Bill Clinton cherished the photo of himself at 16 shaking hands with John Kennedy, and made it part of his campaign for president, incorporating it into his film biography to declare that the torch had been passed.
Kennedy was long gone when Barack Obama campaigned, but he was handed the torch in person by John Kennedy’s brother and daughter, making him his successor and, as Chris Matthews assures us, JFK’s “brother” and heir.
Obama was now the fifth Kennedy brother. “Ted … wanted to be his brother’s brother,” Matthews tells us, redundantly, “and then he turned that torch over last year to Barack.” But did he, and was it his torch to hand over?
Ted has a right to bestow his own torch, (as Caroline has a right to bestow hers, should she have one), but whether they have a right to bestow one on behalf of John Kennedy is a whole other question. It sounds as if there were only one torch — and only one legacy — that is handed down from person to person intact, like a set of Limoges, or the family sideboard. In reality, there have been four distinct Kennedy torches, refined and remade in hands of each bearer, and all have been quite unalike.
Kennedy pere was a pro-business conservative, who backed Franklin D. Roosevelt as he thought he was the only man strong enough to forestall revolution, and an isolationist, whose concern for democracy did not run very deep.
Jack broke with Dad when he morphed into an ardent Cold Warrior, and became a political centrist. Bobby in his later phase was a bleeding heart conservative a la Jack Kemp, who came later; (a number of compassionionate conservatives who worked for George W. Bush were early-life Bobby enthusiasts), and Ted circled back past his father to his maternal grandfather, a liberal mayor of Boston writ large.
All four worked hard for what they believed was the good of the country, but differed on what this “good” was. Joe Kennedy thought it was good for Americans to stay out of wars, so their sons wouldn’t be killed in them (as were his son and his son-in-law); Jack thought it was good to arm (and sometimes to threaten) to forestall aggression; Bobby became a “tribune of the underclass” who was suspicious of welfare and state-run solutions; Ted was a non-interventionists (not unlike his father) who thought there was nothing the state shouldn’t do.
The most unlike in this foursome are Teddy and Jack. Jack ran to the right of all his opponents; Ted was to the left of both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton; Ted was a legislator; Jack an executive; Jack criticized Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower for not arming enough against Russia and China, Ted fought against all the arms programs with which the Cold War was finally won (by Ronald Reagan and Jack, among others); Jack threatened pre-emptive war to keep Cuba from threatening the United States with mega-death weapons; Ted excoriated George Bush the younger for waging pre-emptive war to keep mega-death weapons from Saddam Hussein and Iraq.
Jack and Bobby, who wanted to terminate Fidel Castro, seem unlikely to have fretted over the “harsh” treatment of terrorists, and those suspected of wanting to murder American citizens. Ted took orders from organized feminists, supported abortion in all stages and for all reasons, and fretted over the interests of the transgendered.
By permitting Ted to come in on his slipstream – and then to outlive him by as long as his lifetime – Jack allowed Ted to dismantle his policy imprint, while extending the name of their family. By this time, the name had been pushed, dragged, and tortured through so many contradictory phases that it stood for no well-defined things at all.
When the torch theme itself was invented by Jack, it had a modest, generational meaning, and referred to the fact that the custodianship of the nation was being passed from the World War II commanders, such as his predecessor, Gen. Eisenhower, 26 years his senior, to the junior officers, such as himself.
Now, the torch, name, and legacy ought to go on vacation. Some torches are better off dropped.
Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to the Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
