The Last the Senate Saw of Ted Kennedy

Ted Kennedy made his last stop at the U.S. Senate yesterday before being taken to Arlington National Cemetery to be buried among his brothers. The late Massachusetts Senator's funeral was held in Boston earlier in the day and attended by President Obama, Former Presidents Clinton, Bush (43), and Carter, Vice President Biden, Former Vice Presidents Gore and Quayle, and Secretary of State Clinton, among others. Awaiting his body on the Capitol steps were around 500 mostly former staffers, many of whom had attended Sen. Kennedy's 75th birthday party and now reconvened here under less happy circumstances. The casket was not originally planned to stop at the Capitol (as evidenced by the complete lack of crowd barriers), but seeing as that was where Ted had spent the majority of his life, it seemed only fitting that it should. The public was not given much notice, but from the DC news I read, I learned that the casket would arrive sometime after 4PM. Since I lived only two blocks away, I ventured out at the appointed hour to see it.

Leaving my apartment and nearing the Senate, I saw waves of people converging there, drawn if by magnetism. Residents and tourists. Children and parents. The young. The elderly. A spectrum of all colors. They collectively felt that this was a historic moment and maybe for Teddy or maybe for themselves they wanted to be a part of it. I found myself next to a kindly looking older man with a powder blue Obama hat and holding what appeared to be the only sign in the entire crowd. In felt marker it read "Hail to the Hero of Healthcare" and he quietly held it to his chest as we awaited the hearse.

Just then, a lady wearing a teal blazer and some neck badge I've never seen before came through the crowd and approached the man. She identified herself as a Kennedy staffer, told the man that his sign was disrespecting the funeral, ans asked him to take it down. The kindly man said that he would be unable to honor that request and held it up again. The fact that a congressional staffer asked a man to censor himself hear the capitol deeply troubled me. He wasn't shouting anything or disturbing those around him. The sign he held merely honored Kennedy's championing of health care, and did not directly advocate for anything. What's more, he was holding the sign in a secluded part of a 5,000+ crowd, not on Kennedy's funeral alter or anything. I patted him on the shoulder and we exchanged nods.

"Maybe she's against healthcare," he said to me. The pasty man in front of him turned to him and matter-of-factly said that she's a loyal staffer and was merely enforcing the Kennedys' reasonable request that the event not be politicized. We asked this other staffer what about the sign he found to be partisan and why, given the fact that Kennedy himself said that the pursuit of universal health care was "the cause of my life," it disrespected the event. We reminded him that earlier at Kennedy's funeral, his own grandson, in the church and on live television, said, "that every American will have decent quality health care as a fundamental right and not a privileged, we pray to the lord [lord hear our prayer]." The man seemed to realize that he was not going to look good in this discussion, the way officials arguing with citizens never do. He said something about avoiding the political backlash caused at the Paul Wellstone funeral, and we asked again how a funeral for a lifetime politician can be anything less than political. If Democrats want to turn off voters, they should continue to hire self-righteous staffers like these.

About that time, the 22-year-old woman directly in front of me collapsed. She and her similarly young and attractive husband had been waiting with their 1-year-old baby when heatstroke or dehydration must have got the better of her. Earlier they were frustrated they couldn't get any of the water for their baby that staffers were passing out, and I told them the obvious fact that if they say they have a child, everyone will bend over backwards to give them anything they want. "I have a baby," the father said. Presto: free water.

They had seemed pretty clueless when it came to being in crowds, I had to give them some more advice. "If she's not feeling well, you should shout the word 'medic'." Within 30 seconds the group of middle aged civilian paramedics who had come to her aid were relieved by a platoon of well-dressed Capitol doctors who gave her a full diagnostic and whisked her away. The kindly man turned again to me. "That's government run health care for you." Free and socialized, I thought. And no bureaucrat standing in the way. Within a few minutes, another woman fell, and then another. It became a game watching the young doctors and police man rush from place to place.

Standing in the heat of the Sun, occasionally relieved by a passing cloud, the crowd waited more than two hours, swelling in number all the while. Even the babies remained remarkably calm. The lady next to me remarked that things would have been better if the staffers passed out more water instead of American flags. I told her, "It's certainly not for lack of patriotism that everyone is passing out."

