Likelihood of Success

A softer view on Ted Kennedy, though not entirely different from mine on the facts — merely on the politics — from my former professor, Sean Wilentz:

[Kennedy] overcame personal flaws and searing travails to become a masterful legislator, congressional infighter, and builder of unlikely coalitions. Ironically, he achieved all of this only after he had surmounted the political entitlement that made his career possible in the first place. In an even deeper irony, of the three famous and powerful Kennedy brothers, it was youngest brother, Teddy the latecomer, who arguably had the greatest impact on American politics and government. These travails and these ironies gave Kennedy’s life dimensions of American triumph as well as of prideful, classical tragedy.

When Kennedy first ran for the Senate in 1962, at the age of thirty, for the seat that JFK vacated when he was elected president, the rap against him was that if his name were Edward Moore [instead of Edward Moore Kennedy] his candidacy would be a political joke. It was true, of course: Although he was hardly a reluctant candidate, he was very much the dutiful, slightly wayward, much younger brother in what some viewed warily as a family that was busily acquiring a new firm, otherwise known as the federal government of the United States. As the assistant district attorney for Suffolk County three years out of law school, Kennedy’s surname was really all he had going for him, and everybody knew as much–but that name, and the presumptions about the politics and connections that went with it, were magic in Massachusetts. . . .  Never again, through eight re-election campaigns, would Kennedy fail to win less than 55 percent of the vote. . . .

For many years, he did not understand how the incident at Chappaquiddick in July 1969 foreclosed the possibility that he would ever succeed JFK to the presidency or fulfill the promise of RFK’s presidential campaign in 1968. In part, this was because he would never be able to explain his actions and inactions of that night adequately (except, perhaps, to the forgiving voters of Massachusetts). But the events also marked the beginning of what would become a convergence of celebrity scandal mongering and cynical prurience that forever changed the rules of American political journalism–and from which Kennedy, with his personal demons, would not escape for decades.

Read the whole thing; Sean is a pretty fair broker, and was probably right when he wagged his finger at the the House of Representatives during the Clinton impeachment.  I still believe that, even from the perspective of a liberal, Kennedy does not merit the special treatment of internment in a privileged spot at Arlington.  And Wilentz asserts the same thing above that my cousin Brian G. does in the Facebook comments to my previous post –“it was youngest brother, Teddy the latecomer, who arguably had the greatest impact on American politics and government” — and goes further than Brian in at least suggesting at least half of the answer why that could be, he does not demonstrate it; it’s probably a comparison of apples and oranges, anyway, but if given the chance I would welcome the opportunity to debate the question with someone willing to take the “Teddy” side of it.

Hat tip to The Browser.