The Kennedy Family - 28 October 1994

We're in a bar, an old pub in Boston. Not old perhaps by the standards of English pubs, Doyle's Bar set itself up in business in the early 1890s and as a combination saloon, town meeting, political gossip corner, it has never looked backwards. Although Doyle's is packed most weekends and never lacks for customers at any time, it is today a much-loved artefact, a mellow reminder of the last century and the turn of the century, when the transatlantic ships deposited in Boston, in Boston harbour, a never-ending troop of disembarking Irish immigrants.

Why did the Irish head mostly for Boston? Because their fathers and grandfathers had done it. So why did they choose Boston? Because they had it chosen for them. The first great wave of Irish emigrants to America were desperate and desperately poor, refugees from the 1848 potato famine and if it had not been for the arrival on the shipping scene of one Samuel Cunard, they would have had to go and probably expire, under sail. But in 1840 Cunard instituted the first regular transatlantic steamship service. His partners were men from Glasgow and Liverpool, with connections in Boston, so Liverpool was the sailing port of choice and since Mr Cunard's early, regular route was Liverpool to Cobh to Boston, that's the way the famished Irish went.

One of those famine victims was one Patrick Kennedy, who left New Ross in 1850, settled in East Boston, started a saloon, got into politics, begat four sons, the eldest of whom was a very early and mightily successful example of what came to be known as a go-getter. He also got into the liquor business, though on the side, call it on the wholesale sideline. His main interests and conquests were in banking, real estate and the motion picture industry. His name was Joseph P Kennedy and he begat John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who became the youngest man and the fist Roman Catholic, to be elected president of the United States.

Doyle's Bar is well-stocked with such memories, President Kennedy's picture hangs in two rooms, one room of which is the Honey Fitz room, named after John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, the former president's grandfather on his mother's side, who was also a quick and ready politician. Between them, the Kennedys and the Fitzgeralds took over Boston Irish politics and began a very rude intrusion, which at one time was laughed at by the people they were intruding on, namely the Boston Brahmins, the Cabots and Lowells and Saltonstalls and Adamses and Lodges, the old New England families who had run Boston and New England politics back to the colonial days. Came, however, a day they will never forget, 1952 to be exact, when John F Kennedy, the grandson of an impoverished Irish farmer, defeated the patrician Henry Cabot Lodge and took his seat in the United States Senate.

It's because of another senator, another Kennedy that we are on this Tuesday evening in Doyle's Bar, looking up at a grainy old television set. Mr Burke, the owner, normally keeps the set off. Saloons, bars, he believes are for social intercourse, happy talk and elbow bending among congenial customers. But tonight is very special. There's a battle going on up on the little screen, so once as exciting as a Boston Red Sox game and the customers have names like Burke and John Fox and Jack Lynch and Jimmy Barry, Ellen Reagan. The battle is a television debate and it's between an astonishingly handsome young man named Romney and a rather bulbous, overweight, white-haired man named, of course, Kennedy. It is none other than Senator Ted Kennedy who has, more than any other member of his family, borne an enormous family burden.

The oldest survivor, who became the surrogate father to many children, after his brother, the president was murdered and five years later, his other brother, Robert, a presidential candidate, was murdered. There's been too, the massive stroke that immobilised his father, an elder brother killed in the war, a sister killed in an air crash, the other put away years ago, as a retarded child. For his own misfortune there was the overnight incident, 25 years ago, when a car tumbled off a bridge on a tiny island off the Massachusetts coast and a girl was drowned. The driver escaped. The driver was Senator, even then, Senator Edward Kennedy and he did not show up and report to the police for another eight hours.

All this background and these melancholy memories were no doubt stirring in the minds of the cluster of customers around the bar, looking up at the little screen, heads tilted back as if gazing at an eclipse of the moon, and I think it's necessary to mention this almost Eugene O'Neill aspect of the Kennedy family and the stoicism and courage with which this remaining brother, Ted, has coped with all the following responsibilities because this audience and its comments after the show, played only lightly on the objections to incumbent candidates that are being heard everywhere around the country.

