The press notices that followed the announcement that Senator Edward M. Kennedy has been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor were, quite properly, sympathetic. You don’t kick a man on whom the shadow of death has just fallen.
But the instinct of candor rebels against the constraints of hagiography. Such was the delicacy of some of the encomiasts (among them Robert Kaiser of the Washington Post and Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times) that, with the exception of oblique references to “personal tragedy” and a dynasty’s “tragic epic,” they failed to mention the central event of the senator’s public career. Newsweek’s Sarah Kliff went so far as to express doubt about what the central event was. “Pinpointing the moment that defines Edward M. Kennedy’s 45-year Senate career,” she wrote, “is, to say the least, a bit of a challenge.”
On the contrary, the defining moment is so obvious that probably only a Newsweek reporter could fail to see it. Leave Chappaquiddick out of the reckoning, and the route by which Kennedy mounted to liberaldom’s Olympus appears a bizarre deviation from his family’s traditions. Tell the story with a reasonable respect for the facts, and his progress becomes not only comprehensible but perhaps inevitable. For the fourth and only surviving son of Joseph P. and Rose Kennedy, the path to liberal lionhood began on Dike Road on the night of July 18–19, 1969.
