In the hours and days following the news that Ted Kennedy had succumbed to the brain cancer with which he had lived for over a year, the encomiums that followed were prodigious and predictable. Kennedy, who at the time of his death was the second-longest serving member of the United States Senate, was widely (and quite rightly) extolled for being the firebrand he so often was, the official standardbearer of a certain type of hardheaded and pragmatic liberalism – Kennedy Liberalism, one might call it – characterized by the belief that government should, above all else, provide for its citizens. As the biographical details of his political and personal life were picked up, dusted off, and mulled over, we were treated at length to renderings of Ted Kennedy the Senator, the Health Care Advocate, the Patriarch, the Failed Presidential Candidate, the Lion, the Survivor. Whatever the angle, there existed, throughout many of these portraits, what amounted to mostly fleeting references, anecdotes, or asides to a role that Kennedy took up with particular zeal and relish, one that very likely looms large in the mind of those with any sort of impression of the late Senator: Ted Kennedy the Sailor.
This was the Kennedy who, upon his release from the hospital in May 2008, following his initial diagnosis, proceeded forthwith to his wooden schooner, the Mya, so he might race in the Figawa, an annual Memorial Day regatta from Hyannis, MA to Nantucket, in which he had participated for nearly 30 years. Upon returning to the Senate later that summer, following a brief convalescence, Kennedy was presented by his close friend and colleague Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) with a song, “Headed Home”, written by Hatch and Phillip Springer (who wrote “Santa Baby” for Eartha Kitt, in 1953). The song, overwrought though it was, meant a lot to Kennedy, as it metaphorically associated his return to the Senate – for what would be his 47th and final year – with the sport that, since foregoing the opportunity to play for the Green Bay Packers in favor of a career in politics, in the late 1950s, had become his consuming passion, with the refrain, “America, America, we’re sailing home, we’re sailing home.” “Everybody who hears it, loves it,” Hatch said of his song at the time, hyperbolizing just a tad, one imagines.
Sailing, it seems, had long been for Kennedy the reward at the end of a long workweek. In honoring Kennedy last week, Senator John Culver (D-Iowa) shared a story with mourners gathered at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library, in Dorchester, Massachusetts, one from the summer of 1953, when he and Kennedy were both attending Harvard’s summer school. “One Friday, Ted said to me, ‘Why don’t you come with me this weekend to the Cape. There’s going to be a sailboat race called the Nantucket Regatta, and I want you to be part of my crew.’” Culver, grateful as he was for the invitation, nevertheless declined, reminding Kennedy that he came from Iowa and, as such, had never been on a sailboat. “The only boats I ever saw were barges on the Mississippi River,” Culver quipped. Kennedy, assuring Culver that there was “nothing to it,” finally persuaded the Iowan to join him. Driving south on Massachusetts Route 3, from Boston to Hyannis, Kennedy and Culver caught a news bulletin that warned of an incoming storm system, and strongly advised all recreational crafts to get off the water at once. “Well, I guess sailing’s off,” Culver said, upon listening to the report. “Oh, there’s nothing to it,” Kennedy responded. At about 4 o’clock that afternoon, the two young men went down to the docks at the Kennedy Compound, where the 26-foot sailboat Victura, belonging to then-Senator Jack Kennedy, was cleated. “I did what I could to help us get out in the water, but there were huge waves by now. There was thunder and lightning. The sky was black. And he’s at the tiller, or whatever it’s called, and suddenly this friend of mine, who I thought I knew quite well, starts screaming at me. After a while, I was more terrified of him than the storm. And he kept screaming at me, The spinnaker! The jib! Portside! We’re bouncing all over, and it’s my fault. And we only got two hundred yards out, and I lost the [previously prepared] sandwiches…I’ve never been so miserable in my life.” After reaching Nantucket, and thereafter convincing a salesman from Cambridge – who, for his part, had little to no sailing experience either – to be the requisite second crew member, Kennedy met the qualifications for the regatta. “The races start and all I remember is Ted yelling and yelling, for me to get up on the left side of the boat, and him the right side. I couldn’t see what was happening, but we kept going around and around, in circles. Somehow, at some point, this race was mercifully over…and Ted seemed satisfied. I had no idea why. And I was satisfied, probably because I had lived through it.”
At his funeral on Saturday, Kennedy’s son, Edward Kennedy, Jr., similarly spoke of his father’s dedication to the sport, and his memories of sailing together when he was a child, near their home in Hyannis. “During the summer months, when I was growing up, my father would arrive late in the afternoon from Washington on Fridays and as soon as he got to Cape Cod he would want to go straight out and practice sailing maneuvers on the Victura in anticipation of that weekend’s races. And we’d be out late, and the sun would be setting, and the family dinner would be getting cold, and we’d still be out there practicing our jibes and our spinnaker sets long after everyone else had gone ashore. One night, not another boat in sight on the summer sea, I asked him, ‘Why are we always the last ones on the water?’ ‘You see,’ he said, ‘most of the other sailors that we race against are smarter and more talented than we are, but the reason we’re going to win is because we’ll work harder than them, and be better prepared.”
Sailing was, furthermore, a way for Kennedy to contextualize and find peace with the many tragedies that touched his life. Kennedy biographer Lester David wrote that, after his brother Bobby’s murder in June, 1968, “Ted sought consolation from the sea aboard the Mira, a rented yawl, sailing alone westward on Natucket Sound, past Wood’s Hole and up into Buzzard’s Bay. Or he would cruise north along the coast, as far as Maine, for days at a time, watching the changeless sea.”
In the last weeks of his life, as he began to have trouble speaking, Kennedy would steal his energy for those days in which the breeze over the North Atlantic picked up. Less than two weeks before his death, his nephew, Robert Kennedy, Jr., spoke to the media about his uncle: “He’s sailing. I saw him out on the boat yesterday. He’s going…every day.”
