Legacy
As they hold a funeral mass for Ted Kennedy and bury him today, here’s some praise for the dead. It’s why they loved him. A couple of quick links to demonstrate the good he did as he attempted to redeem himself from the shame of Chappaquiddick, and to demonstrate his application of his considerable influence and political skills for undeniable good.
Pols of both stripes came out for their friend last night and told tales of loyalty, adept politicking and humor at what the Boston Herald is calling Ted Kennedy’s Irish Wake. The JFK Museum on Dorchester Bay in Boston was mobbed over the last couple of days by well-wishers, and members of the Kennedy clan moved into the crowd for personal moments with as many of them as they could. Many of those people were there because Kennedy, the master of constituent services, had personally helped them, or because of his larger support for liberal causes. Here’s the Boston Herald’s Peter Gelzinis on that.
In what is perhaps his most meaningful legacy, something that can be appreciated on both sides of the aisle, he was directly and heavily involved in bringing the violence in Northern Ireland to a negotiated, equitable end. He overcome his own anti-British stance, holding IRA terrorists and their supporters to a high standard, and bringing the Irish Catholic and Protestant adversaries together with British politicians. It worked, and established a precedent and a template that can be useful in places like Iraq that have similar problems. via Boston Herald, it is perhaps the most significant example of Kennedy’s famous ability to reach across aisles and bring people together.
Those accomplishments would make a historic figure of any pol. Does it amount to the redemption all the commentators have been talking about, loath though they may be to delve much into what needed to be redeemed? Maybe. Though there’ll always be an asterisk.*
* It’s a big one.
Contrary to popular, widely reported misconception, his legacy of good does not include immigration. That’s on his list of debacles. While he led the charge on the Immigration Act of 1965 ended a racist immigration policy and installed a more equitable, merit-based system, Kennedy subsequently did everything he could to undermine that by encouraging the massive flood of illegal immigration in our time, as the leading advocate of amnesties that assured border hoppers they could violate our laws and still become legal residents, receive taxpayer-subsidized benefits and ultimately citizens.
Nor is his legacy likely to be universal health care, and certainly not meaningful health care reform. He flipflopped on that, anyway, opposing it for partisan reasons when Nixon proposed it, and subsequently became the champion of socialized medicine, a cause that shows all signs of being about to utterly fail again. I haven’t quite figured out how he gets props for that. Especially since the chances are that even in death, now that they’ve raised the “Do it for Ted” cry, he isn’t likely to be any more successful. Boston Herald with some news and observations on that.
It isn’t that, as an Irish Catholic, he represents the triumph of benighted immigrants against discrimination. His brother represented that, and that isn’t necessarily the bright, shining inspirational Camelot tale it is presented as, but one that involves a lot of the old man’s ill-gotten cash and political arm-twisting. Nothing inherently wrong with that. That was fighting fire with fire. That’s how people have gotten ahead since the dawn of time. But Ted Kennedy, coming along later, was the beneficiary of a fait accompli and represents the worst that America has to offer in the way of privilege and cynical manipulation, from the family’s decision to have his brother’s college roommate appointed to hold the Senate seat until Teddy was old enough, to his own shameless manuevering in recent years to control who gets to occupy Massachusetts Senate seats. Chappaquiddick, while a shameful story of a drunk driver who abandoned a young woman to die and took advantage of his social position to avoid responsibility for it, is also the story of shamelessly using privilege and influence to hold power and future prospects at any cost.
(For another view on that, here’s Chicago Trib scribbler Eric Zorn’s somewhat bizarre observation that the lack of 24-hour news coverage in 1969 was a blessing, because it allowed Ted Kennedy not to be hounded out of office, allowing the subsequent redemptive acts. You could debate all day whether having 24-hour news channels has been a good thing or a bad thing for America, but the notion of allowing pols to skate responsibility in the immediate aftermath of deadly scandal as a check in the “good” ledger seems a bit of a stretch.)
(Also fun is this one from my favorite not-quite-30 deep thinker, Matthew Yglesias. He’s explaining why Kenedy’s effort to prevent a Massachusets GOP governor from being able to appoint John Kerry’s replacement, and Kennedy’s deathbed effort to give appointment power back to the current Democratic governor, is not rank hypocrisy and cynical anti-democratic manipulation. The lefty lad explains that because Massachusetts politics are dominated by Democrats, it’s OK for Democrats to dominate Massachusetts politics. His explanation fails to acount for the 16 consecutive years that a succession of Republicans held the governor’s office .. which is elected statewide, as it happens … and the fact that both Kennedy and Kerry generally have lost about one-third of the votes in this bluest of states.)
(As long as we’re talking about the champion of the little people and liberal causes, it is probably worth noting again that, his feud with Rupert Murdoch led him in 1988 to attempt to put the scrappy blue-collar tabloid I work for out of business and its 1000-odd little people on the street through the FCC cross-ownership ban. Some may say that incorrigible Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr’s references to him as “Fat Boy” were hurtful, but one of the deepest-held principles of American democracy is that our politicians should be obliged to suffer the cruel slings and arrows of a boisterous press and not use the instruments of government to silence them. I’m open to considering that Kennedy learned something in later years from the grace with which George Bush accepted the “chimp” and “Hitler” barbs, though his own “plot” allegations that fanned those flames suggest he was mainly concerned with the goring of his own ox.)
