The Trouble With Teddy

(5 of 5)

Kennedy's face sometimes looks flushed and mottled, with the classic alcoholic signs of burst capillaries, puffiness and gin-roses of the drunk. Sometimes he simply looks like hell -- fat, dissolute, aging, fuddled. But his powers of recuperation are amazing. He has, when he needs it, an organizing inner discipline that allows him, by an act of sheer will, to pull himself together, to focus and resume a senatorial, Kennedy star quality.

What then is shadow in Ted Kennedy? It is not only impossible to say but also presumptuous. A man with Kennedy's temperament and past may need a sort of unofficial self that he can plunge back into now and then -- a rowdy, loutish oblivion where he feels easy, where he takes a woozy vacation from being a Kennedy. It is said that a drunk stops growing emotionally at the age at which he began serious drinking. That would probably be the age then of the unofficial self.

Like other Kennedys, Ted may have a strange capacity to serve as both an exemplar and a warning. He has some of the best and worst qualities of the country. The only shadow that he is responsible for, of course, is the one inside himself.