Kennedy: A The Playboy Image

...Most people are calculating about their friendships to some extent, and politicians are more calculating than most...

...Teddy has finally been taken at his word...

...Among his natural allies were the rebellious students of our fine, liberalarts colleges, but when Kennedy went to talk to them, he told them what they did not want to hear...

...As the newest crop of unfortunates, the refugees from Vietnam, have piled up in this country, indifference has been the most charitable of the responses they provoke...

...The party did not need Teddy, not the way it udd to think it did...

...One is the health subcommittee of the Committee on Labor and Public Welfare...

...It matters that Wilbur Mills and Russell Long took one drink too many, because their performance in the Congress suffered accordingly...

...The careerists of Capitol Hill know that when they need to deal with Scoop Jackson’s office, there is one top banana to work through, and another in Hubert Humphrey’s...

...He explained the difference to me...

...After the next election, he tells them, after I am safe, I will really come on strong...

...This is not a phenomenon limited to the U. S. Congress...

...For most politicians, a calculation of the political risks is an excuse to do too little...

...Most people have grown up before they reach the Senate...

...His hold on the imagination is due less to any nostalgia for the lost glamor of Camelot than to his status as the lone relic of the shared national religious experiences of 1963 and 1968...

...People would not have to pause before saying, yes, they hoped Teddy would he President some day...

...Why doesn’t he change...

...I realize that I would not have received quite this treatment if I had not been writing the article...

...He was hardworking...

...He has few real enemies in the Senate, but even they will often agree with his friends, that Kennedy is one of the handful of most competent legislators...

...As his mother says, in the paragraph quoted above, he has a “sunny disposition”-which, as it happens, pays off handsomely in his profession...

...First, it added another string to his bow...

...When we think of Presidents, a different calculation must be made...

...If hardly unique, this was still a creditable activity, since most congressmen, especially in those days of ambitious social programs, were more interested in getting a law enacted than in checking to see what happened after it took effect...

...m o n g other things, this delicate balancing has helped Kennedy avoid one of the worst organizational trapsthe Haldeman Syndrome...

...Teddy has one or two natural enemies in the Senate-Barry Goldwater, Robert Byrd, and occasionally Gaylord Nelson, who is offended when his ideas for medical legislation seem to wind up as bills with Kennedy’s name inscribed...

...The point is that he dares to use it now...

...They see him follow every rule in the book of legislative craftsmanship and decorum And then, in a twinkling, they see another man...

...But as long as it remains, it is the reason for worrying about his candidacy...

...But no one could call his an expedient or craven position...

...But when working with Kennedy they will find themselves playing one staff member off against another-as Kennedy himself will do...

...As the campaign of 1976 drags on, he is no longer a necessary, or even a plausible, presidential figure...

...The fast driving...

...During the day his assistants dog his heels, asking him questions and feeding him facts...

...In terms of substance,” Ralph Nader said at the time the tax bill was introduced, “in a range of issues, he’s become one of the truly outstanding senators...

...Over the last five years, he has acquired two other important subcommittees, which are now his major vehicles for grinding out legislation and establishing responsible, “expert” policy positions...

...It is a matter of employer and employee...

...Like Kennedy’s Catholic Church, the journalistic profession recognizes certain de facto distinctions between private and public morality...

...He’s only 44 years old now...

...the other, the Administrative Practice and Procedure subcommittee (“Ad Prac” on Capitol Hill) of the Committee on the Judiciary...

...Now, it would take a more cynical view of human nature than I have to read these attentions as the product of single-minded calculation...

...Then he paused, staring through his window to the construction below...

...It takes both care and charm...

...They hurt the boss by denying him full exposure to the outside world, and they destroy morale by creating wild jealousies among the people below...

...The first thing he would have asked is, ‘And what are they doing about it here?’ And then he would have begun his speech saying how proud he was to be in a country that was so generous to its neighbors in distress...

...It was an admirably concrete illustration of the principle they had’been expressing in generalities-that excessive or inap propriate regulation could hurt the very interests it was designed to protect...

...Precisely because I was so confident in my undistorted judgment, my usual practice would be to do what most journalists do-namely, to make no mention of these extra-curricular contacts with the subject and the friendliness he displayed...

