The Passing of Edward Kennedy
Print. October 12th, 2009A hard rain fell on him, the last of the Kennedy boys.
The remnants of a tropical storm named Danny blew up from Ted Kennedy’s beloved Cape Cod on the morning of his funeral. The storm did not slap the streets of Boston with the furious wind that some had feared. But it hurled water down in silvery arrows.
Before the service began, you could look past the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, and see in the distance that the rainclouds had enveloped the tops of the taller office blocks in downtown Boston. By the time the ceremony ended, the mist had swallowed the buildings whole.
At the church, the water dribbled off the edges of the old-style baggy hats of the Boston cops; it came belching out of the gutters of buildings; it matted the coats of the bomb-squad sniffer dogs, snuffling around at the end of their handlers’ leashes.
The basilica sits on a slight incline in the middle of an area called Mission Hill, home to working people, some of them black or Hispanic Americans, some newly arrived from distant places. From the south-east end of that hill, at around 10.40 on Saturday morning, a hearse came slowly, six motorcycle outriders in front. Inside was a flag-draped coffin.
Two days previously, the coffin had been transported from the Kennedy family home in Hyannis Port, just over seventy miles away. On the country roads and on the city streets, the locals had come out to watch it go by. Its first stop had been the JFK Presidential Library and Museum. There, the night before the funeral, there had been a celebration of Kennedy’s life, punctuated by tears and raucous laughter.
The next day, the great and the good assembled in the basilica. The front pews on one side were occupied by the Kennedy family. His wife Vicki, tired-looking but composed, sons Patrick and Ted Jr., and his one surviving sibling, former US ambassador to Ireland Jean Kennedy Smith, were the most frequent focus of the TV cameras.
Across from them sat Barack and Michelle Obama, their mere existence as America’s First Couple proof that some of Kennedy’s aspirations for racial equality had been realised. Immediately behind the Obamas were the Clintons. George Bush the younger and Jimmy Carter were there too. George HW Bush was the only surviving president not present; ill-health was the cause.
The Kennedys have always straddled the ground between politics and celebrity. Lauren Bacall now came to mourn Ted, as did Tony Bennett. A photographer snapped Jack Nicholson sitting, alone and grouchy-looking, before the service began.
In other pews, the Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, sat beside Sarah Brown, wife of the British prime minister. Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams were there as well.
The ceremony lasted two hours. There was music from Placido Domingo and cellist Yo-Yo Ma. Prayers were offered up by some of the youngest members of the Kennedy clan. Scripture was read, including the passage in the Gospel of Matthew which ends with Jesus’ words: “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.”
It fell to President Obama to deliver the eulogy. His rich baritone resonated as he called Kennedy “a champion for those who had none; the soul of the Democratic Party; and the lion of the United States Senate.”
He struck personal notes, too: about gifts he had received from Kennedy, a painting and his new family dog, Bo; about the profound connection between the deceased senator and Vicki, whom Obama had met privately that morning; and about the image he now holds of his former colleague: “a man on a boat, white mane tousled, smiling broadly as he sails into the wind, ready for whatever storms may come.”
For all Obama’s rhetorical polish, it was an earlier speech that had people talking afterwards. Both Kennedy’s sons spoke before the president, and Ted Jr., who preceded Patrick, elicited the more emotional reaction.
He was nervous and his voice grew tremulous at times. But when he told a story from his childhood, several faces in the crowd lost their stoicism and crumpled.
He related how, at the age of 12, he had been diagnosed with bone cancer. He had beaten the disease, but not before he had to have a leg amputated. Soon afterwards, there was a heavy snowfall near the family’s home in Washington. His father had suggested they go sledding down the steep driveway. Ted Jr., struggling with his new artificial limb, fell on the ice, and began to cry. He would never be able to make it up the hill, he told his father.
“He lifted me up in his strong, gentle arms,” the son related, “and said something I will never forget. He said: ‘I know you can do it. There is nothing that you can’t do. We’re going to climb that hill together, even if it takes us all day.’ Sure enough, he held me around my waist, and we slowly made it to the top.”
It was a tale of a simple, strong love.
