn them on like spigots: How are we doing in Harlem? What’s the latest from Syracuse? Are we all set for tonight’s speech? Staffers leapt to show what they knew, and what they could do! He admired them, they admired him, and the result was action: informed, compassionate action.
Do I exaggerate? Just ask Orrin Hatch. Or John McCain. Or the Republican Senators who were present when Kennedy, despite the medical death sentence he had just received, entered the Senate, in May, 2008, to save Medicare from brutal cuts to doctors: some switched their votes on the strength of his personal, moral example; and some broke down and cried.
Back in the spring of ’80, by the time that Ted appeared before the press to accept the stunning upset victory he had just been granted by the voters of New York, I knew I was getting an education in politics that no college would rival. In fact, I was getting an education in greatness.
The scene is crystal clear. The waist-high stanchions and ropes - all that separated the candidate from any would-be assassin - the press, overawed, the staff and volunteers, exuberant beyond words, and finally, the Candidate. No Robert Redford moment: no, just a great grin, a few words of remarkably humble and humorous thanks, an appreciation of how the people of New York – who, like the people of Massachusetts, have always been kind to the clan – have given the nation cause for thought, and then another great grin, and a call to move onward (yes, to move the nation).
There I am, standing just outside the line, still in front of the press, within inches of the Candidate, at his right hand. (We don’t get to choose our moment in history, but I couldn’t have done better if I’d planned!) I wouldn’t be able to volunteer any further, and anyway, even though the exuberance of new hope from New York would carry Kennedy through other primaries, from Connecticut to California, it wouldn’t be enough – Carter had an insuperable lead in the delegate count from the earlier primaries, and a desperate battle at the Convention in Madison Square Garden failed to get delegates released to vote their conscience. The die was cast.
III. The Kennedy gift revealed: the triumph amidst the failure.
And yet, from that ultimate defeat, we gained this: Ted Kennedy’s greatest moment of leadership. Yes, his moment, not of greatest legislative triumph, but of leadership.
This is the third and final moment that struck me this morning, the moment that perhaps we only think we know. Until we feel our way through it, again, and know it for the first time.
It’s August 1980, it’s Madison Square Garden, and Kennedy has risen to make his concession. We can hear the Boston brogue, the personal agony, the communal triumph, and yes, the words, those words, as though they had been uttered yesterday –
“For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end. For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die.”
Those in the Garden and those of us watching at home – it made no difference – we wept, we cheered, we carried on like banshees. The death of presidential aspiration, the birth of new hope. Politics had become profoundly personal.
And in that personal moment, it became real. We touched what is common to all.
Oh, to be sure, not everyone got with the moment. The President was plainly pissed that he had been upstaged; but then again, how did the picture of diligence presume to compete with a Kennedy at the height of his power? The delegates were out of control for a full half-hour!
And when have we seen the like since? I had the pleasure, in London, a couple months after the Inauguration of President George H.W. Bush, to ask an assembly of Republican graduate student scholars to raise their hands and recite a paragraph from his Inaugural Address. What did I get? Silence.
So I asked, instead, just for a sentence. Angry silence.
“Oh, come on!” I said, “it can’t be that hard: we have many students from the (British) Commonwealth who were not even born on the 20th of January, 1960, and I’d bet that they remember the key phrases of Jack Kennedy’s Inaugural Address!” Sure enough, I had only to say, “The torch has been …” and they chimed in, “passed to a new generation;” I’d start to say, “Ask not …” and the students of the Commonwealth, from India and Pakistan through Kenya and South Africa to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, would chorus: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country!” You’d think we were at an evangelical tent revival!
To make my Republican compatriots feel better, I concluded that part of the speech by acknowledging that George H.W. Bush did get off one memorable line – “kinder and gentler” …though I had to concede that Nancy Reagan probably eclipsed him, in the biggest (and most furious) stage whisper in Washington: “Kinder and gentler than whom?”
So, there is a gift in rhetoric, a gift that endures even in a counterfeit age, when utterly mindless emotions are dumped all over the Internet – and spewed all over town hall meetings. There is a reason Pakistanis could “remember” Jack Kennedy’s Inaugural – when bright grad students who had recently volunteered for George H.W. Bush couldn’t remember a word he said.
It isn’t just the words.
Or else the extraordinarily creative speechwriters for George W. Bush would be up for a Nobel Prize in Literature.
It’s what informs the words: that’s the “x” – the gift of the Kennedys!
And none know it better than Ted Sorensen.
He never crafted a speech for Jack Kennedy that he did not go over, and over, and over again with the Senator and then the President. Oh, they did a lot of wordsmithing together, but mostly, they worked on the high moral concepts and the practical political realities. They worked on them at length because Jack wanted to capture his experiences, his beliefs, and the facts of the matter at hand, all in one. Jack knew his own mind – we cannot conceive a moment in the Oval Office where Paul O’Neill would raise a moral dilemma and Karl Rove and Dick Cheney would drown him out with a chant – but Jack also knew that he needed to be informed: the Presidency is not a faith-based enterprise.