...There was something suspect in his position...

...In 1965 Kennedy acquired his first subcommittee, on refugees, through which he registered many of his “humanitarian” protests against the war...

...He might also be spared the unspoken horror of a presidential camp aign-not the certainty of smears upon his character, but the probability of physical harm...

...But apart from these indirect possibilities, his personal torments are not publicly significant, not as long as he stays in the Senate...

...Kennedy has been deeply involved and responsible, more so than any of his 99 colleagues...

...Now that the crunch has come, Kennedy spends many of his weekends listening to irate groups of parents, telling them that he is sorry, he understands their problems, he is Boston Irish himself, but they have to obey the law...

...But apart from these occasions, there is little social fraternization between Teddy and his troops...

...One man in particular, David Burke, a lawyer and the son of a Massachusetts cop, helped lead Teddy toward the “underdog” social positions he now cites automatically as the keystone of his policies...

...When Kennedv came to the Senate in January 1963,-he cut an extremely unimpressive figure...

...Cheers...

...Maybe in 1980 or 1984 its traces will have disappeared...

...was the reply...

...A subcommittee not only provides a half dozen or more staff assistants to do a senator’s bidding, but also gives him presumptive right to pronounce on the topic in question...

...Jimmy Carter was the first to break that barrjer, and if, as seemed unlikely, he was ever to be overtaken, it would be by someone who seemed even more potent than he...

...There was something else, he said...

...Does it have a chance...

...His one singeing bout with incaution-pushing the old family retainer, Francis X. Momssey, for appointment as a federal judge-only increased his subsequent hesitation...

...Last year, John Hersey wrote a book about Gerald Ford, called The President...

...His assistants gave me whatever help I needed...

...He has the ability, more that any other working politician, not to per-sonalize criticism,” says David Halberstam, whom Teddy’s brother John, in pique over his reports for The New York Times, tried to run out of Vietnam...

...The “legacy of Camelot” has lost some glitter in that time, and Teddy’s own imperfections have become widely known...

...Whatever may be flawed in the inner man, it has left no mark on his performance in the Senate...

...Struggle as he did to leave the race this year, Teddy quite deliberately encourages presidential hopes for the future...

...Even so, the press was slow to report these facts...

...For years and years, the subcommittee had concentrated on Naderesque inquiries into the shortcomings of government agencies-whether the food and drug laws, for example, were being administered in a responsible fashion...

...He has done a good job there, often an outstanding one...

...Able to attract, and then to use, and if necessary to discard, some of the most competent of staff men...

...Some of his friends say that speculation about a Kennedy administration is disingenuous and wrong, since he would never survive a campaign...

...He hated to use words like “the dark side of Ted’s character,” but there was some thing there, which everyone close to Kennedy had seen...

...Two years ago the subcommittee headed in a different direction, when Kennedy hired Stephen Breyer, a professor on sabbatical from the Harvard Law School, to be its temporary counsel...

...Kennedy’s intellectual independence is now such that no one member of his staff is ever in permanent ascendancy...

...By 1984, there may be a younger, fresher candidate available, who has not spent the previous 22 years marking time in the Senate...

...But Kennedy has the knack, so invaluable to a politician, of making useful gestures in a natural and unforced way...

...There are still a few old-timers left on the staff-the corps of personal secretaries, and Eddie Martin, a Boston newspaperman who handles the press-but the new generation of assistants represents hired talent rather than confidants or molders of conscience...

...Yet Kennedy has kept his staff plugging away on their behalf, trying to get them out of the internment camps and into a semblance of normal life...

...They watch him slave for hours over a statement on detente...

...They still choose to work for him...

...His appeal may not survive such long storage...

...Like most people, I would rather be liked than disliked, but I have learned that dislike is sometimes the price you must pay for writing what you think about a subject...

...with his heart, he says no...

...For years before the order came down, Kennedy was saying in Boston that integration was coming, one way or the other...

...Last March Kennedy kicked off another worthy campaign, this one for tax reform...

...The description ‘took nearly an hour...

...But by comparison both with present law and recent “reform” bills, Kennedy’s represented a dramatic improvement...

