The Survivor : Ted Kennedy Weathers Fall From Grace in the ‘80s to Become a Force in the Senate

At 3:27 p.m. on Nov. 6, the senior senator from Massachusetts enters the Senate and strides down the aisle, thick frame filling his double-breasted suit. The chamber is vacant but for a few tourists and the pantheon of marble busts--John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Aaron Burr--in their honored niches above the gallery.

For a moment, the senator slumps in a chair, studying a black briefing book on HR 2710, a bill to raise the minimum wage for the first time since 1981.

He steps to the podium, 99 vacant desks behind him. Holding the notebook at arm’s length, he recounts the compromise that congressional Democrats have fashioned with the White House Republicans. When deviating from the text, he stammers a bit. Hand gestures--little chops and stabs--substitute for oratorical pizazz. He drones. The gallery shrinks.

But then the senator begins to describe the explosive growth in salaries for industry executives who have resisted better pay for their minimum wage workers, fat cats pulling in high six figures while opposing a six-bit raise.

His voice rises, spiking the chamber with outrage and sarcasm. He is bellowing, to no one, but with the same vigor as if it were August, 1980, and Madison Square Garden were again crammed to the rafters.

Having spoken his mind, he wheels up the aisle and exits through the double doors.

To his innumerable critics, the image of Edward Moore Kennedy declaiming to a phantom audience is an apt metaphor for his long fall from grace.

Kennedy began the 1980s with a sound thrashing at the hands of former President Jimmy Carter; his marriage ended in divorce, while tales of boozing and womanizing continued unabated; for six years he languished in the minority after Republicans captured the Senate; the decade was dominated by his ideological antithesis, former President Ronald Reagan.

He personifies liberalism for a generation. But in 1990s America, that is a backhanded compliment at best.

“After all is said and done,” says Republican Party Chairman Lee Atwater, “Ted Kennedy is still the man in American politics Republicans love to hate.”

At least some of the blame for liberalism’s decline may be laid at his door, and he has been unable to articulate a compelling vision of America’s future acceptable to a majority of the Democratic Party, much less the American electorate. Ruled by his passions, for good and ill, he will forever draw resentment from those who believe he squandered his chance to leave a larger imprint on society.

This image of liberal impotence, however, can be misleading. For as the 1990s begin, Ted Kennedy sits in the catbird seat on Capitol Hill. He will not be President, and seems to know that. Instead, he has channeled his energy and ambition into the Senate, a small, clubby hive of barons that perfectly suits his talents.

Now fifth in seniority in the upper chamber, he has built a kind of shadow government as chairman of the Labor and Human Resources Committee and head of Judiciary and Armed Services subcommittees. Through serendipity and political acumen, he is positioned to dominate the domestic agenda for the rest of this century.

Even Kennedy’s political adversaries acknowledge that his fingerprints may be found on much of the significant social legislation of the past quarter-century: voting rights, immigration reform, occupational safety, fair housing, consumer protection, and on and on.

In the 100th Congress, he shoved 39 bills through his committee and into law, including a big AIDS package and restrictions on the use of lie detectors in the workplace. Of nine Democratic objectives in the Senate for this second session of the 101st Congress, five will be routed through Kennedy’s Labor Committee.

“He’s becoming the statesman that we all hoped he would be,” says Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the ranking Republican on Labor. “Whether you agree with him or not, he’s become one of the all-time great senators.”

Yet, as ever, he remains a figure of controversy and complexity--diligent, shrewd, loud, funny, indiscreet, generous, bibulous, moody, tenacious. An extroverted raconteur with a million friends, he can be his own worst enemy. His vices are well-catalogued, most recently in a Gentlemen’s Quarterly article that portrayed him as an alcoholic libertine “who grew to manhood without learning to be an adult.”

Steadfastly consistent in his political catechism, he is nevertheless a study in paradox: a peerless orator afflicted with bouts of baffling incoherence and blurry political vision; a droll, self-deprecating wit who can be foul-tempered and impatient; a champion of righteous causes whose personal morals are perpetually under fire; a compassionate advocate for the better angels of our nature, capable, in the phrase of one admiring former aide, of “calculated demagoguery”; an implacable foe of Reaganism and Reaganomics who openly admires Ronald Reagan.

He embodies a peculiarly American archetype--the Good Bad Boy--who perseveres, with charm, despite life’s vicissitudes and his own defects. Driven by dreams of a better future, he refers frequently to the past and his fallen brothers--often to good political effect, but without seeming manipulative, perhaps because so much of his personal memory is our public memory.

“Don’t you think,” says former Kennedy press secretary Bob Shrum, “that the country has a very complicated set of feelings about him and his family?”

The most public of politicians, Ted Kennedy is also one of the most difficult to know. Several months of Kennedy-watching leave a curious thatchwork of impressions.

