Hollow Champion
Teddy Kennedy's disasters were vivid. His legislative triumphs, draped in this week's obituaries with respectful homage, were far less colorful but they were actually devastating for the very constituencies—working people, organized labor—whose champion he claimed to be.
He had the most famous car accident in political history when he drove off a wooden bridge on Chappaquiddick Island in July 1969, saying later that he had failed in several attempts to dive down 10 feet to rescue Mary Jo Kopechne, a former aide of his dead brother Robert. She was in the back seat and drowned.
Ted quit the scene and called a Kennedy speechwriter instead of the police, a misdemeanor that cost him a two-month suspended sentence and any chance of ever following his brother Jack into the White House.
He made only one overt bid for the presidency and that was a colorful disaster, too. He challenged the Democratic incumbent, Jimmy Carter, then seeking re-election in 1980. After three years, the left in the Democratic Party was bitterly disappointed in Carter's cautious centrism and Kennedy placed himself in the left's vanguard, declaring in a famous speech that "sometimes a party must sail against the wind."
In those days, I was reporting on national politics for the Village Voice and Rolling Stone and covered Kennedy's bid. It got off to a shaky start when Roger Mudd of NBC, a well-known political reporter and TV newscaster, asked Ted on prime time why he wanted to be president. The 30 seconds of silence that followed this easy lob didn't help Kennedy's chances.
The campaign plane shot backward and forward across America, seeking photo opportunities. On one typical morning, we left Washington, D.C., at 6 a.m. and headed for the Rustbelt, where Kennedy stood outside a shuttered Pittsburgh steel mill and pledged to get the steel industry back on its feet. We shot west to Nebraska so Kennedy could stand outside a corn silo and swear allegiance to the cause—utterly doomed—of the small family farmer. Then we doubled back to New York so he could stand on a street corner in a slum neighborhood in the Bronx and promise a better deal for urban blacks and Hispanics.
I asked one of Kennedy's campaign people why they didn't simply equip a studio in Washington with the necessary backdrops—steel mill, silo, urban wasteland—but he said it wouldn't be honest. As things were, the locations we flew to may have been genuine, but the campaign pledges were as dishonest as a studio backdrop, which is why Kennedy—bellowing out his speeches like a mammoth stuck in a swamp—sounded utterly fake.
By 1980, the die was cast. Disdaining the left option offered by George McGovern in 1972, the Democratic Party had thrown in its lots decisively with Wall Street, and the big players across the American corporate landscape. The labor unions and the other foot-soldier constituencies of the party would be flung empty rhetorical bouquets with decreasing fervor every four years.
Though the obituarists have glowingly related Kennedy's 47-year stint in the U.S. Senate and, as "the last liberal," his mastery of the legislative process, they miss the fact that it was out of Kennedy's Senate office that came two momentous bits of legislation that signaled the onset of the neo-liberal era: deregulation of trucking and aviation. They were a disaster for organized labor and the working conditions and pay of people in those industries.
The theorist of deregulation was Stephen Breyer, who was Kennedy's chief counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Breyer now sits on the U.S. Supreme Court, an unswerving shill for the corporate sector.
We also have Kennedy to thank for "No Child Left Behind"—a nightmarish education bill pushed through in concert with Bush Jr.'s White House that condemns children to a treadmill of endless tests contrived as "national standards."
And it was Kennedy who was the prime force behind the Hate Crimes Bill, aka the Matthew Shepard Act, by dint of which America is well on its way to making it illegal to say anything nasty about gays, Jews, blacks and women. "Hate speech," far short of any direct incitement to violence, is on the edge of being criminalized, with the First Amendment gone the way of the dodo.
Of course, Kennedy did some decent things, which is scarcely surprising in a political career of half a century. But as much as his brothers Jack and Bobby, he was adept at persuading the underdogs that he was on their side.