...In the evening, after Kennedy has taken one of his half-hour cures in the senator’s gym, the staffers are lined up in his office, unscreened by any chamberlain, to see him one by one...

...A skeptical view toward regulation was becoming part of the conventional wisdom...

...and the third, to find more effective ways to encourage cap ital forma tion and business productivity...

...Teddy has learned to focus it for the maximum effect...

...But the charm is not indiscriminate...

...Kennedy was not stinting with his personal charms and attentions...

...Many people close to Kennedy share simifar memories of scenes like these: They are sitting with him, in rapt discussion of the nuances of a health bill...

...Th e fist clear demonstration of this came during the war years, even when he was in Bobby’s shadow...

...The school committee could plan for it itself, or it could wait for the federal judges...

...He is careening down the street at breakneck speed...

...Sometimes the “story behind the story” tells the reader a little more than he cares to know about the writer and his adventures...

...Cheers again...

...Until then, however, Teddy will be America’s Prince Regent, and as long as that is so the drama and the pathos will remain with his story...

...With his head, he says yes...

...That was demonstrably true in the summer of 1969, but I doubt that it is true any longer...

...There’s a lot of time left...

...I hate to do this, he will tell his friends, his wife, but otherwise 1’11 get massacred at the polls...

...Kennedy would never make that kind of mistake,” one of his assistants said...

...Those who knew Hersey said that he was silent on that point because he did not want to seem to be bragging-he did not want to flaunt his connections with such a mighty personage...

...But what he proposed was not the volunteer army -panacea to the students who knew they would not have to volunteer-but an end to student deferments, as a way of reducing the vicious class discrimination of the draft...

...Instead of merely finding out whether the gov-ernment was obeying its own rules, Breyer said, it should ask what effect the rules themselves had on the workings of the economy...

...John Kennedy will go down in history as the man who knew he should take the troops out of Vietnam, but was waiting until the next election to do so...

...I think that I. F. Stone goes too far in insisting on a kind of social celibacy, but when reporters do engage in this intercourse, they should at least leave a few clues so that the reader has a chance to make up his mind...

...How many people support a volunteer army...

...He made a lengthy presentation to the Senate Finance Committee, in support of three general reforms...

...The subcommittee’s report on the CAB-which suggested that natural competitive forces, freed from government control, might make life brighter for the consumer and the businessman as well-was eagerly snapped up by editorialists, academics, and even other politicians...

...Learn the details...

...there is always something suspect when the suburbanites and the upper classes, their children safe in private academies and .respectable public schools, lecture blue-collar workers about interracial understanding...

...Third, it gave him a new beachhead in the struggle for “turf” with other senators...

...Some of his assistants will admit, very privately, that they cannot believe his story...

...His colleagues in the Senate were impressed, even those who hated the principle he stood for, when he endured the taunts of the maddened whites of Boston and repeatedly told them that they must obey the court’s orders about busirig...

...Make sober and authoritative statements...

...He was most attractive, despite his own disavowals, in the days when it was impossible to imagine a winner emerging from the pack of ragtag Udalls and Bentsens contending for the crown...

...I am not looking for a job on his staff, and I will manage to live quite happily without being part of his social set...

...Every so often staff members will get a dinner invitation...

...While on his tour through South America this spring, Kissinger delivered a selfcongratulatory speech in Venezuela about the wonderful things the United States was going to do for the earthquake victims of Guatemala...

...No one who’s thought about it can,” was the way one put it...

...The longer one survives in office, the more of these little fiefdoms one comes to possess, and the better their quality-until, for the most senior senators, there are full committees, rather than subcommittees, to be disposed of...

...He is eyeing a woman in the corner of the room...

...Before joining the committee, Breyer had talked with Kennedy about enlarging its scope...

...This, it should be emphasized, is a different reason from the one Garry Wills has argued in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books...

...So for four years, eight years, who can say ’how long, Edward Kennedy will remain in the U. S. Senateassuming the easily assumable, that he will win his race for reelection in Massachusetts this fq& Taken solely as a senator, his stoj’ offers no contradictions and only a lirpited sense of drama...

...A recent project in Ad Prac illustrates just what kind...

...indeed, he invited me out to the house for an afternoon of tennis, showed me through the family heirlooms, introduced me to the kids...

