The Non - Candidacy of Edward Moore Kennedy

IN a cold autumn drizzle, a crowd of 100 waited on the macadam at Allegheny County Airport. They had been standing there, soggily, for five hours. When his plane finally taxied in through the puddles and Edward Kennedy stepped off, it came--a current of slightly awesome arousal, a rush of something more than just celebrity. People surged, straining to shake his hand, to touch him, collect an autograph or simply stand near. With a touch of marvel, a Kennedy aide remarked: "They aren't Bobby crowds yet. But they're close."

Such scenes are repeated in other cities, epiphanies of the old Kennedy magic. They confirm what all pollsters and politicians know--that against all expectations of two years ago, Edward Moore Kennedy has become a compelling if not predictable presence in the 1972 presidential race. Insistently disavowing any interest in running, shadowed by that night at Chappaquiddick, the last Kennedy brother must nonetheless be regarded as a major candidate for the Democratic nomination.

A Harris poll last week showed him the first choice of rank-and-file Democrats, leading Muskie by 26% to 19%, with Humphrey following at 16%. The Gallup poll, in a two-way contest, had Muskie the front runner, ahead of Kennedy, 50% to 39%, among Democratic voters.

Full Stride

"I have said 1 am not a candidate," Kennedy repeats, "and I don't believe in drafts. I can't see myself reconsidering under any circumstances." The intriguing thing is that he has said just that on 25 trips round the country during the past ten months. Since last August, he has also raced abroad to India, Israel and Sweden on a trajectory that would mark any other man as a candidate in full stride. Humorist Art Buchwald, reflecting on such a frenetically busy noncandidacy, fantasied Kennedy riding up Fifth Avenue "in an open convertible, with his wife Joan, hoping to discourage New Yorkers from considering him as a Democratic hopeful."

Kennedy's noncandidacy is elaborately ambiguous, involving some deep and painful hesitations. The questions of Chappaquiddick remain in the public's mind and perhaps in Kennedy's own. He also has tragically good reasons to fear that he might not live through a race for the White House: even now he probably receives more death threats than any other American political figure except the President. Still he remains powerfully fascinated by the presidency--if not next year, then in 1976 or perhaps some election year beyond. Now 39, he could theoretically be a plausible candidate in elections up to the year 2000.

What politicians call "the Kennedy thing" is a psychological compound of iridescent myth and charisma, excitement and guilt, admiration and sometimes a morbid voyeurism. Even the blandest men in power--William Mc-Kinley, for example--can draw a maniac's fire. But the Kennedys are freighted with American legend and invite the passionate involvement of strangers. It shows in the grimy and lonely attention of people who have carved away pieces of the Dike Bridge at Chappaquiddick for souvenirs, or those who have taken to the Kennedy Center like locusts, swiping prisms from the chandeliers, bits of the wall coverings and pink marble handles from the ladies'-room faucets.

Broken Promises

In a Kennedy campaign, the dark and light sides shimmer together in a radical instability. Robert's headlong drive through the 1968 primaries often threatened to turn into something like the riot at Rudolph Valentino's funeral. Even now, in his noncampaign, Ted Kennedy knows what superstar's confusions he can cause. Oregon's Republican Senator Robert Packwood remembers a trip he took with Ted to some hospitals and health centers in Chicago and Cleveland as part of their work for the Senate health subcommittee of which Kennedy is chairman.

"It's the first time I've had such an experience in my life," says Packwood. "It wasn't political. It was regal. People wanted to touch him--not just 21-year-old student nurses but 45-year-old orthopedic specialists. It was astounding and a little frightening. I've never seen that reaction to anybody in my life, in politics or out. The closest thing I can remember was when I attended an Elvis Presley concert a long time ago."

One former Kennedy aide recalls a Boston antiwar parade in which Kennedy, one of the marchers, came up to a group of hardhats waving BACK OUR BOYS IN VIET NAM signs. "The hardhats cheered Ted and waved at him, and after he'd passed by, they continued waving their signs." To some extent the Kennedy mystique is nonideological.

On his cross-country forays, he starts early, often before dawn, and caroms through political ceremonies until late at night. He opens his speeches with familiar, self-deprecatory laugh lines, some of them borrowed from Bobby and Jack. "I'm awfully glad to be here today," he says, "especially since I am just a young Senator out to make a name for himself." At a fund raiser in St. Paul, he began: "I've often dreamed of addressing a major convention in a major city. But, unfortunately, this is the wrong convention in the wrong city and a year early."

