Catching the Windbag By Fred O’Brien
Catching the Wind: Edward Kennedy and the Liberal Hour, 1932–1975, by Neal Gabler (Crown, 928 pp., $40)
America needs more Kennedy biographies about as much as it needs more Kennedys. As the family’s mystique peters out into ineffectuality, alcoholism, and anti-vaxxism, the assumption that any Kennedy should and will be a winner at the polls has dissolved — even in Massachusetts, where Joe Kennedy III (a grandson of Bobby) lost convincingly to Ed Markey in the 2020 Democratic Senate primary. For Bay State voters, it must have felt like that liberating moment when you finally throw out the old address book with your ex’s number in it. Nonetheless, the family still keeps biographers busy (this book is the first of a planned two volumes; don’t say you weren’t warned).
The author of Catching the Wind — Neal Gabler, until now mostly a Hollywood historian — is nothing if not meticulous. He has, for example, catalogued each of the dozen or so times Ted’s parents moved him to a different prep school, as well as the weight fluctuations that plagued him even in childhood. Then there’s this entry in the index: “Kennedy, Edward Moore ‘Ted,’ womanizing of, xxxi, 82–83, 88, 89, 395, 538, 547–49, 550–52, 554, 581, 601–2” — and on this topic the author makes no attempt to be comprehensive, but eventually just gives up; there’s considerably more information on Ted’s love of sailing.
Gabler traces Ted’s public career back to his early days, as an assistant county district attorney and then a U.S. senator — and if that transition sounds abrupt to you, it shouldn’t; remember, he’s a Kennedy. The book also provides some interesting detail on Kennedy’s college-football achievements. He scored Harvard’s only touchdown in a 21–7 loss to Yale in 1955 and was on the field for all but one minute of that game (the NCAA had returned to single-platoon rules). All the Kennedy boys played for the Crimson, but only Ted stuck with it, and this is in keeping with their overall reputations: Jack cavalier and charismatic, Bobby intense and self-righteous, Ted an indefatigable plugger. (After joining the Army during the Korean War, Ted played for a touring military team, and many of his teammates were African Americans from humble, often segregated backgrounds. In a heroic, Plastic Man–with–a–grabber reach, Gabler explains that Ted got along with these men because he “knew what social hardship was” from his days as a Catholic boy attending Protestant boarding schools.)
What made Ted so persistent? Gabler begins chapter one with: “He was the youngest, and from that nearly everything in his life would follow.” A bit too sweeping, perhaps, but only a bit; and it worked both ways, because being the youngest child is a double-edged sword: You pick things up at an early age by observing your elders, but that also means you seldom need to figure them out for yourself. (For what it’s worth, your reviewer was the youngest of four.) And while the youngest child is not confined to a subservient role, he can slip into one easily when necessary, which is often a helpful skill in the Senate. In any case, if you lose four siblings to violent deaths and see another one institutionalized, the birth-order effects will tend to get scrambled a bit.
Another recurring theme in the book brings to mind William F. Buckley’s pronouncement (which has many versions) that he would rather be governed by names taken from the telephone book than by the Harvard faculty. Ted Kennedy seems to have turned his career into a real-life trial of Buckley’s second alternative: Like Jack and Bobby, he constantly called on his family’s many friends at Harvard for help, advice, information, and supportive pronouncements. While preparing for his 1962 Senate campaign, for example, Ted toured Italy and Latin America, calling on local notables (including communists, for which the author commends him), with a Harvard professor of Latin American history and a Kennedy-family biographer in tow. Kennedy’s notes from the trip were published as a three-part series in the Boston Globe. Not bad for an assistant DA. And after Chappaquiddick, as professors and retainers descended on Hyannis Port in droves, an ailing John Kenneth Galbraith pitched in with a phone call. One can imagine the scene: “Quick, Teddy’s in trouble — go fetch an economist!”
For the most part, Gabler is a solid nuts-and-bolts writer and a scrupulous researcher, and despite his obvious admiration of his subject, he does not hesitate to criticize Ted now and then, though it’s usually wrapped in a compliment, as in this puzzler: “The Chappaquiddick incident had cost him his moral authority, which may have been even more important than his presidential potential in his accrual of power.” Um, what?
But the author’s main stumbling block, which he trips over again and again, is conservatism. For an open-minded reader, Gabler’s simplistic “libs good, cons bad” point of view is a constant distraction, like a bad television show droning in the background. It sours the whole book, not because the author is a leftist but because he simply does not understand conservatism. Conservative is the opposite of liberal, he seems to think, so if liberals want to help the poor, conservatives must want to hurt them. (On the book’s opening page, he prints Matthew’s parable of the sheep and the goats.) As in our old friend Jonah Goldberg’s notion of “sherpa conservatives,” Gabler thinks that helping liberals reach the summit of justice and equality is the only legitimate role for the Right. In other words, conservatives should be content to lie back and think of America.
