review - The Man Who Became the ‘Lion of the Senate’
John A. Farrell’s “Ted Kennedy” is a sympathetic take on a complex life.
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By Thomas Mallon
Oct. 27, 2022
TED KENNEDY: A Life, by John A. Farrell
In 1982, Richard Nixon, the subject of John A. Farrell’s previous biography, mused that of all the Kennedy brothers, Edward was “the best politician. … He’s gregarious, he loves it, he’s warm.” Politically and otherwise, Ted Kennedy is much more congenial terrain than Nixon was for Farrell, who finds the most essential part of him in the spirit of his maternal grandfather, Boston’s rollicking Irish mayor John Fitzgerald: “The Honey Fitz in Ted was always ready to surface.”
But that component had to brave all kinds of emotional obstacles in order to break through. The son of a bulldozing father and cold, self-satisfied mother, Ted Kennedy, the family’s youngest child, spent much of a clowning youth being dandled and teased and convinced of his inferiority within the huge clan. An incipient playboy, temporarily expelled from Harvard for cheating (twice), he should have amounted to very little. The family’s later violent tragedies would sometimes make him speak of his own experience in “the second person — guarded against revelation, distancing himself from feelings.”
Farrell can, in his sympathy for his subject, let Kennedy’s core failings seem incidental, to soften terrible behavior with a kind of dictional lotion (Kennedy’s “hunger for ameliorating sensation”) and to dispense forgiveness even before laying out the particulars of an offense.
After running his brother Jack’s 1960 presidential campaign in the Western states, and with no more government experience than an assistant district attorney’s post, Kennedy was pushed by his father to enter Massachusetts’ nepotistic 1962 Senate race. He ran in the Democratic primary against Edward McCormack, nephew of the House speaker, and then, in the November general election, against George C. Lodge. The whole force of the White House carried him along: President Kennedy likely appointed an Italian as his secretary of health, education and welfare to help with one voting demographic, and the Washington fixer Clark Clifford was tasked with “handling the Harvard cheating story.”
When Ted arrived in Washington, he adhered to his family’s restrained liberalism (President Kennedy refused to let him attend the 1963 March on Washington), and he later managed to maintain a more civil relationship with Lyndon Johnson than his brother Robert did.
For all the eventual genuineness of his liberal fervor, as well as the diligence he could practice amid his own dissipations, it’s hard to escape the impression that Kennedy often had to ask others what he should think and what he should do. To some extent his life was more staffed than lived. During the mid-1970s, one aide advised: “Obviously you should do something unique and spectacular. I don’t know yet what that will be, but we’ll come up with it.” Soon enough, another young staffer named Stephen Breyer led him to the issue of airline deregulation, in those days a potential boon to consumers. The accomplishments did accrue, and Farrell does a particularly good job of highlighting the largely forgotten work Kennedy did on behalf of the world’s refugees.
The great ethical test of his life was Chappaquiddick, and he failed it abysmally. Farrell can be tough, here and there, about the matter (“There was recklessness. There was evasion”), but his heart isn’t in the indictment. The facts of Kennedy’s behavior may be there on the page, but they always seem to be soothed toward absolution by Farrell’s tone. He writes that the bridge where Kennedy lost control of his car, plunging Mary Jo Kopechne to her death in the water below, stood at an “iniquitous angle,” as if its fault were moral instead of structural.
Kennedy telephoned his mistress before he called the Kopechne family or went to the police, and, according to Farrell, just after the accident he wondered, to a cousin and a friend: “Why … did the world have to know that he was driving the car? Couldn’t Mary Jo have driven off the bridge herself?” Farrell calls these appalling hypotheticals “magical thinking” rather than the consideration of a criminal cover-up. It is hard not to laugh at the assertion that “Kennedy’s shaken condition made life difficult for the company of advisers who were now en route to Cape Cod,” some of them to help write a televised address that Farrell judges “clumsily manipulative” and “mawkish.”
That last adjective is often applied to the “Checkers” speech delivered by Nixon in 1952. But Farrell’s chapter on it in “Richard Nixon: The Life” shows that Nixon’s address could stand up to factual verification by accountants and lawyers. Kennedy’s verbal farrago (“I was overcome, I am frank to say, by a jumble of emotions”) existed in a world beyond substantiation.
His long, flagrantly unfaithful marriage to the tormented and alcoholic Joan Bennett makes for consistently painful reading. In his first campaign she felt “needed”; by the third she felt “used.” When Ted ran for president, the Secret Service gave her the code name “Spectator.”
Farrell performs a lively reconstruction of Kennedy’s losing challenge to the incumbent Jimmy Carter for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1980, capturing the men’s petty and mutual miscomprehension, along with their essential difference: “To Jimmy Carter, schmooze was a dirty word. To John Fitzgerald’s grandson, it was life.” Despite his characteristic gift for political blarney, Kennedy was mumblingly inarticulate when he tried explaining to voters why he actually ought to be president. He recovered his voice only in defeat, and gave a tremendous concession speech at the 1980 Democratic convention, but he never lost his contempt for Carter.
The presidential run briefly interrupted Kennedy’s long metamorphosis into the Senate’s “liberal lion.” His public rhetoric became increasingly fierce, sometimes demagogic, but in the committee rooms of the upper house he could be companionable and compromising, achieving real legislative successes — for voting rights, Americans with disabilities and those with AIDS — with Republican partners like Bob Dole and the even more unlikely Orrin Hatch.
If Farrell is quite unconvincing in his argument that Kennedy “nudged Nixon” into his trip to China, he makes a good case for how, in other areas — including health care, Kennedy’s abiding passion — the rivalry could be fruitful: “Nixon looked upon Kennedy with the kind of dread that Neverland’s ticking crocodile evoked in Captain Hook,” he writes, and “the slightest sign of a Kennedy initiative would spur a countermove from the Nixon administration.”
Once in a while Farrell adds too many ruffles and flourishes to his prose: He sees the Senate of the early 1960s as a “sump of aged men with liver spots, claws and bourbon breath, who strode the chamber with reptilian gait and hailed one another with mellifluent courtesies.” But for the most part “Ted Kennedy” is a sturdy, if partisan, production. The ampleness of Farrell’s research attests to both his Ph.D. in history and his long career as a political reporter. It is his misfortune to be publishing this book only two years after the first volume of Neal Gabler’s Ted Kennedy biography appeared, and just weeks before the second one is due. Farrell’s is a sensibly shorter single volume, but both biographers see their subject in terms of redemption — Kennedy’s determination to expiate personal failings through legislative good works.
An almost pastoral perspective still governs tellings of Edward Kennedy’s life, and so long as it remains in place, the subject, fairly or not, can’t really lose for winning.
Thomas Mallon’s political novels include “Watergate,” “Finale” and “Landfall.” His next book, “Up With the Sun,” will be published in February.
TED KENNEDY: A Life | By John A. Farrell | Illustrated | 738 pp. | Penguin Press | $40
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