His standard theme, the "broken promises" speech, is a litany of charges against the Nixon Administration, which offers a series of accusations but few answers. "Not since the Great Depression 40 years ago has the spirit of America been so depressed," he declares in his familiar flat Boston baritone. "All that this Administration has given the American people is a shopping list of problems that grows longer every day." If it is not a campaign speech, none was ever delivered. After reciting the issues --Viet Nam, the economy, welfare reform, crime, Nixon's 1968 promise to "bring us together"--he limns "the kind of society we want," with peace, safety, no generation gap. "For the sake of our party, for the sake of our future, I ask you to march again as we marched before." Massachusetts Senator Edward Brooke declares flatly: "Kennedy is running just as hard as Nixon is at this point."

Is he indeed running? The answer is complicated, depending upon 1) Kennedy's own psychology and decision to run some time in the next six to eight months; 2) whether a candidate, especially Edmund Muskie, can win enough of the primaries next spring to purchase a lock on the Democratic nomination; and 3) how vulnerable Richard Nixon looks from the perspective of the Democratic Convention in Miami Beach next July.

"Teddy has plenty of time," his sister Jean Smith says firmly, with an echo of the family's apprehensions. Eunice Shriver, who relishes politics as much as any Kennedy, is similarly negative about 1972. "Some day I'd like to see him in the White House." she says, "but only when he's ready." Ted himself, for all his campaigning, says reflectively, "I feel in my gut that it's the wrong time, that it's too early." And yet, when a friend recently asked Kennedy why he did not take himself out of the running with a Sherman statement, the Senator replied, "Why should I? I'd lose all my influence. I'd just be a Senator from Massachusetts."

Possible Scenario

The Democratic scenario for the next eight months contains mazes of possibilities. It is all but certain that Kennedy will not run in any of the primaries, even the late ones in New York and California, both of which could be prime Kennedy territories. But if the primaries prove inconclusive, with Muskie, George McGovern, Hubert Humphrey, Scoop Jackson and perhaps others dividing those preliminary spoils, it is more than possible that a convention might turn to Kennedy as the one man who, with his constituencies spanning the left, center and even some of the right, might unite the party to defeat Nixon.

But the Democrats, with their party reforms designed to prevent back-room convention brokering, might be reluctant to award the nomination to a man who had not taken his case to the people in the primaries. The speculations are fairly heady nonetheless. Some Democrats say that Kennedy would make a strong move for the nomination if he believed that it was about to go to Humphrey or Jackson, on the theory that either man would ensure a breakaway fourth-party movement on the left, thereby guaranteeing Nixon's reelection. Others maintain that Kennedy would have to try for the nomination if he saw New York's John Lindsay descending on the prize; better for Ted to head Lindsay off in 1972 than risk the New Yorker's becoming the party's glamorous leader in 1976.

The Nixon Factor

At the moment the Democratic campaign is only in the casting process, with candidates moving on and off the stage. Last week, in a triumph of fantasy over realism, Los Angeles' Mayor Sam Yorty announced his candidacy, hoping for the party's rightward constituency. More persuasively, Washington's Scoop Jackson also entered. "The No. 1 priority in this country," said Jackson, "must be to put people back to work." Then he drew the distance between himself and the party's left: "Most Americans are fed up with people who are fed up with America . . . This society is not a guilty, imperialist, oppressive society."

Humphrey seems poised to announce some time around the first of the year. Muskie remains overall the dominating force in the race, quietly commanding the party's center. Richard Nixon, from the comfortable vantage of incumbency, can watch the Democratic fighting with a certain equanimity. There is no White House consensus, however, on the potential opposition. Some in Nixon's high command think that Muskie would be the toushest man for the President to beat, believing that Muskie would unite most elements of the nation's majority party with the smallest flake-off at either end. Muskie could bring to television an effective counterimage to Nixon, as he did on election eve last November. Of Humphrey, Muskie and Kennedy, Nixon's political advisers think Humphrey would be the easiest to defeat. "He's got all those scars," says a Republican National Committee official, "and if you get Hubert, you're likely to get a fourth party."