Accustomed to dominating any room he enters, he can be overbearing and caustic--”that snitty tone,” one acquaintance calls it--if the limelight focuses elsewhere.

Intensely competitive, he loves to wager, not as a compulsive gambler but rather as someone who enjoys being right.

He is neither erudite nor particularly analytical, except when it comes to politics.

He also is impulsive: During a trip to Sparta, Ga., in December, he abruptly deviated from the schedule to tromp through a marshy field and inspect the wood filigree on an old barn that was for sale. “It’s only $7,500,” he muttered aloud, “but where would I put it?”

In late February, during a dinner in Washington for Vaclav Havel, Kennedy decided the new Czech president must visit the Lincoln Memorial--and off they went, late at night.

“If you want to find Ted Kennedy,” says Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), echoing a similar line about Franklin D. Roosevelt, “listen for the laughter.”

Robust humor is both salient in Kennedy’s character and a secret to his political success. He is a gifted mimic, whether imitating Italian ward heelers in New England or his grandfather’s singsong Boston brogue. He often lampoons himself, particularly his girth.

His puckish streak plays well on the Hill, where humor can heal even the most jagged political wounds.

Two years ago, Kennedy and Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) fell into a heated Labor Committee argument over additional federal aid to education. After several barbed exchanges, Kennedy cut off the discussion and gaveled the session to a close. But as the two senators left the room for a meeting of the Judiciary Committee, Kennedy threw an arm around his colleague’s shoulder. “C’mon, Strom,” he urged, “let’s go upstairs and I’ll give you a few judges.”

The flip side of good humor is bad humor, particularly if Kennedy’s patience is taxed.

In Geneva, Switzerland, several years ago, he threw a bitter tantrum when a snafu caused a girlfriend to show up at the wrong airport terminal. Last November, as Congress careened toward a recess, he apologized for his office petulance by sending flowers to his secretaries--with a note signed, “From Grumpy.”

Even the ritualized courtesies of the Senate melt away when he blows a fuse. Kennedy erupted during a small, private meeting about a drug bill in the vice president’s office in the Capitol. When Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.) persistently questioned a Kennedy amendment regarding the death penalty--a provision that Senate leaders already had agreed could come to a floor vote--Kennedy exploded: “I even opposed the death penalty for the man who killed my brother!”

In recent years, Kennedy has found it easier to make public reference to the tragedies that stain his life. But sometimes the scar tissue rips away.

In November, 1983, the night before a memorial Mass at Holy Trinity Church in Georgetown marking the 20th anniversary of John Kennedy’s assassination, he stopped abruptly while rehearsing his remarks and stalked in sorrow and anger down the aisle and out of the church.

In 1986, at a House luncheon celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Peace Corps, Kennedy again faltered during his speech. Waving a hand in front of his face as though trying to claw away the pain, he turned, left the podium and walked back to his Senate office alone, several staff members trailing at a respectful distance.

The overriding impression Kennedy leaves is of a man consigned to perpetual motion. Involuntary idleness--waiting for a late plane, getting stuck in traffic--often makes him furious.

“He’s like a shark--not in the negative sense, but rather in the fact that he’s got to keep moving all the time. That’s part of Ted Kennedy’s metabolism,” says Thomas M. Susman, who spent 11 years on the Judiciary staff.

“Why is he so driven?” another former Judiciary staffer asks. “Because when you’ve got a legacy like his, you’re one step ahead of the shadows. He’s competing with myths.” Less generous and more prosaic is the explanation of another aide who sees occasional glimpses of “a spoiled rich kid . . . who’s never had to wait in line for anything.”

He ardently believes in the urgency of his causes, in pushing for a society that is fair, just, humane. As the sole male survivor in a family obsessed with public achievement, he is constantly confronted with the unfinished agenda--and legendary stature--of his brothers.

And were he to stop “moving all the time,” in Susman’s phrase, who would Ted Kennedy be? Perhaps just another rich playboy, a clutch of appetites and indulgences, a nobody. As one of his closest friends observes, “This is a man who’s not asking many questions about life; he’s just doing it.”

“My babies,” Rose Kennedy once said, “were rocked to political lullabies.” Clearly, Ted Kennedy remembers the lyrics.

When referring to himself professionally, he almost invariably uses the word “politician, and on political terrain he is as sure-footed as anyone on Capitol Hill.

In the cloakroom or on the floor, Kennedy shuttles between senators, wheedling, guffawing, importuning and periodically peeking at a note card of colleagues to lobby and subjects to discuss.

Brother Jack considered his youngest sibling the best politician in the family, and that may be most evident in Boston.

The Kennedy brand of politics requires a big, sometimes brassy supporting cast.