...It was an obvious point, but he was one of the very few to make it at the time...

...He will tell most people who ask that, yes, he would like to be President some day...

...He had just finished ticking off the reasons he considered Edward M. Kennedy one of the outstanding men in the Senate...

...The question that matters to the rest of us is whether this contrast is important...

...The answer to these various worries is the one Teddy himself has chosen, at least for the time being-to stay in the Senate, where he has done just the job we would hope he might do...

...It may not matter that another politician is estranged from his wife or has had a breakdown or is gay...

...Even his most conspicuous sin-that he has for seven years stuck with a Chappaquiddick story that virtually defies belief-no longer subverts his performance as a senator...

...As a member of the nation’s holy family, Teddy retains a certain unmatchable aura...

...it is the best we can hope for from a career politician...

...One of the ways to become a “good” or “effective” senator (the words are virtually synonymous on Capitol Hill) is to become a master of detail in several specific areas...

...I &so do not think that these little niceties made any difference in my judgment of Kennedy or what I wrote about him...

...Second, it made him look “effective...

...16 Find an expert...

...The draft is bad, he would say...

...The question that engrosses his friends is how someone who has devoted such patient, loving care to the construction of a worthy political career can throw caution to the wind in living his own life...

...If that is so, then there could be a simple, happy ending to the story of Teddy...

...He wanted to pass a civil rights bill also, but not too soon...

...This is as close to “courage” as a man can come if he knows he must win 51 per cent of the vote at the next election...

...In addition, personal warmth and gregariousness come more easily to him than they did to his brothers...

...But Teddy will not be considered solely that way, at least not until many more years F:ave passed...

...consider Machiavelli, Cardinal Richelieu, John of Gaunt, et cetera...

...he now had a basis for making pronouncements about regulatory policy, sure to be an important issue in the months and years ahead...

...The sense of control is intensified by Teddy’s careful distribution of his personal charms...

...In a rather old-fashioned but good term, he always had a ‘sunny disposition.’ ”) H e ha s learned the little tricks of tact, a point his staff illustrated by contrast with Henry Kissinger...

...When the receptionist in his office answers the ceaseless stream of telephone exhortations, she says, “He’s made up his mind not to run for the presidency this year...

...In the midst of the resulting silence, Kennedy would explain that such a double standard was wrong, was unfair...

...In 1984, Teddy will be eleven years younger than Gerald Ford is today...

...The analogy everyone uses is a wheelKennedy is the hub, each assistant a spoke-but the simpler way to put it is that one man is clearly in control...

...A good public servant...

...It is always surprising to realize just how much time...

...Ambition may play a part in that decision, and the rubbed-off glamor that Kennedy can impart, but most of all it reflects the conviction that what is good about him as a senator is more important than what is tragic about him as a man...

...It swelled, began to burst, was joined by a second...

...By the time they neared completion, however, they made headlines all across the country...

...Hands shot up everywhere from the crowd...

...the next, to enact additional tax breaks for the poor...

...This is his fate no longer, for Teddy has learned to use political calculation as a means of liberation rather than restraint...

...Teddy’s, too, was the calculation of caution during much of the sixties...

...I had given him a copy of an earlier article I had written, which mentioned quite favorably his efforts to reform the draft...

...Night after night he drags home his briefcase full of papers, to study, make notations, let the staff know he is on top of things...

...Every Democratic senator, as part of the spoils system in Congress, is chairman of at least one subcommittee...

...If Teddy drove off a bridge once again, I don’t think that the same council of elders would convene to protect him, nor that the local police and judiciary would so willingly turn a blind eye...

...Like many people who are both skillful politicians and friendly human beings, Edward Kennedy can make it a pleasure to deal with him...

...Brave about his principles...

...Kennedy’s assistants howled with derision when they saw the press reports, for they knew what Kissinger apparently did not: that the Venezuelans themselves had been first on the scene with help after the earthquake struck...

...Although I don’t believe that Kennedy’s attentions distorted my judgment, I do believe the “full disclosure” which the press is always insisting on from the politicians could with benefit be applied to the press itself...

...Breyer claims that, when the hearings began, Kennedy did not think they would be a big public-relations success...