He also dabbles in armchair psychology, better known as mind-reading. He writes of “the emotional repression under which the Kennedys were forced to function, which led to the denial of their deepest feelings and ultimately of themselves, and . . . the ways in which that denial tortured them and warped them and even brutalized them.” JFK, he writes, “fed off Ted’s physicality” and had to oppose North Vietnam strongly because of his “fears of being regarded as insufficiently masculine.” And so on. We’ve all read biographies like this, and if you like that sort of thing, there’s plenty of it here.
Most pervasive of all, though, to the point of creepiness, is the author’s Nixon obsession. When it comes to Richard Nixon, Gabler is like the guy at your party who launches into a 30-minute tirade whenever his ex-girlfriend’s name comes up, while everyone else stares at their shoes. Gabler sees Nixon as the source of all evil, even though Nixon was quite liberal as right-wing extremists go: the Clean Air Act and Environmental Protection Agency, winding down the war in Vietnam, wage and price controls, OSHA, Supplemental Security Income — this from a man who the author says “had tried hard for years to discredit government” — not to mention affirmative action, the openings to Russia and China, et cetera.
To make a proper right-wing monster out of Nixon, Gabler has to resort to making stuff up, such as calling him a racist because he emphasized law-and-order issues, or characterizing any criticism of Democrats or the Left as “divisive” (he uses “backlash” as shorthand for “conservative opposition,” the same way he uses “moral” for “liberal”). His most frequent charge against Nixon is that in the wake of the 1968 riots, he “pois[ed] Americans against one another and against their government,” even though (a) lots of Americans were already against the government and one another, hence all the riots, and (b) he did a pretty good job of unifying the nation by the 1972 election, when he won 49 states.
Gabler repeatedly complains about Nixon’s habit of co-opting Ted Kennedy’s policy proposals and presenting them as his own, thereby “preempting the Democrats’ agenda so as to appear” a centrist. Well, yes. That’s how politics works in a democracy; that’s why they call it politics and not debate team. You’d think Gabler would be glad that Nixon was so open to liberal ideas, but one can almost hear him jumping up and down and screaming “No fair!” At least in the next volume he won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore (though you know he’ll try).
In fact, going back to his Amazing Kreskin telepathic mode, Gabler has Nixon figured out: “Nixon had envied Jack and Bobby Kennedy and hated them, hated them because he envied them, and he had envied them because they represented all the people who had disdained him, ignored him, excoriated him.” His repeated use of terms such as “paranoia” and “fixation” to describe commonplace political behavior (e.g., collecting opposition research) suggests that he views conservatism as a mental illness. Physician, heal thyself.
As a writer, Gabler has an odd tic of repeating words: “Ted would ask questions, lots of questions.” Or: “The president was involved, deeply involved.” Or: “Doubts abounded, and doubts would persist — intractable doubts.” Or even: “But Ted Kennedy had been coached. And Ted Kennedy had been prepared. And Ted Kennedy was ready.” Easy there, Neal. Writers do this for emphasis, and perhaps it works for some readers, though it always makes me feel like my lapel is being grabbed. On page 140, Gabler uses this device no fewer than four times in a single glorious paragraph. As Mark Twain said about James Fenimore Cooper, it breaks the record.
And when he isn’t repeating himself, he leaves things out. The arch-segregationist record of Senator Sam Ervin (D., N.C.), who later chaired the Senate’s Watergate committee, is tactfully left unmentioned. The Tonkin Gulf incident, which provided a casus belli for the Vietnam War, gets a single sentence. Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan, who assassinated Jack and Bobby respectively, get half a sentence apiece. This allows the author to quote an RFK aide saying insinuatingly that Ted feared “forces in motion that were . . . dark and determined to destroy what the Kennedys represented” by killing Ted too — without mentioning that the forces that had killed JFK and RFK were communism and Palestinian nationalism, respectively.
But Gabler’s greatest oversight is his dismissal of Barry Goldwater in three skimpy, hostile pages that quickly descend into auto-rant: “Barry Goldwater did not want consensus. Barry Goldwater did not want pluralism. Barry Goldwater was the personification of the threat [Jack] Kennedy saw to his programs and to his America.” Gabler doesn’t see Goldwater as a founder of modern conservatism because he can’t; the very idea of a coherent political philosophy based on individual rights, small government, low taxes, and anti-communism seems clearly beyond his capacity to comprehend. He doesn’t get Goldwater at all, and it’s a sure bet that in the next volume he won’t get Reagan either.
In the end, 1960s liberalism did not survive contact with the 1970s. Even Sonny & Cher lasted longer. And through it all, Teddy Kennedy, whether owing to his birth order or his family’s constant specter of sudden death, or just because it had always worked for him, let himself be controlled by events. In the 1970s, the spirit behind those events, both small (rebellions against the 55-mph speed limit, the metric system, even the FDA’s bans on artificial sweeteners) and large (the wipeout of George McGovern, the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, the California tax revolt, protesting school busing) culminated in the rise of Ronald Reagan. That’s not how it was supposed to play out, and this, in the end, may explain why Gabler is so grumpy throughout the book: His “liberal hour” — that brief, shining moment when Americans believed their government could do anything — turned into a conservative hour after all.
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