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December, 1999

Edward M. Kennedy: A Biography By Adam Clymer William Morrow & Co. Click on the title to buy the book

) In 1957, his fellow senators asked John F. Kennedy to chair a committee honoring five of their predecessors whose oval portraits would adorn the President's Room off the Senate floor. After consulting historians and politicians, the author of Profiles in Courage chose Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, Robert M. LaFollette Sr., Robert A. Taft Sr., and Daniel Webster.

Few would then have predicted that JFK's youngest brother would someday be a candidate for similar enshrinement. Make room for Teddy? At the time, Edward Moore Kennedy's only public record was on the blotter of the Virginia State Police, who issued speeding tickets to the University of Virginia Law School student. His reputation as a Rabelaisian roustabout lingered until 1992, when he remarried at 60. Yet the man who transformed Chappaquiddick and Palm Beach into campgrounds of dysfunction, if not debauchery, "deserves recognition not just as the leading senator of his time, but as one of the greats in its history," writes Adam Clymer.

The Senate is an intimate, forgiving institution where a colleague's flaws are visible daily and where most members know that being chaste and sober is no guarantee of being honorable or effective. When Republicans controlled Congress and while his own party was drifting rightward, Kennedy never compromised on core issues, like civil rights, while working incrementally for other changes. Millions of Americans are healthier physically and even financially because of Kennedy's efforts on health care and the minimum wage. "A son of privilege, he has always identified with the poor and the oppressed," Clymer writes.

Edward M. Kennedy: A Biography is a story of the peculiar triumph of starting at the top and overcoming low expectations. The 30-year-old politician elected to the Senate in 1962 was the ninth of nine children. Less cerebral than Jack or Bobby, Teddy relied more on a charm that masked a ferocious tenacity. Often tongue-tied in interviews, Kennedy had a ready answer in 1994 during his seventh successful campaign for the Senate. Asked to list his greatest strength, he said "Perseverance."

In the Senate's all-time roster of seniority, Kennedy now ranks seventh, still behind those sequoias, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia. In 1969, after Kennedy was elected majority whip, Majority Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana delivered the ultimate tribute: "Of all the Kennedys, the senator is the only one who was and is a real Senate man." Kennedy lost the whip's job in 1971 to Byrd, an avid historian of the chamber, who said six years later, "Ted Kennedy would have been a leader, an outstanding senator, at any period in the nation's history."

Kennedy's journey from playboyville to the Senate's enduring pantheon is a terrific story, and Adam Clymer is a terrific reporter, as faithful readers of The New York Times know. If the prose style of his biography can evoke the heft and pace of the Congressional Quarterly Almanac, that only suggests the astonishing range of Kennedy's legislative interests. Since first elected 37 years ago, he has plunged his thick Irish mitts deep into every topic of public policy, save perhaps the environment: health care, housing, civil rights, criminal justice, labor, education, transportation, immigration, refugees, the military, and foreign policy.

Clymer does not sugarcoat his subject's flaws: "At the bridge at Chappaquiddick his conduct caused Mary Jo Kopechne's death. Whatever happened in the hours before and after the accident---the stuff of controversy for three decades---is trivial compared to that one blunt, sad fact." At times in his career, Kennedy's days and nights swung between substance and squalor: "Even during a year of vast legislative accomplishment like 1985, he seemed remarkably unhappy, chasing women and drinking heavily."

While some biographers protest the profound unknowability of their subject, Clymer lets the reader do the psychological speculation, while he does the reportorial work, finding details that illustrate how the Kennedy legacy has both blessed and cursed its surviving standard-bearer.

At Harvard College, Kennedy had arranged for a fellow undergraduate to take a Spanish exam for him despite advice from his father, "who had once warned Ted to be careful because he was the kind of person who would always get caught." He was caught, banished, and then served as an Army private for two years before returning. On January 24, 1980, amid an ill-advised, almost unplanned run for the presidency, Kennedy stopped by headquarters to buck up the troops. President Jimmy Carter had just clobbered him in the Iowa caucuses by a 2-1 margin, forcing Kennedy to deny to reporters that he was quitting the race. While visiting the delegates' desk, he took a phone call from Puerto Rico. The call went badly and Kennedy said, "Now you see how much trouble I had with Spanish."

