The “boys from Boston,” as Republicans call the Massachusetts senators, have been on the campaign trail together regularly over the past few months. Always, Kennedy gets a huge laugh referring to himself as the lucky “uncle-in-law of an Austrian body-builder Republican governor of Kah-lee-for-nee-ah,” and Kerry draws some chuckles, too, making light of his career as second fiddle to an icon: “Someone asked me what it felt like, whether it was really hard to live in the shadow of Ted Kennedy. He asked me what it was like to know that in all of my life, I would never have an amazing legislative record like Ted Kennedy. He asked me if I was jealous of the fact that I was working with a living legend… And it was Teddy who asked me that.” “He made that up himself,” Kennedy notes proudly. “I thought that was pretty good.”
Kerry, that kidder, certainly has no harder-working ally than Kennedy, who probably deserves as much credit as anyone for resuscitating his presidential campaign. When Kerry was trailing badly in the polls, Kennedy lent advice, on-the-ground support where it mattered most, in Iowa and New Hampshire–and his capable chief of staff, Mary Beth Cahill, who took over as Kerry’s campaign manager. Wherever he was needed, Kennedy whipped off his jacket and worked up the crowds. He always had the sense, the candidate says, that Kerry would have a second act.
Now that Kerry has sewn up the nomination, though, Republicans with long experience in running against Kennedys real and imagined are reveling in the connection. Footage from their primary-season road show is sure to figure prominently in Bush ads. And several Democratic strategists outside the campaign who credit Kennedy with dragging Kerry across the finish line in the early primaries hope he’ll move off center stage now. “They’ll use him for fund-raising, as a sounding board and principally with African-Americans,” one says. But Kennedy himself, who is clearly having the time of his life, seems to have other ideas–as he demonstrated in a blistering speech on Iraq last week, going far beyond what Kerry himself has said in condemning the run-up to the war.
Will Kennedy even campaign in the South? “Sure, I’d be more than glad to go anywhere,” Kennedy says in a second interview in his hideaway in the Capitol. Kerry campaign aides, on a staff that includes several people who have also worked for Kennedy, bristle at the very suggestion that his role would in any way be curtailed. And when I ask the candidate’s wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, about attempts to portray her husband as a Kennedy clone, she says, “They should be so lucky. We’re honored to have him. I’m not afraid. He’s fun to be around, you know? When he really gets wound up, he’s amazing.” Kennedy’s appearances have always been carefully targeted, she says. “But I would think he’ll do whatever he wants to do.” She does allude to the possibility that he is so amazing he’s capable of upstaging her more laconic husband–but then she laughs that off, too: “Ted is a bubbling Irishman and John is not that, but you can’t have two bubbles or you’ll be really wet.”
In fact, the only hint of ambivalence comes from the candidate himself. “I’m so happy to sit,” Kerry begins an interview, clearly exhausted at the end of his umpteenth day on the road. Kerry, whose prep-school friends say he has always loved all things Kennedy, was a full-time volunteer in Ted Kennedy’s first Senate race the summer before he entered Yale, in 1962. “I was one of the headquarter brats hanging around making a nuisance of myself,” he says. He briefly dated Jackie Kennedy’s half-sister Janet Auchincloss that same summer, and even got to sail Narragansett Bay with JFK at the helm. Asked how it feels to have Ted Kennedy stumping for him now, Kerry says, “It’s neat–pinch me; is this really happening?” Yet when invited to dispute the idea that “Kennedy” is a dirty word, he answers by saying that any attempt to link him to Kennedy’s record “is not going to work, it’s so silly and infantile. I’ve been a deficit hawk since the day I arrived, so let them try.” Kerry describes himself as “much more of a devolution Democrat” than his primary-season protector. “My health-care plan is based on market incentives, very different from Ted’s. They’ll have trouble labeling me.” Given the 93-point rating the liberal Americans for Democratic Action gave Kerry–compared with Kennedy’s mere 88 points–this seems unlikely. So, I ask, wouldn’t this be as good a time as any to say, “Yeah, I’m a liberal just like my buddy Ted and here’s why…”? Expressionless, Kerry responds this way: “They just want you to be authentic and clear.” So that’s a no? “I’m not stuck on the idea I have the only solution,” he says, back on the subject of health care. “I just want to get it done.”
For decades, the relationship between the two men was slightly fraught, with Kennedy guarding his turf perhaps a bit more zealously than was absolutely necessary; their staffs were not merely competitive, but at times openly hostile. Kennedy did go all out, however, to help Kerry in his tough 1996 re-election campaign against popular Republican governor William Weld. Asked about their history, Kennedy says, “We haven’t always agreed and at times have sort of chafed each other and had competitive staffs, but we have a common direction.” Kerry answers much the same way: “Compared to many Senate relationships, we have a great relationship.” And both say they have gotten to know each other better in the decade since each man remarried. “We were loose friends and colleagues” for years, Kennedy says, “but our wives were warm friends from Nantucket, so we’ve become closer personally.” When Kennedy celebrated his 70th birthday, Kerry and Connecticut Democrat Chris Dodd were the only colleagues included at a gathering for family and close friends.
At this point, despite the obvious potential pitfalls, Kerry might have a hard time distancing himself without playing into Republican attempts to paint him as a man who has sometimes been less than consistent in his stated views. (In the past, even Kerry’s ethnicity has been a muddle. Though most people assumed he was Irish, his Jewish grandfather changed the name from Kohn in Austria in 1901. When I ask Kennedy whether he, too, was ever under the misimpression that his colleague was Irish, he says, “I hadn’t really sort of thought about it.”) The Kerry team, in any case, is hoping that its political opponents have already exhausted the effectiveness of campaigning against the name Kennedy and the word “liberal.” “Is someone liberal when they voted for welfare reform and a law to put 100,000 new police on the streets?” asks one senior Kerry aide. “I resist the label not just because of the way it has been demonized on the other side, but because I don’t know what it describes anymore.” The campaign is very clear, however, about what happened when the party’s last nominee put himself through contortions over whether and how, if and when to use his patron on the stump. For how not to run away from one’s political betters, see Gore, Albert.
