"That Which We Are, We Are"

By Hugh Sidey, John Stacks

Kennedy goes out in style--and looks ahead

THE ALSO-RAN. Winning isn 't everything; it's the only thing, said Vince Lombardi. But sometimes nothing so becomes a candidate's run for the Oval Office as the manner in which he bows out. Sport and politics share the inevitability that someone must lose --but also the redemption that there is almost always a tomorrow.

The great resonant voice rumbled from the podium and through the arena, capturing the full attention of the thousands of Democrats below. The curly, graying head bobbed in acknowledgment to the cheers from his listeners. Ted Kennedy's roar, once strangely uncertain, now clearly had become a force to move a multitude's emotions. The youngest of the Kennedy brothers, for so long during this campaign at odds with himself, seemed to have found a kind of peace. He quoted some lines from Tennyson's Ulysses:

I am a part of all that I have met... Tho'much is taken, much abides... That which we are, we are--One equal temper of heroic hearts ... strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Throughout the convention hall, tears filled many eyes. For Democrats who lived through the 1960s, this was a final chapter, both for Kennedy's quest for the nomination and for the social and political cause that he embodied. His speech may have been the last great liberal call to arms. To some it seemed impractical and out of tune with the country's needs and wants. It spoke to what once was and is no longer. But even many of those among his listeners who never admired Kennedy or his brothers may miss the sense of strength and certainty and hope that the family represented. Thus, in counterpoint to his ringing words, there was a sadness for many on the convention floor for what might have been, for a political party that has had to change direction, to find new answers and perhaps even a new purpose.

After the speech, Madison Square Garden was alive with talk of whether Ted Kennedy would make o another run at the presidency. His supporters were convinced that he has learned Sand matured from the bruising 1980 fight and that he is the natural heir to the Democratic nomination in 1984.

His performance last week makes that possible, but far from certain. In losing the nomination, he punctured the myth of Kennedy invincibility and thus opened the way for campaigns by other Democrats like Vice President Walter Mondale, Senator Gary Hart of Colorado, Governor Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia. Some of these men are further along in reshaping a new Democratic approach to government than is Ted Kennedy.

His campaign may have been, in the words of his friend, former Senator John Tunney of California, "a campaign of atonement." Said Tunney: "That campaign and that speech spell the end of the Chappaquiddick era. It is something that had to be done." But the reception of Kennedy's speech last week inevitably raises the question of whether the 1984 Ted Kennedy will be the Ted that America saw in the campaign or the Ted who spoke so magnificently on the convention podium. All year the irony has been that the further Kennedy seemed from the nomination, the better he performed and was received by the voters. There seemed to be some form of liberation in losing.

For the next few days, Kennedy will sail the waters off the Cape in the Victura and the Curragh. He will walk the uncrowded beach with his mother Rose and play tennis with his sister-in-law Ethel. He will savor the world acclaim from papers and television about his convention speech, and he will probably eat more ice cream than he should and have an extra daiquiri or two. He will luxuriate in his patrician world far from the American deprived whom he has championed, a long distance from the middle class whose stresses he says he perceives. Ted Kennedy may at last be a true Kennedy, one of those depicted in the photographs, paintings and mementos that grace the family homes in Palm Beach, Fla., McLean, Va., and Hyannis Port, Mass.

At breakfast with reporters in McLean the day after the convention, Kennedy slouched in an armchair and sipped coffee in his spacious, beamed living room. Joan strolled into the room and sat at his arm, relaxed and confident. For the first time, he willingly reflected on what had happened to him in the campaign, and what might be his future in politics. Said he: "After the early primaries, we knew the chances of getting the nomination were remote. But programs and issues that we were raising were beginning to take on a life of their own, and I saw them expressed in human terms that I found very moving and motivating."

Kennedy promised to campaign for Carter, but, like his appearance on the podium with the President, he will be restrained and distant from the current occupant of the White House. His campaigning this fall will be cautious, linked mostly to his friendship with Senators and Congressmen who want his help. He made it clear that the degree of his support for Carter will depend on the President's economic pronouncements. Kennedy believes that Carter must focus his campaign on the economy, which the Senator said is "the area where we were able to get some response." Even so, Kennedy thinks that Carter will be "hard pressed" to win.

There is, of course, no way of being certain about what Ted Kennedy will do in 1984 because events and a man's own mind may change his life in unpredictable ways. "Clearly," he said, "we have made no judgment about 1984. As we have seen, this is a volatile period where even a few days or a few weeks are a long, long time. I'm not going to disappear." But right now the belief within the inner Kennedy circle is that he will stay in the Senate, from which he can help define national problems and offer solutions, all the while protecting his remaining privacy. He might find his party clamoring for him again in 1984, and he might find himself and the country truly ready by then. He is only 48, certainly young enough to take part in any redirection of Democratic Party goals.

