Ted Kennedy's Finest Hour May Be Yet To Come

After 45 years in the Senate, this is Kennedy's finest hour

Published: 18 February 2007

Thanks to the enlightenment that descends upon a man when he enters his seventh decade, I finally understand my life's pattern. It was not an accident of career, but a dictate of birth that has seen me spend much of the two past decades in the United States. Or more precisely, not a dictate of birth, but of birth-day. Permit me to tell you about the gentle mysteries of 22 February.

In truth, long before I arrived in America, I had suspected that the date was exerting an undue influence. At the Financial Times, two of my fondest colleagues on the foreign staff (then numbering maybe 50 in all) were born under this happy star. But in the US, suspicion became a certainty.

First, there is the small matter of the founder of the republic and the first President. Tomorrow is President's Day here, a public holiday that falls on 22 February or the Monday immediately before it, commemorating the birth of one George Washington 275 years ago.

Plainly that was auspicious for my career on this side of the Atlantic. More evidence was provided by two of the last three British ambassadors in Washington - Sir John Kerr and Sir Christopher Meyer - whom I also discovered were members of the club.

So on Thursday I will remember all of the above, and if possible raise a glass with Jurek Martin, one of my two fellow birthday-boys from the FT who has settled here. But pride of place goes to yet another of our number. If anyone deserves a toast this week, it is Edward Moore Kennedy, exactly 200 years the junior of George Washington. Never has the last Kennedy brother been more of a force in the land than now.

Obscured by the excitement of the Democratic capture of Congress was the news last November that the senior Senator from Massachusetts had won his eighth full term. He's the third longest-serving Senator in US history, and by the time he's up for re-election in 2012, Ted Kennedy will have put in a full half-century.

If he wants, and his health permitting, he has a chance of shattering every record. Assuming he makes it to 2012, Ted Kennedy will by then have overtaken South Carolina's Strom Thurmond, who was in harness until he was 100. At that point the only Senator with longer service would be Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who has now clocked up 48 years. But at almost 90, Byrd's powers are visibly fading. Not so our man of 22 February.

Once upon a time Ted was the spoilt child - gifted the Massachusetts seat vacated by JFK when he became President and kept warm by one of his brother's friends until 1962, when Ted turned 30, the minimum age for a Senator. There was the flirtation with a White House bid in 1968 after Bobby was murdered, the Chappaquiddick affair, the speculation about presidential runs in 1972 and 1976, and finally the botched challenge to Jimmy Carter in 1980.

At that point, the manifest destiny bug seems to have stopped biting, and Ted Kennedy - to the surprise of most people, including probably himself - emerged not just as keeper of the liberal conscience but as one of the master legislators of his era. And he just keeps getting better.

He has worked with Republican Presidents, and remained effective even while Republicans ran the Senate, forging bipartisan legislation. Many of the important developments in health care and family and education reform of recent years bear his imprint.

But the vote of which he is proudest came in 2002, on foreign policy, to deny President Bush authority to invade Iraq.

That cause, of course, was lost.

But with his party in charge again on Capitol Hill, and every prospect of a Democrat winning the White House in 2008, Ted Kennedy's finest hour may be yet to come.

Already he's teaming up with a Republican colleague to empower the Federal Drug Administration to regulate the tobacco industry. He's also trying to introduce a single layer healthcare system, an even more far-reaching idea. Forget George Washington, assorted British ambassadors, even yours truly. This 22 February belongs to Ted Kennedy.


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