First, though this is not a regularly scheduled posting day, it would be absurd not to mention the historic event taking place today. For the first time, Vermonters who co choose may marry their partner of choice even if that partner is of the same sex.

Word has it that some folks are coming in from out of state to send these Vermonters a message. The News Guy will send them one, too:

MAZELTOV

OK, this is a bonus posting that has nothing to do with Vermont. But it is not often that as important a person as Sen. Edward Kennedy dies, and those of us who knew him (though I did not know him well) are entitled if not obliged to look back on what we knew.

Mostly, I covered Kennedy’s two greatest failures: his personal failure after he drove his car off that bridge on Chappaquiddick Island in June of 1969; his political failure when he challenged President Jimmy Carter for the 1980 Democratic nomination.

I got to Edgartown, Mass., the evening after the accident, having reserved the last rental car and hotel room available. As the day was fading, not knowing what else to do, I drove to the bridge.

Yup, it would have been easy enough to drive off it, drunk or sober, going fast or slow. As I stood there, it grew dark, and for some reason, I started to walk away from the bridge, the route Kennedy had taken after the accident.

Not far from the bridge, on the left side of the road, was a house, with lights on inside and a bright light outside the front door. I went to the door, knocked, and was invited in by a friendly older couple.

Yes, they had been home the previous night. Yes, they left their outside light on all night, every night. No, no one had knocked at their door.

I walked on, knocking at every door with a light out front. If I recall correctly there were nine houses where people told me their light had been on all night and no one had knocked.

That was my story. It was non-judgmental. It noted that Kennedy, too, had been in the accident, was injured and possibly traumatized. But it didn’t speculate about what might have been going through is mind. Reporters didn’t do that, then, at lest not much. We told what we knew had happened, not what we surmised. It seems like along time ago.

By the next afternoon, of course, Edgartown was crawling with journalists of all shapes and sizes. It was a heluva story, and to tell the truth we were all having a heluva time. We zipped around in our rental cars, examined the bridge, the ferry, the sleeve of water Kennedy said he had swum across after the accident. We interviewed everything that moved.

But that wasn’t the only reason for the good times. Two distinct socio-cultural cohorts dominated Edgartown and environs for the following week: Reporters, mostly youngish and middle-aged men on generous expense accounts; college students spending the summer waiting tables and working in hotels, most of them Ivy Leaguers and almost all of them women, most of them quite comely. The two groups were not unaware of one another.

What followed was several days of journalists drinking too much, driving too fast, and spending many an evening with young women while their wives waited at home, taking off a couple of hours each day to write (among other things) innuendo about whether Ted Kennedy was…well, you get the picture.

But of course none of those co-eds died. And the vast majority of the flirtations no doubt were only flirtations, even if in some cases it was the young women, not the reporters, insisting on that limitation.

Actually, I was never convinced that the same was not true of Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne. I had known Mary Jo. I was a general assignment reporter for Newsday, and among the stories I covered was the controversy over the price of home heating oil, important to Long Island homeowners. Sen. Robert Kennedy was involved with the issue, and Kopechne was the staff person in his Manhattan office who knew about it. I talked to her on the phone maybe twice a week for some months, went into New York to interview her twice, and on one of those occasions we had lunch.

She was a soft-spoken, intelligent, serious person who understood both the economics and the politics if the heating oil issue. She was not a secretary. Her duties combined constituent service, press relations, and maybe a bit of policy advice.

I don’t want to exaggerate. She wasn’t a senior staff person. But neither was she a hanger-on. Nor – unless I am an awful judge of character – was she a “floozy” or “party girl,” or whatever dismissive slang one uses to describe a flighty young woman interested only in fun and glamour.

As it happens, she was not the only woman at that party whom I knew, and though this neither proves nor disproves a thing, from what I knew of both of them I always found and still find it hard to believe that what transpired there was some kind of drunken orgy.

A decade later, now the chief national political correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, I was on Kennedy’s campaign plane as he took on Carter. The campaign was a disaster. Though Kennedy started out well ahead in the polls, his lead evaporated almost at once.

It wasn’t just that he couldn’t tell Roger Mudd in that famed television interview why he wanted to be president. He couldn’t tell anyone for weeks. He flubbed his campaign speeches, which at any rate lacked a cohesive theme. He tore from city to city with no apparent strategic design. And he made that impolitic (if entirely accurate) remark about the Shah of Iran being a tyrant after the American diplomats were seized in Teheran.

No need here to go into detail about how he lost that campaign. That story has been told. But a few things have not been said, at least not very often.

One is that this was probably the first and only presidential draft in American history. It wasn’t that Kennedy didn’t want to be president. But he ran only because one Democrat after another begged him to get into the race to stave off what they feared would be (and turned out to be) a disaster for their party.

And then, as he fumbled, one after another they deserted him. All except Arizona Rep. Mo Udall. For two reasons, I think. One was that for Udall, it wasn’t just politics; it was also policy. Like Kennedy, Udall didn’t like the direction in which Carter was taking the Democratic Party.

The other is that Mo Udall was a stand-up guy.

Then there is this question of character. A terrible candidate while he was ahead, Kennedy became a superb one after he had almost no chance of winning. After the Illinois primary, he wasn’t really running for the nomination any more. He was running for…well, perhaps to demonstrate who he really was.

Who he really was turned out to be impressive. There was this compassionate, articulate, considerate politician who spoke clearly about policy.

And it was policy that really interested him. One day on the campaign plane, probably because we were heading into Chicago, I got a few minutes to interview him. I never liked to ask the candidate about his political tactics. Not that I didn’t write “horse race” stories. I did and make no apologies for it. But the candidate isn’t a good political analyst. Hell, I was the political analyst. The candidate has to run the campaign; he has no time to analyze it.

But I did ask one or two political questions, which he answered as if bored. Then I asked him a policy question. One of his supporters had complained about Carter’s devotion, or lack thereof, to organized labor. I forget the details now, but I asked Kennedy about it, and he became animated. He knew all about it—who was on the National Labor Relations Board, the sections and sub-sections of the law, the names of the union leaders and the labor experts in academia. The press secretary interrupted to say that my time was up, but Kennedy was having fun. He kept going until we landed.

I last saw Kennedy in January of 2007, the day Congress reconvened. I was doing a story about Sen. Patrick Leahy. Like many a re-elected senator, Leahy hosted a reception, and I was standing in the hallway just outside the reception room, taking notes while interviewing one of Leahy’s advisors, when Kennedy walked up, pointed at me, and said, “still in the front row asking the tough questions, I see.”

I laughed, and not only because obviously he didn’t remember my name (nor should he have; it had been at least 15 years since we last spoke). But also because, though I had asked him a few tough questions, I had not one of the more outspoken reporters who made sure to sit in the front row at his press availabilities.

But Kennedy, who liked reporters, knew just what to say to please one.

Tags: Ted Kennedy

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 at 12:07 am and is filed under Politics & Elections. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.