After the service ended, most but not all of the mourners kept their distance from the media. Jesse Jackson, the veteran civil rights leader, told me of his love for Kennedy. “He saw this as a nation of rights for all, not privileges for a few,” he said.
Jackson abjured the usual description of Kennedy as a liberal – though he was one, by any normal American yardstick – instead insisting that his public positions were best viewed through a moral lens.
“It’s redemptive leadership, transformative leadership,” Jackson said. “The Public Accommodations Bill [which outlawed racial discrimination on the part of hotels and similar establishments]: moral centre! Women’s rights: moral centre! The disabled having rights: the moral centre! Healthcare for all: the moral centre! That’s his legacy: he changed the flow of the American river.”
Later that afternoon, Martin McGuinness talked admiringly of the “beautiful, very poignant” service.
The North’s Deputy First Minister, as might be expected, emphasised the role Kennedy had paid in the peace process. But he also placed Kennedy in a broader context, asserting that he had long respected his and his family’s “concern for equality and social justice, particularly in relation to the black community.”
McGuinness also noted Kennedy’s famous capacity to establish friendly relationships with those with whom he disagreed. A three-way meeting between Kennedy, McGuinness and Paisley two years ago had, according to the Sinn Fein man, produced “a rapport between him and Ian Paisley that was very warm.”
Others whose names are less familiar had their own stories to tell.
Brian Hart, a 50-year-old from Bedford, Massachusetts, admitted that he had not been a supporter of Kennedy until the senator came to his aid after Hart’s son, John, a US Army Private, was killed in Iraq in October 2003. Kennedy helped Hart and his wife campaign for proper body and vehicular armour for US troops. John Hart is buried in Arlington National Cemetery, as are John and Robert Kennedy.
Ted “told my wife that the best time to go to Arlington is in the morning, so you can have a private time in a public place,” Hart said. “He was so warm and generous to our family.”
It was to Arlington that Kennedy would himself be taken, a few hours later. The plane carrying his coffin was late leaving Massachusetts and, once it got to Washington, there was another stop to make, at the US Capitol building. Around 1,000 congressional staff members, many of whom had served Kennedy, were waiting on the steps to say a last goodbye.
By the time the procession reached Arlington, and the colour party carried the coffin down a grassy slope to the newly dug grave, the sun had faded from the sky. The Washington Monument shone in the distance. A bugler played, and a seven-rifle salute was given. Kennedy was laid to rest in front of his immediate family. They lingered by the grave.
Theodore McCarrick, the archbishop emeritus of Washington, officiated at the burial. While praising Kennedy, McCarrick also read from a letter the senator had written to the Pope in the final phase of his life. “I know I have been an imperfect human being,” it acknowledged.
Such admissions drew attention to the darker side of Kennedy, which kept peeking out even on the day of his funeral. It was there in Obama’s eulogy, when the president referred to his friend as having “experienced personal failings and setbacks in the most public way possible”; it was there in the presence of William Kennedy Smith, whose trial for rape in 1991 ended in acquittal but which nonetheless shone a light upon the dissolution of his uncle Ted, who had been present during some of the night in question; and it was there in thoughts of Mary Jo Kopechne, never mentioned explicitly during the ceremonies because she never had to be. The ghosts of Chappaquiddick haunted Kennedy in life and are not exorcised by his death.
In the end, though, Edward Moore Kennedy on Saturday got what is, perhaps, the best that any of us can hope for: an acknowledgement that, when the final accounting of a life is done, both sides of the ledger should get their due weight. Kennedy’s 77 years included bouts of recklessness and solipsism. But they also had compassion and resilience in abundance– and acts like helping an amputee son, hurting inside and out, to climb an icy hill.
Kennedy now lies exactly one hundred feet from his brother Robert. Past Robert’s resting place is the eternal flame that commemorates John F Kennedy. Together, they form an arc of graves on Arlington’s green grass.
As the newest point on that arc was created on Saturday, it felt like the end of something more than one life.
For the Kennedys, and perhaps for America itself, a circle was completed. In the gloaming, a chapter reached its close.
First published in The Irish Independent, 31 August, 2009.