Citizens of the Green Room: Profiles in Courage and Self-Delusion by Mark Leibovich

Author:Mark Leibovich [Leibovich, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-11-13T10:00:00+00:00

The Reluctant Kennedy

March 17, 2013

In early December, Washington’s political class was in one of its episodic ventilations over who would fill the latest round of job openings. The intrigue of the moment involved Hillary Clinton’s replacement as secretary of state. Susan Rice, the US ambassador to the United Nations and onetime front-runner, was taking a public battering, and the fallback candidate, Senator John Kerry, was looking more likely to get the job. This would in turn mean that another Massachusetts Senate seat would be up for grabs—the third election since the death of Ted Kennedy in 2009.

In the midst of all that, I was eating lunch at a private club near the White House at the invitation of Ted Kennedy Jr. As the namesake of the late senator, he was of course entitled under Massachusetts law to slide happily into any available political seat without so much as leaving the compound to drop off a ballot petition. There was only one slight problem with this: he lived in Connecticut, not Massachusetts. But Kennedys have a way of surmounting pesky barriers like these, and conjecture about Kerry’s seat, if it were to become open (which it has), was on the table.

Ted Jr., as he is known, has eager blue eyes and windswept Kennedy hair. He is friendly and solicitous, but his efforts at ingratiating himself come off as more self-taught than natural, a bit too eager, as when, weeks earlier, he marveled at how really great it was to see me. At one point he asked if I had ever been to the family home on Cape Cod. When I said no, he insisted, “Oh, you have to come down sometime.” We had never met before.

He speaks in the patrician New England accent and nasal-honking intonations that conjure his father. He kept saying things like “I am entering a new phase of my life” and “I come from a family of public servants,” and it was perfectly clear what Ted Jr. had called me here to discuss. After a lifetime of entreaties, many from his father, the oldest son of Edward M. Kennedy was now, at fifty-one, prepared to join the family business. In the musty parlance of his heritage, he was being “called to service.”

For someone so incubated in the heat of public life, Kennedy betrayed a surprising transparency, or maybe naïveté, in explaining to me how he had been preparing for this next phase. “I’ve been cultivating all sorts of friendships and relationships with people who can be helpful,” he said. And then he made clear how I came in. He also kept mentioning to me that “my father and brother had always spoken highly of you,” which carried a whiff of declaring me “reliable” within the family. (Was I, too, being called to service?) What he envisioned, Ted Jr. said, was “a foundational story” being written about him. “What’s this guy like?” he asked. “What’s he thinking?”

This was somewhat unusual. When someone decides to “come out” as a

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