More on Kennedy

Naitonal Review offers this honest reflection on Sen. Kennedy's life.

As a member of the modern American aristocracy, Senator Kennedy believed that he had a mandate to use his power to do good for the least well-off among us, and that cast of mind is, at its core, admirable. Among the better achievements of his life, Kennedy lent moral support to important civil-rights and voting-rights legislation. Unhappily, he mistook power for wisdom, and he very often left things worse than he had found them. He meddled in Northern Ireland to no good end, contributed mightily to the politicization of the federal courts, sought to regulate and restrict political speech, appeased the Soviets, contributed to the American defeat in Vietnam, and attempted to apply the Vietnam template to Iraq. A child of privilege, he worked energetically to deny school-choice scholarships to poor black children in Washington, D.C. His ideas on taxes, immigration, and social welfare were reliably counterproductive.

Senator Kennedy was famed for the power of his oratory. Another way of saying that is to note that he was a gifted artist whose medium was slander, and he found his canvases in Supreme Court nominees Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. Powerful a speaker as he was, it is not clear that Senator Kennedy’s rhetoric was powerful enough to sway the hardest hearts, including his own. Consider this: “Wanted or unwanted, I believe that human life, even at its earliest stages, has certain right which must be recognized — the right to be born, the right to love, the right to grow old.” A beautiful sentiment, beautifully expressed — and callously ignored when the political winds changed and he felt himself compelled to denounce the “back-alley abortions” that would be necessitated in “Robert Bork’s America.” ... Senator Kennedy left behind his pro-life convictions when they became a political burden. This is an especially painful failing in Kennedy, whose family has traded on its Catholicism so profitably.

Driven to do good, he could not, because he was hostage to his own defects, personal and ideological. His best impulses deserve to survive him; his worst ideas and legislative agenda do not. RIP Edward M. Kennedy, 1932–2009: May he encounter the divine mercy that both the greatest and the least of us will require at the end.