Article published January 1980
When this article was written, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts was challenging incumbent president Jimmy Carter for the Democratic Party nomination. Although President Carter had brokered a peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, Senator Kennedy supposed that he could broker an agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs.
Senator Kennedy has angered many friends of Israel by proposing that the Arab Palestinians be given Judea and Samaria. He adds that U. S. troops should guarantee Israel’s protection–something Israel has never requested. He naively assumes that such a “resolution” of the Mideast conflict would assure a trouble-free flow of oil to America. Among other things, this assumption overlooks two obvious problems: it would not satisfy the Arabs, who really prefer that Israel not exist at all; there is more than one Mideast conflict, and therefore no trouble-free oil flow would result.
The same friends of Israel may imagine that Kennedy, who never fails to insist on his support for Israel, surpasses Republican candidate [and former Texas governor] John Connally in sensitivity and prudence in matters where Israel is concerned. He has told Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin that Israel should have “secure, defensible and recognized borders”; and he has refused to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organization, which continues to call for the erasure of Israel. But a careful look at the Senator’s character, record, and rhetoric conceals a far weaker position than those dazzled by `the last Kennedy’ see, or dare to see.
The Senator’s character has excited much comment, most of it tendentious. Understandably so: shabby doings pockmark the biography from its beginning. Many critics have asserted that Kennedy’s most notorious misadventure, which involved the death of Mary Jo Kopechne and numberless clouds of evasion, reveals a man incapable of dealing with crisis, a man incapable of enduring the still more serious pressures imposed on a U. S. president. Few can listen without contempt when Kennedy hagiographer Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. straight-facedly contends that the Chappaquiddick disaster put “iron in Kennedy’s soul.” For what we have seen before and since is the same old all-too-human clay, mixed with precious little soul and even less iron. Yet such critics miss part of the point: anyone can botch things in a crisis, but Chappaquiddick and other Kennedy scandals bare not just had crisis management but the thoroughgoing weakness of a lifelong hedonist.
Kennedy’s hedonism shows itself not only in private acts but in public words. Unlike other liberals (his older brother, J. F. K., and Lyndon Johnson), who promised Americans more butter while insisting on defending it, and them, with guns, the left-liberals of the Democratic Party (Henry Wallace yesterday, Senator George McGovern and Senator Kennedy today) promise more butter with a reduction in guns. They overlook the fat that those who have butter always face–indeed, attract–enemies with guns who at very least would take the butter away. Hedonism without some sort of moderating self-discipline eventually gets squashed–one of the few moral lessons history upholds.
Kennedy’s hedonism extends to public acts as well as to public words. In a recent issue of the liberal American weekly, The New Republic, journalist Morton Kondracke lists some of these acts, and it is a record to be wondered at. In 1975, for example, the Senator voted against President Gerald Ford’s request for $522 million extra aid to South Vietnam and Cambodia–contending, in effect, that wouldn’t make any difference. Maybe yes, maybe no, but, given the mass murders committed by communist rulers in both of those countries in the intervening years, might it not have been worth trying?
In 1976, Senator Kennedy supported a proposal to withdraw U. S. troops from Europe at a time when the Soviets had already achieved marked conventional military superiority over NATO. Responding in 1978 to the determined Soviet effort to equal and surpass overall U. S. military strength, Kennedy voted to transfer four percent of the defense budget to domestic programs. In fact, he voted against almost every new seasons system developed in the decade, including anti-ballistic missiles, the B-1 bomber (which alone can match the Soviets’ Backfire bomber), the cruise missile (a second-strike, hence defensive weapon), the neutron bomb (a tactical weapon designed to prevent a Soviet-led tank attack on Western Europe), aircraft carriers (essential for trouble spots like the Mideast), and Trident submarines (an upgrade to the only class of nuclear weapons that is relatively invulnerable to a Soviet first strike).
Prudence? Iron will? Sensitivity? Kennedy also voted against the AWACS early-warning system, without which in the event of a nuclear attack, his fellow Americans will never know what hit them. There may be a sort of sensitivity in that.
On the diplomatic front, the senator would threaten dictatorial allies like Chile, Argentina, and South Korea with withdrawals of American aid, while offering aid to dictatorial enemies like the Soviet Union, Cuba, and North Korea. If he did that, you see, he could then threaten to withdraw aid from America’s enemies and encourage America’s erstwhile enemies, so that they too might qualify for aid. Alice, meet Wonderland.
Whereas Connally would make Israel an outright American protectorate while amassing the military power to make that stance believable, Kennedy would applaud Israel’s independence while weakening one of the bases of that independence: America’s military power, the now-weakened bulwark of the democracies.
Kennedy, whom so many Americans prize for his `charisma,’ his `qualities of leadership,’ in fact would preside over–aid and abet–a decline of the very power that buttresses leadership, makes it real., not a sustained act of pretension. The senator has just published a book entitled Our Day and Generation: The Words of Edward M. Kennedy. Reviewers have complained that it reveals nothing of Edward Kennedy, the man–consisting as it does entirely of statements of public policy. But the critics misspeak. For the Senator’s words–banal snippets from the kind of politely meaningless speeches senators give when asked–are much less prominent than the photos, all of which burnish the Kennedy image instead of foregrounding the Kennedy substance, of which little can be seen.
How much substance is there? Someone described Stalinist Russia as a mystery wrapped in an enigma; Edward Kennedy is banality wrapped in an image. Or, perhaps more accurately, he is a vacuum wrapped in an image. In revealing nothing he reveals himself.
2016 NOTE: President Carter went on to defeat Senator Kennedy in the Democratic Party primaries before losing the presidential election to Ronald Reagan. Senator Kennedy returned to Capitol Hill, where he eventually gained a reputation for hard work on behalf of the left-liberal economic and social programs he favored. All three men might be said to have gone to their proper reward that year–four, if you include Connally, something of a wheeler-dealer who took his act into the private sector, where scrutiny is less intense.
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