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Teddy: In His Own Words

"Number 2: He's drunk, he's all hands, and he brags about beating Mitt Romney." - David Letterman, Top Ten Reasons You Know You Are On A Bad Date

"It's Bring Your Daughter to Work Day. This tradition began about 25 years ago down in Washington, D.C. by a quick-thinking Ted Kennedy who was spotted leaving his office with an 18-year-old." - David Letterman

On November 22, 1963, on a warm afternoon in Dallas, Texas, young, handsome, mediocre President of the United States was assassinated and an icon was born, Camelot, unfulfilled promise and potential, and the Democratic Party became prisoners of this legend. John F. Kennedy overshadowed everything for the next forty-five years until a young African-American politician named Barack Obama, with a charisma all his own, became President of the United States. Lyndon Baines Johnson got through a great majority of his legislation by draping the image of the fallen President upon it, even though his predecessor did not have the political will or ability to pass one-tenth of it. The Johnson presidency ultimately crumbled under the pressure of trying to out-Kennedy Kennedy.

The public looked to their next fair prince in the form of John's younger brother, Bobby, Robert Francis Kennedy, the former Attorney General, bulldog for his brother, and current junior Senator from New York. Although formally unsuited for such a role given his temperament, his brother's death had changed him. He, sadly and too soon, joined his brother in Arlington Cemetery a little over four years later, another victim of an assassin. This time in a Los Angeles hotel pantry while he was campaigning for President. The only benefactor of this event was Richard M. Nixon, who would leave the Oval Office in shambles a few years later. In the mid-1970s, a peanut farmer and Governor from Georgia shocked the world by coming out of nowhere to be our next Commander-and-Chief. Several newspaper articles during his run made the point of making a great deal of his Kennedy-isque looks. The hair, the wit, but sanitized for our protection, no sexual scandals in this Sunday school teacher's past. In 1988, handsome, smart, charismatic Gary Hart looked like he could have been painted into a Kennedy family photo and was the front runner to be next President of the United States. One little problem, he had a Kennedy-like appetite for pleasures of the flesh and soon found his political career derailed because of a little "monkey business" with a young model named Donna Rice. Four years later, an Arkansas Governor named Bill Clinton seemed to make it his goal in life to be the heir apparent to the Kennedy legacy, even pushing the notion that the dead President saw greatness in this fat southern child by making one of the prominent photos of his campaign, John Kennedy shaking his hand at a Boy's State gathering. A person can almost see the boy the young Clinton had to shoulder out of the way to shake the President's hand. In many ways, Clinton was a low-rent Kennedy with a used car dealer's appeal and a tackier taste in women.

The Republicans currently have their own imprisonment under the legacy of Ronald Reagan and will not escape it until most of the Reaganites pass away. If you do not believe me, if you only causally paid attention to the last election, you would have thought that the 40th President had risen from the grave and wandered back to the White House. The chief victim of the dead President Kennedy might be his youngest brother, Edward Moore Kennedy, fondly known to the world as Teddy. He was ill-suited to be in the public eye as the spoiled, fun-loving child, with appetites bigger than himself, from a rich powerful family. He was thrust into the spotlight too soon. At thirty, with his brother's accession to the Presidency, his father decided that the young man, who had been kicked out of Harvard for cheating a few years earlier, should take his brother's place in the Senate and what Joseph Kennedy wanted, he got. The same machine that protected the President from public judgement for his peccadilloes was there for baby brother. Speeding tickets, drinking, grab-assing, drugs, the public heard almost nothing of the married Massachusetts Senator's self-destructive ways. What the newspapers did not look the other way on, daddy's money and bag men buried.

