The Transformation of Teddy Kennedy

by Richard D. Mahoney

Walking into the Russell Building in 1965 on his first day as newly-elected senator from New York, Bobby Kennedy was met by younger brother Teddy at the doorway. Gaunt and leaning heavily on a cane (the result of a near-fatal plane crash six months before), Teddy shook hands with his older brother as they grinned their toothy Kennedy grins. RFK, somewhere between teasing and deprecation, then pointed at the brother whose rocky election to the Senate in 1962 he had pretty much stage-managed and said, “You,” shaking his head.

“You,” the charming underachiever, had already completed two years in the Senate. Teddy had become an insider, an ally of the conservative southern chairmen who ran the place and who had schooled him in the Senate’s arcane practices. He seemed comfortable, anything but a fighter. Bobby took to calling Teddy “the club member” at Kennedy family gatherings. It was not a compliment.

Today, he is remembered as “the liberal lion” – the moving force behind a generation of progressive legislation — rivaling Henry Clay or Lyndon Johnson as one of the greatest Senate legislators in history.

Though surely proud, RFK would also been thoroughly surprised by the transformation. What happened? Why and when did the “club member,” skilled at courting segregationist Senate cronies, turn into a warrior rushing to every front to battle for the sick, the poor and those fighting the system? How did the boozy, bloated survivor of Chappaquiddick and ingloriously unsuccessful candidate for president in 1980 eventually become one of America’s most cherished public figures?

Did he change or did we change? He clearly changed, and what was written into his blood by Bobby’s death – to base power on the poor and people of color in order to renew ourselves – is now the transformative fact of American political life.

Teddy changed the way Jack and Bobby had – idealizing in death the life of the one before. Jack, who would not talk about his beloved older brother Joe (killed in a World War II bombing mission), instead idealized him in a reverential family memoir. Bobby, after JFK’s murder, would practically come apart at the seams if anyone reminisced in his presence about Jack, a person who he insisted could only be referred to as “the President”, except in his own final seconds of consciousness. Lying on the gummy kitchen floor in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, blood rapidly pooling around his head from a gunshot wound, a friend saw Bobby’s lips moving and leaned down to hear him say, “Jack. Jack.”

Teddy himself, before falling largely silent about Bobby, would pronounce, broken-voiced, those three lapidary phrases at his brother’s funeral, the ones that would define the balance of his public life: “He saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.”

Applying the credo to himself, the surviving brother was now an idealization of them all, left behind not just to touch the painful edges of what might have been, but to measure himself against those three towering figures in the Kennedy pantheon. The ‘club member’ had become a crusader.

Even in personal and political disgrace in the 1980s, across the generation during which the Silent Majority became the Moral Majority, Teddy Kennedy never changed his dedication to his brothers’ mission except in one way — reaching out to bonded conservatives like Senators Barry Goldwater, Orrin Hatch, and John McCain, all in the cause of finding new and necessary ways to enable government serve people. The Senate’s historic liberal remained its preeminent club member.

I remember Teddy coming out to the Kennedy Library in 1988 for a ceremony to recognize several foreign journalists being honored for risking their lives to write the truth. “The fullness of life,” he said to them, “is in the hazards of life.” The line, of course, was Bobby’s.

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Richard D. Mahoney was the first John F. Kennedy Scholar at the JFK Library and author of two books on the Kennedy experience – “JFK: Ordeal in Africa” and “Sons and Brothers: The Days of Jack and Bobby Kennedy”. Mahoney is currently the director of the Baker Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pa.