By Russell Shaw
Often called a liberal icon, the senior U.S. senator from Massachusetts was indeed a liberals’ liberal who took a typically activist — and, in the view of many, generally praiseworthy — approach to issues like immigration reform, health care, and social welfare.
But moral conservatives, including fellow Catholics, parted company with him on things like abortion and same-sex marriage. He supported both.
In some ways Kennedy’s career was the story of a man who might have been: might have been president of the United States if his shortcomings hadn’t prevented that; might have been a powerful leader of the pro-life movement if he hadn’t turned pro-choice; might have been a model of the Catholic statesman in public life if he hadn’t become a symbol of American Catholicism at odds with the Church.
Edward Moore Kennedy was born Feb. 22, 1932, youngest of nine children of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Rose Fitzgerald. The elder Kennedy was an Irish Catholic multimillionaire and a power in the Democratic party with high political ambitions for his sons.
Young Ted entered Harvard in 1950, but he was soon suspended in a cheating scandal. After two years with the army in Paris, he returned to Harvard and eventually graduated.
The oldest Kennedy brother, Joseph Jr., was originally the chief object of the family’s political ambitions, but he died in World War II. The ambitions then were transferred to brother John, a war hero who served in the House of Representatives and Senate before his election as president in 1960. President Kennedy chose his brother Robert as attorney general. In 1962, as soon as he reached the minimum Senate age requirement of 30, Ted was elected to John’s former seat.
Assassination ended the lives of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, in 1963 and 1968 respectively. With the death of Robert, who was campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination at the time, Ted faced the challenge of filling his brothers’ political shoes. But his chances of becoming president ended in 1969 at a place off Cape Cod called Chappaquiddick Island.
After leaving a party with a young woman named Mary Jo Kopechne in his car, Kennedy drove off a bridge and into a pond. The car sank. Kopechne died, but Kennedy swam to safety, then left the scene and didn’t call the authorities until after the woman’s body was found the next day. Following an inquest a judge concluded that negligent driving was a factor in Kopechne’s death, but Kennedy was not charged.
In 1980, nevertheless, Kennedy made a run at the White House, challenging incumbent Jimmy Carter. Carter won 24 Democratic primaries to Kennedy’s 10, and Kennedy dropped out of the race.
Kennedy had married Virginia Joan Bennett, a Catholic like himself, in 1958. The couple had three children. But the marriage unraveled as Joan Kennedy struggled with alcoholism and the senator acquired a playboy reputation. The two separated in 1978 and were divorced in 1982. Subsequently Kennedy married Victoria Reggie, a lawyer, and, according to friends, pulled his life together, in the process becoming a far more effective member of the Senate.
Be that as it may, many people saw Ted Kennedy’s political evolution as nothing short of scandalous.
In August, 1971 — two and a half years before the Supreme Court’s decision legalizing abortion — the senator sent a constituent who asked his position on abortion a letter that could have been a text for a consistent ethic of life. The letter read in part:
“When history looks back to this era it should recognize this generation as one which cared about human beings enough to halt the practice of war, to provide a decent living for every family, and to fulfill its responsibility to its children from the very moment of conception.”
Once abortion was approved by the high court, however, Kennedy became one of its most outspoken and aggressive supporters on the national scene. Twice, for example, he voted to sustain President Bill Clinton’s vetoes of federal legislation to ban the partial-birth abortion procedure. Eventually the ban was adopted with the support of President George W. Bush. The Supreme Court upheld the legislation in 2007.
Kennedy also backed same-sex marriage and opposed a constitutional amendment supporting traditional marriage.
Light may have been shed on Kennedy’s views on matters like these by the disclosure, years later, of a meeting that took place in the summer of 1964 at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. It involved Kennedy family representatives and prominent liberal priests, including Jesuit Father Robert Drinan, then law school dean at Boston College, and moral theologians Father Charles Curran and Jesuit Father Richard McCormick.
The priests’ task was to find a rationale permitting a Catholic in public office to support abortion. According to meeting participants they did — to their own satisfaction.
In his 2008 book about Boston Catholicism “The Faithful Departed” (Encounter Books, $25.95), Philip F. Lawler speaks of the dismay of prolife Catholics at the failure of the Church hierarchy to discipline Catholic politicians who support abortion. For years, Ted Kennedy was foremost among these. In this way as in others, his influence seems likely to last long after his death.
