WHILE offering condolences to the Kennedy family at this sad moment, it’s important to note that Ted Kennedy’s life was not as simple or heroic as is now being portrayed.
On the cable channels yesterday, his fellow Senate graybeards were lamenting the passing of what was invariably described as Kennedy’s “collegial” Senate, where voices were seldom raised and partisan bickering ended when the gavel came down to end the session.
All of which would have come as a surprise to Robert Bork, the Supreme Court nominee of whom the collegial Ted said in 1986:
“Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters . . .”
So much for collegiality.
Of course, Kennedy is now endlessly lauded for his support of “women’s rights,” i.e., abortion. But into the 1970s, before the Roman Catholic Church’s influence began to wane, he was a traditional, pro-life New England Democrat.
Here was his take on abortion in 1971: “Wanted or unwanted, I believe that human life, even at its earliest stages, has certain rights which must be recognized — the right to be born, the right to love, the right to grow old.”
There’s a story, perhaps apocryphal, that in his first Senate campaign in 1962, Kennedy was shaking hands at a factory gate during a shift change. A haggard worker began berating him about how he’d never worked a day in his life.
As the legend had it, at that point another salt-of-the-earth blue-collar type leaned in and told Kennedy, “Never worked a day in your life, kid? You ain’t missed a thing.”
But in fact he had. Yesterday, the tributes kept mentioning his commitment to the “working class.” He fought for, as President Obama said (on Martha’s Vineyard, of all places), “an America that is more equal and more just.”
But more equal and more just for some people than for others. When it came to the white-ethnic working class from which his father came, Kennedy just plain didn’t get it. Whether it was court-ordered busing in Boston in the ’70s, or the affirmative-action policies that stymied the careers of so many of his family’s traditional voters, Kennedy never grasped the depth of the blue-collar frustration as he veered left.
What infuriated them even more was that so many of them had grown up in homes where on one side of the mantel was a faded photo of the martyred JFK, and on the other, the pope, with a dried-up Palm Sunday frond between them.
Chappaquiddick, of course, never went away. But sometimes, Kennedy could seem oblivious even to that ultimate blemish on his career. In 1974, when President Ford pardoned Richard Nixon for his Watergate crimes, Kennedy issued this thundering statement:
“Do we operate under a system of equal justice under law? Or is there one system for the average citizen, and another for the high and mighty?”
On issue after issue, he was wrong — the nuclear freeze, the Reagan tax cuts, the Immigration Reform Act of 1965, which he assured his Senate colleagues would not lead to a “flood” of immigrants into America’s cities.
With a TelePrompTer, he could be articulate, but when he wasn’t using his glasses to read a prepared statement, he was often an oratorical mess. In 2005, at the National Press Club, he referred to the current president as “Osama bin La — uh, Osama, Obama, uh, Obama.”
Yet he was always protected by most media, who shared his views on just about everything. In 1962, at the behest of President Kennedy, the Boston Globe played the story of Ted’s expulsion from Harvard below the fold on the front page. To the end, the Globe did its best to shield him.
Last week, the struggling New York Times-owned broadsheet broke the story of his deathbed attempt to change the Massachusetts law on Senate succession, without mentioning that he had lobbied in 2004 to enact the law he was now denouncing as undemocratic. Only then, he was for stripping the governor of his right to fill a Senate vacancy, because the governor was a Republican.
The Globe reported that Kennedy was much concerned that the people of Massachusetts would have no representation in the Senate for five months until the special election. The fact that he’d missed 97 percent of the Senate roll-call votes in 2009 was not noted until the next day — in a different newspaper.
The hagiography will continue through the weekend. We all agree that Ted Kennedy should rest in peace. But let’s not forget that there was more — much more — to his “legacy” than is being reported on MSNBC.
Howie Carr is a columnist for The Bos ton Herald.