...Yes, there is the risk that he will kill himself through reckless driving (he might have been the one drowned at Chappaquiddick, if indeed he was driving the car...

...the CAB spontaneously adopted several of the subcommittee’s suggestions, and both President Ford, and his Secretary of Transportation, William Coleman, released letters endorsing the report...

...By these standards, Edward Kennedy, the senator, has very little to answer for...

...I saw him deliver compliments, but none that seemed patently contrived...

...On vacations Kennedy may drop in on friends like Richard Goodwin...

...And yet they stay...

...But there is obviously ‘a greater danger, namely that the writer’s judgment can easily be ceopted as a result of social contact with his subject...

...Every move Teddy makes in the Senate is still most carefully weighed, but there has been an enormous change in the intentions and the results...

...We must reform it...

...All up and down Capitol Hill, ambitious staff men have followed Haldeman’s example by installing themselves as chamberlains to the boss, making sure that anyone who wants to see the senator or representative must come through them first...

...A youngest son, barely 30, obviously elected on the strength of his family’s name and not his own accomplishments, his main ambition seemed to be to spare himself further embarrassment...

...This Kennedy has done, using the bright lawyers and academics who, because of glamor or glory or effectiveness, have always been drawn to his staff...

...Teddy had to undergo that process after he arrived...

...If you write a good speech for Kennedy, it will make page one in The New York Times...

...If you write a good speech for me, it will make page one in Duluth.’ ”) The way to establish such expertise is to work through subcommittees and their staffs...

...E o m Kennedy’s point of view, a study like this brought three blessings...

...Given his constituency and the magic of his family name, Teddy automatically has more room than a Senator Tunney or Clark will ever have...

...I saw him smile at many people, but never with what seemed to be a forced grin...

...The danger is not that we cannot see Teddy’s defects, but that there is so little leeway for them in the White House...

...Kennedy was friendly and forthcoming...

...As his mother put it in her book, “Being the last child, and a robust, handsome little boy, I expect that in our family he received the most affection from the most people at the earliest age, and that this helps to account for his cheerful and outgoing character, his expectation of liking people and being liked...

...One does not want to sound too pious about these things...

...it marked off yet another area in which he had done serious, “responsible” investigative work...

...By paying attention to the things that matter in being a “good” senator, he has given himself a tether and learned its precise length Instead of staying close to the pole, he realizes how much room he has for maneuver, and has gone out as far as he can OR issues that matter to him...

...the visitor asked...

...He could remain in the Senate, a demonstrably valuable public servant, his private behavior of concern to no one but himself...

...Everyone is delighted to be there, staff as well as visitors, and in the warmth of his embrace they will do whatever they can to help Teddy...

...In a way, this reticence is a sign of reverse snobbery, or a becoming sort of modesty...

...Like another college football player, Gerald Ford (apart from the rescue of the Mayaguez), Kennedy has not needed to go flexing his muscles in other people’s faces...

...It was not exactly a great imaginative leap-Kennedy did not, for example, propose dumping the home-mortgage interest deduction, that pathetic bit of bait which has lured us all into supporting the loophole system, even though most of its benefits flow to the rich...

...If he could only cut all this out, the Kennedy hand said, then he would be an unequivocally outstanding leader...

...Only in 1996 will he have attained Scoop Jackson’s current age...

...Private behavior, under journalism’s normal canon, matters only when it affects public performance...

...The occasional fraternity-like bashes...

...When I was first interviewing for jobs on the Hill,” says one of these people, “I went up to talk to Walter Mondale...

...But in general he has learned the art of peaceful coexistence...

...h e y can have wonderful advantages, these subcommittees and their staffs...

...It is a point of self-conscious pride within the Kennedy office that this does not happen...

...Maybe the streak is not permanefit...

...This was simply a part of many men’s mental equipment during the 1950s...

...Thinking of him in the White House, it is not the East Room concerts of Pablo Casals that come to mind so much as a somber Edward Kennedy waving from the rear of his brother Robert’s funeral train, or the black horse bearing empty boots marching down Pennsylvania Avenue, or the family portraits, from which just one son remains...

...Teddy is having a gathering of advisors at his spectacular house, on the banks of the Potomac in McLean...