Chappaquiddick helped to doom Kennedy's White House hopes. While he never articulated his reasons for challenging Carter in 1980, he did so after the election, when he praised Carter's victorious opponent: "Ronald Reagan has restored the Presidency as a vigorous, purposeful instrument of national leadershipŠ He moved the country." Optimism, not malaise, has been the Kennedy credo, of the family and the man alike. It was the mantra, the formula, the McGuffin of this long-running drama, even when Republicans controlled Congress.

He learned a lesson from the late Philip Hart of Michigan in the Senate, "you measure accomplishments not by climbing mountains, but by climbing molehills." Through all of Clymer's conference-committee details, Kennedy's undiminished energy and enthusiasm lend his saga its own lilt of Irish laughter. While Republicans were using Kennedy as a fundraising hobgoblin to rake in millions through the mail, their bete-noire was cooperating with their party leaders, from Barry Goldwater to Nancy Kassebaum, and even, during President Clinton's impeachment trial, Phil Gramm. "That was Kennedy's institutional contribution," Clymer writes, "a moment across party lines in the traditions of his alliances with Howard Baker, Jacob Javits, Peter Dominick, Hugh Scott, Mark Hatfield, Bob Dole, Orrin Hatch, Alan Simpson, John Danforth, and Lauch Faircloth."

What is the balance sheet on Kennedy's legislative legacy? He's been around long enough to have revised several of his "reforms," like immigration quotas. Some seemed like a good idea at the time, like the one Kennedy pushed in 1973, "a bill that encouraged the development of health maintenance organizations, which in time led to the economies, efficiencies, and irritations of managed health care."

In July of this year, the senator said "a bad bill is worse than no bill at all." He may have reached that conclusion by seeing some of his own handiwork become more loophole than law. Kennedy deserves the credit or blame for today's campaign finance system. On March 26, 1974, at the high tide of Watergate righteousness, he told the Senate, "At a single stroke, we can drive the money lenders out of the temple of politics. We can end the corrosive and corrupting influence of private money in public life. Once and for all, we can take elections off the auction block." Twenty-five years later, Bob Dole's reply seems more persuasive: "Public financing is simply not a solution for human stupidity, individual criminality, or personal greed."

Neither bipartisanship nor the drifting of his own party could erode his deep beliefs. He urged Presidents Carter and Clinton not to forget the poor while wooing the middle class. During protests against the war in Vietnam in 1970, Clymer reports Kennedy's prescience about what the war could do to Democrats and American society: "He said the party should be broad enough for supporters of the war as well as its enemies. 'We have become so preoccupied with the generation gap,' Kennedy said, 'that we have failed to see the class gap that is opening and that threatens us far more seriously."'

Of all the issue Congress confronts, nothing is simpler or more partisan than that of the minimum wage. The issue is clear to those who receive it and would like it raised. Those who oppose boosting the minimum wage, usually Republicans, see it as vastly complicated and hard to explain but remain confident that any increase will surely wreck the American economy. Just as Kennedy never rested on bringing up civil rights to the unsympathetic Reagan and Bush administrations, so he hammered away until he prevailed. "The minimum wage," he said in 1989, "was one of the first---and is still one of the best---anti-poverty programs we have."

The soundest test for any biography: Did I learn anything new about the subject? As someone who started covering Kennedy in 1961, I learned something new on every other page. This is a masterful work worthy of its subject not least because of its impressive outlay of shoe leather. Readers may be suspicious of an old-boy-network conflict in such an appraisal. Although the author quotes several of my newspaper stories about Kennedy, I am not among friends in the acknowledgments but among acquaintances in the database.

But my admiration for Adam Clymer began in 1966 when he was writing for The Baltimore Sun and both of us were documenting the twilight of the career of A. Willis Robertson, the Democratic stalwart from Virginia who succeeded Carter Glass in the Senate. Robertson, later famous as the father of evangelist Pat, refused to say what his first name was. This refusal puzzled some of us but spurred Clymer into action and into his automobile to drive down to the Blue Ridge country, where he unearthed the 1887 birth certificate of Absalom Willis Robertson.

Absalom, Absalom! Of course, the Old Testament name for the rebellious son of King David was not a proper handle for a docile disciple of the Harry Byrd machine. The thirst to settle the unanswered question, that curiosity and diligence resonates through every chapter of this splendid book, which sets a new and high standard for political biography.