The Patriarch Lies Dying
It isn’t often that a member of the United States Senate asks the governor of his home state to change the rules on appointing his successor.
Yet that is what happened last week when the senior senator from Massachusetts wrote the governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick. In the event of a vacancy, he asked Patrick to appoint an interim senator immediately rather than waiting for a special election — mandated by state law — which would take place some five months later.
Unusual, yes. Then again, the senator making the request is Edward Moore Kennedy, who has served in that august body for almost 47 years. He is the country’s greatest living legislator and its leading liberal.
If the letter is extraordinary, so are the circumstances. Ted Kennedy is 77 years old. He has brain cancer. He is dying.
He doesn’t mention his illness in his letter. But when you have been absent for months from Washington, when you cannot accept the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the White House or attend the funeral of your sister, you must be keenly aware of your mortality.
Meanwhile, Congress is considering health care with less than deliberate speed. This may well be the legislative jewel of the presidency of Barack Obama, who wants Congress to pass a bill by the end of the year.
Kennedy was diagnosed with a brain tumour in the spring of 2008; doctors said that those with his condition usually have less than 18 months. If that is so, Kennedy is running out of time.
For Kennedy, health care is the ark and covenant. “It is the cause of my life,” he says. His fear is that if the bill were to come to a vote in a divided Senate and he were not there, it might fail.
Hence, the letter from the senator to the governor, a fellow Democrat. Kennedy wants to ensure that if he cannot cast a vote, another like-minded Democrat can. Some suggest that his successor may be Joseph P. Kennedy III, his nephew and a former congressman from Massachusetts who left politics in 1998.
So here, once again, is the latest saga of the House of Kennedy. The patriarch, the last male of his storied generation, lies dying at the very moment his greatest legislative wish — universal health care — is moving to a conclusion in Congress.
It is poignant, tragic, wrenching and simply exquisitely sad, as it could only be with the star-crossed Kennedys, who do nothing — living or dying — without a sense of Shakespearean drama.
Ted Kennedy is the youngest of the Kennedys, the brother of Jack and Robert, the chieftain of the country’s most famous family, the heir to Camelot who never became president.
What is less known is Ted Kennedy, the conscientious senator. He was elected in 1962, while Jack was president and Bobby was attorney general. He was barely old enough when he took the seat, which had been held by Jack since 1952.
Ted had never been elected to anything. As his opponents charged, if his name were Edward Moore rather than Edward Kennedy, he never would have won.
Yet Ted Kennedy surprised everyone. In a long, dazzling career, he has been associated with almost every major reform of the last half century. From civil rights to the environment to education to the composition of the Supreme Court, Ted Kennedy has changed the United States.
Indeed, he may have had more impact in shaping modern America than either of his brothers, both of whom were assassinated, their work unfinished.
No cause, though, has been more important to Edward Kennedy than health care. Of this, he talks in a deeply personal way: about his long recovery in hospital from a plane crash in 1964; about his son’s bone cancer and partial leg amputation at 12; about another son’s asthma; about his daughter’s lung cancer. All survived because all received excellent health care, which they could afford.
His experience with injury and illness deepened his commitment to health care. He often laments that 47 million Americans have no coverage in a country that spends 17 per cent of its GDP on health care (in contrast to 10 per cent in other advanced countries).
In 1966, he helped create neighbourhood health centres; in 1971, he introduced a national health insurance scheme; in 1986, he pushed through a plan to continue health benefits from a former employer; in 1990, he helped pass a law prohibiting discrimination for the disabled; in 1997, he helped expand health-care coverage for children.
Now he has proposed the American Health Choices Act, which would provide universal access to essential health care. Predictably, it has set the standard and become the roadmap to the national debate. Kennedy wants to “end the disgrace of America as the only major industrialized nation in the world that doesn’t guarantee health care for all its people.”
The cause of a life, an extraordinary life, now slipping away.
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