James Naughtie: The day Ted Kennedy’s dreams died
In his new book, On The Road, James Naughtie draws on his decades of reporting to recall America’s political, economic and social evolution from Nixon to Trump. This extract revisits 1980, when the journalist and broadcaster was a political correspondent at The Scotsman and in New York to cover the Democratic Convention where Ted Kennedy’s attempt to win the nomination from Jimmy Carter finally ended. It proved to be a last hurrah of the Kennedy clan and the end of an era as Ronald Reagan and the Republicans were swept to power later that year
Senator Ted Kennedy’s pursuit of the presidency was wild and melodramatic, combining excitement and dejection, and marking, more definitively than most people realised at the time, the end point of a political age. It rekindled memories of a lost romance in politics (at least for many Democrats) and seemed to some to promise all the fervour of another march to what his brother had called the New Frontier. A Kennedy candidacy was always going to have an especially rich flavour. In the end, that was all it had.
He would almost certainly have been a candidate sooner, of course, had his partying not led to grisly tragedy a decade earlier. A campaign worker for his late brother Bobby, Mary Jo Kopechne, died in his car on June 18th 1969 (two days before the first moon landing) when he drove it off a wooden bridge in the dark on Chappaquiddick Island after a party during a regatta weekend on Martha’s Vineyard, the adjoining island off Cape Cod in Massachusetts. His ten-hour delay in reporting the accident, the determined efforts to summon help from friends and lawyers at dead of night before telling the police, his vague account of what happened when he left the party (and the strange turning his car took, onto a road that led to nowhere but a remote beach), his nationally-televised broadcast of explanation which raised more questions than it answered, produced a surge of public hostility. When he said in that broadcast that in his confusion after the accident he’d wondered if a curse did indeed hang over the Kennedys, it was a crudelyjudged appeal for sympathy that didn’t move most Americans and infuriated the rest. The 37-year-old Senator was marked as the Kennedy who would never be able to emulate his slain brothers and run for the presidency. His suspended jail sentence for leaving the scene of an accident, and the settled public belief that he wasn’t telling the truth, apparently put an end to it.
But Kennedys persevere. Ten years passed before he dared to take the chance.
As a liberal irritated by the Carter administration, by the summer of 1979 he was angry enough to try to snatch the Democratic nomination from Carter. By August, one poll even suggested he might beat Carter in the primaries by a margin of more than 2 to 1, a once-unthinkable prospect. It was fantasy, but the lure was irresistible. Then in one interview, the truth slipped out.
He sat down on Cape Cod with Roger Mudd of CBS for a TV film that was clearly intended to coincide with the campaign launch. The Senator answered questions about Chappaquiddick with obvious discomfort. Then Mudd, a senior correspondent whom Kennedy had rightly trusted to do a straightforward interview, asked the simplest of questions. Why did he want to be president? Kennedy’s answer was bumbling and unfocused, devoid of any clarity. Embarrassingly vague. He sounded as if he’d never thought about it seriously, and was running because it was a family tradition. His words trailed away, leaving the impression of a man without purpose. A veil had been lifted.
His campaign pitched and yawed through the spring, Kennedy veering from the excitement of a stump speech to some huge crowd to the despair of yet another shouted question about Chappaquiddick in a shopping mall, which was almost a daily occurrence. Time hadn’t healed the wound. There were some flashes of the natural campaigner, and the sharp tingle of a liberal crusade in the run-in, but by the time he arrived in New York for the convention in the second week of August, the chance of a famous upset had disappeared.
I happened to have a grandstand view of the denouement. A friend in Edinburgh, Nancy Drucker, was the daughter of Edwin Newman, the veteran NBC newsman who was anchoring the network’s radio coverage of the convention. He was friendly and generous, and after we had lunch on the first day of the convention he suggested that I might come into the NBC radio booth and join a panel to comment on proceedings on the floor
– on the very night that the nomination would be decided. To my astonishment, the other participants were Theodore H. White, whose Making of the President books (starting with Kennedy in 1960) I’d been devouring for years, and Miz Lillian Carter, the President’s mother. This was a cast list in which I felt myself having, at the very best, a minuscule walk-on part.
Having duly lost the nomination (Carter eventually got 64 per cent of the vote on the floor), Kennedy spoke to acknowledge defeat, on a day when his lieutenants engaged in such petty fiddling with the convention timetable with the Carter team that it almost produced fist fights backstage. Eloquent and passionate, now that everything was over, he seemed to cast off the hesitancy that had crippled his campaign. At the last, here was a candidate who had found his voice, released because all hope had gone, and spoke with style and guts. The peroration was memorable, and Madison Square Garden went wild. He quoted Tennyson – ‘to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield’ and said, ‘For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end. For those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.’
