The news of Ted Kennedy’s fatal illness marks the final chapter in the remarkable saga of a political dynasty

THE Kennedys, it is said, don’t matter any more – that you have to be in
advanced middle age to have any serious memory of that vanished golden age
when John Kennedy was king, and America was young and beautiful and full of
boundless promise. To which there is only one answer. Ted Kennedy matters.

If not, then the first disturbing news at the weekend that the Senate’s
Democratic titan had been rushed to hospital with a suspected stroke would
not have caused the cable networks to drop all other programming. And if Ted
Kennedy and the Kennedys didn’t matter, why would The Wall Street Journal,
of all papers, have led its front page yesterday not with the latest primary
results or the convulsions in the oil market, but with the announcement that
the brother of the murdered president was stricken with a grave, and possibly
fatal form of brain cancer.

One can but hope that in Ted Kennedy’s case, the grim prognoses are not
borne out of an illness that, once discovered, kills half its victims within
a year. But subconsciously you sense that America is already preparing for
the fourth and final act in the tragic drama that began in Dallas on
November 22, 1963. Five years later, Robert Kennedy was gunned down as he
sought to follow his elder brother into the White House. Then in 1999, John
Kennedy Jr, JFK’s impossibly handsome son, died when his small plane crashed
into the sea. And now Ted. The difference perhaps is that this time the
country has been given time to prepare.

DYNASTY

Once, the Kennedys were America’s nearest thing to a ruling dynasty. But in
terms of real politics and real power, the family has long since been
supplanted by the Bushes and Clintons. That, however, is mere reality. But
the imagination is something else, where celebrity and politics have
intersected in a half-century-long melodrama of the Beautiful and the Damned.

There are younger Kennedys dotted around American politics and public life,
but none appear to have either the taste or the talent for high office.
They, too, are sometimes brushed by

“The Curse of the Kennedys” – a horrible skiing accident, marital or mental
breakdown, trouble with women or drugs, even murder. But Ted is the last of
the brothers, the last of the lineage, the last one who really matters.

And matter he does. The outpouring of shock and grief is not merely a
Pavlovian response to a name. Yes, Ted Kennedy (with the possible exception
of Hillary Clinton) is the most recognisable Democratic senator. But he is
also the most influential and effective Democratic senator, and has been so
for two decades.

Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Barack Obama in January did not, it is true,
enable the likely Democratic nominee to carry the Kennedy family fiefdom of
Massachusetts in that state’s primary on Super Tuesday. But it served notice that
the party establishment might forsake Hillary Clinton. Most important, it
sprinkled the stardust of the Kennedy legend over the young man from
Illinois.

Barack Obama, Ted declared in so many words was the John F Kennedy of 2008.
And if Obama does win the supreme prize, and Ted Kennedy is still at work,
the new president will have no more important ally on Capitol Hill. Few –
not even old Joe Kennedy, the patriarchcum- philanderer, who was determined
that one, and preferably all his sons, become president –could have imagined
Ted’s career would take the course it did.

When he first appeared on the scene, he was very much in the shadow of his
elder brothers, Jack the president and Bobby the attorney-general.

When he won the White House, Jack had to give up his senate seat in
Massachusetts, but the family machine kept it warm for Ted. In 1962 he was
duly elected senator at the tender age of 30. The callow young man, it was
assumed, would be a make-weight whose ambitions, like those of his brother
before him, were set on higher things.

True, there were signs of the future master-legislator as early as 1965,
when Kennedy helped to push through the bill that ended special preferences for
immigrants from white Europe. But for the country, he was still a youngster,
albeit one tempered by the tragic death of his brother, who had passed the
torch of fraternal seniority to Bobby. But then Bobby died, assassinated in Los
Angeles in the early hours of June 5, 1968 at the very moment he was
savouring a victory in the California primary that might well have brought
him the Democratic nomination. By the highest measure of all, the one set by his
father and attained by his brothers, Ted Kennedy’s career could be termed a
disappointment.

It is often forgotten in the light of everything that has come after, but
for more than a year – the interval between RFK’s death and the Chappaquiddick
incident of July 1969 – he seemed the monarch in waiting, for whom the presidency
sooner or later would be his for the asking.

Very briefly, cloistered with a few of his closest advisers in a Chicago
hotel suite as the chaotic Democratic convention of 1968 unfolded in the
city’s International Amphitheatre and on its streets, Ted toyed with the
idea of a run. But he quickly concluded that not only was he too young (at
36, a single year older than the minimum of 35 required to become
president), but that a presidential campaign would have been unfair both to
his own family and to the entire extended Kennedy family, of which he, as
Joe’s last surviving son, was the de facto leader. It would have thrown down
a macabre gauntlet to fate, in a country all too familiar with political
assassination.

Then came the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne in July 1969, at Chappaquiddick,
an island linked to Martha’s Vineyard. The young woman was a passenger when
Ted Kennedy drove his car off a bridge after the two had attended a party
for former campaign worker of RFK. He escaped, she did not. For reasons
never properly explained, Kennedy failed to report the accident.

