- A LIFE OF COMMITMENT
- Elmer Smith: Kennedy escaped the patterns of his past
- Local pols remember Ted's visits
- Jenice Armstrong: Like MLK, he was a hero to her family
- Ted Kennedy called to a better country
- 'Well done, Mommy, well done!'
- He was no stranger to the stain of scandal
- With his passing comes his memoir
- Signe Wilkinson cartoon: Evolution
- Ted Kennedy timeline
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Elmer Smith: Kennedy escaped the patterns of his past
IF IT had been my call to make, the political legacy of Edward M. Kennedy would have ended at Chappaquiddick.
His career in the U.S. Senate, indeed his freedom, would have ended with the life of Mary Jo Kopechne, the 28-year-old Robert Kennedy campaign aide who was trapped in a car that Edward M. Kennedy drove off a narrow bridge after a night of alcohol-fueled reveling on Martha's Vineyard 40 years ago.
Kennedy's failure to report the accident for 10 hours compounded his criminal recklessness. His apparent disregard for the law marked him in my mind as unworthy of consideration for elective office.
There were too many unanswered questions. Did he really try to save her life before saving his? Was her death the only difference between this night of drinking and reveling and others that went unreported?
But he escaped both my judgment and the demands of justice even as he had managed to free himself from that car and from the consequences of his fatal recklessness.
Today, I'm glad he escaped, not just because of the sentimentality surrounding his death. But, in looking back on what he achieved in the 40 years since that night on Martha's Vineyard, I'm reminded that there is a justice higher than mine.
A week ago, I wrote a column saying that Michael Vick didn't deserve a second chance because, in my way of thinking, nobody does.
Second chances are an extension of grace that you can't earn before you get them, and the good you do afterward is just your reasonable service.
But I applauded what the NFL and the Eagles did in Vick's case because I have seen incredible transformations in people whom I would have banished.
Edward M. "Ted" Kennedy was such a man.
He was a throwback to an era before compassion for the underprivileged went out of fashion. His relentless advocacy for disadvantaged and disabled constituencies was the wedge that kept the door open for what would have been lost causes.
Chappaquiddick chastened him, and the iron ceiling it placed on his higher aspirations freed him to focus his advocacy from his safe seat in the Senate.
His tireless advocacy for the Americans with Disabilities Act was an essential element in its passage. Thousands of Americans whose disabilities had sidelined them have become productive workers because of that initiative.
He fought for passage of the State Children's Health Insurance Program, which set a minimum standard for health care for minors from poor homes, then fought to keep it from being amended to death.
His ability to rise above his own narrow, parochial interests moved him from backing one side in the Northern Ireland conflict to his push for what became known as the Good Friday Accord and a peace that persists to this day.
On the domestic front, his name and his handiwork appear on virtually every piece of civil- rights, human-rights and education legislation that has passed through the Senate in the last 40 years.
The Fair Housing Act, the extension of the vote to 18-year-olds and his battle to keep the Voting Rights Act from being gutted all have his fingerprints on them. He helped establish the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
He was a master of compromise in the best traditions of political activism. At its best, politics is a high calling. It is the art of balancing competing interests. Kennedy was able to cross the ideological chasms that separate lesser lawmakers.
He and Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain worked closely on legislation to create a viable immigration reform. Former President George W. Bush credits Kennedy with the legislative push that got his No Child Left Behind Act through the Senate.
Kennedy fought for the loaf. But he knew how to salvage a slice when a piece was better than nothing.
He had huge flaws and his life and career were an alternating current of tragedy and triumph.
His eulogy at the funeral of his slain brother Robert could be his epitaph.
"My brother need not be idealized or enlarged in death," Ted Kennedy said. His brother, he said was a man "who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it."
But the words that come to mind for me as I consider his second-chance legacy are the words he used to describe why he had backed Barack Obama for president.
Obama, Kennedy said, is a man "who refuses to be trapped in the patterns of the past."
Ted Kennedy escaped the patterns of his past in ways that I could never have imagined 40 years ago. I've never been so glad to be wrong.
Send e-mail to smithel@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2512. For recent columns: http://go.philly.com/smith.