The demonstration of support on the floor lasted for the best part of half an hour.
Up in the NBC box, White spoke of a speech that had produced one of the great convention moments. I burbled for a bit. But it was when we came off the air that Miz Lillian, a twinkling lady
A Kennedy candidacy was always going to have an especially rich flavour. In the end, that was all it had
with a gracious southern style and a warm wit who was three days away from her 83rd birthday, produced a line that was rapier sharp. ‘Why,’ she said, ‘that sure was a wonderful speech. Truly wonderful. I sure hope nothing happens to that boy.’
To which there was really no adequate reply. We spoke for a little while, and she slipped away. ‘What a lady,’ said Teddy White.
The convention ended with the coolest of handshakes on the platform after Carter’s acceptance speech, Kennedy having to be manoeuvered towards the President to do the deed. White later wrote that Kennedy’s disdain and his refusal to accede to Carter’s effort to get them to raise their arms together, boxer-style made him look like someone who’d just had to attend his chauffeur’s wedding. As Democrats drifted away from New York, pretending that a truce had been sealed, they were in truth walking into the path of a political tornado that was about to rip across the landscape. Kennedy’s speech had tried to recapture the spirit of his brother’s New Frontier; but the Reagan victory that was already in the making would radically recast that dream for a generation and more.
A coda to the convention came at the end of the following summer. I was spending a weekend on Martha’s Vineyard with two friends, Peter Pringle and Eleanor Randolph, who’d rented a house there. The high heat of summer had passed, days were just beginning to shorten, the wind was brightening the barbecue fires, and there was one last party. Eleanor had covered the Kennedy campaign for the Los Angeles Times the year before and as a consequence we were all invited to spend the day at the Senator’s annual party at ‘the compound’ where the Kennedy homes cluster on the Hyannisport shore, 25 miles or so away. The easiest way to get there was to fly, so we hired a tiny plane (for a surprisingly modest sum) and hopped across Nantucket Sound, fetching up at the gates of the compound to find a Boston Irish party in full swing. It went on all day. There were barrels of Guinness and vats of clam chowder, Irish whiskey and improbably-energetic games of touch football on the lawns and the beach. Ethel Kennedy, Bobby’s widow, was enticing people into a yacht that she was sailing oceanwards; people were singing Irish ballads down by the shore. You could see that a maudlin tone would infect everyone before proceedings were over.
The afternoon had a few bizarre twists. I found myself throwing a rugby-shaped ball around with a guy maybe a decade younger than me, whom I thought I recognised. Where from? Even as I asked the stupid question, I realised the answer. He was one of Bobby’s 11 children, Christopher, who had the look of his father about him. The other slight embarrassment was the discovery that a wellknown British journalist had hooked up with a famouslyfrisky woman reporter from the New York Times and was disturbing the bushes at the edge of the lawn only a few feet from the crowd – with great vigour – as a consequence of what the papers might call, delicately, an amorous encounter. We moved away to let them get on with it with as much privacy was possible, which wasn’t much.
That aside, the afternoon left me with one sharp memory. I was standing together with Peter, a Sunday Times and Observer veteran, on the porch of the main house, where the Kennedy parents had raised their family. The Senator came across and we had a conversation. In the midst of it, to my astonishment, he held out his arm in a gesture of welcome and uttered the unlikely words, ‘Have you met my mother?’ And there she was.
Rose Kennedy was 91, a tiny bird-like figure wearing a wide soup-plate straw hat. She was full of beans, and in her rasping Boston voice asked us if we’d seen ‘the President’s house.’ No was the answer, obviously. So she strode off across the lawn and let us into JFK’S home, where we entered rooms that seemed pretty much as they must have been left in November 1963, when it all came to an end. The children’s pictures on the piano; the family mementoes. A ghostly simplicity clung to everything. We were glimpsing the relics of an era gone; a place where memories would never die but which had turned, in a few years, into a past that couldn’t be recovered. She spoke a little about family evenings there, then led us away.
Eventually, the revellers began to trek back to Boston, and the day was over. We squeezed into our little plane and jerked merrily over the sound to Martha’s Vineyard. As we did, I remember looking down just before we landed and seeing beneath us the outline of the island that juts out to the east of the Vineyard. Chappaquiddick.
There was nowhere better to quicken the senses about the profound political change that had taken place in the preceding months. The Sixties and Seventies were behind us, and slipping away fast. We were in the Reagan era.