Ted Kennedy Part II: Pale, Slim Hands

A Political Par-tee!

He was called the last and the least, an attitude firmly grounded on the morbid deification of his brothers. Perhaps it’s hard to appraise his value. Few people have had to perform publicly with as many ghosts as Ted Kennedy.

Ted never really escaped

The White House was his, until he abandoned a young girl to drown in his overturned, submerged car.  And then OJ'd his way out of it. After that, the only thing they would trust him with was an incumbent-for-life senatorial position. Massachusetts loved him.  Everyone felt so lousy about his murdered brothers, what else could you do?

Surprisingly, he performed well – which is either a testament to Kennedy’s innate political savoir faire, or evidence of what kind of job it really is.

O them ghosts

Ted had a hard-earned reputation for womanizing and boozing – not exactly a career-killer, but one that keeps you off Pennsylvania Avenue. It was impossible to tell whether he cared, or was just going through the motions ... Something, unprincipled and painful, kept pushing him on.

He had everything and, in a way, very little, choke-collared by historical expectations, and perhaps, when alone, subject to late-night nightmares of slim, pale hands.

‘In our sleep, pain that cannot forget' - Aeschylus

                                                                                                                                                                                  

John F. Kennedy: The Song, Never the Singer

"Hey you, doll face - road trip!"

He remains the Don Draper of U.S. presidents. His promiscuity was of gargantuan proportions. His inclination for risk-taking was pathological. He lied and cheated with energetic abandon and shared a family trait for vengeance and a dark appreciation of noblesse oblige.

Arguably —is there any other way? — his approx. 1,000-day reign was potholed with self-induced crises. His decisions surrounding the Bay of Pigs exposed the decomposition of his character. His heedless drive to murder Fidel Castro propelled the world into a U.S./Russian nuclear showdown. His womanizing exposed him to blackmail.

'Hiya girls': Frank, JFK, and, well...

Yet he was brave, handsome, articulate, wealthy and witty. He loved his children and had great taste in clothes. His image alone attracted a generation of bright, educated young people to pursue careers in the civil service, including a cigar-smoking William Jefferson Clinton — a career path that just a few years later Richard Nixon, building on Kennedy’s boneheaded involvement in Vietnam, would napalm into destruction.

Actually, it looks pretty good

Though he kick-started the 1960s, JFK was nothing if not a swingin’ rat-packer, a rich kid slumming with Sinatra and bed-fulls of prostitutes. In fact, his autopsy report indicated the presence of sexually transmitted diseases which, the doctors surmised, must have given him years of grief, let alone the pain imparted to his paramours.

The question arrives: do we wish to know salacious details as means of explaining motivations and judgments, or are we mired, sick with frustration and boredom, in belittling men and women of accomplishment? Is it a combination of the two?

In our sleep comes the song

Anyway, his importance can not be found in what he was, but what he seemed to be, what he could have been, and most importantly, what we wanted him to be. JFK knew his history, and he knew that in our dreams comes the song, not the singer, rounding our little life with a sleep.