Ted Sorensen & Jack Kennedy did this so often, they could finish each other’s sentences. And what they did, Ted Kennedy recreated to meet the needs of his office.
We’ve spent a lot of time on the Kennedy family, rather than simply on Ted. But Ted cannot remotely be understood without an appreciation of his family, from the unremitting pressures of his father – “We don’t want any losers around here” – to the extraordinary inspiration – and horror – of having had all three of his elder brothers killed in the line of duty. Ted did not simply love his brothers and admire their accomplishments; in a very personal way, he knew he was called to carry on their work – not to finish it, but to advance it. It took him years to realize that that would have to be in the Senate, and more years again to become the master of legislation, and yet more years to convince the members across the aisle that his joy in legislative combat diminished in no way the joy he took in them.
Pakistani students quote Jack’s Inaugural by heart. Ted’s fellow Senators weep at the sight of him.
Perhaps it is because Ted, like Jack and Bobby (and in another domain, Eunice) knew that the only way to lead “we, the people” is to educate us, then exhort us, to practice empathy with us as much in private as to show it in public – and above all else, to speak from the personal trifecta of experience, belief, and fact.
That is the acme of leadership. And that, I submit to you, is the secret of Ted Kennedy’s legislative brilliance.
Ted Kennedy first studied health care with Harvard Profs – when he spent six months on his back, after the near-death experience of the plane crash in ’64. In ’66, he visited a community health care clinic that two Tufts medical profs had opened in a housing project; that experience gave him a new belief, and upon consultation with his staffers, in just a couple months, he had persuaded the entire Congress: community health centers became part of the law of the land; and not only have they survived every cut of the last 28 years, they now serve some 9,000,000 Americans.
Thinking back on the hardships his own family had experienced in their first generations in Boston, and believing that we could learn never to label a people as undesirable again, Ted helped craft the Immigration Reform Act of 1965. And so it goes: his experience, belief, and careful staff work build the greatest body of legislative accomplishment in our history. And every loss began a new opportunity – the very moment he lost the coveted position of Majority Whip in 1971, he told the press that he would dedicate himself to committee work, and never more so than on universal health care. As President Obama said this morning, “For five decades, virtually every piece of legislation to advance the civil rights, health and economic well being of the American people bore his name and resulted from his efforts.”
It was his ability to read others and their needs that made him great. No detail was to small to attend to, no political current too great to cross. For the least of Americans, he was always there. Twice he defied the political correctness of the hour and led the Senate to increase the minimum wage. And even when he was battling to defend President Clinton on the floor of the Senate during his trial, he actually took time to come to the phone and say, “Jerry, I think what you need for your article is a team: I’ve asked a lawyer and a theologian from my staff to collaborate with you. Do you think that will do? If not, call me back.”
Who else would recall a boy’s name from1980? Who else, in the midst of the worst Presidential crisis since Watergate, would pride himself on putting together just the right team for a college article?
No wonder they call him the Lion of the Senate. In his pride, we all stand tall.
What was the special gift of the Kennedys? The call to serve: exemplified in life after life, career after career, exemplified in such a powerful way that we want to go and do likewise. From the Peace Corps to political leadership, three generations have been inspired by the Kennedys. What other “dynasty” could claim as much?
How did that gift play out in the NY primary? The voters remembered the gift – and rewarded it even when it could not make him the winner. In effect, they said in 1980 what we all too rarely say to those whom we esteem: this is how much we value you.
What was the triumph amidst the failure? Through career defeats and personal errors, even of great magnitude, Ted had the humility to know that we are all of us flawed, and to those who have been given the least, the community owes the most.
The call to serve, the gift that millions doubled, the triumphs that have empowered three generations in the face of idle celebrity, mindless candidacies, and sheer apathy: what are these political gifts, if not a testimony to faith?
Ted Kennedy would not always agree with the Bishops, and yet, who, Catholic or otherwise, would deny the inspiration that he brought to millions? The inspiration that he especially drew from his mother Rose, from his brothers Jack & Bobby, and from all those whom he worked with – from volunteers through staffers to GOP opponents and friends.
Inspiration compounding inspiration at every turn. Only the greatest of leaders remembers the least of volunteers; only the greatest of legislators empowers the world.
What he said of his brother Robert, in New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, on that grim day in June, 1968, may be his own and most fitting close –
“My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it. Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will someday come to pass for all the world.”
Requiescat in pace: Edward M. Kennedy, 1932-2009
Jerry
http://saintpaulcspc.org/forum/author/jerome/
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