To this day there are deluded souls who argue that Jack was going to pull U.S. troops out of Vietnam and that is why he was killed; that Bobby, who supervised the U.S. "Murder, Inc.," in the Caribbean, was really and truly on the side of the angels; that Ted was the mighty champion of the working people, even though he gave them deregulation and backed NAFTA, the "free trade" pact that was another body blow to American labor.
By his crucial endorsement last year, he helped give them Obama, too, now holidaying 6 miles from Chappaquiddick, on Martha's Vineyard. But because his mishaps were so dramatic, no one remembers quite how noxious his political triumphs were for those who now mourn him as their lost leader.
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Entries(RSS)
He's gone. Good riddance! Now how to undo the great harm and evil that is his only legacy?
NAFTA and other "free trade" agreements are not intended to benefit American workers. Big Business gets what it wants (cheap labor) and the liberals get what they want (a government-dependent class of Democratic voters). You might call it a domestic Axis of Evil if you wanted to be hateful.
The evil one's greatest blow against American working people was immigration sponsorship.
Tell me again why you all permit this venomouos toad a place on your page? He only turns to the right, after a life of dishonest attacks on the right, because even the left will no longer have him. Now our obits are hatchet-jobs written by out-of-work lfeties? Force him back under the rock he crawled out from. "Cockburn" is so appropriately named . . .
I think Mr. Cockburn has written a couple of interesting essays on Kennedy and Novak, with some unusual perspectives and penetrating insights. He is a welcome addition to the pages of Chronicles.
If I could, I would go to his funeral just to make sure. However, I would not be able to bear seeing the evil, disgusting thing being buried in General Lee's front yard. Oh, the sacrilege!
Free trade and massive immigration are two sides of the same coin (although I will allow that I'd rather live poor in America than poor in Internationalistan).
saltine, Cockburn has not "turned to the right," nor do I think anyone has claimed that. He is an honest liberal, and as such is not a shill for the mainstream left or the Democrat Party. So he often has the same enemies as we do, but usually for different reasons.
Teddy favored deregulation of transportation because of his family's feud with the Teamsters. That's why Hoffa supported Nixon in 1960 and 68, and Nixon pardoned Hoffa.
But deregulation was necessary to bring down the high cost of transportation, including air travel. The worst hit on the working man, especially in transportation, was Nixon taking us off gold in 1971. Energy prices, including jet fuel and diesel for trucks, were stable until then. Since then, those prices have gone up and down depending on the whims of the Federal Reserve Board, leading to the roller-coaster history of the airline industry ever since.
I worked in the trucking industry for many years, both before "deregulation" and after. Before deregulation there were a large number of small to medium sized trucking companies, mostly family owned, that handled the bulk of motor transportation. Now there are two or three major truck lines. The drivers and dockworkers (mostly teamsters back then) had decent paying jobs with decent benefits. Yes, the Teamsters got out of control but that is another story. Who were the big promoters of deregulation? Well, of course, all our libertarian friends and people like Kennedy and big business who knew they could squeeze the small truck lines out once there was dog eat dog competition. Of course, I can't help but think this was Kennedy's way of getting back at Jimmy Hoffa for his brouhaha with brother Bobby. Not all regulations are created equal. Some destroy small business, some can protect it. While there definitely needed to be some reforms in transportation, there was no call for the tsunami which actually occurred.
One of the things that struck me about Senator Kennedy's funeral, was the lack of poor people and minority members who were in attendance. I thought, however, for a televised Catholic funeral the commentators seemed inordinately respectful. The networks hired nobody, like Christopher Hitchens at Mother Theresa's funeral, to "balance" the coverage. At first I thought this was progress for the networks respect for the dead, until I realized they held the Senator's efforts for the poor as far superior to any that Mother Theresa had made. In fact, it had more in common with a democratic rally than a Catholic funeral. I was also disappointed that only Ethel and Eugene maintained any sense of public bearing that was once a part of high ritual and solemnity in the Western world. The later generation had the bearing of Bill Clinton trying to salute Marine Guards when he first took office. Even the clergy were without it, reminding all of us of the old adage about knew wine in old skins.