May 20 2008
The End of the Kennedy Era?
Today, the Kennedy family announced that Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy has been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. For those of you like me, who sometimes get confused by the words malignant and benign, malignant means cancerous.
To people my age, Ted Kennedy is something of a relic, a politician who survived a drunk-driving scandal and the assassinations of both of his brothers. In some ways, he is the underachiever of the Kennedy brothers, settling for remaining his state’s Senator for 45 years after he took over the seat vacated when John Kennedy was elected president.
John was the president; Bobby was the attorney general and Ted was the survivor. As Senator Kennedy decides what to do with the remainer of his life in light of this diagnosis, my mother’s generation, baby-boomers everywhere feel a strange tugging at their heart strings. Sure, there are other generations of Kennedys, some even serving their country well in politics, but this is the final blow, the crumbling of the last bastion of Camelot.
Ted Kennedy is like a fixture in the United States Senate, a power broker whose endorsement of Barack Obama made a difference in the smoke-filled backrooms of politics. Without him, the Democratic Party loses one of the oldest punch lines in the business and the deep respect that America had for Rose & Joe Kennedy and their kids. It’s a little like the death of a prince, who is third in line to the thrown. Sure, he never fulfilled that potential, but he was still a prince and the Kennedys were American royalty.
It seems likely that another Kennedy will be appointed to take Ted’s place and that he will retire, to live out his remaining days with his family, as the battle against brain cancer is a horrible one for anyone to face. If he chooses to remain in the Senate, America should give him his due and when he is wrong, fight him as stringently as we have for the last 45 years. To do anything less would be disrespectful of a man who has earned his place in history.
