Ted Kennedy and TV . . . Still at Odds

He appears irritated, panicky and confused, at times stammering almost incoherently, aborting his thoughts in mid-sentence, rambling but unaware that he’s rambling.

No, not “Old Yellowstain”--Commander Philip Queeg, self-destructing under cross-examination in “The Caine Mutiny.”

This is not a play, or a movie starring Humphrey Bogart.

This is Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) once again getting freeze-framed by TV into history, captured recently by cameras in Washington when he finally made himself available to answer questions about his ambiguity in the aftermath of an alleged rape by his nephew, William Kennedy Smith, at the family’s Palm Beach, Fla., estate.

Shown and reshown in various sizes and forms by both legitimate newscasts and tabloid programs, the Kennedy video was inevitably shocking, a bizarre, glazed-over performance hardly to be believed.

If Kennedy has nothing to hide, he’ll be relaxed, you thought, or if he does have something to hide, he’ll have a well-rehearsed story ready for the cameras. Yet neither happened.

Even after having several days to compose his thoughts, Kennedy under pressure was still flustered and self-contradictory when asked about his initial response to the police and his alleged misunderstanding of the accusation against Smith. It was not a pretty picture of an effective legislator who appears to be respected by colleagues and who sits on the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee.

But it was a familiar one.

Many Kennedy watchers are comparing his seemingly erratic behavior in Palm Beach to the still-mysterious 1969 Chappaquiddick, Mass., case in which he was widely criticized for waiting 10 hours to inform police that a woman had been trapped in the car that he drove off a bridge. She drowned. And if obstruction of justice charges are filed in the Palm Beach case, as some expect, the Chappaquiddick comparison will loom even larger.

Yet it’s another Kennedy that his 1991 video brings to mind.

It’s the Kennedy of Nov. 4, 1979--two days before he would formally announce his candidacy for the White House--being unable to answer cogently a question put to him by Roger Mudd on a one-hour “CBS Reports” program titled “Teddy.” As it turned out, Teddy wasn’t ready.

Mudd’s question--”Why do you want to be President?”--was a soft lob down the center of the plate, and Kennedy promptly drove it into his toe.

You’d have thought he could have answered this one in his sleep, that no one runs for President without knowing why or at least being able to fake a reason to impress voters. Yet his 244-word response (“Well, I’m--were I to--to make the . . .”) was so inarticulate and unfocused that he was later savaged by political reporters and pundits looking in, and their hostile rehashing of the interview gave it greater significance and a wider audience than the relatively small one tuning in that night.

Response to the Mudd interview surely helped sink Kennedy’s candidacy and, as Jeff Greenfield noted in his book about the 1980 Presidential campaign, showed how the media “crystallize an impression of a candidate into an unyielding mass.”

This time, though, it’s Kennedy who’s crystallized himself into the unyielding mass, erecting this granite impression of himself as a sort of klutz with something to hide, as his own link to this case ultimately may eclipse even the alleged sexual battery charge against his 30-year-old nephew.

It doesn’t help Kennedy that TV’s own paparazzi are now sating the airwaves with accounts of his supposedly swinging sex life. Last Thursday’s wild-swinging, innuendo-driven, peephole’s-eye-view by syndicated “Inside Edition” was simply awful. And typically, TV’s ambush interviewers make the fleeing, puffy, blotchy senator appear guilty . . . of something, even if it’s merely wishing not to be interviewed.

Meanwhile, all of this negative coverage of his uncle ultimately may render Smith guilty by association, making it harder for him to get a fair trial.

The media’s so-called worshipful treatment of the Kennedys has always been exaggerated, evidenced by some of the tough coverage the family has received since Chappaquiddick. How ironic, though, that the younger brother of a man elected President in 1960 partly because he looked and performed better on TV than Richard Nixon should now be either stalked by the camera or facing it as if it were his executioner. And ironic, also, that someone able to be such an effective stump speaker should appear, in unscripted situations on TV, as sputtery and out of touch as an elderly Ronald Reagan.

One upon a time, Kennedy was a handsome, smiling media God in waiting. There’s a message here for all politicians: Charisma is fleeting, and what the camera giveth, at some point the camera can take away.