TEDDY BARED

Had I met any of the Kennedy boys, I suspect I would not have found them to my taste. Surpassingly arrogant – a self-confidence based upon eye-watering wealth, parental expectation, unrivalled connections, continuous celebrity, legendary sexual magnetism and a very useful lack of moral compass (useful in fixing day-to-day problems) – they would not, you would be bound to feel, be remotely interested in you, save insofar as you might be placed to do them some sort of favour.

I remember Jack Kennedy’s administration vividly. After the Eisenhower years – “cosy but crass” as Stephen Sondheim succinctly despatched them – JFK seemed almost superhumanly glamorous, young, creative and enlightened. His administration could be said to have been a triumph of style over substance even (perhaps especially) in the Bay of Pigs crisis during which the world really did appear for a few days to teeter on the brink of World War III.

Jack’s early and shattering death sealed his legend. It was simultaneously as public as any in the twentieth century and yet enduringly inexplicable. The theories will never die. My favourite – infrequently aired -– goes like this. Kennedy didn’t die but was left by the bullets in a vegetative state. This accounts for the succession of visits allegedly paid to the Parkland Hospital in Dallas by Jackie after the President was formally pronounced dead.

Meanwhile, Mama Rose, mindful of the need to avoid any repetition of the family’s disastrous attempt to bury the embarrassment of their lobotomised daughter Rosemary, determined that Jack would be officially dead, a much more manageable outcome. Once a weighted coffin had been laid to rest before the eyes of the world in Arlington, there was just the little matter of “burying” the uncomprehending Jack. They needed a secure refuge, somewhere like a well-fortified island. Now, who owned such an island? Well, Aristotle Onassis for one. The rest you know.

Of course, Jack’s reputation was bound to decline. Anyone so incapable of keeping his pants on (even, it was said, within the Oval Office) was bound to generate stories sooner or later. In the late 1970s, a feature of Bette Midler’s seductively raucous stage act was her claim to have “slept with Jack Kennedy. And you know what?” – and here she’d rake the audience with a blood-red fingernail – “They slept with Jack Kennedy”.

The instinct to fix things was deep-grained in the Kennedy clan long before Ted was born. Irish-American political chicanery in Boston is as endemic as the more widely known history of Irish-American political chicanery in Chicago (Mayor Daley and all that) and the Kennedys were up to their necks in it for decades before Joe covered up Teddy’s rustication from Harvard for cheating and then fixed it for him to take over Jack’s Senate seat when Jack became President. Political favours were called in repeatedly to smother Kennedy scandals, misdemeanours and crimes. The least controllable of Ted’s disasters was the Chappaquiddick affair, least controllable in the sense that even Kennedy money and influence couldn’t prevent it killing any expectation he still entertained of succeeding to the White House. But anyone other than a Kennedy would have gone to jail and, never formally required to explain his actions on the night a young woman died while in his company, he rode it out and the full truth of the matter dies with him.


caricature by Steve Nyman from aaacaricatures.com

It’s hard to imagine socialising with people who sincerely imagine that the law does not apply to them. I imagine the Kennedys must have been much like the Krays, only with ‘class’ in its American meaning. Add to this the Catholicism they inherited from Joe and Rose, a religious subject indeed for it was clearly an ingredient that would not brook mockery or even discussion. How devout Catholic men square their conviction with the addiction to adultery that ran rampant among all the Kennedy men in every generation is hard for rationalists to figure. Did they think they were redeemed every time they went to confession and hence were cleared to sin again just as soon as possible?

I don’t know how the women put up with it but the Kennedy girls seemed inured. In the English-born actor Peter Lawford, Pat Kennedy found a husband quite as devoted to booze, recreational drugs and sleeping around as any of her brothers. Kathleen Kennedy was never forgiven by Rose for marrying outside the faith, even though it was into the English aristocracy, but she had adulterous affairs of her own. Alone of the family, Joe attended her funeral after she and her lover perished in a plane crash, the same fate that befell Joe Jr (in World War II), Jack and Jackie’s only son John and indeed Teddy, who survived with a broken back and lumbar pain for the rest of his life. Only Eunice, who died a fortnight before Teddy, seems to have led a pretty blameless life (if you can forgive her being the mother-in-law of Arnold Schwarzenegger).

And yet … and yet … There is always an “and yet” with people of real talent. I was in the States one election year and turned on the C-Span channel in my hotel room just in time to watch from the start a speech by Ted Kennedy. It was no great occasion, just a routine stump speech in the marathon that is the American democratic process. The Democrats didn’t even win that year. But it was magnificent. I hung on his every word, because it was all so beautifully crafted, cogently argued, magically lacking in spin or patronising or political trimming. It was proper, old-fashioned oratory of the kind we used to get from Nye Bevan, Michael Foot, indeed Winston Churchill. It was just enthralling.

Kennedy was a politician to his fingertips if not in that part of the cerebrum that weighs appetite against consequence. I wouldn’t have trusted him with a boiled sweet – I certainly wouldn’t have left him alone for two minutes with either of my partner’s nieces – but I would have trusted him to know how the system works and to get things done. And getting things done, that’s what politicians are for, isn’t it? Kennedy got things done in Massachusetts, thereby ensuring that he had a thumping majority every time his senate seat was contested and becoming the third longest-serving senator in US history. And he got things done in the Senate, keeping the often flickering flame of liberalism alive there through screeds of legislation.

Of course, the Kennedys were progressive only as and when it suited. Like Richard Nixon, Bobby Kennedy spent part of his youth working for the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, the most anti-progressive force in the most anti-progressive period of modern American history. Unlike Nixon, the Kennedy clan was real close to Joe McCarthy, who was godfather to Bobby’s eldest child. This was the Irish Catholic mafia taking precedence over fine judgments of politico-moral stances. Nonetheless, however much that kind of connection tarnishes the Kennedy legend, it is still the progressive liberal image that tops all others when we contemplate Teddy and Bobby and Jack.

In reality, Teddy achieved more in the public arena than Jack or Bobby ever did, not just by being granted comparative longevity but because he lived to attain the maturity to see that real legislation on the statute books achieves more than any amount of glamour, fame and snatched sexual gratification. For that alone, he deserves to be hailed as an American hero. I’m just grateful that I never had to meet him.