AMERICA

The last Senator Kennedy

MURRAY KEMPTON

New York—Mr Stokely Carmichael once said: '1 can't laugh any more. l've been to too many funerals.'

If it is true that this is the end of Senator Edward Kennedy as a candidate for Presi- dent, might we not at least notice how many worse things have happened to him before?

We do not know as much about him as we do about his brothers; and yet the little we know hardly suggests that running for President is a vocation he would have chosen. There is about the whole history of the Kennedys a continual aspect of con- scription—the President pushed into politics to replace the first brother; the Senator forced into running for President to redeem us for the loss of the second brother; and the last brother left behind and put under draft, whatever his will in the matter.

Now he has confessed himself guilty of having left someone drowned behind him; that is the kind of act whose damage to the interior is worse than any penalty the statutes prescribe, being a failure of human fraternity and a collapse of the spirit under danger. And yet whose moment of shame, among all the millions of such moments in all the private memories of living men, deserves our sorrow and our sympathy more than Edward Kennedy's? Or are we simply to think of the sad protagonist at all those funerals, the marcher in those dreadful pro- cessions, as just a public presence, an actor? Is there no room in our judgment of him to consider the factor of mere fatigue?

Here we have a man, with no obviously unusual strengths of character, beaten upon

by unimaginable disasters, left as surrogate father to a dozen children, loaded by un- known strangers with surrogate responsi- bility for a whole nation, then brought to a crisis in the water in the dark of the night; and we dare to blame him because he could

not react with the automatic élan of a man with no experience of the fatality of life. We have, in the things we have been saying, more reason to be ashamed of ourselves than he has to be ashamed of himself.

There is, for example, the gossip. We are, in our freedom about matters of the flesh, as dirty-minded as the Victorians could ever have been in their imprisonment. It no longer occurs to us that observation and experience still argue rather strongly for the assumption of gentlemen that most young ladies are virtuous as against the presumption of muckers that all girls are loose. We are so far gone that a man 1 know to be a gentleman said to me that the party Senator Kennedy and Miss Kopechne had left was an orgy, his evi- dence being that the participants said they had sat up and talked through the night afterwards. Yet who has not sat up and talked all night in mixed assemblies? By the laws of logistics, gatherings of five couples in two-bedroom cottages are apt to be either massively innocent or massively licentious; and the odds are heavily with Innocence, the ratio of flirtations to falls remaining about ten to one.

And yet our hearts ought to have gone out to Senator Kennedy for every reason

over and above the minor one that now he might not be able to be President of the United States. We had only to think of a young man, certainly rather spoiled and with a great appetite for enjoyment, loaded with successive sorrows and then brought to one more confrontation than he could sustain. When we talk of Kennedys, we do not speak of gods; we speak of targets. There is no defence for what he did. Yet every excuse cries out to us.

Those thoughts came before his televised explanation to the citizens of Massachusetts; and they remain, with the pity which already commanded them made deeper and more clearly defined when he had finished. His presentation was four parts human shame and sorrow and one part policy. The policy was in its peroration. an appeal to the public to help him decide whether he should remain a Senator or resign his seat. The answers to such appeals are pre- ordained; when a man in such trouble asks for advice, he can be sure that he will get support: it would be unspeakable cruelty to send him an unforgiving message. He will get a few of course, some of us being rather gone towards unspeakable cruelty by now; and there will be for their harshness of tone the small excuse that, in the end, policy had pushed him to ask to be judged as a performer rather than as a person.

He was not allowed, whatever his inten- tions may have been, even now to avoid the dictation of the solicitors for the family estate. It was two of his friends, not his enemies, who on television later searched for a speech of comparable public impact and went back to 1952 to cite that famous defence of his financial probity which is remembered as Mr Nixon's Checkers speech. They were different in every way; Mr Nixon was talking about his political future; and Senator Kennedy was confess- ing a tragic collapse of the spirit; the difference was between politics and tragedy. Yet Senator Kennedy's friends could draw the comparison because, for them as well as his enemies, the test of each performance was whether it had worked, and whether Senator Kennedy had got away with it. even at a moment when the lasting thought of so many who watched was of the long hours before Senator Kennedy's interior

'I'll he glad when we get out of quarantine. I can't wait to see New York'

would even begin to get over it. He was, in his worst hour as in his best, just a piece of property. No one around him, feel for him though they think they do, would seem to base the grace just to stop and cry—for God's sake, leave him alone.