CREDIT: Associated Press/Toby Jorrin
EDWARD M. Kennedy, better known as “Ted” or “Teddy,” made many rousing speeches, but his greatest was delivered after he had lost an election. In 1980, at the behest of liberals and unions, he tried to wrest the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination from the incumbent Jimmy Carter, whose tepid support for national health insurance, labor law reform, and other issues disappointed the party’s progressive wing. Kennedy’s heart was not in it, he made a number of gaffes, and Carter won enough delegates to secure the nomination. Typically, candidates who lose their party nominations speak at the conventions and call for party unity behind the winner. That Kennedy did, but in his August 12, 1980, oration at Madison Square Garden he devoted only one sentence to endorsing Carter. For the rest of his half-hour speech, Kennedy made an impassioned case for progressive values and policies:
I am asking you to renew the commitment of the Democratic Party to economic justice.
I am asking you to renew our commitment to a fair and lasting prosperity that can put America back to work. . . .
Our cause has been, since the days of Thomas Jefferson, the cause of the common man and the common woman. Our commitment has been, since the days of Andrew Jackson, to all those he called “the humble members of society—the farmers, mechanics, and laborers.” On this foundation we have defined our values, refined our policies, and refreshed our faith.
In this wide-ranging speech Kennedy affirmed the importance of full employment, women’s rights, civil rights, and universal health care, the cause he had championed throughout his political career.
Kennedy ended the speech by declaring, “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.”
The delegates leapt to their feet. Their ovation lasted more than a half hour.
Carter lost to Ronald Reagan that fall. Kennedy went on to become the longest-serving and most effective liberal senator in American history, serving for forty-seven years in the Senate, longer than all but two others—Strom Thurmond and Robert Byrd. During that period, Kennedy used his remarkable legislative skills to fight for the most vulnerable members of society. Whenever his Democratic colleagues began currying favor with big business and moving rightward on social policies, Kennedy worked to keep the progressive flame alive.
When he was growing up, and even into young adulthood, few expected Ted Kennedy to be a successful politician, much less the most accomplished politician in the Kennedy family. He was the ninth and youngest child of Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy and Joseph P. Kennedy. His autocratic father made millions in real estate, banking, and movies, on Wall Street, and in liquor during Prohibition. He served in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration as the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and then as ambassador to Britain, but he was never a New Deal liberal.
Ted Kennedy was overshadowed by his three older brothers and was often seen as a hand-me-down politician. His father expected the oldest son, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., to run for Congress and even the White House someday, but Joseph Jr. was killed in World War II. Then John was elected to the US House of Representatives, then to the US Senate, and then, in 1960, to the presidency. Robert became JFK’s attorney general and closest adviser.
Ted, who graduated from Harvard and then from the University of Virginia Law School, was never an outstanding student. He dutifully worked on JFK’s campaigns. After JFK was elected president, Ted took a job as an assistant district attorney of Suffolk County, based in Boston.
In 1962, at age thirty, he ran for the Senate seat that John had once held. During one debate, his opponent, state Attorney General Edward J. McCormack Jr., ridiculed Kennedy, saying that the senatorial job “should be merited, not inherited” and that, given his qualifications, if Kennedy’s name were “Edward Moore,” his candidacy “would be a joke.” Yet Kennedy beat McCormack in the Democratic primary and then bested George C. Lodge, the son of a former Republican senator, in the general election.
After the murder of John and Robert, Ted became the senior Kennedy politician and the head of the large Kennedy family. But his life zigzagged between numerous triumphs and tragedies, not only the deaths of his three older brothers but also the serious illnesses of two of his children and the deaths of three of his nephews. In 1964 he was almost killed in a plane crash, which left him with permanent back and neck problems. He also had to deal with an early reputation as a vacuous man of privilege and a playboy, most seriously in 1969 when, on vacation on Cape Cod, he drove his car off a narrow bridge and plunged into a tidal pool, which killed his passenger, a twenty-eight-year-old campaign worker, Mary Jo Kopechne. Kennedy survived the accident, but Kopechne’s death, his failure to report the incident for almost nine hours, and his leaving the scene of an accident haunted him personally and politically for the rest of his life.
His triumphs, however, were numerous and made America a more humane and democratic society. He led the fight for the eighteen-year-old vote, the abolition of the draft, and campaign-finance reform. He supported the original Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (sponsoring the amendment banning the poll tax), and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and he was instrumental in legislation to strengthen them in subsequent years.