...It would have been easier for Kennedy to give one great demagogic speech about the evils of busing, safe in the knowledge that it would not change the court’s decision one bit...

...But there is a kind of story behind most political stories which readers at least deserve a chance to know about, and which came up in the preparation of this one...

...Kennedy is hardly the only man of his generation to grow up thinking that, whenever you had a chance to get laid, you were a fool to pass it by...

...Kennedy has the talents that count as intelligence in a legislator: a willingness to work long hours, and the ability to bone up on a subject quickly...

...The continuing quest for women...

...he would earnestly inquire before adding his name to any piece of legislation, so eager was he to avoid the false step that would make him look a fool...

...One was to reduce the “tax expenditures” (known as “loopholes” in the old days) which protect a large share of the upper classes’ income...

...Smart...

...Kennedy’s glamor is so great, Wills says, and other men’s desire to please him so strong, that he can strip people of their normal power to criticize and judge...

...I had a good time working on this article...

...Veterans of those days recall how easily-with just a jpke, even a glance-his brothers could reduce him to the dumb,fun-loving sidekick role he had always played, and how large a part his staff played in helping him think out the things he should stand for as a politician...

...It is all in deadly earnest-the personal attentions, the treatment of the staff, the legislative homework...

...The right mixture of calculation and spontaneity...

...The briefcase itself has become a joke among the staffers...

...He is digging in for a bout of black Irish drinking...

...Throughout 1974 and 1975, Breyer directed hearings on the Civil Aeronautics Board, the agency which has essentially run the airlines business since 1938, and which seemed a sitting duck for illustrating the darker side of regulation...

...And how many would volunteer...

...Some of those closest to Kennedy suggest that there is a simple way to explain the contrast in his behavior...

...James Fallows is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...

...Kennedy’s devotion to refugees, too, seems to be something more than a fling with radical chic...

...As Daniel Greenberg wrote this spring in the New England Journal of Medicine, not a notably sympathetic source, “On matters concerning science and medical affairs...

...His health subcommittee staff, for example, has learned what there is to know about biomedical research policies, hospital construction, and the like...

...Shortly afterwards he had the article printed in the Congressional Record, and he sent me a flattering note about it, with a hand-written postscript about our next get-together on the courts...

...The perils of the next election can be a reason not to push the bill, cast the vote, or make the speech the legislator knows he should...

...He does not really want to be President, they say...

...If his acts are “self-destructive,” they are meant only to destroy the ambitions that others have urged upon him...

...I n his first few years in the Senate, Teddy was still very much a man in formation...

...It might be signifi-cant, as a clue to Kennedy’s character, if it were accompanied by other signs that he gloried in domination or proofs of strength-if the ethic of machoism were as important to him as it was to Richard (“pitiful, helpless giant”) Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, or the worst sides of Teddy’s brother John...

...Even the praise given Teddy after a few years in office, that he was more of a “Senate man” than his brothers, only emphasized, by implication, how much less daring and how much more tolerant of the fatuous and petty he must be than his dazzling predecessors...

...Why couldn’t Macbeth stop himself...

...He will make small tdk for ten minutes, and then come back to the health bill, or gun control, and chew them over for hours...

...They will come flying in, from Boston, from Chicago, the experts on economic policy and arms control and health, to dine with Kennedy and his staff and let him pick their brains...

...In it he omitted one interesting fact-that he and‘ Ford had known each other at Yale, when Ford was coaching the football team Hersey played on...

...He looked at me funny, as if he couldn’t understand what I was doing talking to him if I had a chance to go with Kennedy...

...A senator with such a streak can finally only harm himself, but a President can harm many others...

...Kennedy would ask time and again...

...He found out I was also considering Kennedy...

...w h a t is significant is another set of clues, especially the drinking and the fast driving, which suggest a streak of self-destructive behavior...

...Kennedy has followed the same pattern in his other special territories...

...But nothing in Kennedy’s public performance has suggested that need...

...Yes, he may wound his wife and family through personal recklessness, and thereby somehow impair his capability to serve...

...maybe it has been exaggerated even now...

...As one of his assistants says, “The great thing about working for Kennedy is that no one refuses to return your calls...