Editorial: Ted Kennedy remembered in mixed messages

Issue of September 4, 2009 / 15 Elul 5769 The swell of emotion and affection that has followed the passing of Senator Edward M. Kennedy may have caught some of us by surprise. Perhaps those born after the Camelot years don't quite get the Kennedy thing. It's been said often that Americans born during or before the 1960s viewed the Kennedys as akin to American royalty. Those born later, however, never experienced the nirvana that seems to have been the JFK presidency or the tragedy of his assassination, or the redoubled tragedy just a few years later when the late president's brother Robert was also cut down by an assassin's bullet. We know only of a famous family that seems to have something of a black cloud hanging above it - Joe Jr., who died in air combat in WWII, JFK, RFK, Chappaquiddick, William Kennedy Smith, a family wild child accused of rape in the '90s, JFK Jr., killed in a plane crash with his young wife - to name some of the lowlights. To a certain, unkind, extent, for those who came of age after 1969, Ted Kennedy himself, the last son of Camelot, could be reduced to a punch line, to morbid jokes about Chappaquiddick. To those Americans who don't remember the senator before that night when he saved himself and left a young female aide to die, he has never seemed to be presidential timber, despite what his brothers were or might have been. This week we have two front-page articles looking back on the life and work of Senator Kennedy and his relationship with American Jewry. David Seidemann, in his column From the other side of the bench celebrates Kennedy's life, and how a man born to great privilege fought for those who were not so fortunate - fought, in his own words, “for as long as it takes,” in a senatorial career that is truly one for the ages. Very much on the other side of the bench, so to speak, is a sharply worded analysis by Kosher Bookworm columnist Alan Jay Gerber, writing about an episode that was little-known in Kennedy's lifetime but that may very well serve to tarnish his posthumous reputation and affect the way in which history remembers him. Despite the wealth and the fame it couldn't have been easy to be a Kennedy. Whatever mistakes he made in his life, Senator Kennedy - a Liberal's Liberal, the Lion of the Senate - certainly worked hard at being a force for good in America, and for that, in death, he deserves to be remembered well.