Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy
By the team at the Boston Globe with Peter S. Canellos, editor
480 pages, $28.00
Simon & Schuster, New York: February 2009
Ted Kennedy: Scenes from an Epic Life
By Photographers and Writers of The Boston Globe
208 pages, $28.00
Simon & Schuster, New York: March 2009
No portrait of Ted Kennedy is complete without all those whose lives are forever enriched by his life's work--the sick, the poor, the elderly, the disabled--for whom, as the Boston Globe once declared, "in actual, measurable impact on the lives of tens of millions of working families ... Ted belongs in the same sentence with Franklin Roosevelt."
--Senator John Kerry, introduction, Scenes from an Epic Life
The Lion of the Senate. (Photo by WDCPIX)
I'm not ready to let Ted Kennedy go just yet. I thought I was, for a couple of weeks there after his brain tumor was diagnosed. During those first shell-shocked days, it felt like an eternal fixture of American politics was going to be erased quite soon, and resignation set in. Yes, there would be a brief, bittersweet elegiac interim in which America was going to be blessed with a couple of months of tribute time before waving him off into the eternal historical sunset. But then, of course, he fooled us. He showed up in Denver, for the national convention. He attended the inauguration, despite being so weak he collapsed at the luncheon that followed the event. And still today he continues on, showing up just last week for President Obama's signing of the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act.
By no means was this the first time the Massachusetts senator was counted out, only to rise once again.
Two new books, both published by his hometown newspaper, the Boston Globe, document in different ways the improbable evolution of the lightest weight of the Kennedy brothers into the legend who stands astride the Senate today, revered and renowned for his dominance of that most august of American chambers. The Last Lion is a general timeline biography, authored by a panel of Globe reporters and pulled together by Globe editor Peter Cannellos. Scenes from an Epic Life draws on the photographic record of the Kennedy family to show the different stages of the senator's life in a lavish visual display with light commentary provided to move the reader quickly from one page to the next. Kennedy is born, grows, (ahem) expands and ages before our very eyes.
Each book has its own strengths, and these strengths don't overlap. The Last Lion is a traditional biography, tracing the senator's rise from youngest (and most spoiled, extroverted and light-hearted) of a big raucous, ambitious clan, to the overpowering, awe-inspiring patriarch of today. His evolution is remarkable, as told by friends and family members to the Globe reporters, with all the peaks and valleys that we know of his story and his family recounted in detail. And as the subtitle indicates, his story in many ways is an outline in reversal of expectations; his meteoric rise in the wake of his brothers and their assassinations, and his responsibility for the death of Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick in any other story would have served as opening and closing acts of a political career.
Against the odds, he came back from Chappaquiddick, challenged an incumbent president of his own party, ascended in the Senate ... and then seemed to decline yet again as the 1980s gave way to the 1990s and his extended family unraveled on the front pages of gossip magazines and his own struggles with alcohol and womanizing became fodder for the late-night comedians after the trial of William Kennedy Smith. As The Last Lion put it:
People will forever disagree, but the disintegration of Ted's personal life continued for a quarter of a century. The robust politician was dogged by obvious weaknesses, from drinking to problems maintaining relationships; his furious work ethic couldn't out run his personal problems.
After his 1980 presidential defeat, it appeared that his story was all over but the telling, that he was fated to live out his years repeating the pattern of periodic legislative successes and personal disappointments.
But there was another act to come.
Yet as the quotation notes, his "furious work ethic," part of his make-up ever since he entered the Senate, was doggedly adhered to even as the fiasco of his private life became more and more apparent. In the end, having to make a place for himself in the chamber that both of his older brothers had impatiently treated as the place where they were marking time proved to be the younger brother's salvation. No matter how messy and scandal-ridden his hours outside of government, his career and his reach became increasingly impressive on the Hill. He racked up legislation on important liberal issues, led the fight against arch-conservative Robert Bork's appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court, and forged true, deep alliances across the partisan divide. Orrin Hatch is now one of his closest friends despite their marked ideological differences. This is no small feat for an unapologetic liberal and erstwhile playboy.
The third--and one hopes--final rehabilitation of his reputation came with his marriage to attorney Vickie Reggie. As The Last Lion portrays her, she is no-nonsense, smart as a whip, stalwart and everything that the wild bachelor senator needed to help him settle down in the autumn of his life. Her influence has been steadying and companionable, allowing him to concentrate in this last great epoch of his life on championing his beloved liberal causes for the future of the country he has served so well and for so long. One of the more satisfying portions of The Last Lion is devoted to their unlikely courtship and union.
Still, there is an opacity at the heart of Edward Kennedy that is unlikely to be reached through a fact-laden narrative like The Last Lion--excellent in its own way for what it sets out to do--or a photographic coffee table book like Scenes from an Epic Life.
Additionally, The Last Lion is not without some minor flaws. It reads as the work that it is -- the work of committee assembling facts. There is little attempt to dig below the surface of the man; most of the observations made about him are superficial and obvious--struggles as the youngest to keep up with his brothers, the expectations being laid upon him as the last male in a family built around the patriarchal model, the burden of the family name. There's also an annoying recurrence of recounting incidents as if they hadn't been discussed earlier in the book, in a different context. There's a sense of a book thrown together quite quickly by objective reportorial writers who are uncomfortable with character analysis but strong on straight biographical material, all pulled together by a more-than-competent editor. But if readers are hoping for a Robert Caro/Lyndon Johnson work of psychological insight and genius, well ... you've still got to wait.
Scenes from an Epic Life is the more successful volume of the two, largely because its aim is clearly lower as a finely made photographic book destined as a gift for Kennedy devotees. Surprisingly, some of the best writing in either book is highlighted here--Senator John Kerry's introduction is stellar, managing to balance heartfelt sweetness and language honed for a statesman tribute. The photos are well-chosen and nicely laid out, with just enough text to fill in the details of what was afoot in the senator's life at the time they were taken.
Both works have the feel of eulogy, which at first seemed off-putting until, upon reflection, I thought it's probably a lot better to be above ground hearing how wonderful you are than beneath it. And as always ... we're still left wanting just a little bit more of Ted.
Thankfully, his health of late seems poised to deliver more, and the workhorse of the Senate is still with us in this historical administration, as strong as ever in his liberal beliefs, as proud as ever of his progressive policies, and still possessed, as John Kerry says in his introduction to Scenes, of "heroic steadfastness":
To appreciate fully the greatness of Senator Ted Kennedy is to understand that behind each snapshot, there has always been a heroic steadfastness. Behind the liberal lion who roared--gloriously--"the dream shall never die" is a lifetime spent in tireless service to the creed that "circumstances may change, but the work of compassion must continue." Day after day, decade after decade, Ted Kennedy has lived and legislated according to this creed, amassing a record of groundbreaking legislation equal to that of any United States senator in 232 years of American history.