Last month, vacationing on Cape Cod, I drove around the corner of a street in Hyannis Port near the ocean and coming down the street was a golf cart with Senator Ted Kennedy as a passenger. I quickly pointed him out to the others in my car and we pulled over to watch as the golf cart left the road and headed onto a pier, taking Kennedy to view his beloved ocean.
As a Massachusetts native and someone who is involved in politics as a passion and as a livelihood, I constantly felt Kennedy’s presence. I spoke to him only one time, after college, while looking for work in Washington, D.C., and coming across him in the halls of a Senate Office building. Quick hellos were exchanged.
A couple of years before, spending a week on Martha’s Vineyard with teammates from my college cross-country team in pre-season training, I took a break, jumped on a bicycle and traveled to Chappaquiddick. I followed the dirt roads on the island that Kennedy said confused him in the dark a month earlier, which lead to the tragic death of the woman in his car, Mary Jo Kopechne. And, I remember thinking at the time … in the dark … could be.
Kennedy came up in political context over the years, of course, even though I settled across the country and had a decidedly different political perspective. He was a subject in different ways to people I worked with. Howard Jarvis had a political cartoonist draw a picture with the senator in a museum, as if Kennedy’s style of liberalism was now relegated to history. Arnold Schwarzenegger used his uncle as a foil in his political speeches, but always in a good-natured way for you could hear the governor’s respect and devotion to the man.
I will remember Kennedy at this time as a passionate advocate who, nevertheless, built lasting and sincere friendships and tried to work with political opponents such as Ronald Reagan, Orrin Hatch and John McCain. That is such a value in political life that seems to be disappearing.