The Lion sleeps tonight . . .

I heard Ted Kennedy speak at the University of Alabama in 1971. As a young teen I thought I was being pretty radical. He was a Kennedy, a name synonymous in the south with the Civil Rights Act and racial integration, not exactly the most popular developments in Alabama. Add that to the delicious moral outrage of southern gentility in response to the Chappaquiddick incident and you wonder why he came to speak at the University at all.

When you are young, eight years is an eternity. At the time I did not appreciate the epic drama of this Kennedy's life as he stood before us. Chappaquiddick was less than two years past. Robert had been murdered three years before. He broke his back in an airplane crash in 1964. Only eight years had passed since President Kennedy's assassination. And there he was in Foster Auditorium, that place of infamy in the eyes of the world where eight years earlier George Wallace "stood in the schoolhouse door" to prevent Vivian Malone and James Hood, African American students, from enrolling at the University of Alabama. That place where Wallace was forced to back down from his pledge to prevent integration because President Kennedy, at the insistence of Robert Kennedy, ordered the National Guard and the U. S. Marshalls to intervene on behalf of the young students.

That was thirty eight years ago.

It is easy to see, looking back, why Ted Kennedy became one of the greatest Senators in American history. He had been taught compassion for the less fortunate by his father, who believed that along with privilege came responsibility. But that alone was not enough.

I cannot comprehend surviving the sorrow of the unspeakable tragedies that beset the Kennedy family. Add to that personal failures scrutinized by the entire world: Chappaquiddick, loss of the Democratic Presidential nomination to Jimmy Carter, divorce and rumors of infidelity and alcohol abuse, and one would think that Ted Kennedy had every reason to retreat to Hyannis Port and live the life of privilege.

But he did not.

Senate colleagues past and present praised Ted Kennedy today. Two comments stuck with me. Ted Kennedy was never petty, and he did not hold grudges. Unfortunately those traits seem to be counter to the current political climate.

But those traits allowed him to get things done, from civil rights, to title IX, to education reform, to the rights of the disabled, and hundreds of pieces of legislation which directly improved the lives of millions of Americans who traditionally had been overlooked.

When you have suffered such great personal loss, petty things lose their importance.

When you have been judged by so many for personal failures, it is often difficult to be judgmental or hold grudges against others.

He could have easily quit, many, many times. Most of us probably would, especially when our financial future was never in question.

But he never quit. He fought for those who never had the privilege or power that he had been born into.

Ted Kennedy was certainly not perfect. It seems that he understood that. But it wasn't about him. And since it wasn't about him, his lack of perfection was irrelevant. So he fought on.

Maybe in the end that was his greatest strength.


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