THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 19BY THE TIMEEdward Kennedy died, in Au-
gust 2009, he had represented Massachu-
setts in the United States Senate for nearly
47 years — longer than any of his brothers
had lived. He was eulogized as one of the
most important legislators in American
history, an assessment reflecting not only
the affection he enjoyed on both sides of
the aisle, but also genuine awe at his
achievements. Over the course of five dec-
ades, Ted Kennedy had sponsored nearly
700 bills that became law, and left his im-
print on scores of others. The Voting
Rights Act of 1965; the Immigration and
Nationality Act of that same year; the
Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990;
the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993
— all bore his influence or were advanced
by his efforts.
None of this was foreordained — or even
all that likely. He was a Kennedy, of course,
and Kennedys were born to advantage;
but as a child and young man, he was seen
within the family not merely as the last of
the Kennedy brothers, but the least: the
least talented, serious, capable, promising.
The press, initially, saw him that way, too.
During his first campaign for the Senate, at
the age of 30 in 1962, he was derided as
President John F. Kennedy’s callow kid
brother — a man so obviously unqualified
that his election, in the view of The New
York Times, could only demean “the dig-
nity of the Senate and the democratic
process.” Kennedy won that race, and set
to work defying expectations. Still, the
long, consequential career that followed
would to the end remain, in profound ways,
a struggle — against the fates, the tides of
history and, in no small part, his own fail-
ings.
That struggle and its significance are
the subjects of “Catching the Wind,” the
first installment of a two-volume treat-
ment by Neal Gabler, the author of well-re-
garded books on Walt Disney and Walter
Winchell. Kennedy’s expansive life has
yielded no shortage of biographies, but Ga-
bler’s is on its way toward becoming the
most complete and ambitious. As a charac-
ter study it is rich and insightful, frank in
its judgments but deeply sympathetic to
the man Gabler regards as “the most com-
plex of the Kennedys.” The story of Ted’s
brother Bobby is typically written in two
acts: before and after the assassination of
President Kennedy in November 1963.
Ted’s time at center stage, so much longer
than Bobby’s, was more varied, consisting
of numerous acts, twists, turns and appar-
ent endings — less a linear progression
than, as Gabler describes it, a “cycle of sin
and expiation,” loss and renewal.
Within weeks of entering office, Ken-
nedy talked about staying there the rest of
his life. He adored the Senate’s traditions;
he adapted quickly to its rhythms and
norms. And, to the surprise of many, he
was willing to work. John Kennedy had
served eight years in the Senate without
ever investing much of himself in it; he was
— often visibly — bored by its slow-moving
machinery. But Ted Kennedy relished it:
the pressing of levers, the working of
gears, the intricate business of cutting a
deal. No less important, as Gabler writes,
“there was a joy in him, a great love of peo-
ple.” He drew them in — whether voters
back home or the Southern septuagenari-
ans who ran the Senate — won them over,
made them willing, even eager, to support
him. He was the most natural politician in
his family, a close match in temperament to
his grandfather John “Honey Fitz”
Fitzgerald, who had taught him, Gabler
notes, “what empathy meant.”
“Catching the Wind” lends a cinematicsweep to Kennedy’s legislative crusades —
for example, his failed if noble campaign in
1965 to ban use of the poll tax, that old, rac-
ist roadblock to the African-American
vote, in state elections. (The 24th Amend-
ment, ratified in 1964, had prohibited its
use in federal elections. The year after
Kennedy’s effort foundered, the Supreme
Court ruled the poll tax unconstitutional at
the state level.) Gabler makes these bat-
tles exciting, though at times he seems in-
tent on making everythingexciting; scenes
are often over-egged, amped up by incan-
tation: “And then Ted quoted at length,
great length, from a speech, a remarkable
speech,” reads a typical passage. “Richard
Nixon was wounded now, badly wounded,
wounded and reeling from his wounds,” be-
gins another.
The reader needs no such prodding; the
drama, as it develops, is real enough. The
swiftness with which Ted Kennedy went
from being teased by Republicans as “Lit-
tle Brother” to becoming the patriarch of a
political dynasty — the bearer, as he him-self put it, of his martyred brothers’ “fallen
standard” — is unfathomable, however fa-
miliar the story remains. In 1968, when
Robert was killed in Los Angeles while
running for president, Ted was only 36.
The pressure upon him to carry forward
the campaign was instantaneous: One of
Bobby’s aides cornered Ted on the flight
that carried his brother’s body back to New
York, pleading, “You gotta run.” Kennedy
knew himself well enough not to accept a
draft — he was deeply depressed, immobi-
lized by grief. But he had lost control over
himself and his future. Tragedy begat trag-
edy, and Los Angeles led, in some indirect
but inexorable fashion, to Chappaquiddick
in July 1969. The death of Mary Jo
Kopechne in Kennedy’s car was, as Gabler
writes, “indelible — a stain he bore that no
amount of penance could erase.”
And Gabler suggests it was more than
that. Because Kennedy, he writes, was “the
face and the voice of modern liberalism,”
Chappaquiddick cost liberalism its moral
authority — at a time, the end of the ’60s,
when that authority was already waning.
“Catching the Wind” is presented as some-
thing of a parable — “This book,” Gabler
states, “is about political morality” — but
the concept never quite coheres. By “politi-
cal morality,” the author seems to mean,
exclusively, a concern for the “voiceless
and powerless,” as Kennedy often put it.
There is no discussion of its conservative
counterpoint, that system of belief that
saw abortion and homosexuality, for ex-
ample, as morally intolerable and the
death penalty as defensible. Instead, Ken-
nedy’s foil, in Gabler’s account, is the
amoral Nixon and his politics of resent-
ment and racial division. This is accurate
enough in itself, but less than the full story
that the book aims to tell. The decline of lib-
eralism, in any event, had at least as much
to do with economic stagnation as it did
with moral authority or the imperfections
of liberal apostles.
Kennedy, for his part, felt the winds
shifting. In the wake of Bobby’s death and
Chappaquiddick, as the book describes, he
redoubled his commitment to be “the sena-
tor of all those in need.” Yet the book ends
with Kennedy on the run from a rock-
throwing mob in his own hometown of Bos-
ton, which, in 1974, had exploded over the
busing of Black students into overwhelm-
ingly white school districts. “You’re a dis-
grace to the Irish!” a protester shouted,
one of the milder comments that day.
Never mind that Kennedy was not a partic-
ularly strong proponent of busing; what
the crowd made clear, as Gabler writes in a
powerful closing, was that “he was no long-
er one of them.” To the white working class
from which the Kennedys had risen, Ted
was now “just another condescending lib-
eral who favored minority rights over their
rights.” As Gabler’s next volume will no
doubt describe, Kennedy’s response was
not to change course. He would simply sail
harder. 0The Workhorse
Ted Kennedy rose through tragedy and scandal to become an icon of the Senate.
By JEFF SHESOL
CATCHING THE WIND
Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour
By Neal Gabler
928 pp. Crown. $40.
Edward Kennedy at work, 1968.PHOTOGRAPH BY GEORGE TAMES/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Over the course of five decades,
Ted Kennedy sponsored nearly
700 bills that became law.JEFF SHESOLis the author of “Supreme Power:
Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court.”
His book on John Glenn, John Kennedy and
the space race will be published next year.