He Was a Friend of Mine

From the time I was six years old, I admired the Kennedy family.  I knew nothing about politics as a child, but the First Family was not just about politics.  The charm and mystique of Camelot inspired even young children like me, who could identify more with Caroline than with her famous father.  It was often a lighthearted admiration.  My family owned a record album of a comedian who impersonated the President, and I would listen to it on our stereo and memorized some of the funny bits.  I also remember the Cuban missile crisis.  Though I was not quite eight years old when it happened, I watched the President address the American people on television, observed my parents' nervous concern, and went to bed at night wondering if I would wake up in the morning.  I'm sure I was much older, probably in college, when I finally understood that Jack and Bobby Kennedy's wisdom, their courage in rejecting the unsound advice they were receiving from their top military advisors, and their superb diplomacy, saved the world from nuclear war.

My most vivid memories, sadly, are of JFK's assassination.  I was in my 4th grade classroom when the Principal announced over the P.A. system that President Kennedy had been shot and that we were being sent home.  The buses took us home early, my mother had to go to the store, and it was there that we learned that the President had died.  It happened days before my ninth birthday, and that week we were glued to our black and white television set, watching every detail of the coverage of the funeral:  the horse-drawn hearse, the flag-covered casket lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda, the grieving widow holding the hands of her daughter and little John-John, the 21-gun salute, the eternal flame at Arlington National Cemetery, and that awful footage, shown over and over and over again, of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald at point blank range as Oswald walked in the custody of Texas sheriffs.    

Five years later, on an early June morning, I went across the street to wait for the school bus.  I was 13, and just completing eighth grade.  My older sister was also at the bus stop, and said "Did you hear Kennedy was shot?"  I thought it was some kind of bad joke.  Of course I had heard, he was shot five years earlier in Dallas.  "No," she said, "Bobby Kennedy."  I was stunned.  Like many people my age, I was inspired by Bobby.  Although my political sensibilities were still in their formative years, I saw Bobby Kennedy as a budding hero, as someone who deeply cared about the underprivileged, about right and wrong, about justice, and most of all, about peace.  I couldn't believe that this inspirational family could be stung again by an assassin's bullet.  I couldn't fathom the evil that would do this, and the depth of the loss our country had sustained.

Ted Kennedy lived in his brothers' shadows, shadows of what had been and, more importantly, of what might have been.  No one at the time viewed the youngest of the Kennedy brothers as possessing the strength, charisma or vision of his older brothers.  Yet all of us felt deeply for him as he delivered the eulogy at Bobby's funeral, a eulogy that he struggled to get through.  We could only imagine the pain he felt at the sudden and tragic loss of yet another brother, whom he loved.

For me, Ted Kennedy has always just been there.  I moved to Massachusetts in 1979 and he has always been my Senator.  In my first year here, when I served as a law clerk to a federal district judge in Boston, I quickly came to understand Ted's importance in the area of judicial appointments.  A vacancy had opened in the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and my judge was being considered as a strong candidate to fill it.  The judge had accomplished a great deal for the underprivileged, especially the mentally retarded, and was also a vigilant defender of constitutional rights.  However, he was a Republican and a Nixon appointee, and he did not get the nod.  Harvard Law Professor Stephen Breyer, now a Supreme Court Justice, did.  I learned then what I have since always known to be true:  that the road to the federal judiciary in Massachusetts, like so many other roads here, went through Ted Kennedy's office.  

I have seen Senator Kennedy speak a few times, and while he was not always as eloquent as his brothers, he never failed to inspire.  As many have said during this sad week, he eventually proved to be among the most effective legislators in our nation's history.  One of the speakers at the Friday night service said that John Kennedy inspired America, Bobby Kennedy challenged America, and Ted Kennedy changed America.  While he has always been a controversial figure, in part because of the unwillingness of many on the right to forgive his inexplicable behavior on a single night forty years ago, he has done a great deal of good for this country over the years, and many of his political enemies were his personal friends.  Over time, he emerged from his brothers' shadows, and made his own indelible mark on our nation, and on the many, many lives he has touched.  

I will continue to reflect on Senator Kennedy's life, his accomplishments, his compassion, his good humor, his passion for justice, his love for family and friends, and his benevolence.  I hope to learn from all those good qualities that made him both so popular among those who knew him and so successful in helping others and effecting change.  But most of all, I will miss him.  As the Byrds sang after the world lost JFK:

"Though I never met him, I knew him just the same.

 He was a friend of mine."