The Other Kennedy Connection
By Howie Carr

Senator John Forbes Kerry has an obsession with the Kennedys. John Fitzgerald Kennedy is, in many ways, his lifelong model. Kerry’s signature Naval service, his first race for public office—all were modeled on the late President. But the JFK mimicry is not the problem. What is likely to cause problems for a possible President Kerry is the extent to which he has mimicked another Kennedy—youngest brother Ted, his fellow Massachusetts senator and warrior for the Left—in his views, his votes, and his choice of staffers.

 

By now the nearly indistinguishable voting records of the two senators are well known. Last year the two men voted the same way 93 percent of the time, reports the Congressional Quarterly. In four of the last six years, they voted the same way 100 percent of the time on important issues.

 

Donna Brazile, Al Gore’s campaign manager in 2000, has called Kerry “far more liberal” than Gore. In fact, as the Republicans have gleefully noted, Kerry’s voting record, as tallied by National Journal and others, actually makes Ted Kennedy the more conservative senator from Massachusetts.

 

It was Ted Kennedy who tossed John Kerry a life preserver when his Presidential campaign appeared to be on its last legs last winter. Teddy provided a direct blood infusion, in the form of sending his 49-year-old chief of staff Mary Beth Cahill to take over the running of Kerry’s campaign.

 

All you need to know about Cahill’s politics is her list of earlier employers. She broke into Washington in 1980 by working for Barney Frank in his first campaign for Congress. She has run campaigns for Senator Pat Leahy (Dick Cheney’s dear friend!) and for Representative Ed Markey (leader of the nuclear-freeze movement and other sideshows). Cahill also worked for Senator Claiborne Pell, another high-visibility New England liberal Democrat. Cahill then spent five years running Emily’s List, the political action committee that funnels money to left-wing female Democratic candidates, and made it into a force to be reckoned with in national politics.

 

Last winter, Cahill took over a campaign buffeted by feuding factions. Just as Kerry never seems quite able to decide which side of an issue he’s on, he’s never been able to make up his mind from which set of aides to accept advice. Cahill arrived to impose some order on his campaign, and imported other Ted Kennedy acolytes like Stephanie Cutter (now Kerry’s director of communications) to carry this out.

 

As for Ted himself, he did campaign for Kerry during the Iowa caucuses, but as Kerry rose in the polls, Ted appeared to back off. Kerry has always had a habit of lifting other polls’ lines—during the primary season he, shall we say, borrowed, Dick Gephardt’s line about holding George W. Bush to one term, “like father, like son.” He so liked Howard Dean’s declaration that Harry Truman was the first Democrat for universal health care, that he repeated it practically word for word.

 

Some of Kerry’s borrowings from JFK have been obvious (“We can do better”); other lifts been more obscure. On the night of the Wisconsin primary, he put his arm around Teresa and said, “I’m getting to be the guy who accompanies Teresa around the United States of America, which is fine by me.” Which bears more than a slight resemblance to this line JFK delivered in France on June 2, 1961: “I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, and I have enjoyed it.”

 

On the afternoon of November 22, 1963, JFK was supposed to deliver a speech at the Trade Mart in Dallas. He never made it, of course, but the transcript survives, and includes this line: “We, in this country, in this generation, are—by destiny rather than by choice—the watchmen on the walls of world freedom.” In a May 2004 Seattle speech, Kerry turned that into a wholly different proclamation: “We do not have to live in fear or stand alone. We don’t have to be a lonely watchman on the walls of freedom.” It’s odd that Kerry would recycle a well-turned phrase from his hero into a renunciation of that same mentor’s principles.

 

But then, Kerry has always had a sort of love-hate relationship with the Kennedy legacy. As recently as 11 years ago, until he managed to marry Teresa Heinz, John Forbes Kerry, scion of one of the oldest Brahmin families in New England, was living hand-to-mouth in the city of Boston, without even a permanent address, mooching off of friends and dicey supporters to cover his living expenses. And there was Teddy living on his trust funds, in a seaside mansion bought by his father, well supplied with boats and other accoutrements of the good life. Kerry tried to keep up with the Kennedys. In the mid 1980s, when Ted bought a new convertible, Kerry got the same model. But his striving was a pathetic charade—in the early 1990s he was reduced to taking free Buicks from a shady car dealer.

 

All that changed in 1995, when Kerry married the widow of Senator John Heinz, the Pennsylvania Republican who died in an airplane crash. For the second time, Kerry had hooked an heiress, this one worth a billion dollars. Money changes everything, and it changed Kerry’s relationship with Ted. As Ted was forced to sell his getaway mansion in Palm Beach after the family trust funds began to dissolve, Kerry suddenly had access to at least $60 million worth of real estate and a $35 million Gulfstream jet.

 

Wherever he went, Kerry now traveled in sleek, gas-guzzling SUVs. Kerry always had a hankering for ostentatious toys—in the early ’90s, when he was flipping condos for spending money and giving no money at all to charity, claiming he was broke, he somehow was able to scrap together the dough to buy an expensive imported Ducati motorcycle (which has now been replaced by a Harley). More recently, the Heinz trust fund bought him an $8,000 bicycle, a Serrotta. He let his fingernails grow long, the better to pluck his new classical guitar.

 

Freed of all monetary concerns, Kerry’s voting record went further and further left. In the early 1990s, worried about a well-heeled Republican challenger like Governor William Weld, Kerry would occasionally tack right on issues. For a short time, he supported the balanced-budget amendment. In speeches (as opposed to legislation), he briefly questioned the power of teachers’ unions and the fairness of racial quotas. But he quickly hurried back to the reservation of liberal orthodoxy when people squawked.

 

Sometimes Kerry still shows off a bit of the old Kennedy touch. Like JFK, he pronounces idea “idear.” And like Teddy, he seems to be able to get away with anything. In July, he announced that life begins at conception, an astounding statement considering that he votes to keep even partial-birth abortions legal. A liberal columnist for the Boston Globe called up the national spokeswoman for NARAL and asked her if she, too, was shocked by Kerry’s pro-life epiphany. The abortion advocate chuckled and told the columnist to lighten up. She knew better than to take John Kerry at his word.

 

Oddly enough, that may be the biggest difference between John Kerry and Ted Kennedy. Whatever else you may think of Teddy, when it comes to politics, at least, his word is good.

 

Howie Carr, a columnist for the Boston Herald, has spent most of his life in Massachusetts, and hosts of one of Boston’s most popular radio shows on WRKO.