He played a key role in establishing the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. He pushed to expand school lunch programs, raise the minimum wage, and ensure that laid-off workers receive extended unemployment benefits while they search for new jobs. Despite being a religious Catholic, he embraced the cause of reproductive rights for women. Kennedy was one of the earliest supporters of gay rights. He championed AIDS research and treatment and guided the battle to enact the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. He sponsored legislation that increased funding for high school and college students and college graduates to participate in community service.
Some of Kennedy’s most important legislative successes involved blocking efforts by Republicans to cut funding for social programs, restrict civil liberties, or approve the appointment of reactionary judges.
In 1981, when Ronald Reagan won the White House and the Republicans won a majority of Senate seats, Kennedy found himself in the minority for the first time. Over the years, he had established friendships with many GOP colleagues, with most of whom he had sharp ideological disagreements. But he was celebrated for being able to find enough common ground with some Republicans to support important legislation, even if it was watered down. In 1987 he led the opposition to Reagan’s nomination of ultraconservative Robert Bork to the US Supreme Court. “In Robert Bork’s America,” Kennedy said, “there is no room at the inn for blacks and no place in the Constitution for women. And, in our America, there should be no seat on the Supreme Court for Robert Bork.”
Conservatives poked fun at Kennedy for being the epitome of a “tax-and-spend” liberal. He never backed away from the label. He viewed himself not only as a legislator but also as part of a broader progressive movement. Kennedy met frequently with working families to hear their concerns, to relay their stories of both suffering and success, and to lend his support to their struggles. He was not only a regular and stirring speaker at labor union meetings but also a regular presence on picket lines and at rallies. In 2000, for example, he traveled to Los Angeles to march with striking janitors. The next year he showed up on the Harvard campus to support students protesting to pressure the university to pay janitors a living wage.
Kennedy’s initial support for the Vietnam War shifted after he visited the country and as US involvement escalated. He called the war a “monstrous outrage” and began making antiwar speeches around the country, particularly opposing President Richard Nixon’s “Vietnamization” policy as “war and more war.” He led the congressional effort to impose economic sanctions on South Africa over apartheid. He worked for peace in Northern Ireland and successfully fought for a ban on arms sales to the dictatorship in Chile. In 2002 he voted against authorizing the war in Iraq, a move that he later called “the best vote I’ve made in my 44 years in the United States Senate.” Although many Democrats worried about appearing unpatriotic, Kennedy opposed the impending invasion of Iraq, warning that it would “feed a rising tide of anti-Americanism overseas.”
Kennedy called health care reform “the cause of my life.” For years, while advocating a single-payer system of universal health care, he pushed for stepping-stone reforms to make health care more accessible. He began this long crusade in 1966, when he won a $51 million appropriation to create thirty community health centers to make it easier for poor Americans to get medical care. There are now thousands of such centers around the country. He helped establish the Women, Infants, and Children program, which helps low-income mothers have healthy, well-fed babies; the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, which permits workers temporarily to continue receiving health insurance between jobs; the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which limits the ability of insurance companies to cancel coverage; the Mental Health Systems Act, which allows the mentally ill to stay in their homes and communities instead of being institutionalized; the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which provides health insurance for millions of poor and working-class children; and the Orphan Drug Act, which sponsors research into rare diseases.
In May 2008 he was found to be suffering from a brain tumor. Only weeks later, he left the hospital, against his doctors’ orders, and secretly flew from Massachusetts to Washington, to vote for legislation to avert deep cuts to Medicare. When he arrived on the Senate floor, his colleagues gave him a standing ovation. According to a story in the Washington Post, “Several Republicans were so moved that they switched votes, assuring passage.”
Kennedy was one of the first high-profile Democrats to endorse Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy, calling for “a new generation of leadership.” That support, in early 2008, was an important milestone in Obama’s campaign.
It is one of the great tragedies of Kennedy’s life, and of American social policy, that after Obama won the presidency, the senator became too ill to help shepherd a universal health care reform bill through Congress. He had geared up for the fight, hiring new staff, advising the new president, and writing articles to set the stage for what he hoped would be his ultimate achievement as a legislator. When he learned he had terminal cancer, he handed the reins to other senators, who were less skillful at legislative maneuvering. Shortly before he died, he wrote an article for Newsweek, proclaiming, “I am resolved to see to it this year that we create a system to ensure that someday, when there is a cure for the disease I now have, no American who needs it will be denied it.”
Kennedy died before Congress passed the landmark health care reform law in March 2010. It was not the comprehensive bill he would have preferred, but it was the most important health care legislation in the nation’s history, and it would not have happened without Kennedy’s years of hard work.