“Kennedy uses staff people the way Pony Express riders used horses: Ride ‘em hard and then leap to another horse,” says Thomas M. Rollins, former staff director of the Labor Committee. “He’s a genius at managing people.”

Kennedy’s presidential ambitions once attracted bright young Democrats who envisioned themselves with big offices in the White House West Wing. Today the rewards must be found in working for a senator able to get things done.

His staff is one of the Senate’s largest, with nearly 100 professionals and several dozen interns and visiting fellows. Universally acclaimed for its competence, the staff is often suspected of being the driving force behind the senator’s success. In truth, the relationship is symbiotic, an intimate bond of mutual benefit.

Kennedy’s nocturnal ramblings and other personal habits have been the subject of uncommon public interest since a young woman died in his car beneath the bridge at Chappaquiddick more than 20 years ago.

Tales of his drinking and raffish behavior have become part of his public persona, often lumped under a vaster damnation known as “the character issue.”

He appears to compartmentalize his off-duty conduct and his Senate responsibilities. During dozens of interviews for this article, with friends and foes, not one could cite an instance in which drinking appeared to impair him professionally.

Yet Kennedy also has a knack for embarrassing himself in public. He was: caught in flagrante delicto with a female luncheon companion on the floor of La Brasserie restaurant in 1987; photographed last summer atop a comely brunette on a boat in St. Tropez; observed with Dodd in 1985 as they smashed each other’s autographed pictures in La Colline restaurant on Capitol Hill; involved in a barroom scuffle last winter at 2 a.m. with a heckler in Manhattan.

Such episodes provide ample ammunition for the senator’s political antagonists. “He has been utterly shameless, brazen and indifferent to what should be his internal conscience,” says Howard Phillips, chairman of the Conservative Caucus.

Without question, Kennedy likes to drink. During a two-hour stretch on a Lufthansa flight from Boston to West Germany in November, he downed two Scotches, two vodkas, and, with dinner, three glasses of red wine. After three hours of sleep, he appeared sharp and refreshed upon arriving in Frankfurt, where he put in a full day. He also is disciplined enough to stop drinking during his annual winter diet. Last year, for example, he lost 50 pounds in 49 days, imbibing little more than a weight-loss concoction.

But the wine-and-women lifestyle leaves him vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy. When the nomination of John Tower as Defense secretary turned into a referendum on extracurricular behavior, no senator kept his head lower than Kennedy--to the point that it became a joke on the Senate floor and in the press gallery. (Kennedy eventually voted against Tower’s nomination.)

Kennedy is not enlightening when discussing morality and his private behavior. He professes to ignore accounts of his drinking and womanizing. His colleagues, he says, will judge him on the basis of the man they know rather than the man they read about.

Among human virtues, Kennedy rates loyalty very high. For nearly 30 years, he has been a faithful standard-bearer for the very young and very old, for immigrants and refugees, for blacks and American Indians and blue-collar workers. For the most part, these constituencies have repaid the allegiance. An Ebony poll in 1988 found that the magazine’s black readers trusted Kennedy more than any other white American.

Kennedy sees himself now as more tolerant, patient, pragmatic--”finally hitting my stride.” In recent years, he has elevated his native gift for getting along with older men into a potent knack for coalition building.

He and Hatch, hardly organized labor’s best friend, joined forces to overcome White House opposition in 1988 and pass into law a bill that prohibits most employers from using polygraph tests on workers or job applicants.

Last summer, Kennedy spent hours meeting with White House Chief of Staff John Sununu, Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh and Senate Republicans to reach a compromise on the Americans With Disabilities Act, prohibiting discrimination against 43 million Americans with physical or mental handicaps.

Perhaps Kennedy’s greatest asset in the Senate is persistence. In the late 1970s, he labored to fashion an 880-page bill that restructured the U.S. criminal code, only to see the proposal die in the House. Six years later, he finally succeeded in finessing many of the provisions into law.

But on other issues, the jury is still out. In the 1980s, Kennedy tried to modify the liberal agenda by shifting costs away from the federal Treasury to businesses. His most ambitious effort in this vein involves mandatory, employer-financed health insurance, a proposal that thus far--to Kennedy’s great frustration--has failed to muster sufficient political support.

Less clear is Kennedy’s larger message about the nation’s future. Kennedy speaks of “convincing the people that you want to be able to do more with less,” of discovering “ways that we can still stay committed to these fundamental values, but do it in different ways.”

When asked how Democrats can “move beyond the New Deal, the New Frontier, and the Great Society,” as he says they must, Kennedy replies, “We ought to be in a more important and dramatic way focusing on the minimum standards of decency in terms of the quality of life for working men and women.”

That’s the ideology Democrats are going to ride to the White House? he is asked.

Kennedy shrugs and replies, “There are some that would agree and some that would differ.”