Union Square Station
Malone
1/19

The Return of the Hero

Ted Kennedy is back.

He got quite a vacation during the Clinton years. There he was back in '92, moving into his golden age as a pronounced reprobate, and then Bill Clinton rolls onto the scene and steals away the spotlight.

The Hero of Chappaquiddick was clearly beyond his prime at the dawn of the Clinton era, but he could still gather his sons and nephews around him on the holidays and scrounge for ass at the nightspots of Palm Beach and Aspen, in the grand Kennedy tradition. This certainly was enough for Ted to age disgracefully, as the sole surviving son in a family where a fantastic amount of money had freed the men to relentlessly pursue sex and politics, interchangeably, or all at once.

I had barely noticed Ted the past eight years, what with a raw bald-faced liar occupying the Oval Office. But just as Clinton heads off into his own peculiar purple sunset, Ted pops up in full apoplectic disarray to go after John Ashcroft during the latter's Senate confirmation hearing.

At one point he leveled a question at Ashcroft that made simple dishonesty look like virtue by comparison. He attempted, with this question, to take the pre-Brown v. Board of Education segregation laws of Missouri (Brown was decided in 1954 and it declared segregated public schools unconstitutional in the United States) and meld them with a completely different era -- the late 1970s, early 1980s -- and imply that Ashcroft had supported them. What that told me is that Kennedy thinks -- if he is thinking, which is another question -- that the audience that he is aiming such confused rhetoric at is imperishably stupid.

The over-the-top accusatory tone used by Kennedy during this strange interlude of irrational conduct could easily have been put up on a split screen with a clip of Joe McCarthy at his best and have prevailed before an unbiased panel of judges as being much more flagrant in its basic disregard for truth.

My colleague Billy Beck always refers to Ted as the "runt of the litter," and that could very well be to the point when it comes to Ted's malignant striving. Jack Kennedy, a man who spent most of his adult life either in miserable pain, screwing, dying from Addison's disease, medicated with steroids and methamphetamine, and, yes, throw in a thousand days being President of the United States, nevertheless had charm and at least some class in public. He was certainly a hero of mine growing up. Likewise, Bobby Kennedy, who was a strange mixture of stern axial strength, ruthlessness, and effeminate shyness, had that certain something that seriously rich boys rarely have -- the ability to project a transcendent sense of purpose.

Teddy, meanwhile, was neither his father's son nor his brothers' brother nor, apparently, his mother's son. He was always the imitation Kennedy, with all the sex but none of the pure existential edge; he was the Kennedy who yearned without anything to yearn for but another cause to add to the general index of Kennedy family causes. He was and is, essentially, a perfect introduction to the third generation of public Kennedys -- a perversely animated bureaucrat posing as a leader -- and the perfect role model for, principally, his horrid son Patrick, a screeching monster now representing poor little Rhode Island in the House of Representatives.

If this familial mess is to be properly understood one has to look back to the grandmaster Kennedy, Joseph P. Kennedy, the patriarch whose design, as bad as it was to begin with, has clearly replicated in American politics like an out-of-control hanta virus.

Joe Kennedy made an early splash in the corporate world during the World War I era, after a successful stint at Harvard and marriage into a prominent Boston political family. But that was not his destiny. He was not looking to become a preeminent corporate man in the manner of such recent corporate figures as Lee Iacocco or Michael Armstrong or Robert Wright. No, Joe Kennedy was a businessman in the main, who during the Roaring '20s found much profitable involvement in liquor importation and stock manipulation. Later on, he bought himself into the movie business, purchasing RKO studios (whence his long affair with Gloria Swanson), was chosen by FDR as the first Commissioner of the Securities Exchange Commission (a fox-guards-chicken-coop kind of thing) and later sent to England as the U.S. Ambassador, where he was notorious for urging non-intervention in World War II.

Anyway, by 1950 Joe had pretty much made his bundle and gotten his second son, Jack, successfully into politics, but it was around this time that he declared that he had never really made any money until he "retired" down in Palm Beach and gave himself a little time to think. To say the least, what came out of this was no doubt an even greater diversity of the Kennedy portfolio -- for who can say what it is that the Kennedy's "do" to collect their dividends? (Yes, they own the Chicago Merchandise Mart -- I've lost track, did they finally sell it or not? -- but that was just a public expression of their holdings that were otherwise kept with various fund managers and the like.) 

Average Americans are just learning the trick of seriously wealthy folks like the Kennedys: the best way to make the money work is to own a little bit of everything. Of course, no one will ever know how much of everything the Kennedys actually own, but suffice it to say that it's probably a tad less than the Rockefellers and substantially more than Bill Gates, whose relative poverty is indicated by the fact that his name still appears on lists of the richest Americans, while the truly rich have long since disappeared from any such list, and the Kennedys are among these.

Whereas Norman Mailer once wrote about the Kennedy problem with sex in The Prisoner of Sex, the real Kennedy prison is in fact the trust fund. That's where each of them must contend with the slow drip of wealth that they are actually allowed access to, and this is what keeps them in a relative state of equilibrium, so to speak. Jack Kennedy didn't get access to the bulk of his wad until he was 45, for instance. He was notorious for never having a dollar in his pocket. His son, the late JFK Jr., had managed to assemble a small identifiable fortune from wealth passed onto him principally from his mother's estate, but not much mention was made of his particular portion of the Kennedy fortune, for instance.

Needless to say this all comes back to exactly what we are looking at when we make close observation of the runt of the litter, Teddy. He's been in the Senate for, I believe, 38 years, longer than any current senator, as best I recollect, other than Strom Thurmond, who is 98 or thereabouts. Teddy has never even pretended to have a job, of course, and after being the brother of two vital and oddly charismatic political figures of the 1960s, he is most famous for having killed a young woman in a car accident while driving her off to a spot where he could have sex with her. Instead of using the opportunity to excuse himself from public life, after he was given a free pass for culpability in the woman's death by local officials observant of his family power, he has continued on, for nearly another thirty years, as a hyperkinetic gasbag easily recognized for saying things in the Senate that normal individuals would get kicked in the balls for saying in public.

Hence it should be with some shame that anyone with perspective and an ounce of judgement -- whether a Democrat or Republican or whatever -- would view his attempt to fuse the era of legal segregation with a federal court decision some thirty-five or more years later in an attempt to ask a loaded question of John Ashcroft which question implied that Ashcroft was a racist. Alas, after the Clinton era, the ability of so-called normal people to distinguish right from wrong, truth from lies, and reality from fantasy seems to have declined to the advantage of the Kennedys and the ruling runt of that litter.

Correction: And speaking about truth and lies, last time out I cited the lead paragraph of Alex Cockburn's column in last week's New York Press which claimed that the Clinton's were renting a building on their Chappaqua property to the Secret Service at a price equal to their entire monthly mortgage payment for the entire spread. As best as I can tell, Cockburn had no idea what he was talking about and that's the last time I'll ever pass on something by him. My mistake. I should have known better. 

© Union Square Journal 2001

Previously by Malone...

The Hero of Chappaquiddick (01/11/01)

Real Millennium Strange (01/03/01)

Smoke 'em if you got 'em (12/21/00)

Union Square Station (12/11/00)

Union Square Station (12/3 back to 11/24/00)