Most of the rolling news reports following Ted Kennedy’s death overnight — with their mundane references to “the grand old man” of US politics and their poring over the Chappaquiddick mystery — surely miss the point of this great man. In one sense, his death marks the end of the “Camelot” dream of optimism, civil liberty and social justice first pursued by Jack and Bobby Kennedy before their assassinations in the 1960s. As the last surviving brother (the eldest was killed in the Second World War), the “Lion of the Senate” fought hard for progress on nuclear disarmament, educational aid and, of course, universal health care for more than half a century.
But it is in the last of these — “the cause of my life” — that a clue to Ted Kennedy’s lasting legacy lies. His death, which comes as the forces of conservatism (including certain UK Tories) battle to suppress Barack Obama’s health-care plans, is a fitting and timely reminder to the president of the work still to be done.
And let us not forget how much President Obama owes to the senator from Massachusetts, who first took up his seat in 1962 after JFK became president. It was, after all, Ted Kennedy’s pivotal endorsement of Obama in January 2008 that probably won him the Democratic candidacy over Kennedy’s old friend Hillary Clinton. Kennedy rightly recognised that after the Bush years, America’s thirst for change called for a clean break from the Washington Establishment, which, for all her attributes, Hillary Clinton still represented. Like Obama (but unlike H Clinton), Ted Kennedy had foreseen the Iraq disaster of 2003 and opposed the invasion from the beginning, one of only 23 senators to do so, amid a furious post-9/11 consensus in favour of war.
Today, the flame of Camelot burns brightly in the Obama administration after Ted Kennedy passed the torch of hope to what he called “a new generation of leadership”. But the president’s responsibility to live up to that hope — and not just on health care — is all the weightier this morning.
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