Ted Kennedy, on the Rocks

For those tired of all the lionizing of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy this week, see Michael Kelly's scathing 1990 profile in GQ, "Ted Kennedy, on the Rocks." It's not so much a profile, considering Kelly didn't interview Kennedy (he declined), but a brutal recounting of Kennedy's huge missteps during the 1980s and before: drunken swashbuckling with Sen. Christopher Dodd at La Colline, a Washington restaurant; dry-humping waitresses at Brasserie, another Washington restaurant, with, again, Dodd; and, of course, Chappaquiddick, among others.

Writes Kelly, who became an editor of the Atlantic and New Republic, only to die in the second Iraq War: "Arrested development doesn't seem to explain why Kennedy seems to be getting worse as he gets older. According to a theory, currently popular in Washington, such incidents as Brasserie I and II [II is having sex on the floor of a private dining room] are evidence that Kennedy, freed at last by the knowledge that he will never be president, is simply giving his natural inclinations full vent." And: "In short, with nothing left to lose politically (he'd have to hit the pope and pee on the Irish flag to lose his Senate seat) and long inured to ridicule, he has become the Kennedy Untrammeled, Unbound."

Really, this just makes me ache for the man. When his two older brothers are assassinated as president and running for president, and so much of the family dies and suffers in cruel ways, the psychological pain Ted Kennedy must feel are unfathomable. Kelly touches on this in one paragraph, noting that in April 1969 on a flight back from visiting poor Indians in Alasksa, "a hard-drinking Kennedy pelted aides and reporters with pillows, ranged up and down the aisles chanting 'Eskimo power' and rambled incoherently about Bobby's assassination," but doesn't properly address this. And to think of how titantic a lawmaker he has been! His professional core has been immigrant rights, health care, education, voting rights, housing and opposing ill-conceived wars. It doesn't get much better.

To end, one of the best lines from political speeches there is, the famed 1980 Democratic convention one by Kennedy: "For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end. For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."