Briefly On Ted Kennedy

The Last Shards of Camelot

I wrote obits for Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett and Les Paul and Marilyn Chambers of all people but managed to not write one for Ted Kennedy. I thought about it, but I was left feeling strangely empty. He was important, he was the last remaining link to a mythical time, but I sort of shrugged and paid attention to something else instead.

So I feel a little stupid to be writing this today, but this bit got my attention:

Kennedy also writes in the memoir that he always accepted the official findings on his brother John's assassination.

He said he had a full briefing by Earl Warren, the chief justice on the commission that investigated the November 22, 1963, Dallas shooting, which was attributed to Lee Harvey Oswald.

He said he was convinced the Warren Commission got it right and he was "satisfied then, and satisfied now".

...which is really interesting at this point in time.

As the remaining patriarch of the Kennedy clan, I imagine that there would be no other recourse, even in the face of mounting arguments. I sort of wonder how he lived through that time in the early 1990s when Oliver Stone's film was sensationally making a case for a conspiracy.

I imagine if you were the last standing Kennedy brother who was at once a Senator of the United States of America, you wouldn't dare allow yourself to be swallowed up by that possibility;it would be too scary. What if Democracy was just a facade and the Military Industrial Complex really ruled America with a deft and bloody hand? What would he have done? What would it have meant? Surely a US Senator can't buy into that stuff, right? Although it would have been intriguing to have sat Ted Kennedy down and gone through the case bit by bit as Jim Garrison does in his book.

I guess the thing about Ted Kennedy was that he was remarkably disappointing in some ways when compared to the over-idealised brothers who were felled by assassins. That had he shared their imagination or idealism, he might have been a very different politician; but he wasn't. He was Ted Kennedy, the less inspiring brother.

Which in turn fed my own luke-warm indifference at his passing. I know that's a bit rough when you talk about a man who was a Senator for so long and got so many bills through. Yet it has to be said, he was no Jack or Bobby - for better or worse. I guess if he were that different guy, he might have seen the argument for the conspiracy that we all saw in the 1990s.

We still won't know until 2039.