Such a future campaign is made possible by the singular crusade of Teddy Kennedy in 1979 and 1980. He learned about the nation. More important, he learned about himself. It was believed last fall by Ted Kennedy and almost everyone else that a person who had come through the assassination of two brothers and the personal scandal of Chappaquiddick, and who had served 17 years in the U.S. Senate, was prepared for big power politics. These assumptions proved to be almost entirely wrong. Kennedy could not articulate any appreciation of the economic anguish of Middle Americans. Nor did he understand the ferocity of the political encounters on the presidential level in these times or the smoldering resentment against his personal excesses in earlier years.

"Looking back," he said, "I would have preferred to have waited until the congressional session ended and made a statement some time in December. We would have had more of a start-up period. We had a rather frenetic type of campaign in the very beginning and were not developing the themes early enough in ways that were clearly comprehensible. There were mistakes made moving the campaign off the ground, mistakes I made personally. There was also the distraction from economic issues by issues of foreign policy, as well as questions raised about my own character."

Would these character issues haunt him if he ran again? "As the campaign developed," he said, "there was much more focus on the issues. ; If I were ever to run again, I would hope it would start from there."

Ted Kennedy's plunge in the opinion polls and his devastating loss in the Iowa caucuses were perhaps the greatest political shocks in his life. That changed him, he acknowledged last week. He explained: "You learn to live with disappointment. In past campaigns we have always been successful and won. In this campaign I found, with the series of defeats in the primaries, that the forces that have motivated me are much more significant than any particular outcome on a primary day."

Kennedy concluded after his initial losses that he had to rely on his own instincts. He was in a battle that he might lose, but from which he could not walk away.

For the next six months he received the education that he had avoided in his adult life, and he imposed a self-discipline that he had formerly rejected. While seeking the help of his troubled wife, he became more mindful of his part in her problems, and he became more thoughtful. His sense of public propriety and his need to preserve grace in political affairs were sharpened.

Kennedy's persistent smile through the primaries was at first forced, but then it came from an understanding that he was proving something to himself. He could take the political opprobrium that was heaped upon him and still keep his dignity. He confided to a friend not long ago that being jeered with Mayor Jane Byrne in Chicago, a city that used to revere his brother John, had left an ugly scar. Finding, when he began to falter, that professed "old friends" in the Senate and the nation's statehouses would not even return his phone calls shocked him into the realization of just how lonely it was to be a loser.

Kennedy was wedded to the old-style liberalism before he wandered into the presidential buzz saw. He knew nothing else. The politics that he learned he got from his brothers and their counselors, like Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Economist John Kenneth Galbraith, relentless disciples of the New Deal. Kennedy's convention speech may have been a declaration of new understanding acquired in today's world. Its specifics are almost less important than the sense of the moment that the speech acknowledged. It was a time for poetry in the affairs of the country, a moment to show spirit and feeling and to soar, rather than to list and explain and justify. Perhaps Kennedy knew that this was the declaration of purpose he never spoke for Roger Mudd last November when the CBS interviewer asked him why he wanted to be President, and also perhaps a belated acknowledgment that the nation and the world are changing and he must change with them.

One paragraph was especially crafted to weld the old Kennedy passion with that new understanding. It could be the clue to the political theology that he will now follow. Said he: "The commitment I seek is not to outworn views, but to old values that will never wear out. Programs may sometimes become obsolete, but the ideal of fairness always endures. Circumstances may change, but the work of compassion must continue. It is surely correct that we cannot solve problems by throwing money at them; but it is also correct that we dare not throw national problems onto a scrap heap of inattention and indifference. The poor may be out of political fashion, but they are not without human needs. The middle class may be angry, but they have not lost the dream that all Americans can advance together."

In a political system that makes leadership such a personal matter, Ted Kennedy will be a central figure no matter what the circumstances. His determination to stay the distance in the brutal, exhausting primary fight and to raise his voice even in his hour of greatest defeat was courageous.

But he will not be the same politician he was. In the poetry that he quoted last week, he left out the telling passages in which the aging wanderer Ulysses admits his weakness and lost strength to his followers, lines that may apply to the Senator today:

Tho'much is taken, much abides;

and tho'

We are not now that strength which

in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that

which we are, we are--

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but

strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not

to yield.

With reporting by WALTER ISAACSON

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