I entered politics in 1962 along with Ted Kennedy. Well, not exactly. Actually, I entered politics against Ted Kennedy. No, I was not for Edward McCormack, who was Speaker McCormack's nephew and was running against Teddy in the Democratic primary. And I was also not for George Cabot Lodge, Ted's G.O.P. opponent and descendant of many Massachusetts Cabots and Lodges going back to George Cabot, who served as the Bay State's United States Senator from 1791 to 1796. (The family still lives but not the party of its ancestors.) I actually supported H. Stuart Hughes, an intellectual historian at Harvard and the grandson of Charles Evans Hughes--Chief Justice of the United States and the 1916 Republican nominee for president against Woodrow Wilson. So there were four eminent scions in the race.
Hughes was one of the first post-war peace candidates and ended up with 2.4% of the vote. The issue was not Vietnam. There were two issues then: nuclear disarmament and "fair play for Cuba." Hughes and Dr. Benjamin Spock, on whom many of you were raised, were co-chairmen of the National Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy. The dyad attracted high-borns who disdained Teddy's father Joe and brothers Jack (by then president of the United States) and Robert (attorney general on the New Frontier); ideological sandal wearers; Quakers plus other pacifists; Communists and ex-Communists (yes, Virginia, there were Communists) and fellow-travelers who somehow decided they'd go politically underground during the Red Scare. It was folks like these who dominated the adult "peace movement" for several years until Gene McCarthy and masses of dissident Democrats came along. The child peace movement was, well, childish and destructive. Plus Abbie Hoffman, Norman Mailer and some professors. Actually wicked.
The Cuban missile crisis intruded on the senatorial campaign and made Ted's victory inevitable. It was a time of high danger, but in America no one wanted to capitulate to what nearly everyone saw as Khrushchev's blackmail--and fraudulent blackmail, at that. I have to confess that Teddy, who was 30 at the time, seemed exactly 30 ... and more than a bit overwhelmed.
The elder statesman. The dynastic icon. The man of personal excess. The man of a thousand legislative accomplishments. As the tributes and obituaries attest, Ted Kennedy was all of these things, at one time or another--for better and, yes, sometimes for worse. Like he famously said of his slain brother, Robert, Ted Kennedy "need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life."