But Kennedy is unpredictable. If he should become the Democratic nominee, the only certainty is that it would be an uncommonly dirty campaign. Already some automobile bumper stickers are appearing: REMEMBER CHAPPAQUIDDICK and WOULD MARY JO VOTE FOR TED? The Republican National Committee's newsletter Monday this month showed a sign that hangs on the office wall in the Shiretown Inn on Martha's Vineyard, where Kennedy was staying the weekend of Chappaquiddick: PLEASE

DO NOT ASK US TO ANSWER QUESTIONS CONCERNING THE KENNEDY INCIDENT. THANK YOU. THE MANAGEMENT. Some handbills are circulating that bear a picture of Ted Kennedy and large type reading: WANTED EDWARD MOORE KENNEDY, FOR MURDER OR PRESIDENT?

Playing Fair

Officially, the Republicans would probably never even have to mention Chappaquiddick. Says a G.O.P. operative in California: "We'd talk about character, about stability and morality, and the voters couldn't help thinking about Chappaquiddick. Compared with that incident, Nixon comes out looking sincere and upright and wholesome."

Ted Kennedy is the one man who might explain what happened on that July weekend when at the same time man was first setting foot on the moon --why and when he and Mary Jo Kopechne left the party at a cottage on the island, why and how he failed to summon help immediately instead of waiting until the next morning when his car was discovered under the Dike Bridge. A week afterward, he went on television with a carefully crafted and largely ghostwritten statement, pleading that while his conduct was indeed "indefensible," his doctors "informed me that I suffered a cerebral concussion as well as shock." In the national mind, the lacunae and the doubts remain. That night will surely be replayed endlessly if Kennedy wins the nomination.

But some politicians think that a backlash of sympathy might develop for Kennedy. Says a leading House Republican: "Half the women in this country don't believe it ever happened, and the other half are dying to forgive him for it." According to an informal survey by TIME'S bureau chiefs across the nation, Chappaquiddick would not cut so deeply as an issue in a Kennedy run against Nixon as is commonly believed (see box, opposite). That could change if voters found themselves in the booths next November, forced to make a decisive judgment about the case. For the episode does indeed raise a serious question about Kennedy's potential behavior in the White House. One of the "boiler room" girls who attended the party that night has long been a Kennedy partisan. But she muses: "He's seen two brothers killed, and the Chappaquiddick thing has happened. How stable can anybody be in light of all that?"

Kennedy has been profoundly affected by Chappaquiddick. Some who know him believe that he is a wiser leader because of it. California Democratic Leader Jess Unruh declares: "That terrible incident was an ordeal that made a hell of a better man out of Ted. Everything had been so easy for him. He was almost insufferable in 1969 when he won the job as Senate whip . . . Then came Chappaquiddick and he lost his whip job, too. Those experiences humbled him. That's on the private side. On the public side there is no doubt it has cost him votes." Mike Feldman, a former aide to John Kennedy, frequently plays tennis with Ted; he notices one small change: "Teddy bends over backward to be fair, is scrupulous about the calls, always giving the advantage to his opponent--and I haven't seen that in any other Kennedy."

For months after Chappaquiddick he was painfully withdrawn, but that period seems long since ended. Now he jokes easily. Recently, on a flight between Chicago and Salt Lake City, he was confronted in the aisle by a woman carrying a baby. Kennedy grinned and told the reporters with him, "Hey, get this." He elaborately faked kissing the baby, with a loud smooch an inch from the infant's cheek. Then he collapsed laughing in his seat.

After Bobby's death and again after Chappaquiddick, there was talk of his drinking heavily. Today, except at an occasional private party when he will have several Scotches, he drinks only a Dubonnet before lunch or a Cutty Sark Scotch or two before dinner. On the road he prefers a bottle of Heineken's beer. He smokes long, thin Filipino cigars and now, at 6 ft. 2 in. and 210 Ibs., is winning his constant battle against overweight.

If he was inclined for a time to moody fatalism, his nearly hyperthyroid present political pace and his family life leave little time for brooding. The Kennedys' $750,000 gray-shingled house and five acres in McLean, Va., overlook the Potomac River. Despite the back injury from his near-fatal 1964 air crash, he plays tennis frequently, at his own court or at Ethel's home at Hickory Hill, often coaching his two eldest children. He swims once or twice a week in the Senate gym, skis with the family on winter vacations and occasionally hazards a game of touch football.