SCANDAL

In retrospect, Ted Kennedy’s White House dreams died along with Mary Jo
Kopechne that night in the tide-torn waters of Nantucket Sound. He sat out
the 1972 and 1976 elections, when the scandal would undoubtedly have
dominated a White House campaign. But by 1980 memories were less raw. Many
Democrats, believing that the unpopular incumbent, Jimmy Carter, was simply unelectable,
urged Kennedy to run. This time he did, but his campaign got off to a
disastrous start with a TV interview in which he seemed unable to say
exactly why he wanted to be president. Though he won many primaries, he never
really recovered.

However, the end of his presidential ambitions was a liberation. Kennedy
threw himself into his work in the Senate, and over the years has put together
an unrivalled legislative record. The young man whose birth conferred upon
him almost every advantage life could offer – money, looks,
connections and the most glamourous family name in American politics –
instead took it upon himself to master the nitty gritty of lawmaking, and
make it his special mission to help those less fortunate than himself.

But, while never losing sight of his goals, he also understands, more than
any of his colleagues, how Republican adversaries can sometimes be useful
allies. He remains utterly committed to his party and the liberal cause.

Kennedy also knows that, in politics, you must have the means to achieve
your ends. He understands the importance of favours given and received, of
the vital art of compromise and has long since realised that 70 per cent of
what you want is better than nothing at all.

That the poor and disadvantaged have no more effective champion in modern US
politics is precisely because Kennedy is ready, on occasion, to take a
bipartisan approach. One of his closest senate friends for instance is Orrin
Hatch, better known as a fiercely conservative senator from Utah. He has
also worked closely, if in vain, with John McCain, presumptive Republican
presidential nominee, on the cause of immigration reform, which foundered in
Congress last year.

At a moment when most Democrats were still seething at George Bush‘s
perceived theft of the White House, Kennedy reached out to the new President
on education reform, rounding up Democratic votes for one of the biggest
early successes of Bush’s first term. That the two have since diverged – on
Bush’s failure to come through with funding for No Child Left Behind, aimed
at improving school standards and accountability, but above all over the
Iraq war – in no way diminishes Kennedy’s initial willingness to do business
with a political foe.

Kennedy was one of the 23 Democratic senators who in October 2002 voted
against giving Bush the authority to attack Iraq. In September 2003, six
months after the invasion, he called the war a “fraud cooked up in Texas”,
and his language about what he calls “Bush’s Vietnam” has, if
anything, grown even harsher since. Yet that has not prevented him working
on other issues with McCain, the war’s most ardent advocate and defender.
Obviously very moved, McCain described Kennedy as “the single most effective
member of the Senate”. And this member, let it not be forgotten,
belongs to a party that has held the White House for only eight of the last
28 years.

Whatever happens now, the Kennedy era is drawing to a close. This eighth
full six-yearterm in the Senate, which theoretically runs until 2012, will
be his last. He is one of just three senators in history to have cast more
than 15,000 votes. But Ted will not now overtake the record set by Robert
Byrd, who is now 90 and has an unprecedented 50 years unbroken service in
the Senate behind him.

On Tuesday, Byrd wept as he paid tribute on the Senate floor, shortly after
the grim news swept through Capitol Hill. “Ted, Ted, my dear friend, I
love you and I miss you,” Byrd said, in words with which every one of
his colleagues, whatever their party, would probably agree.

DEBT

Barack Obama’s debt to Ted Kennedy is obvious. But if, indeed, the great
liberal lion is forced to step down within the next few months, no one would
have more reason to rue his absence than a President John McCain – obliged
to do business with a new Congress that is almost certain to be even more
firmly controlled by the Democrats than the present one, but without the Democrat
with the most skill and stature to reach across the aisle. Of course,
Kennedy has his flaws – who doesn’t?

At 19, he was thrown out of Harvard for cheating. He shares that ferocious
competitiveness of his brothers that sometimes turned into ruthlessness.

He done his share or more of drinking and womanising, while Chappaquiddick
cast enduring doubts about his strength in a crisis.

But these sins have been more than mitigated by the way in which he took on
extra families after the assassinations, as father figure for the children
of JFK and RFK. Over the years, occasional waywardness has become part of the
Ted Kennedy legend. He will be remembered as one of the legislative giants
of the past half century, who probably did more to improve the lives of his
less fortunate fellow citizens than any politician since President Lyndon
Johnson.

It was 28 years ago, that Kennedy – vanquished, for once – delivered
the unforgettable peroration of his keynote speech at the Democratic convention
that nominated his rival, Jimmy Carter. “The cause endures, the hope still lives,
and the dream shall never die,” he told an audience that had tears in
its eyes. His words were at once an epitaph for his own dream of the White
House, an encomium to his fallen brothers, and the articulation of a myth.
But they were also a promise for the future. And whatever else, Ted Kennedy
has delivered.

- Rupert Cornwell