Friday, August 28th, 2009

Teddy, and Larry, and Me

by Ken Shane

Jack, Bobby, and Teddy KennedyEver since Senator Edward Kennedy died on Tuesday, there’s been a movie playing over and over in my head.

I come from the Sixties. I believe that the day John Kennedy was murdered was the day that this country began a long slide down a slippery slope that continues to this day. I believe that by the grace of God we were giving one more chance to right our course in the person of Bobby Kennedy. When he was murdered on that June night in 1968, our fate was sealed.

My best friend growing up was Larry. We met in seventh grade, and became friends immediately. We both played guitar. We loved the same bands, and were in bands together. He was a fanatic Kinks fan. I wasn’t quite as avid, but a fan nonetheless. We were together constantly. Larry had been born with an aneurysm in the base of his brain, but that wasn’t known at the time. In fact, doctors operated on his heart when he was four years old because they thought that was the problem. He still managed to live a full life until the symptoms of his affliction began to manifest themselves when he was in his mid-thirties.

After high school, Larry left for college in Boston. Northeastern. He was a criminology major of all things, and went on to be a respected analyst for the New York State Police. I missed my friend. I had never been to Boston before, so I decided to take a ride up there and visit with him.

I arrived in town and parked my car on Boyleston Street, right in front of the restaurant where we’d agreed to meet. Finishing our meal, we headed to our cars, where I would follow him back to his place. There was one problem – my car had been broken into, and my guitar had been stolen from the back seat. Hello Boston, nice to meet you! There didn’t seem to be much we could do about it, so I got in the car and began following Larry. Keep in mind that I’d never been in Boston, and so had no idea where we were. A few minutes later, I caught sight of a guy hitchhiking. I noticed that he was carrying a guitar case that looked suspiciously like mine. I stopped to give him a ride.

It was until he was seated in my car that the hitchhiker noticed that the car looked familiar. I informed him that the guitar was mine. He responded with a feeble, “I know.” He went on to tell me that his old lady had some problems and that they needed money. I told him that the best thing I could do for him was to let him out of the car and not press charges. He seemed grateful, and I had my guitar back.

The rest of my stay in Boston was, thankfully, less dramatic. After a couple of days, Larry and I decided to head down to Cape Cod just to change the scenery. Neither of us knew anything about the place, but we forged ahead anyway. We had no idea what we do when we got there, or where we would go, but somehow we ended up on a little town called Hyannis Port. Of course we knew that the town was home to the famous Kennedy compound, but we didn’t know where it was.

Somehow, and to this day I don’t know how, we found ourselves walking on the beach in Hyannis Port on a beautiful fall day in October. In retrospect it seems like we shouldn’t have been allowed on that beach, and we were the only people on it, at least for the time being. After a few minutes, we noticed a group of people approaching us from the other direction. There seemed to be about ten of them, children of varying ages mostly. There was a football being tossed around.

As they got closer, it became apparent that this little band was being led by none other than Senator Edward Kennedy. Kennedys playing football on a beach in Hyannis Port? It seemed like something right out of the newsreels. While I couldn’t believe our good fortune, I was also afraid that we had intruded in a place where we were not welcome. I need not have been afraid, though. The Senator greeted us with a smile and gracious greeting. Our entire encounter lasted less than 30 seconds, but it made an impression on me that has lasted over the ensuing decades.

Larry died a few years ago. After numerous surgeries, and a courageous fight for life, the aneurysm finally defeated him, but his battle was an inspiration for all who knew him. Now Teddy is gone after his own brave battle, and it brings me back to that October day so long ago. I hope that Larry and Teddy get another chance to meet now on some faraway beach under a beautiful blue sky.

“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.”
Senator Edward M. Kennedy – 1980 Democratic Convention

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 28th, 2009 at 3:19 pm and is filed under Current Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • Perhaps this isn't the place to start this conversation but, hey, what the hell.