Trick or Treat

When he is at home, Ted starts almost every day with bacon and eggs in the wood-paneled breakfast room with his three children--Kara, 11, Teddy Jr., 10, and Patrick, 4. He also eats dinner with them as often as possible. On Sundays he takes them to a guitar Mass at Holy Trinity Church in Georgetown, and he often scans the ads for family movies. When he is away, Kennedy calls home to talk to the children every night, a habit designed in part to assure them of his safety. Last year at Halloween, he startled his neighbors by joining the kids for the trick-or-treat rounds, dressed in a sheet.

As a surrogate father to Bobby's eleven children, Ted visits Hickory Hill about twice a week. Occasionally he takes the older ones on sailing trips or camping overnight. Last week, on the 46th anniversary of Bobby's birthday, Joan, Ted and their children joined Ethel and six of her sons and daughters to visit R.F.K.'s grave at Arlington National Cemetery. This week the family makes the trip again to observe the eighth anniversary of Jack's death.

At 8:15 a.m. on working days, Kennedy slips behind the wheel of his 1971 Pontiac GTO convertible and drives rapidly to the Capitol, one foot on the accelerator, the other lightly on the brake.* Almost invariably dressed in a dark British-cut suit, a monogrammed shirt with a PT-109 clip holding his tie, Kennedy trots rather than walks into his office to begin his daily race of trying to keep up with a schedule jammed with more interviews, hearings, appointments, speeches and votes than any man could realistically accomplish.

Senate Record

Calls come into Kennedy's office at the rate of 1,000 a day. He receives roughly twice as much mail--2,500 to 3,000 letters weekly--as any other Senator. Most of it is routine, but there is also a flood of hate letters. Some of these are crank notes ("Listen, lover boy"), but the serious "threat" mail is turned over to the Secret Service; there is an average of two death threats per week. Kennedy rarely if ever sees them.

Kennedy's staff of 27, variously described as "sharks," "incredibly ambitious," and the "best damn bunch on the Hill," is an object of some enmity and envy at the Capitol. Like his brothers, Ted has assembled young, intense and singlemindedly loyal subalterns. When Kennedy was a 30-year-old freshman Senator, elected chiefly by his brother's being in the White House, it was sneeringly said that Ted was kept afloat by his staff. Now he is sensitive to the charge; as a result, he takes only one or two aides with him on trips.

Even so, the staff's tough-minded thoroughness has served Kennedy well and, combined with his own hard work and undiminishing publicity, has made him an energetic and generally effective legislator. He has made two major errors in the Senate. The first was his sponsorship of an old family friend, Boston Municipal Court Judge Francis X. Morrissey, for the federal district court in Massachusetts. The second came when, through inattention and uncharacteristic sloppiness, he lost the Senate whip's job to West Virginia's Robert Byrd earlier this year.

In his nine Senate years, Kennedy has compiled a strong liberal record. His greatest achievement was the key role he played in the passage of the 18-year-old-vote amendment. Also, as chairman of the health subcommittee, he became the top congressional expert on health, leading the development of a massive amount of legislation, notably the proposed Health Security Act of 1971 to provide almost total national health insurance. His work for health care earns him a large constituency among the elderly. Since 1966 he has been working for draft reform, although he is against an all-volunteer army; he argues that it would create a "ghetto army," manned heavily by the poor and minorities. Kennedy prefers a draft that equalizes risk for all, with no deferments.

His strong support of liberal positions on gun control, open housing, aid to American Indians and civil rights has earned him a 100% rating from the AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education. His ratings from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action average 90%. Those same political stands earned Kennedy some of the lowest marks for any legislator from the conservative Americans for Constitutional Action. At the same time his strong opposition to key White House proposals--the ABM, the SST, the Carswell and Haynsworth Supreme Court nominations--has won him the Administration's unfailing hostility. Nixon's Director of Communications, Herb Klein, accuses him of "childish tantrums, demagoguery at its worst."

He has been called "the hottest mimeograph machine in town," and sometimes he is led to excesses, as when he suggested earlier this fall that he would be willing to "crawl on my belly" to the Paris Peace Talks to gain release of U.S. P.O.W.s. More recently, together with Connecticut's Abraham Ribicoff, he called in the Senate for the withdrawal of British troops from Northern Ireland and for Irish reunification, a proposal that earned him the distinction of being condemned by the British Prime Minister.

