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Kennedys Delivered Another Curve Ball

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By JOHN HERBERT

Published: June 7, 2008

Few families outside the war-torn Middle East or nature-ravaged Asian countries have sustained so many personal tragedies as the Kennedys, who were once hailed as America's Camelot. Sen. Ted Kennedy's terminal brain cancer is only the latest "curve ball" (his wife's words) tossed at the family.

Ted Kennedy might be a politicalicon in many circles, but not in the Herbert household. My somewhat bitter father, now deceased, but once executive editor of the old Boston Herald Traveler, frequently blamed the senator for his role in influencing the Federal Communications Commission to withdraw the Herald's license to broadcast on subsidiary Channel 5, one of Boston's "big three" TV stations 50 years ago.

The money-losing Herald Traveler survived on cross-subsidies from itsprofitable TV outlet. Deprived of that revenue, the Herald Traveler was doomed to be sold, first to the Hearst chain and then to News Corporation's Rupert Murdoch.

The daily newspaper thrives today as a locally owned tabloid. Always a Republican Party house organ, theHerald Traveler readership core was made up of Boston Brahmins and white collarsin general.

Ted's goal,my father maintained, was to make Boston a one-newspaper city whose agenda would be set, more or less, by the competing Boston Globe,a staunch supporter of Irish Americans andDemocrats. The Kennedys, of course,areboth.

Itis nothing new or unusual that Boston is controlled by the Irish — and Italian Americans. Ted is the grandson of a one-time Irish-American Boston mayor. Another Irish-American mayor was so popular he ran for, and won, re-election while languishing in jail on charges of financial monkey business.

A former president of the Massachusetts state senate, Billy Bulger, is Irish American. His gangster brother, Whitey Bulger, currently wanted formurder, is still regarded by grateful old folks in Boston as something of an American Robin Hood.

Two years before I started college in the late 50s, Ted was bounced from the same school for hiring a classmate to take the future senator's exams. Although exam security haslong since tightened, students still clucked about the incident when I was there.

Curiously, Ted retained his dues-paying membership in the off-campus Owl Club until 2005, until well after it had supposedly become politically impossible to belong to any organization that banned minorities.

The Kennedy clan was legendary, at least in Massachusetts, long before the JFK assassination. Old Joe Kennedy, the father, managed the big naval shipyard in the Boston suburb of Quincy, during World War I. There, he caught the eye of a young assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

As president, Roosevelt appointed the elder and still arch-conservative Kennedy ambassador to England. Kennedy was recalled a couple of years later after he insisted, once too often, that Adolf Hitler was a statesman Roosevelt should do business with.

Joe Kennedy had already made the family fortune, in rum-running during Prohibition, in shares before stock-trading was regulated, as a real estate mogul and, later, as a legitimate importer of alcoholic beverages.

Several years ago, I traveled to northernmost Sweden with Ted Kennedy, an early advocate of universal health care,when the senator was in the country to do a study ofrural health delivery. The glittering journey, akin to a state visit,was just to go through the motions; a Swedish Foreign Officeofficial later told me the health care study had already been done, two weeks earlier, by staffers from Ted's Washington office.

The trip was not without its "unusual" moments, though. Ted's wife at the time, Joan, had to be checked into a local hotel to sleep off a bad hangover. More recently, she has served a couple of stints in rehab, fighting serious bouts with alcoholism.

As "do as I say, not as I do" liberals, the Kennedys still have a long way to go if a Camelot frenzyis ever to grab America, again. I couldn't help noticing that, as Senator Ted left a Boston hospital to return to Cape Cod recently, where he's been leading opposition against an eyesorelocal offshore wind farm, he sped off in a gas-guzzling SUV.

A regular columnist for Hernando Today, John Herbert lives in Spring Hill.

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