[Peace-discuss] A just assessment of Kennedy

[C. G. Estabrook]

[I lived in Massachusetts for many years while Edward Moore Kennedy was a US 
senator from the Commonwealth, and this is one of the few honest accounts I've 
seen of his tenure. De mortuis nil nisi bonum -- of the dead speak only good -- 
but it's important to understand the real politics of the matter.  --CGE]

	Teddy Kennedy the Hollow Champion
	By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Teddy Kennedy's disasters were vivid. His legislative triumphs, draped in this 
week's obituaries with respectful homage, were far less colorful but  they were 
actually devastating for the very constituencies – working people, organized 
labor – whose champion he claimed to be.

He had the most famous car accident in political history when he drove off a 
wooden bridge on Chappaquiddick Island in July 1969, saying later that he had 
failed in several attempts to dive down 10ft to rescue Mary Jo Kopechne, a 
former aide of his dead brother Robert. She was in the back seat and drowned.

Ted quit the scene and called  in  standby Kennedy speechwriters  instead of the 
police, a misdemeanor which cost him a two-month suspended sentence and any 
chance of ever following his brother Jack into the White House.
He made only one overt bid for the presidency and that was a colorful disaster 
too. He challenged the Democratic incumbent, Jimmy Carter, then seeking 
re-election in 1980. After three years, the left in the Democratic Party was 
bitterly disappointed in Carter's cautious centrism and Kennedy placed himself 
in the left's vanguard, declaring in a famous speech that "sometimes a party 
must sail against the wind".

In those days I was reporting on national politics for the Village Voice and 
Rolling Stone and covered Kennedy's bid. It got off to a shaky start when Roger 
Mudd of NBC, a well-known political reporter and TV newscaster, asked Ted on 
prime time why he wanted to be president. The thirty  seconds of silence that 
followed this easy lob didn't help Kennedy's chances.
The campaign plane shot backwards and forwards across America, seeking photo 
opportunities. On one typical morning we left Washington DC at 6am and headed 
for the rustbelt where Kennedy stood outside a shuttered Pittsburgh steel mill 
and pledged to get the steel industry back on its feet. We shot west to Nebraska 
so Kennedy could stand in front of a corn silo and swear allegiance to the cause 
– utterly doomed - of the small family farmer. Then we doubled back to New York 
so he could stand on a street corner in a slum neighborhood in the Bronx and 
promise a better deal for urban blacks and Hispanics.

I asked one of Kennedy's campaign people why they didn't simply equip a studio 
in Washington with the necessary backdrops – steel mill, silo, urban wasteland – 
but he said it wouldn't be honest. As things were, the locations we flew to may 
have been genuine, but the campaign pledges were as dishonest as a studio 
backdrop, which is why Kennedy – bellowing out his speeches like a mammoth stuck 
in a swamp - sounded utterly fake.

By 1980 the die was cast. Disdaining the leftward option offered by George 
McGovern in 1972, the Democratic Party had thrown in its lot decisively with 
Wall Street, and the big players across the American corporate landscape. The 
labor unions and the other foot-soldier constituencies of the Party, would be 
flung rhetorical bouquets with decreasing fervor every four years.

Though the obituarists have glowingly evoked Kennedy's 46-year stint in the US 
Senate and, as 'the last liberal', his mastery of the legislative process, they 
miss the all-important fact that it was out of Kennedy's Senate office that came 
two momentous slabs  of legislation that signalled the onset of the neo-liberal 
era: deregulation of trucking and aviation. They were a disaster for organized 
labor and the working conditions and pay of people in those industries.

The theorists of deregulation were Stephen Breyer who was Kennedy's chief 
counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee and Alfred Kahn, out of Cornell. 
Prominent on Kennedy’s dereg team was David Boies. Breyer now sits on the US 
Supreme Court, an unswerving shill for the corporate sector.