Time and age change everyone and some need a little more time and age than others. Teddy needed all the time he could get. One little problem, he did not have it. Not even forty years old, he had buried his three older brothers. He was the last of them and public looked to place Camelot's crown on his head. He could not even turn to his father for help and advice. The elderly Kennedy suffered a stroke that he never recovered from. If he had ever needed his father, it was on July 18, 1969. With Teddy the odds-on-favorite to run against Nixon in 1972. Teddy was attending a party on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts with six young women, known as "the boiler-room girls," who had helped his brother Robert's ill-fated Presidential campaign a few years earlier, and a few close friends. The Senator left the party with one of the girls, Mary Jo Kopechne. How drunk the politician was, what Mary Jo and he intended to do, is any one's guess. What is clear is Teddy's car made a wrong turn down an unlit, dirt road known to locals as Dike Road and while crossing over a bridge, the car plunged into the water. The Senator swam free and instead of helping the young woman still trapped alive in the submerged car, he panicked. Running back to the cottage where the party had taken place, not bothering to stop by four houses which had their lights on and from which he could have called for help, Teddy reported what happened to two of his friends at the party. The two men tried to rescue Kopechne but failed. They then drove the sobbing Kennedy to the ferry landing, to return to the town of Edgartown, where they assumed Kennedy would report to authorities.

Instead, Teddy swam the 500-foot channel, returned to his hotel room, removed his wet clothes, and made no effort to contact authorities. In fact, he tried to cover up his role by pretending he had been in his hotel room all night. He went down to the manager's desk to complain that a noisy party had awoken him. The next morning, with Mary Jo's undiscovered body still in the car, he chatted the winner of the previous day's boat race. One little problem, his two friends were not going to go along with his story. Kennedy's 1972 hopes were over.

As unforgivable as Teddy's conduct was that evening, politically his more unforgivable crime was not raising President Jimmy Carter's hand at the 1980 convention. The manhood contest between the two politicians, and memories of what had occurred more than a decade earlier proved too much to overcome. Instead of rallying around his party's nominee, Kennedy refused to withdraw from the race, bleeding the Georgia politician financially dry, even trying to divide the convention by freeing delegates bound to Carter. When all else failed, he finally took his ball and went home. He did not lustfully campaign for his President. Many commentators point to this battle between the two men, that surpassed any rationale, as the major reason that Ronald Regan defeated President Carter that fall.

The Conservative movement can be laid at the feet of the rotund Massachusetts gentleman's feet. Now, after somehow surviving a scandal like Chappaquiddick, most politicians might have curtailed their behavior, not Edward M. Kennedy. There were drugs, public displays of drunkenness, and sex scandals, much of which cannot be chronicled here. Then came the creepy stuff, the partying with his son and walking around pantsless the night his nephew, William Kennedy Smith, was accused of rape. Given his conduct, many Americans rolled their eyes at the sight of Teddy sitting in judgment at the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings. If anyone knew sexual harassment, it was Edward M. Kennedy. At nearly sixty, the once future light of the Democratic Party enjoyed only a 22 percent approval rating among Americans. Maybe it was the thought of losing his seat or maybe it was just time to settle down, Teddy got remarried, stopped his public carousing, curbed much of his drinking, and served almost two decades more in the Senate.

All that being said, Edward Moore Kennedy was maybe the greatest Senator of the latter half of the 20th century. For a man who many consider a failure because he never became President, he has left behind a legislative record that none of his brothers, really anyone, could match. He might have played hard but he worked hard too. There is a reason he was known as "the lion of the Senate." There is almost no area of American life that has not been touched by Kennedy (and that was not a Freudian slip). He has championed the poor, women, minorities, and children long after it ceased being fashionable. He never let ideology get in the way of reaching across the aisle. Former Senator Alan Simpson might have summed up Kennedy the best when he said, "The finest legislator I ever worked with was Ted Kennedy. He had a magnificent staff, he even had a parliamentarian on that staff of his. So, when you were in the legislative arena and you were bringing your lunch and staying late, you wanted to get Ted on your side or least use some of his expertise. I would go to him sometimes early on and say look, you'll have to trust me, what the hell do I do right now to move this bill? Boy, I'll tell you he had ways to do it and as you can see he used those skills on issues in which I was totally on the other side. I can't remember them all, there were so many. We were never on the same side. But he is a legislator." While the documentary Teddy: In His Own Words is very biased and glosses over as much as it can, it gives some insight into all that Teddy has done for this nation. I am sure John and Bobby would be proud of their baby brother and how, instead of being imprisoned by their legacy, he surpassed it.

Verdict: Very Biased