Other commentators have already done admirable takedowns in recent days on the myth that Kennedy represented a more collegial political era, noting that the man who uttered the words “unitah, not a dividah” in fact inaugurated the modern era of bitter partisanship with his vile attacks on Robert Bork and rarely missed a chance to launch cheap slurs at his opponents after that.
Kennedy’s legacy of good works also can’t be about his much-vaunted vote against the Iraq war. While he should be applauded for being honest and being consistent, unlike all the other mountebanks … notably John Kerry and Hillary Clinton … Kennedy had no viable plan for dealing with the dire threat Saddam Hussein was at that time widely and credably believed to pose, and the threat that, with the imminent collapse of the sanctions regime, Saddam would continue to pose. Being anti-war is not helpful, when it poses the threat of more dire circumstances such as American anti-war mongering have produced in recent decades, from the fall of Southeast Asia to our current Mideast troubles, a stright line to which can be drawn from American retreat/defeatism. It’s not even so much his loud, irresponsible denunciations of the “plot hatched in Texas,” which while shameful in time of war, was buffoonish and gives the lie like so many of his other outragoues denunciations to the notion that he represents some bygone age of collegiality. He is given much credit by the anti-war crowd for pushing the up-armoring of Humvees, which may well have saved some lives in some circumstances. While the attention to the needs of soldiers and veterans is always laudable, those who used the issue as a political brickbat against the Bush administration never grasped that IEDs were killing the crews of heavily armored vehicles, and continued to kill and maim the crews of up-armored Humvees.
With regard to war, what Kennedy and has advocates should most be ashamed of is how, much as he had in the 1960s and 70s, he continued to oppose the successful prosecution of a war in which both American troops and American interests were engaged, but more than that, American moral obligations were committed, instead advocating abandonment the result of which was and would be easily predictable mass killing and dictatorships. The banner moment in the Iraq war was actually not his vote against war in the first place. That was irresponsible enough. It was his opposition to George Bush’s surge strategy, which brough Iraq back from the brink and thwarted a looming, politically induced Vietnam-style failure.
Ironically, just as it was the security unapologetically enforced by British troops and intelligence agencies at great cost over many years that created an environment within which Kennedy could work his peace-making magic in Northern Ireland, it was the removal of Saddam Hussein by force and the subsequent security provided by U.S. troops that has given Iraq and the broader Middle East their best chance at democracy, stability and peaceful ethnic co-existence that, absent American involvement, most certainly wouldn’t have happened. Quite the opposite, we would have faced the high likelihood of an uncontrolled Arab-Iranian nuclear arms race and upon Saddam’s natural or unnatural demise, a genocidal bloodbath and power struggle that would have dwarfed the trauma of the Iraq war … with even more naked Iranian and Syrian interference and without the tempering presence of the United States.
In the long term, nothing has damaged the security interests of the United States in the long term more than the abandonment of Vietnam, compounded by the Iranian hostage crisis, compounded by the ineffectual responses to terrorism and Saddam Hussein in the 1990s, and the abandonment of Iraq could well have been the death knell for the United States as the dominant force for good in the world. That is something, considering the alternatives, people of all non-autocratic political stripes and nationalities should deeply concerned about going forward. For now, Kennedy’s failure to negatively influence the prosecution of the Iraq war is something we should all be grateful for. The world is a better place for it.
Apologies in advance, if anyone considers any of that to be speaking ill of the dead and takes offence. But even on the day of burial, it doesn’t serve anyone to allow history to be misconstrued, glossed over and imagined as anything other than it was. To do so never exalts the dead, only in the end diminishes them. And the most tragic thing would be if Ted Kennedy’s legacy were to be the enshrinement of privilege, shortsightedness, obstructionism, political manipulation, divisiveness, hypocrisy and revisionism as laudable traits in American politics.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:25 am Comments (6) on Saturday, August 29, 2009
6 Responses to “Legacy”
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August 29th, 2009 at 11:33 am
[...] This post was Twitted by julescrittenden [...]
August 29th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
There’s speaking ill of the dead, and then, there’s speaking the truth about the dead. What you have done, Jules, is the latter.
August 29th, 2009 at 2:13 pm
Jules, you go to great lengths to be measured. This guy destroyed so many lives for his own political and personal benefit. I had and have no respect for him whatsoever.
August 29th, 2009 at 9:40 pm
[...] as MA resident Jules Crittenden explains, it’s not quite that simple: The lefty lad explains that because Massachusetts politics are dominated by Democrats, it’s OK [...]
August 30th, 2009 at 11:44 am
[...] In the interest of…well, decency, actually, Jules finds something nice to say about the raddled old murderer: In what is perhaps his most meaningful legacy, something [...]
September 13th, 2009 at 1:44 am
[...] There are very few people I wish death upon, such as Kim Jung Il. Kennedy was by no means one of those people, so his death is too bad. That being said, I am quite glad he is out of the Senate, for a whole variety of reasons, as there is much to say about the man. [...]