John
F. Kennedy, the eldest brother, was King Arthur, and wife Jackie his
Guinevere. Bobby, the second brother, was Lancelot, defender of the
powerless and, it is said, secretly in love with the queen.
And
then there was the youngest of them all: Teddy, in whom the best and
the worst of everything Kennedy seemed to come together.

It
was he who would ultimately become this Camelot’s Galahad. Though far
from perfect and nowhere near a man of great virtue, Edward M. Kennedy
was the knight who ultimately set for himself a quest. Its object was
no less momentous than the Holy Grail itself: universal health care.

Embracing the legend

If
the analogy is imperfect, it is only because of the myth to which it is
attached. The Camelot of legend never existed, except in the minds of
people who needed there to be such a place. It and the people in it
were always what we wanted — and needed — them to be.

This
is why the myth is so powerful. Camelot was nothing more or less than a
reflection of the Garden of Eden, that perfect place inhabited by
perfect people in some bygone age when such places and such people
existed.

Ted Kennedy
undoubtedly understood that. He certainly embraced it, idolizing his
older brothers, fully believing that there was a happily-ever-after
that men could forge, if only they were bold enough to do so.

And
in the end, Ted Kennedy also came closer to the myth than his brothers
ever could. For that, he could thank the one gift his brothers never
had: the opportunity to live his life to its natural end.

An ailing Arthur

John
F. Kennedy may have been president when “Camelot” was a hit on
Broadway, but he was no King Arthur. Arthur was virtuous and pure, a
powerful warrior glowing with health. JFK only looked the part.
His
greatest virtue was his movie-star good looks, which projected the
image of other virtues that we willingly ascribed to him. In real life,
he was, as Mae West said of herself, “as pure as the driven slush.”

Physically,
he looked the part of the warrior who had survived the destruction of
PT 109 in the Pacific theater during World War II and had swum to
safety dragging one of his injured crewmen with him. But in reality,
according to his biographer, Robert Dallek, he was a physical wreck.
The newsreels showed him playing touch football on the White House
lawn. They did not show the massive doses of medications that allowed
him to do so.

To get
through the days, Kennedy took, “steroids for his Addison's disease,
pain-killers for his back, antispasmodics for his colitis, antibiotics
for urinary-tract infections, antihistamines for allergies and, on at
least one occasion, an antipsychotic (though only for two days) for a
severe mood change that Jackie Kennedy believed had been brought on by
the antihistamines,” Dallek wrote. At times, the hero of America’s
Camelot reportedly could not even put on his own shoes and socks.

As
president, JFK was inspirational. He also nearly plunged the world into
nuclear war. But none of it mattered. In 20th-century America, as in
every other culture from the birth of civilization, image trumps
reality.

It is no
different today. Humans have never been very good at letting the facts
get in the way of a good story. And the story of the Kennedys is more
than good; it is great, the stuff that myths are made of.

This
is a family that Aeschylus and Sophocles and Homer would have written
about, a family that Norse poets would have immortalized in sagas, a
family that medieval troubadours would have sung about, a family that
Shakespeare would have devoted a trilogy to, a family that America
transformed into a vision of its ideal self.

Expectations and excess

Teddy
was the kid brother of that family, the youngest kid who was faced with
the Everest of expectations established by his three older brothers.
Joseph
Jr. had died heroically as a pilot defending London against the Nazi
blitz. Jack, the second-oldest, became the embodiment of the Camelot
myth that would follow the family to the present. Bobby, the third
brother, was the brilliant orator and idealist who was on his way to
the White House in 1968 when he was cut down by an assassin’s bullet.
It
was a lot to live up to. It was both a curse and a blessing that Teddy
alone among the brothers lived out his natural life. It was a curse
because the reality of his personal life became public at
Chappaquiddick, when Mary Jo Kopechne, a young campaign worker, died,
and the famous senator neglected for nine hours to tell anyone about it.

There
was more. After his unsuccessful challenge to incumbent President Jimmy
Carter in 1980, Ted Kennedy outraged his Catholic base by divorcing his
wife, Joan.

Much of the
1980s seemed to be a blur of excess, of public drunkenness and lechery.
In a Greek tragedy, that would have been the last act: a great man
brought down by his own excesses, due to the original sin of hubris.

Remorse and redemption

But
life doesn’t always imitate art. In the 1990s, Ted Kennedy met his
second wife, Vicki, and finally became what the Kennedy myth had always
held him and his brothers to be.

His
redemption began with a very public confession of his own sins. In a
remarkable 1991 speech at Harvard, the senior senator from
Massachusetts did something that we were not accustomed to seeing our
political heroes do: He admitted to being less than what he seemed.

“I
recognize my own shortcomings, the faults and the conduct of my private
life,” he said in the distinctive Kennedy accent. “I realize that I
alone am responsible for them, and I am the one who must confront them.”

In
an interview with NBC News the following year, he explained that
speech, saying, “I owed them some explanation, or at least the
recognition that I understood.”
That would be
what ultimately set Ted Kennedy apart, and what transformed him into a
man who would be eulogized as one of the greatest senators in American
history. Unlike so many others, Ted Kennedy proved by his actions that
he really did understand.

His
legislative resume is a towering testament to his ideals. And in those
ideals, he was always consistent. His brother Bobby had swung from the
right to the left of the political scale, and Jack had been a centrist
and a political pragmatist. But Ted was consistent for four decades in
his defense of the least of us, in his belief in the common man and
woman.

Repentance and respect

It
takes more than age to become known as a statesman. Strom Thurmond
served forever in the Senate without ever being accused of such a
thing. Ted Kennedy didn’t have that distinction given to him. He earned
it.

He would give a lot of
credit to his second wife, Vicki, in whom he found a soul mate and an
inner peace that had been lacking in his life. He told NBC that those
later years were “a different plateau of my life; a different chapter
of my life.”

In the end,
there would be a final bit of Kennedy tragedy in his death. It could
not be said that he died too young; at 77, he had lived as full a life
as anyone could hope for. It was rife with imperfection, but that
proves nothing except that he was human. Much as the mythmakers would
have us believe otherwise, there are none of us who are perfect, none
of us who are without sin.

What
made him heroic to many in the end was that he accepted his sins,
repented, and fulfilled his vow to do better. By his final days, he was
as respected a man on both sides of the aisle as is ever likely to be
found in Washington, D.C.

Yet
still he died too soon. The great dream of his career, the Holy Grail
that this knight of Camelot spent a lifetime seeking, had been to see
universal health care in the United States. And at just the moment that
that goal was finally coming into sight, a moment when his leadership
and intellect were most desperately needed, he died.

The finish line of a lifelong race had been in sight. He never reached it.