Tag: Teddy Kennedy

Trump, Kennedy, Kemp and Les Miz (and Maybe Paris)

Donald_Trump_Laconia smDonald Trump is important.  Maybe he’s channeling Huey Long, maybe Lonesome Rhodes, maybe just “the Donald,” but despite his xenophobia and thinly veiled racist take on immigrants, he has spun a new American dream and captured those who have been without one for a long time.

Despite those excluded, whom Ta-Nehesi Coates describes so well, the belief that the dream exists is a gigantic part of the American story even though, for many, it’s faded from view. Today, in the shadow of the attacks in Paris, I wonder whether his message will thrive or wither in the face of such horror and fear.

Jack KempTeddy Kennedy smWith all that in mind, what does Trump have to do with John Valjean? What did the story mean to Jack Kemp (there’s a new biography ) and Teddy Kennedy (there’s a new book about him, too) both of whom, from opposite parties and ideologies, saw Les Miz multiple times? Can what spoke to them teach or maybe comfort us as we recoil from another bloody revolution in the streets of Paris?  Tell me that this* is not what they – and we – are feeling today.

dan kidThis little boy is now a father, but when he was six, we took him, along with his brother, to see Les Miz. At the end, he dissolved in my lap in tears, a wise child who understood, as so many do, especiallu today, what we may have lost and must struggle to recover? Listen and then, you decide.

*When Les Miz opened in New York, both Teddy Kennedy and Jack Kemp saw it multiple times. It might have been about a revolution, but it was everyone’s revolution:

Do you hear the people sing?
Singing a song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again!
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes!

Will you join in our crusade?
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Beyond the barricade
Is there a world you long to see?

Then join in the fight that will give you
The right to be free!

SAD NEWS; SENATOR TED KENNEDY

Teddy_3Catherine Morgan, star of stage, screen, (well not really, but she should be) and (yes this is true) blogs including Political Voices of Women, has sought posts on the news that Senator Edward Kennedy, seen here with Senator Barack Obama, whom he endorsed, is suffering from a malignant brain tumor.  It really is a sad thing.  People make jokes about the Senator, some of them really cruel, as I discovered while searching for images for this post.  And he’s made mistakes, including those surrounding the tragic events at Chappaquiddick.

But as a great speaker and legislator, he’s used his talents to be a champion of the “downtrodden” and many of the rest of us, for over 40 years.  Coal miners, civil rights advocates, children who need better schools, American who need access to health care, soldiers in Iraq and veterans of every war and dozens of other causes; he’s been a mainstay of support for them all, often when not too many people were willing to be.

Since he lost his two brothers, President John Kennedy and Senator Robert Kennedy, to assassins, he’s also been the protector of their children:  JFK’s two, John and Caroline, and Bobby’s eleven. He’s buried John’s son and two of Bobby’s.  His own son Edward contracted bone cancer and had a leg amputated at the age of 12.  Kennedy himself nearly died in a plane crash in 1964.  And there’s plenty more; take a look at this Wikipedia entry on the “Kennedy curse” which left him with burdens of care for so many.  Weddings, illnesses, even funerals, it was he who was there for them all.

When I first came to Washington, I was a very young researcher in the CBS News Washington Bureau.  Because I was so young, I was assigned to call the Kennedy “boiler room girls” – campaign workers who knew the young woman who had died in that car in Chappaquiddick, Mary Jo Kopechne, to see if they would talk to us.  I called.  All of them.  Every day for a year.

Every day for a year they took my call.  Every day for a year they were polite, gentle and silent on the subject of the crash.  And so they have remained.  Since I know many other people who have worked for Teddy and shown a devotion and loyalty seldom seen in public life, I am not surprised; that’s how people are in the Kennedy universe.  It says a lot about the Senator and his family and the sort of commitment they inspire.

When I think of the Senator though, it’s not any of that I think about.  Or of the fact that he can be hilarious, self-effacing and very kind to those around him.  My strongest, and most unambiguous memory, is of his eulogy at the funeral of his brother Bobby* in the summer of 1968.  You’ll see why.

*This is audio accompanied by cover footage; I couldn’t locate any video of the speech although I remember it vividly and can see it in my head.  Can’t get that up on the Web though, at least not yet.