The crowd broke out into sustained applause when the sickly 91-year-old Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) appeared in his wheelchair on the steps, and then again 15 minutes later when the hearse arrived. After some words by a religious official and a representative of the family, a choir led the crowd in America the Beautiful. As the family returned to their cars, the crowd broke into impromptu recessionals of patriotic songs sung in muted and reverent tones. From what I heard there, the singing began with the staffers on the steps and slowly spread like a faint wind onto the gathered crowd so that it too was fully involved by each song's first chorus.

The caravan consisted of a half dozen black sedans, a few black short-buses, and no less than five full-sized Peter Pan tour buses. After a while I started to wonder exactly how many Kennedys there really were. And then they all finally left, the sun setting behind the Lincoln Monument far in the distance, motorcycle engines competing for volume over the din of the cicadas: the Last the Senate ever saw of Ted Kennedy.

The lonely, rose-covered Senate desk

Since Ted Kennedy's internment in Arlington Cemetery will be closed to the public, I visited the Senate today with the help of a certain Dartmouth congressional intern to see his desk and pay my respects. Because the Senate is not currently in session, and in such times no pictures or videos are allowed to be taken of the floor, you'll have to rely on my description. As per Senate tradition, his desk is draped in black, and placed on the level top is a bowl of white roses. His desk is rather far in the back, which I found surprising given his seniority. Maybe he wanted it that way. His chair was one of few I could see that had a tan butt cushion, and I'm not really sure what to make of it.

Also on his desk was a single piece of paper, printed with the words of The Road Not Taken by the great Robert Frost. Consulting various news outlets, I can't seem to find out who is responsible for putting it there, or what personal significance it might have had for him, besides the fact that Frost came and spoke at the JFK inauguration. The Road Not Taken is so overused and frequently misunderstood that I find its placement on Kennedy's desk rather curious and worthy of examination. Here are the words:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

What did the placer mean when he put this on the desk? Did he fall victim of the ignorant view that the poem is about individuality and the importance of choices? Was the poem choice suppose to honor the "trail-blazing" leadership of the Kennedy clan, of taking the life path less traveled as described in the last stanza?

That would certainly be a moving tribute if the poem didn't directly contradict that interpretation in the second and third stanza, when the paths are revealed to be equal in wear and leaf cover. Only in the projected future will the narrator amend reality to romanticize the decision. And further, in the immediate present of the decision, the speaker knows that he will speak of his decision later in time not with with defiance but with a regretful sigh.

Instead the poem illustrates the irony of a sentimentalist, knowing he will regret a meaningless choice, wishing perhaps to see where all roads lead before taking a step in either direction, and, once he does, inflating the story beyond what it actually was. Doesn't sound very fitting. Doesn't sound very Kennedy.

Instead I'd suggest putting a different Frost poem on Kennedy's desk, Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

First, the poem is set in the cold and snowy night of winter, alluding to the cold, the darkness, and the somberness of death. Second, the narrator is in isolation, as Kennedy now is in death. His only company, a horse (which for political purposes might as well be a donkey), expresses a desire to keep progressing to their objective (health care?) before turning in for the night. Last, the ending quatrain hearkens to the yet daunting amount of unfinished work to be done, the unfinished destiny of "the dream", the endurance of "the hope". And in all these things we find our Teddy Kennedy and are reminded of why we'll miss him so very much for so very long.

Edward Moore "Ted" Kennedy (1932 - 2009)

Ted Kennedy, the longest serving brother in one of the greatest political families, died early this morning of brain cancer, exactly one year to the day of his surprise appearance at the Democratic National Convention. He was a son of privilege in a family that championed the poor. He sought the glory in life that his brothers were denied in death. He was the Lion of the Senate and he became an institution onto himself. And his alter flame will be the guiding light to a new generation of change-makers, our current President included.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy is that Ted never lived to see the health care plan, largely of his inspiration, pass congress. Now, in the proposal's greatest hour of need, its champion is dead. And for that, America will miss him so very much.

I've always been fond of Ted's oratory, and I'd like to share a clip from his eulogy of Bobby Kennedy, who was slain during his 1968 Presidential Campaign.

My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.

Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world.

As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him:

"Some men see things as they are and say why.
I dream things that never were and say why not."