    Just wondering: do you still feel that had JFK, and subsequently RFK, not been assassinated, America would be different. I'm not being confrontational, and you'll see where I'm driving in a moment, it's just that a lot of the '60s kids had this idea and I'd like to hear how you felt things might have changed for the better.

    For myself, any scenario that would have seen less of a crisis on American grounds could have been an improvement. The country went into a group Post Traumatic Stress situation and, much worse, murder as a political tool seemed so much easier to implement once the president was taken out. Before then, presidents of the modern age seemed to be invincible. Sure, there were assassinations, but that all seemed past-tense, high school book reports on Abraham Lincoln and such. JFK's murder was so public, and was carried off so easily, a militia of psychotics were galvanized by the example. Had JFK not been shot in the head, and had he taken the bullets (single bullet theory, my ass) in the shoulders, the tactic would not have seemed effective. The chain would have been broken, Oswald wouldn't have been shot by Ruby in retaliation, RFK wouldn't have ascended to the national spotlight & target and maybe, just maybe, it wouldn't have seemed feasible to blow away Martin Luther King on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.

    Maybe.

    But that doesn't change the Nixon problem. Showing how desperately Pres. Nixon was trying to keep his power during Watergate, I have to believe that side would have come out earlier had JFK lived. As puritanical as the US might be now, the political world was even worse back then. The Kennedys would have been run out of town on a rail, none of Camelot's promises to come true. Nixon would have been sent packing too because he would have violated rule 1 of Fight Club - in this case, you do not expose that which everyone in the club was doing. Dick the Snitch would have been sunk, but I have to believe his twisted ambition would never have made him cognizant enough to not follow through.

    The point - while I certainly would have loved to have been born into a world where the blood of our leaders wasn't shed so callously and freely, I don't think the future for the Kennedys would have been any rosier.

    Damn, this was a long comment!
  • Despite his involvement in ratcheting up the Vietnam struggle, I do not believe that JFK would have continued the escalation as LBJ did. I believe that Bobby would have been elected if he had lived, and that he would have ended the Vietnam War years before Nixon did. The Vietnam War was the defining issue of the era, and in many ways it still is. The demonstrations against the war, that I was a part of, eventually created a shift to the right because people were afraid of what they were seeing in the streets, and the Republicans played on that fear very skillfully. That shift to the right continues to inform the politics of this country to this day.

    In short, I don't believe that the U.S. would have taken this disastrous turn to the right if the Kennedys had lived.
  • See, but I don't think Vietnam would have had any bearing on it, nor would LBJ. Nixon has proven he's not above dirty tricks. Nor do I believe that the political elite of the day had no idea of Kennedy's scandals. It's just that, back then, they all had scandals, everyone kept their mouth shut, and the spin cycle was not as flash-paced as it is now. If Nixon was hot enough for the White House, he would have been the first to air JFK's dirty laundry.

    Essentially, we're itching about Marty McFly's alternate universe here, but I have to think the Kennedys would have been undone anyway, not with a bullet, but with their secrets.
  • JonCummings
    I've never been sure where to come down on this, but while the Kennedy myth-makers have always insisted that he wouldn't have escalated in Vietnam, there's a nagging fact that stands in the way: the last major event in South Vietnam before JFK's assassination was the U.S.-approved overthrow and murder of President Diem. Apparently JFK didn't even approve, but his generals did it anyway; that didn't bode well for his ability to control events. The phrase "Hey, hey, JFK, how many kids did you kill today?" rhymes, too.

    I do tend to believe that RFK, had he even won the nomination (which wasn't certain by any means), could have stopped Nixon. Whether the entire era would have been different is hard to say, though. I imagine that everything from 1980 forward might have been exactly the same, considering what a charismatic figure Reagan was.
  • SeagirlX
    What a fantastic story! Thank you for sharing that!
  • Malchus
    Nicely done, Ken. Some of the best moments in life are the ones that happen by accident. I'm sorry to hear about your friend; I know how sad it can be when a person you grew up with and were close to leaves before their time.
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