The Anguish of Edward Kennedy

The Anguish of Edward Kennedy

JOHN and Robert Kennedy died violently, yet their deaths endowed them with a larger grace and the flourish of legend. The youngest brother, Edward Kennedy, is living out a fate that is far more complicated. Having buried his brothers and become a surrogate father to Bobby's children, he is now suffering an ugly species of character assassination that in many ways he brought upon himself. However much he has fallen in public esteem, it is probably in the deeper recesses of his own mind that Kennedy is suffering most and experiencing the harshest judgments. The Grecian aspects of the family's tragedies shade here into the existential. There is nothing heroic about fencing with half-truths, falsehoods, omissions, rumors, insinuations of cowardice.

Since his car drove off the Dike Bridge on Chappaquiddick, carrying Mary Jo Kopechne to her death, the scars of stress and self-doubt have etched themselves into Teddy Kennedy's face and affected his voice and actions. None of his friends expected him to regain his equilibrium soon. Now, among both friends and political intimates, who initially felt that his withdrawal from presidential contention and his expressed intention to remain in the Senate would suspend the harassments plaguing him, there is a growing fear that he is being driven from public life.

"How much can one man take?" a Kennedy intimate asks. By last week, before he left Washington for three days of sailing off Cape Cod, Teddy's complexion had turned sallow and his bright blue and usually merry eyes had become dull and distracted. He had begun to greet acquaintances with a hesitant, questioning glance, as if fearful of their suspicions and doubtful about their loyalties. Frequently he avoids looking people directly in the eye.

Privately, Kennedy has expressed astonishment at some of the speculation that he has read--such as the contention that he had not swum from Chappaquiddick to Edgartown. Why, he wonders, would people think he might have invented such a story? The public attitude, of course, is to wonder why Kennedy left so many odd details--such as the swim to Edgartown--unexplained. In private, Kennedy also marvels that anyone could imagine him so stupid as to attend a sex orgy in his own state, accompanied by a middle-aged chauffeur and girls from his own and his late brother's staff.

Kennedy talks somberly about "that night" and about its darkness. If there were indeed any lights along the way back to the cottage, he says, he never saw them. He understands the damage that he has inflicted upon his family and himself. He also ponders these days whether his future usefulness may not have to lie somewhere outside of public life.

Such doubts are spoken in his troughs--and Kennedy has been susceptible in the past few weeks to more than usual ups and downs. After his three-day sail last week, his intention to remain in the Senate and seek re-election in 1970 seemed buoyed anew. Though he retained serious doubts about his future effectiveness, he seemed convinced for the moment that to quit public life would simply be "letting them" drive him out. Still, nearly all his friends --among them the scholarly subalterns of the New Frontier--are worried about him.

Some longtime Kennedy supporters even seemed to be in the process of withdrawing from the family legend they had served so long. Theodore Sorensen, who supervised the drafting of Kennedy's televised explanation of Chappaquiddick, said on a television talk show last week: "I don't think that that, [his conduct] being so recent in the minds of the public, and that being so clear an indication of his action under pressure, he should try for the presidency in 1972." Privately, some of Kennedy's friends are baffled, and doubting even their own defense of him. A few do not rule out the possibility that he will leave politics entirely.

At the end of the week, Kennedy seemed freshly determined to try to re-establish a normal senatorial routine. In one of his rare post-Chappaquiddick appearances, he and his son attended the "Northeast Special Olympics" for mentally retarded children in Boston. With the coming of the inquest into Mary Jo Kopechne's death, however, Teddy Kennedy's private anguish is bound to intensify. It, as much as anything that the inquest produces, must be counted as a major factor in Kennedy's future.

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