Ted Kennedy: A Legacy to Cherish
Thursday, August 27, 2009
William H. Chafe is the Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of History at Duke, former president of the Organization of American Historians, and author of "The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II." This originally appeared the (Durham) Herald-Sun.
DURHAM, N.C. -- We have lost a brother, a friend, a patriot, a believer –- an inspiration who in the face of personal tragedies that would have cowed most of us into bitter silence instead held high the flag of our common ideals and insisted that we never falter in our quest for their attainment.
Ted Kennedy’s colleagues have called him the greatest senator of the last century, and clearly he excelled as master of the legislative domain. Partisan and principled on issues as diverse as immigration and health care, he also understood, profoundly, the importance of working with the opposition to achieve a tangible goal. Health insurance for children might not be as desirable as health care for all, but he -- and his Republican colleague Orrin Hatch -– nevertheless recognized the importance of moving forward together where progress was possible, rather than become frozen in partisan squabbling.
Interestingly, the moment he most regretted in his political life was his decision not to accept half a loaf of progress in health care when that was proposed by President Richard Nixon, but instead to persist in the struggle for more comprehensive care. Nowhere will Kennedy’s voice be missed more than in the delicate final negotiations forthcoming in Washington on where to strike a compromise on national health care reform.
But the heart of Ted Kennedy’s legacy is the torch he passes to us of faith in our common ideals. The Kennedy brothers appealed to the better side of our national character. It began with Jack Kennedy, who famously told his fellow citizens, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” Who among us, Jack Kennedy asked his fellow Americans, would choose to be born a “Negro” in a society where the color of one’s skin meant rates of infant mortality, illness and unemployment far in excess of those found among whites. It was time, finally, he declared, for Americans to face up to an issue “as old as the Scriptures,” one that was fundamentally a question of morality.
Jack’s brother Bobby carried forward the message, from deep in the coal mines of Peru, to the tenant-farmer shacks of black Mississippi where small children suffered cruelly from malnutrition, to the oppressive brutality of apartheid South Africa. “Each time a man stands up for an ideal,” he told a Cape Town audience, “or strikes out against injustice, he sends a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
After Jack and Bobby were torn from our midst Ted Kennedy did not give up. Rather, he honed their messages of faith in our better selves, galvanizing generations to come with his insistence on fighting for the “common good.”
“My brother need not be idealized,” he eulogized during Bobby’s funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York, “or enlarged in death beyond what he was on life, [but] to be remembered simply as a decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.” If only Americans could recognize that we are all brothers and sisters, he said, each person briefly on this planet, but all seeking to live out their lives in purpose and happiness.
In his last six months, Ted Kennedy retained his profound commitment to these values, heartened by the degree to which a new American president sought to carry forward their shared vision of working for the common good. The journey will never be finished, he said, but with each generation, a new voyage would begin. It was his task, he said, and that of all the rest of us, to sail on that voyage, keeping our eyes on the compass that shows us how to care for each other, work with each other, and fight for a justice that will enhance us all.
This is the legacy of Ted Kennedy.