In an interview with TIME Correspondents Bonnie Angelo. Simmons Fentress and John Austin, Kennedy talked about the country, President Nixon and the potential strength of the opposition in 1972:

THE MOOD OF THE COUNTRY: "It's one of fear, really--fear of the worker's losing his job, fear of businessmen for the collapse of their companies, fear of the wealthy losing their resources, fear of the blue-collar worker that he may lose his job to a black, the fear by whites of blacks, the fear of older persons that they won't have sufficient resources to live. There is a sense of apprehension among young people as to whether they can do anything about the problems that they see in the country. There is fear about ending the war, about the Middle East, and now the India-Pakistan crisis.

"There is a political atmosphere that is plowed by those who appeal to baser instincts. As a result, people turn inward and away from the problems of the country. It's very dangerous for our society. But I find people are prepared to respond to these problems. There's a sensitivity about responsibilities. People are thinking more about some of these questions and problems, and are concerned about them. It comes down to a question of leadership, sensing the concerns of the time and developing a view about these issues. It's sharing the passion of the times and the ability to develop responses to the problems.

NIXON'S LEADERSHIP. "I would list a kind of balance sheet on particular issues, both pro and con. I applaud his efforts to reduce tensions internationally, his new China policy and the Nixon Doctrine in the Far East. But a basic question is whether the country is coming to grips with the more essential problems we have at home. There is no sense of where the country is and where it is going. The basic catalyst for leadership is the President, and the failure of Nixon is in leadership.

"I don't think that he has ended Viet Nam as an issue. Have we fulfilled our responsibilities if the violence continues? On the economy, all we have is a blueprint of a plan--Phase II. There are many pieces still to be filled in. Nixon has put the economy through the wringer. Things were bad in 1969, they grew worse in 1970, and now in 1971 we have the freeze and Phase II. I hope it works; I think it may. But no amount of rhetoric can mask the fact that the Administration should have acted long ago, in 1969.

NIXON'S VULNERABILITY. "I think it's going to be difficult to beat the

President under any circumstances. It would be extremely difficult to defeat him if, for instance, he ends the war. If the SALT talks succeed. If the trip to Peking is effective. If the cities are quiet. If the economy recovers and unemployment goes down. But if the war drags on, if the economy lags, if the trips are only smokescreens, if deep-seated divisions continue in the country, then . . .

"You can make a case that a Democratic victory is possible. Don't you think that anyone who voted for Hubert Humphrey in 1968 will vote for a Democrat next time? And what if we can get 8,000,000 young voters to the polls out of the 25 million who will be eligible? But I don't underestimate the strength of the President's appeal."

Kennedy has gone through metamorphoses. He was the heedless Kennedy kid brother who left Harvard for two years after he got a friend to take a Spanish exam for him. When he ran for the Senate in 1962, Harvard Law School Professor Mark DeWolfe declared: "His academic career is mediocre. His professional career is virtually nonexistent. His candidacy is both preposterous and insulting." But he has become a skilled student of the Senate, and Jack once called him "the family's best politician."

A Personality Contest

Some still suspect that his glamour is merely an inheritance, or that he is not quite intelligent enough for the White House. A wire photo purporting to show him emerging from a Paris club at 5 a.m. with an Italian princess is enough to start the womanizing rumors again. Is he really qualified for the presidency? How would he use the power if he had it? How great is his capacity for growth? Such unanswerable questions surround Kennedy as much as his family's aura.

Ted Kennedy has had an extraordinary education in public affairs: more than a decade at the heart of American politics and power, tutored by a President and by some of the grimmest personal experiences in the nation's history. He has located some central issues --civil and constitutional rights, health care, war, housing--and approached them with an uncomplicated and often effective passion. Of course, he is not unique in that.

Kennedy is unique in his potential constituency. It is compounded of blacks, urban liberals, many moderates, the poor, the young, the aged and even some of the lower middle class, blue-collar workers, like those who supported Bobby Kennedy in the 1968 Indiana primary. In the end it is conceivable that 1972 might turn into a personality contest between Ted Kennedy and Richard Nixon--the flawed Democratic star, damaged by Chappaquiddick, going against the often awkward but immensely experienced incumbent. If so, the nation will then find out how much of the magic is Teddy Kennedy's own.

*Kennedy's Massachusetts driver's license was suspended for one year after he pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of the accident at Chappaquiddick. About a year ago, he obtained a new license.

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