On their convention’s opening night Monday, Democrats waved Kennedy signs and welcomed their lion in winter, the ailing Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. And he delivered, using his political and cultural clout to etch a vivid connection between his family’s mythology and Barack Obama’s potential.
“The dream,” Ted Kennedy said, “lives on.”
A partisan party is one thing, though; American culture at large is another. And as the senator edges toward stage left, the final brother of his extraordinary generation, a question presents itself: When he is gone, what becomes of the renowned Kennedy mystique, that alchemy of hope, charm, tragedy, controversy and just a whiff of royalty?
“It’s embedded in our history now. It’s part of our DNA. You can’t take that away,” says Bobbi Baker Burrows, director of photography for Life magazine, whose intimate images helped craft the Kennedy mythology in the early 1960s. Potent as a political dynasty, the Kennedys of Teddy’s generation represent far more. Straddling the eras of Audrey Hepburn and Paris Hilton, they have embodied the better angels of the American nature, and their aura has endured tales of foibles and tragedies and missteps.
And, of course, they were the prototypes for a uniquely American hybrid of politics and celebrity — something that played well for JFK in 1960, RFK in 1968, Ronald Reagan in 1980 and, some would say, Obama in 2008.
It’s more than that, though. It’s about adaptability to the national mood, a Kennedy hallmark.
Which is why, in a fragmented century attuned to sound bites and information overload that might have made even JFK dizzy, space remains in the modern American bandwidth for the Kennedy mystique.
“They would be as successful today as they were in their own era because of their ability to adapt not only to their audiences but to the era they were playing in,” says Gerald Shuster, a political communications expert at the University of Pittsburgh. “They had a very unique ability to integrate themselves into any audience demographic.”
The Kennedys also used hope as clay, molding it into whatever shape was necessary for the moment. That encompassed not only the renowned oratory but the ability to convert the building blocks of personality into cultural capital.
Thus did a gorgeous American extended family, laughing and playing as if posing for a sporting-goods ad, become grist for a mythmaking machine that was far more self-aware than Americans of JFK’s era ever realized.
Cynical to some, it created bonds that made politics about far more than, well, politics.
“It really helps from on high to have somebody that you revere, that you care about and want to hear what they’re saying and doing and what they’re wearing, everything,” says Letitia Baldrige, who was Jackie Kennedy’s social secretary and chief of staff during the Kennedy administration. “That’s important for us, whether it’s an apparition or not.”
Despite Democrats’ attempts to link them for the purposes of Campaign 2008, those who study the Kennedys largely reject comparisons between Robert and John Kennedy and Obama. But forces outside candidates’ control can also evoke the Kennedy mystique in more subtle ways.
“People are looking back now because we’re in a very similar situation to ‘68 — an unpopular war, an unpopular president who’s waging it, serious domestic problems,” says Thurston Clarke, whose new book, “The Last Campaign,” chronicles RFK’s final days in 1968.
“People ached to feel noble in 1968, and they ache to feel noble again,” he says. “People sense there’s a similarity between the two periods, and it makes the Kennedys more interesting to them.”
Nevertheless, a huge swath of American voters know John and Robert Kennedy only from their parents and their history texts.
And the current crop of Kennedys, with such notable exceptions as Caroline Kennedy and Maria Shriver, have not achieved the top tier of renown populated by their parents.
“I don’t think the American people know them very well,” JFK biographer Michael O’Brien says. “They do a lot of good humanitarian work, but if I was to have to name them, I think I would have a hard time.”
Try telling that to the hard-core Democrats inside the Pepsi Center on Monday. They waved Kennedy signs at Teddy as he spoke, erupted into cheers at the nostalgic video of sailing and family gatherings and black-and-white footage of a time when much seemed possible.
Some, standing in the aisles, even wept when the senator said, “It is time again for a new generation of leadership. It is time now for Barack Obama.”
He also said this: “For me, this is a season of hope.” The same Kennedy clay, yet another new sculpture.
Graying and aging and even retooled slightly, the Kennedy mystique endures — as political symbol and cultural touchstone. The torch has been passed.
What the new generation of Americans do with it is, as always, up to them.
Comments