The three brothers share a Virginia hillside with a view of a city that few would call shining. John F. Kennedy’s gravesite—as befitting a fallen president—is the most elaborate. A large circular stone plaza to accommodate the crowds that still come to Arlington National Cemetery 46 years after his assassination, topped with a simple black granite headstone and an eternal flame. Down a short path like the spoke of a wheel, Robert F. Kennedy, gunned down in 1968, lies beneath a plain white cross. And now, a little further still, Edward M. Kennedy, buried this past weekend in the shadow of two large maples, and his tragic siblings.
The 77-year-old, who succumbed to brain cancer on Aug. 25, was the youngest of nine children, and never meant to be the family standard-bearer. But the political ambitions that fell to J.F.K. when the eldest brother, Joseph Jr., died in action during the Second World War descended inexorably down the line with each fresh family horror. And in the end, “Teddy,” a man who proved to be far too flawed for the nation’s highest office, improbably may be remembered as the greatest of them all. In his 47-year career as a U.S. senator for his native Massachusetts, Kennedy authored more than 300 pieces of legislation, and steered thousands more through partisan shoals with a unique mix of bluster, bonhomie, and pragmatism (“Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” was his oft-repeated credo).
His progressive legacy includes legal protection for the disabled, state-run health insurance for children, food programs for poor mothers, education reform, and lowering the voting age to 18. “The greatest expectations were placed upon Ted Kennedy’s shoulders because of who he was, but he surpassed them all because of who he became,” President Barack Obama eulogized at the packed funeral mass in a Boston basilica. “A champion for those who had none, the soul of the Democratic party, and the lion of the United States Senate.”
History has taught us that John and Jackie’s Camelot was never more than a glamorous myth. Robert may have joined Martin Luther King Jr. in calling for a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam, but after his slaying it took five more years and a Republican president to bring his brother’s war to an ignoble end. Written off as a political force after 1969’s Chappaquiddick incident, Teddy proved that some American lives do indeed have second acts. And as if to emphasize the point, fell from public grace again two decades later as an aging, drunken roué, only to stage another comeback. He was the best and the worst his country has to offer wrapped up in a single package. The last call for an American dynasty.
If Joseph P. Kennedy, the late president’s father and patriarch of the clan, left his sprawling brood with anything—besides a vast fortune and influence to burn—it was an almost religious belief in the virtues of effort. “For the Kennedys,” he used to boast, “it’s the outhouse or the castle—nothing in between.” But for the longest time, it seemed like Teddy never absorbed the lesson. Growing up in a family of strivers—J.F.K.’s prep-school yearbook presciently declared him “Most likely to become president”—he was an indifferent student. And in 1951, his first year at Harvard, he was expelled for having a friend take a Spanish exam in his place. (The family managed to suppress the story until Ted first ran for his big brother’s old Senate seat 11 years later.) There was a two-year stint in the army, spent safely away from the battlefields of Korea at NATO’s then-headquarters in Paris, then a less eventful return to Cambridge to complete his degree before moving on to study law at the University of Virginia.
Ted’s first political experience was managing John’s Senate re-election campaign in 1956. (The war hero returned to Boston from his PT boat and won a seat in Congress in 1946, graduating to the upper chamber six years later.) In 1960, he oversaw efforts in the Rocky Mountain states for J.F.K.’s presidential campaign. But it was Bobby, a crusading special counsel in Washington, who was rewarded with a seat at the cabinet table as attorney general.
The Kennedy blueprint called for Ted to take over in the Senate, but at 28 he was two years younger than the minimum age set out in the U.S. constitution. A family friend, Ben Smith, was named as a placeholder and served until 1962, when the youngest Kennedy triumphed over his razor-thin resumé—he was nominally an assistant district attorney in Boston, but spent most of his time building his political profile—and won both the Democratic primary, and a special election. Years later he still cherished the photo Jack sent him in the wake of the win. “To one coattail rider from another,” the president had written.
A report card for Ted Kennedy’s early Senate years would damn him with the faint praise, “works well with others.” Despite his famous brothers, it was generally agreed that he knew his place, was properly deferential to more senior legislators, kept his mouth shut and worked hard. He was presiding over the chamber on the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, when his brother was gunned down in Dallas. Bobby took charge of the family and funeral. It was Ted’s job to travel to Hyannis Port and break the news to their father, by then severely disabled from an earlier stroke.
When J.F.K. was slain, most of his ambitious legislative program was bogged down in Congress. It was his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, with Bobby’s incessant prodding, who finished the work and carried it further, invoking the president’s memory to push through the 1964 Civil Rights Act and start the War on Poverty. Ted remained in the background as R.F.K. picked up the family torch. Shaken, but seemingly not as stirred.
