GODSTUFF

TED KENNEDY: SO MUCH MORE THAN HIS MISTAKES

“I recognize my own shortcomings — the faults in the conduct of my private life. I realize that I alone am responsible for them, and I am the one who must confront them. I believe that each of us as individuals must not only struggle to make a better world, but to make ourselves better, too.”

— Sen. Edward Kennedy, in a speech at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, Oct. 25, 1991

Ted Kennedy was a complicated man with a complicated life. Deeply faithful and deeply faulted, Kennedy was a lion of a man full of contradictions. Fierce and loyal. Dangerous and wise. Strong and yet felled by all-too-human weaknesses.

It is the complexity of his story and his character that made him such a compelling person, a heroic figure in an arena where they are few and far between.

I grew up in an Irish-American family in New England where the Kennedy clan was like royalty. They were icons — culturally, politically and in some ways spiritually.

My parents were married the year John F. Kennedy was assassinated. As a child, I was aware of the depths of tragedy the Kennedy family endured time and time again, and I was taught to admire the family’s resilience in the face of despair. The way they kept picking themselves up and soldiering on. Their commitment to public service. Their devotion to caring for the poor, the weak and those on the fringes of our society.

For all of my life, Sen. Kennedy was the patriarch of the Kennedy clan — an avuncular, kind and fun-loving Irishman who forged into political issues with dead seriousness, but never took himself too seriously.

Ted Kennedy made many mistakes. The most infamous occurred 40 years ago when he drove his car off a bridge in Chappaquiddick, Mass. He was able to swim safely to shore, while his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned. He neglected to report the accident until the next morning. A reckless and selfish act of cowardice to be sure.

“I think he was chastened by it,” Randall Balmer, a professor of religion at Barnard College in New York and author of God in the White House: A History, said, referring to Chappaquiddick. “He did have his period later in life — this kind of wild period — but he repented of that as well and then settled down.

“He was a human being,” Balmer said. “He had faults. But he was big enough to acknowledge them, and that’s fairly uncommon for a politician.”

Kennedy’s life was marked by tragedy and loss. Two of his siblings — Joseph Jr. and Kathleen — died in plane crashes. Two more brothers — Jack and Bobby — were cut down in the prime of life by assassins’ bullets. Three of his nephews died tragically and too young — Bobby’s sons David and Michael of, respectively, a drug overdose and in a skiing accident, while John Kennedy Jr. perished in a plane crash in 1999. Ted Kennedy himself survived a plane crash the year after Jack was assassinated.

He weathered scandal and the divorce from his first wife, Joan, in 1984 after 24 years of marriage, substance abuse (a burden shared by several of the Kennedy clan offspring), chronic back pain (from the plane crash in 1964), a crushing political defeat to Jimmy Carter in 1980, and, finally, brain cancer.

It’s a litany of despair that would crush a lesser man. But Kennedy kept going with a stubborn faith — in God and in the common good — while carrying the burden of grief and the mantle of responsibility for a family and, in many ways, a nation.

Sen. Kennedy was Roman Catholic. Whether he was a “good” Catholic is, of course, a matter of opinion. Unquestionably pro-choice and pro-contraception, a supporter of stem cell research and same-sex marriage (all big no-no’s in orthodox Catholicism), he also was undeniably a champion of social justice, leading the fight for universal health care, workers rights, arms control and peacemaking — most notably in Northern Ireland where he was instrumental in crafting a lasting peace.

He opposed the war in Iraq and fought for the rights of people institutionalized — the disabled, the elderly, the mentally ill and prison inmates — to practice their religion with access to pastoral care. He helped craft the Aviation Disaster Family Act of 1996, which ensured that victims’ families (including the families of those who perished in the 9/11 attacks) received the emotional and spiritual support they needed.

“Catholic hierarchy always wanted to hammer him about his stand on abortion, but he embodied Catholic social teaching much more fully than any other politician I can think of in the national arena,” Balmer said. “He was much more in keeping with Vatican principles on the invasion of Iraq than the Catholics who were anti-abortion. He was one of the few senators who voted against it. .. . I think that, in some ways, balances out.”

When I think of Sen. Kennedy, I remember Chappaquiddick, but I recall something else. Something more powerful and, hopefully, more indelible.

Ted Kennedy refused to be defined by his worst moments.

None of us wants to be reduced to the sum total of our mistakes, deadly or otherwise. Yet, it’s uncommon to be able to rise above them, without becoming paralyzed by guilt or regret, and devote your life to making the world a more just place.

In an Associated Press report from Dublin earlier this week, an Irish everyman — Joe Drennan, a 68-year-old contractor from County Cork who was among those waiting in a line outside the U.S. Embassy to leave his condolences for the Kennedy family — summed up Sen. Kennedy’s legacy beautifully.

“He had his peccadilloes, like all of us . . . but boy, did he overcome them,” Drennan said. “He overcame the biggest obstacle in his life — and that was himself.”