In the mid to late 1970s these Kennedy rent-a-thinkers began to tout 
deregulation as the answer to low productivity and bureaucratic and corporate 
inertia. Famous at that time was a screed by Breyer, then a Harvard Law School 
professor, quantifying such things as environmental pollution in terms of 
assessable and fungible “risks” which could be bought and sold in the market 
place. (The Natural Resources Defense Council,  adorned by Ted’s nephew, Robert 
Kennedy Jr., has long espoused this disastrous approach.)

The two prongs of Kennedy’s deregulatory attack – later decorated with the 
political label “neo-liberalism” – were aimed at airlines and trucking, and 
Kennedy’s man, Alfred Kahn was duly installed by Jimmy Carter at the Civil 
Aeronautics Board to introduce the cleansing winds of competition into the 
industry. By and large, airline deregulation went down well with the press and, 
for a time, with the public, who rejoiced in the bargains offered by the small 
fry such as People’s Express, and by the big fry striking back. The few critics 
who said that within  a few years the nation would be left with five or six 
airlines, oligopoly and higher fares, were mostly ignored.

No one ever really wrote about the terrible effects of trucking deregulation 
outside the left press. It was certainly the most ferocious anti-labor move of 
the 1970s, with Kennedy as the driving force.  Some of Kennedy’s aides promptly 
reaped the fruits of their legislative labors, leaving the Hill to make money 
hand over fist trying to break unions on behalf of Frank Lorenzo, the Texan 
entrepreneur who ran the Texas Air Corporation and its properties, Continental 
Airlines and its subsidiary, Eastern.

Did Kennedy fight, might and main, against NAFTA? No. As Steve Early relates in 
his piece on this site today, he was for it and helped Clinton ratify the 
job-losing Agreement.  Then he put his shoulder behind GATT, parent of the World 
Trade Agreement.

We also have Kennedy to thank for 'No Child Left Behind' – the nightmarish 
education act pushed through in concert with Bush Jr's White House, that 
condemns children to a treadmill of endless tests contrived as "national standards".

And it was Kennedy who was the prime force behind the Hate Crimes Bill, aka the 
Matthew Shepard Act, by dint of which America is well on its way to making it 
illegal to say anything nasty about gays, Jews, blacks and women. "Hate speech," 
far short of any direct incitement to violence, is on the edge of being 
criminalized, with the First Amendment going the way of the dodo.

The deadly attacks on the working class and on organized labor  are Ted 
Kennedy’s true monument.   But as much as his brothers Jack and Bobby he was 
adept at persuading the underdogs that he was on their side. If it hadn’t been 
for Kennedy, a lot more people  would have health coverage . In 1971 Nixon, 
heading into his relection bid, put up the legislative  ancestor of all recent 
Democratic proposals, but Kennedy shot it down, preferring to have this as his 
campaign plank sometime in the political future.

After reelection, Nixon did promote a health plan in his 1974 State of the Union 
speech, with a call for universal access to health insurance. He followed up 
with his Comprehensive Health Insurance Act on February  6, 1974. Nixon said his 
plan would build on existing employer-sponsored  insurance plans and would 
provide government subsidies to the self-employed and small businesses to ensure 
universal access to health insurance. Kennedy went through the motions of 
cooperation, but in the end the AFL-CIO,  with a covert nudge from Kennedy, 
killed the bill because Nixon was vanishing under the Watergate scandal and the 
Democrats did not want to hand  the President  and the Republicans  one of their 
signature issues.  Now the Republicans scream “socialism” at exactly what Nixon 
proposed and Kennedy killed off  38 years ago, in 1971.

To this day there are deluded souls who argue that Jack was going to pull US 
troops out of Vietnam and that is why he was killed; that Bobby, who worked for 
Roy Cohn and supervised a "Murder Inc" in the Caribbean, was really and truly on 
the side of the angels; that Ted was the mighty champion of the working people, 
even though he helped deliver them into the inferno of neoliberalism.

By his crucial endorsement last year he helped give them Obama too, now 
holidaying six miles from Chappaquiddick, on Martha's Vineyard, another salesman 
for the inferno. But because his mishaps were so dramatic, few remember quite 
how toxic his political “triumphs” were for those who now foolishly  mourn him 
as their lost leader.

http://www.counterpunch.org/