I remember well that Friday afternoon civics club meeting I was chairing back in the eighth grade -- working out the details of one of the guys bringing his aquarium into the classroom -- when our principal, Sr. St. Augustine, came over the school-wide address system to advise everyone at Immaculate Conception School that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.
We were Catholic kids. Trust me, we were very aware that he was the first and only one of us to be elected President. We loved the guy and his family. Our hearts broke when little Patrick died at birth in the hospital. The term hadn’t been coined yet by Mrs. Kennedy, but this was our Camelot. How much tragedy could we and the Kennedy family take?
My first thought after the initial shock was that President Kennedy couldn’t die. I mean, we needed him. We kids needed him, that’s for sure. Along with John Glenn and Alan Shepherd, he was a genuine, grade A, American hero -- the author, for pete’s sake, of Profiles in Courage. How could God take him from us?
Well, we all know what happened within the next hour. Our America was no more. It changed. Radically. And our innocence went with it. It’s part of the reason I like the movie Dirty Dancing: it’s summer story was to have taken place in 1963. Max, the proprietor, says at the end of the movie that he could feel something changing. Boy. Did it ever.
Even with the horror of losing our Presidential hero, however, there were still the other Kennedy brothers. We didn’t know attorney general Robert and Massachusetts senator Teddy as well, but I believed they were good men and when given their chance, surely they would make us proud Catholics as Jack did. I was in the eighth grade, after all. We hadn't heard the Marilyn Monroe stories yet.
And we all know how their stories turned out. Of four Kennedy boys, Jack was the only to serve in the highest office of our land, and then only for three years at that. Joe died over Europe in World War II, Bobby murdered the night he won the California Democratic primary in 1968, and though Teddy found his way out of his submerged car at Chappaquiddick a year later, his Presidential aspirations were not as fortunate. Neither was Mary Jo Kopechne.
So if the truth be told, I haven’t been a real Ted Kennedy fan over the years. I liked his progressive/liberal politics well enough, but I always thought he acted irresponsibly with Kopechne and pretty much got away with it.
Presidential material? Maybe not. But while listening to retellings of Ted’s life over this last weekend, the Kennedy story was dusted off and, for me, polished to a 1960s shine once again. I hoped a little bigger back then. I remember.
Perhaps a sinner, it was he, the Lion of the Senate, who made universal health care his self-proclaimed political cause of his life. He tried and failed with Clinton in 1994. Still, he sponsored lots of health care legislation over almost five decades in the Senate -- and was successful passing some. Medicare was one. Not bad.
The political cause of Ted Kennedy’s life and the substance of his legacy issue is now upon us. America gets to decide soon if we are big enough as a nation to guarantee that everybody can see a doctor and get treatment when they get sick. I know it galls some that somebody somewhere might get something they didn’t earn. But what of the moral issue of insuring that all Americans get medical care if they need it? Most, if not all, major industrial countries do it already. Except us.
What will the United States do?
Today’s elder idea: We’ll make health care what it should be in America: a fundamental right for all, not just an expensive privilege for the few.
Senator Edward M. Kennedy
on the stump, somewhere, sometime
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