Ted Kennedy From the Middle Distance

In 1980, I was 3 years old, Washington, D.C., was home and my father had been on the road an unmerciful 285 days out of the previous 365 working on the Kennedy presidential campaign. "Teddy" had become a word of great urgency, a word my parents were constantly repeating and exchanging in conversation, late night, during dinner, over the phone. If all my friends had teddies as toys, then mine was Kennedy, not a bear.

The most indelible memories of that year do not find me on the floor of the convention watching the senator from Massachusetts give arguably the best speech of his life (I was overseas, with my mother, escaping a long, hot, empty Washington summer), but instead, standing on a chair in the kitchen so that I could reach the phone, holding the receiver to my mouth and saying, "Give me the numbers!" This is what my dad did every evening when he came home from the campaign, looking for the latest polling data in the heady days before FiveThirtyEight.com and Mark Penn. I was a toddler; I had no idea what I was asking for, except that it was what was done and because of this, I should do it, too.
My father and the rest of the staff got bruised and beaten in that campaign, a messy fight that found its resolution only in Kennedy's words that August. There's a photo that hangs in my father's study of a stronger, younger Kennedy holding a baseball bat, and written across it, in reference to their bloodletting in the Midwest, it says, "Dear Carl: Anyone left to use this on in Iowa?" It took me until I was 13 or 14 to understand what it meant, until I was 20 to actually laugh at it, and only in my 30s can I appreciate the sarcasm and wit in the face of despair.

A few years later, when my mother went into Washington Hospital to have surgery to remove a tumor from her throat, she was scared and I was terrified. When they wheeled her out of the OR, there was a commotion and the attending nurse informed her that there had been three calls for her: it was Sen. Edward Kennedy, checking in and making sure that she was being taken care of. Kennedy didn't have to do this, of course -- by then the campaign trail had long since vanished into the middle distance and my mom was just the wife of a former staffer. But she was sick and he had an idea that he could do something that would perhaps improve her care, and so he did. I don't have memories of Kennedy bouncing me on his knee or teaching me about the Voting Rights Act. I just have a handful of vague recollections from the nosebleed seats -- but they speak to a big man who did, oftentimes, the most decent thing to do, even if nobody was looking.