Ted Kennedy made his run for the White House 11 years too late

TED KENNEDY was both the most loved and one of most hated and divisive politicians in the United States. Republicans frequently depicted him as the embodiment of evil and amorality, as well as a relic of the self-indulgent liberalism of the 1960s.

Coming from a family touched by greatness and plagued by unfathomable tragedy, he was the passionate and sustained voice that liberalism needed during decades of conservative domination.

The late senator was unquestionably one of the most effective legislators in US history. He was one of the driving forces in promoting racial integration in the 1960s, in combating poverty and in promoting gender equality in the 1970s, in supporting disability in the 1980s and in driving education reform in the 1990s. Critics accused him of pushing for bigger government as the solution for every problem.

The conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh lashed this week’s “slobbering media coverage” of Kennedy’s death for ignoring his personal misconduct. He went on to denounce Kennedy as a politician who “uses the government to take money from people who work and gives it to people who don’t work.”

Good-humoured and gregarious, Kennedy was able to build the most unlikely alliances to enact legislation. Last year he and Senator John McCain sponsored the unsuccessful immigration reform bill. Kennedy was not just trying to help the 25,000 undocumented Irish immigrants, but also nine million illegal Mexican immigrants in the US.

He angered Democrats by backing President George W Bush’s plan to add a prescription drug benefit to Medicare and he supported Bush’s education reform in the No Child Left Behind Act. He aligned himself with Republican Robert Dole to push through the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act in 1989.

The only two senators who served longer in the US Senate were Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who had been there for more than 50 years, and the late Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. Although Kennedy would have been poles apart from those two in ideology, he cooperated with both — with Thurmond in passing crime legislation and with Byrd in a variety of matters.

Thurmond and Byrd were trenchant critics of civil rights. Yet when told that Ted Kennedy had a malignant brain tumour, Byrd paid tribute to him on the floor of the Senate and broke down and wept. Politicians sometimes have great personal respect for each other even though they may despise each other’s ideology.

For instance, Kennedy had a long friendship with Ronald Reagan. “Ronnie and Ted could always find common ground, and they had great respect for one another,” Nancy Reagan declared in Los Angeles this week. “I considered him an ally and a dear friend.”

Ted Kennedy could well have been president but he let the moment slip in 1968, following the assassination of his brother Bobby. Had Bobby Kennedy lived, he would likely have won the nomination. Many people believe he would then have beaten Richard Nixon.

John F Kennedy had beaten then Vice-President Nixon in the presidential race of 1960 and Bobby would have been in an even stronger position in 1968. Because most pundits believed Bobby would have beaten Nixon, however, I do not believe Nixon would have won the Republican nomination.

Faced with another defeat, the Republicans would more likely have turned to Reagan or Nelson Rockefeller who were both challenging Nixon for the party nomination. But after Bobby Kennedy’s death, the Republicans felt Nixon could actually win.

Ted Kennedy came very much into public consciousness when he delivered an intensely moving and memorable eulogy at Bobby’s funeral, which was televised live throughout the US.

America was watching as he strove manfully to control his emotions in winding up the eulogy: “My brother need not be idealised, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it. Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world. As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and those who sought to touch him: ‘Some men see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say why not?’ ”

Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago realised Nixon was likely to defeat Hubert Humphrey, so he offered to back Ted Kennedy at the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968. Had Ted accepted the challenge then, he might well have won the White House because the Republicans had already nominated Nixon and if Ted had run and won the nomination, the Democratic convention would probably not have been marred by the riots that did so much to undermine Humphrey, who still came close to defeating Nixon.

The following year Kennedy drove off a bridge at Chappaquiddick and a young woman, Mary Jo Kopechne drowned in his car. When he publicly sought to explain his actions in leaving the scene and not reporting the accident for many hours, he wondered “whether some awful curse did actually hang over all the Kennedys.”

Thereafter many people would wonder the same thing.

Since losing to John F Kennedy in 1960, Nixon was virtually paranoid about the Kennedys. Even though Ted said he would not run in 1972, Nixon still engaged in “dirty tricks” against him in case he changed his mind.

WHEN George Wallace was shot in May 1972, the FBI quickly arrested Arthur Bremer. Without waiting for any report about Bremer, Nixon was recorded in the Oval Office as he ordered aides to leak to the press that “the first reports of the interrogation” indicated that Bremer was a Kennedy supporter. “Now just put that out,” Nixon ordered. “Just say you have it on unmistakable evidence.”

Nixon’s dirty tricks during the ensuing campaign led to his resignation from the White House in disgrace a couple of years later. Kennedy did not actually decide to run for the presidency until 1979 when opinion polls showed him well ahead of President Carter in his bid for re-election.

Kennedy’s presidential campaign was a political disaster from the outset with his bumbling, inarticulate answer on national television as to why he was running. It is usually suggested he was undone by the Chappaquiddick accident, but there was also another skeleton in his closet.

In 1951 he was expelled from Harvard University for cheating. He got somebody to take a Spanish exam for him. The other guy was caught and the two of them were expelled.

People might have been prepared to forget that mistake, but the Chappaquiddick affair destroyed his presidential ambitions. It could all have been so different if Ted had seized the moment in 1968. Richard Nixon might never have become president and so much else would have changed.

As Ted Kennedy is buried today, the words of American poet John Greenleaf Whittier come to mind — “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’”