Ted Kennedy: Remembering the Real Deal by Robert Scheer

[Better Believe It]

Remembering the Real Deal
By Robert Scheer
Editor
Truthdig
August 26, 2009


Oddly enough, for one born into such immense familial expectations, he was a surprisingly accessible and down-to-earth politician in the eyes of most journalists who covered him. I think of him as always authentic and never oily. As opposed to most politicians, the offstage Ted Kennedy was the more appealing one.

Although he excelled as an orator, never more so than delivering the speech that Bob Shrum crafted for him at the 1980 Democratic Convention but which was informed by Kennedy's own deeply felt passion, it was in his less choreographed moments that he was at his best. I spent quite a few hours over the years interviewing him on subjects ranging from health care to nuclear arms control, mostly as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and while his grammar could be troubling, his sentiments never were.

Not once in those interviews did I find Kennedy to equivocate or slide into the amoral triangulation that defines almost all successful politicians. They position themselves, but he took positions, and as in the case of health care reform, he would end his life fighting for those causes with his last breath.

I would put Kennedy alongside my other hero, George McGovern, as the two most trusted standard-bearers of the Democratic Party's too-often-sabotaged liberalism. I just could never imagine either of them ever selling us out. Indeed, I haven't felt quite so sad about the passing of a political leader since the day when people started bawling all over the Bronx with the news that FDR had died. In a political world dominated by bipartisan cynicism, there are few touchstones of integrity for the common folk, and Kennedy was one of them.

In the first year of the George W. Bush presidency, I wrote a column for the Los Angeles Times entitled "Bush Could Really Use a Fireside Chat with FDR," stating, "This is a president who never learned that it is possible to be a leader born of privilege and yet be absorbed with the fate of those in need....Not so Roosevelt, a true aristocrat whose genuine love of the common man united this country to save it during its most severe time of economic turmoil and devastating war." Kennedy wrote me a note thanking me for the column and adding, "I can think of at least fifty on the Senate side of Capital Hill that could benefit from a good fireside chat as well."

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