Time for a change, get the old rascals out, time to set term limits. Four terms, eight years, are enough for a cCongressman, two terms, 12 years, for a senator. These are the slogans chanted monotonously at election rallies from coast to coast and most resounding of all, and in places where the men who've been running the Congress are running for re-election, is the cry, he's been there too long.

Senator Ted Kennedy has been there 32 years, five terms, but there were more solid reasons why it did not seem to help the senator's opponent and he is the astonishingly handsome young man I mentioned, Mitt Romney. In another state he might be called, he has been dubbed by his supporters, a dream candidate, He's 47, six foot tall, an effortless, easy dresser and he has a pretty blonde wife, his high-school sweetheart, naturally, five sons, he's a Mormon, he doesn't drink, smoke, nor according to the strict church rules, touch tea or coffee. It doesn't say in his resumé whether he follows Brigham Young's compulsory order to dance at least once a week if you want to get into heaven. Old Brigham held, the only way you could get there, all things being equal, was to dance in. A professional pollster in Boston, looking over Mr Romney, saw him as an inevitable winner. He's younger, well-spoken, good looking, in good shape, doesn't smoke, drinks milk, he's the perfect anti-Kennedy.

Well, just to recite these attributes immediately brings to mind, in even the most fair-minded person, the burly figure and the sometimes bloated face of Senator Kennedy. Apart from the disaster at Chappaquiddick which, never forget, doomed forever his hopes of the presidency. The senator, down his 62 years and certainly through his later years in the Senate, has weathered some unsavoury domestic storms and lapses. Drink. Women, bar-hopping with a young nephew subsequently charged with rape, many episodes his supporters would rather forget. But the most remarkable thing about Tuesday's debate, it was going on in a famous 18th-century Boston City Hall, was that at the end of it, the general impression implanted deeper by a later roving poll, was that the two candidates had come out even.

One supporting fact should be remarked on, in an election year in which all the experts agree that dirty negative television ads garner more votes than statements of fact, however shining, Mr Romney happens to be too much of a gentleman even to mention the senator's indulgent past. His positions are eminently liberal Republican. Abortion, yes, but the state should not be forced to pay for them. No discrimination against homosexuals in the workplace but no legal homosexual marriages either. Welfare recipients should be required to work and have regular tests for drugs, followed by compulsory treatment. He did add, according to the usual requirements of an opponent, a note that may, in fact, do him harm. The Senator, he said, is tired, obsolete, his influence is nothing but pork. Well getting pork, domestic favours for your district, isn't that what it's all about, cried a neutral onlooker.

Everybody in the hall or the pub or in front of a television set, anywhere in Massachusetts knows, that accusing Senator Kennedy of tiredness, of obsolete policies, was a bad line to take. Even his worst political enemies in the Senate, and I can think of several westerners, Republicans, will tell you he's one of the best informed, hardest working and effective senators of his time. There's no doubt about that. Unlike most of his party, he's not jibbed at the liberal label, he flaunts it and he has left, so far, a large and impressive record of liberal legislation.

During the summer, when Mr Romney appeared, it was as if God had dropped on Massachusetts a demi-god. In no time, he rolled ahead in the polls. Senator Kennedy woke up, he roused himself, he started to campaign and today he seems to be pulling away with a handsome lead. But nobody, not the experts, the pollsters, the candidates themselves, will ever know what gave the election to Senator Kennedy, if he makes it. But if he does and if, as so often happens in crucial elections, votes can turn on the resounding echo of a single phrase. It could well be an unforgettable line that the Senator spoke on Tuesday, in response to an imprudent suggestion of Mr Romney that Senator Kennedy had done financially well out of politics. The Senator fixed him with the gaze of an old Roman. He said, Mr Romney, the Kennedys are not in public service to make money. We have paid too high a price.

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