The Trouble With Teddy

It is not entirely a nasty delight in gossip that makes people wonder about the character of Ted Kennedy.

The curiosity goes deeper than that. Kennedy somehow calls forth nagging mysteries of American politics and psychology. He is a lightning rod with strange electricities still firing in the air around him -- passions that are not always his responsibility but may emanate from psychic disturbances in the country itself. America does not have a completely healthy relationship with the Kennedys.

Ernest Hemingway wrote: "The most complicated subject that I know, since I am a man, is a man's life." Ted Kennedy is a complicated man. The picture of him as Palm Beach boozer, lout and tabloid grotesque is one version. He has other versions -- more interesting selves. Alcohol, or some other compulsion, may drive him now and then to bizarre and almost infantile behavior. But Ted Kennedy also is a remarkable and serious figure.

Once, long ago, he was the Prince Hal of American politics: high-spirited, youthful, heedless. He never evolved, like Prince Hal, into the ideal king. Instead he did something that was in its way just as impressive. He became one of the great lawmakers of the century, a Senate leader whose liberal mark upon American government has been prominent and permanent. The tabloid version does not do him justice. The public that knows Kennedy by his misadventures alone may vastly underrate him.

But Kennedy lives under the rule of a peculiar metaphysic. He had to soldier on in the messy world after Camelot floated away into memory. Unlike his brothers, extinguished in their prime, Teddy would get older and coarser and lose some of the boyo's flashing charm. He would make mistakes. And -- something that did not happen in Camelot -- he would pay for them.

Perhaps his life was cracked after Bobby died, and Teddy found he was on his own and began to cross over from the powerful myth of his family into real time, which is intolerant of the bright and ideal. The fracture set a pattern of sharp contradiction: the "brief shining moment" would give way to long, sordid aftermaths. Greek tragedy ("the curse of the Kennedys") would degenerate into sleazy checkout-counter revelations ("Jack and Bobby and Marilyn"). The serious lawmaker in Ted Kennedy would turn now and then into a drunken, overage, frat-house boor, the statesman into a party animal, the romance of the Kennedys into a smelly, toxic mess. The family patriarch, the oldest surviving Kennedy male, would revert to fat, sloppy baby.

The question is, Why? Was all this unhappy transformation the influence of metaphysics? Or was it alcohol? In any case, the shadow fell. Consider a string of hypotheses:

-- If it had not been for alcohol, Chappaquiddick almost surely would never have happened: Ted Kennedy, that is, would not have driven off the Dike Bridge on Martha's Vineyard in the middle of one night in the summer of 1969, drowning a young campaign worker named Mary Jo Kopechne.

-- Without Chappaquiddick, Teddy Kennedy would naturally have taken his place as leader of the Democratic Party, succeeding his assassinated brothers.