Ted Kennedy: A Life by John A. Farrell

Author:John A. Farrell [Farrell, John A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-10-25T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty-Seven

SWEET JACK FALSTAFF

Kennedy was now in unfamiliar territory: fretting about reelection. With no health care bill, he and the Democrats would slink home that fall with little to show America’s working families. Some of the measures the Democrats had passed—tax hikes, handgun controls, and a ban on assault weapons—aroused the Republican base. Others, like the North American Free Trade Agreement, and yet another crime bill that promoted incarceration, failed to wow Democratic constituencies. It was hard to tell just what the Democrats stood for. And that included Kennedy.

It was not that Kennedy neglected Massachusetts. The federal share of a $6 billion cleanup of Boston’s harbor, defense contracts for jet engines and the Patriot missile, and $12 billion in federal aid to tear down and replace the traffic-choked Fitzgerald Expressway with a modern road and tunnel project were outturns of the clout borne by Kennedy, Tip O’Neill, and the other members of the Massachusetts delegation. After his Vineyard boat ride with the president and First Lady, Kennedy was asked by reporters what they had chatted about. The presidency? International affairs? No, the senator said. He had pressed Clinton about a defense installation that would bring jobs to the town of Southbridge.

At the opening of a conference committee meeting, convened to resolve differences between the Senate and the House, Kennedy would sometimes introduce an issue—an earmarked appropriation for Massachusetts, or some other parochial matter—that was demonstrably not germane. “I just raise it. I just want to make sure that I have the right to bring it up,” he would tell his fellow conferees. To move things along, they would promise to hear him out at some point down the road.

Then, generally at a late hour, with adjournment looming, having reached a final deal on the major matters of contention, they would groan as Kennedy brought up his pet project. And then they would wave it through. “Sure as hell, just as you were getting ready to close the conference,” Representative George Miller remembered. “Everybody’s heading for the airplane . . . home, and so they’d say, ‘Okay Ted, just put it in.’ ”

Kennedy could run the clock the other way as well. Once he sensed a deal at hand, he would press to clinch the agreement before others changed their minds. “He’s got his . . . amendments tucked away,” Miller recalled. “He’s now believing this bill is going to the Rose Garden, and now he’s not going to let it not go to the Rose Garden.” At this point Miller would turn to his staff. “Let’s clean up,” he would whisper. “We’re going to be going to bed in half an hour.”

Kennedy’s ardent preparation enabled him to buffalo his colleagues. “Sometimes he would be reading from a memo,” said Miller—a memorandum or report that the other conferees had missed or ignored, but Kennedy had war-gamed beforehand with his staff. “He would start to take control, because once it became clear to him that you weren’t prepared, you were just bait.” Or he

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