Ted Kennedy, Richard Nixon and Universal Health Care

“Turning now to the rest of the agenda for 1974, the time is at hand this year to bring comprehensive, high quality health care within the reach of every American. I shall propose a sweeping new program that will assure comprehensive health insurance protection to millions of Americans who cannot now obtain it or afford it, with vastly improved protection against catastrophic illnesses.”

Richard Nixon, January 30, 1974

 

 

Over 35 years ago, Senator Ted Kennedy tried to collaborate with President Richard Nixon to achieve a goal that both dearly desired:  universal health care insurance for all Americans.   It was an odd partnership, as Kennedy and Nixon were political rivals, and Nixon was fearful of running against Kennedy in the 1972 Presidential election.  After Nixon won the elections, Kennedy began secret negotiations with the White House that almost led to an agreement on a health care plan.  Nixon introduced his Comprehensive Health Insurance Act on Feb. 6, 1974.  It would’ve built upon existing employer-sponsored insurance plans and would’ve provided government subsidies to the self-employed and small businesses to ensure universal access to health insurance.  Sadly, the Watergate scandal derailed Nixon and Kennedy’s efforts at health care reform. 

 

Steve Pearlstein wrote an article in the August 28, 2009 edition of the Washington Post that detailed the regret that Kennedy had over not being able to make a deal with Nixon on health care.  Pearlstein wrote:

 

“Asked about his greatest regret as a legislator, Ted Kennedy would usually cite his refusal to cut a deal with Richard Nixon on health care.  

…At first, Kennedy rejected Nixon’s proposal as nothing more than a bonanza for the insurance industry that would create a two-class system of health care in America. But after Nixon won reelection, Kennedy began a series of secret negotiations with the White House that almost led to a public agreement. In the end, Nixon backed out after receiving pressure from small-business owners and the American Medical Association. And Kennedy himself decided to back off after receiving heavy pressure from labor leaders, who urged him to hold out for a single-payer system once Democrats recaptured the White House in the wake of the Watergate scandal.”

Thirty-five year later, the single-payer dream of Democratic liberals still remains politically out of reach. But it should tell you how far the country has moved to the right that the various proposals put forward by a Democratic president and Congress bear an eerie resemblance to the deal cooked up between Kennedy and Nixon, while Nixon’s political heirs vilify it as nothing less than a socialist plot.”

It would seem odd that Nixon and Kennedy would collaborate on health care reform, but that cause was something that was dear to both of their hearts.  Ted Kennedy is widely known as a champion of health care.  It is not as well known, however, that Nixon too was a strong lifelong supporter of health care.  Richard Nixon grew up poor and he lost two brothers to tuberculosis, and the illnesses devastated his family’s finances.     When Nixon first came to Congress in 1947, he proposed a national health insurance bill.  As President, Nixon introduced the National Health Insurance Partnership program in 1971, which had government support for private employer related health insurance, health insurance for low-income families, and health maintenance organizations (HMOs).   Kevin G. Hall wrote in a November 28, 2007 article for McClatchy Newspapers:

“Nixon first proposed national health insurance as a conservative California congressman in 1947. He grew up poor and lost two brothers to tuberculosis, which marked him for life. He frequently pointed to the cure for tuberculosis as a medical marvel that underscored the need for a public-private partnership on health care.

“It was something personal for him,” Price said of Nixon’s health-care push.”

Thirty five years after Nixon made his proposals for universal health care reform, President Obama is making similar proposals for reform on our health care system.  Like Nixon, Obama would build upon the present health care system to provide universal access to health care.  Obama would agree with Nixon statement on February 5, 1974, which Nixon stated that he did not want to see “other families of modest means… driven, basically to bankruptcy because of the inability to handle medical care problems of a catastrophic type.”  Nixon’s and Obama’s reform proposals are not radical changes to the current health care system, and neither are socialist.  As Steve Pearlstein notes, the past 30 years has seen the political center move to the right after the Presidency of Ronald Reagan, and proposals that would be moderate in Nixon’s time seem more radical today.   Obama and today’s progressives need to push the political center more to the left again, to be able to define the debate on progressive reforms on more fair terms.   I’m not a fan of Richard Nixon, but his advocacy of health care reform is something that many people can support.  If  someone like Nixon has advocated universal health care proposals that are similar to Obama’s, then it should show people that those proposals aren’t so radical.

In his 1992 book, “Seize the Moment,” Nixon wrote a passage that eerily echoes the arguments of Democrats today:

“We need to work out a system that includes a greater emphasis on preventive care, sufficient public funding for health insurance for those who cannot afford it in the private sector, competition among healthcare providers and health insurance providers to keep down the costs of both, and decoupling the cost of healthcare from the cost of adding workers to the payroll.”

The Collaboration of Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch

Ted Kennedy is remembered as one of the most effective Senators in the history of the Senate. He authored over 2,500 bills, of which 500 became law. Many of Kennedy’s most important bills came about after the 1980s, when the presidency was occupied by Republicans like Ronald Reagan and George Bush and the Congress was frequently had Republican majorities. Kennedy was able to be an effective Senator during those more conservative times because of his ability to collaborate with Republican colleagues on such items as health coverage, educations reform, and immigration reform. One of his greatest collaborators is his friend and political opposite, Orrin Hatch.

It was an unlikely friendship. Orrin Hatch came into the Senate specifically to fight everything that Kennedy stood for. They worked together often in the Senate Labor, Judiciary, and other committees, and they often clashed, as would be expected from any meeting between a liberal Democrat and a conservative Republican. Hatch mentioned that one could tell how vehement an argument was by how much smoke Kennedy was blowing towards Hatch, who frequently got headaches from Kennedy’s cigars.

In spite of this, they eventually became good friends. Hatch wrote in an article in the August 27, 2009 edition of Newsweek magazine:

“We disagreed on nearly every issue, and continued to do so for all the years we served together in the Senate. But to our mutual surprise, during our service on the Senate Labor, Judiciary, and other committees, we soon realized that we could work well together. If the two of us—positioned as we were on opposite sides of the political spectrum—could find common ground, we had little trouble enlisting bipartisan support to pass critical legislation that benefited millions of Americans.

…Amid our constant fighting and occasional compromises, we also became close friends—a friendship that endeared us to some and enraged others who felt a conservative Republican and a liberal Democrat should not be friends. For our part, we checked our political differences and egos at the door when we socialized. We were good friends, plain and simple—and neither pettiness nor others’ opinions came between us.”

Over the years, Kennedy and Hatch worked on many bills that helped millions of Americans with their health coverage, helped AIDs victims receive needed care, and fought discrimination. Among the major bills that Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch collaborated on were these:

The Orphan Drug Act , which provided tax credits for encouraging the development of medicines for rare diseases.

The Ryan White Aids Act, which established a federally funded program for people living with HIV/AIDS, with an emphasis on providing funding to improve availability of care for low-income, uninsured, and under-insured victims of AIDS and their families.

The State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which provided health insurance to thousands of the working poor across our country.

The Mammography Standards in 1992

The Americans with Disabilities Act, which provided individual protections from discrimination against individuals with disabilities.

The FDA Revitalization Act of 2007, which addressed many critical issues including the need to provide proper incentives and support for the development and review of pharmaceuticals and medical devices, and the need for heightened efforts to assure the safety of medications.

The PDUFA, a program that created drug user fees to help expedite the approval of new drugs. This legislation continues to be reauthorized.

The Health Centers Renewal Act of 2007, which reauthorized the health center program for five more years and provided people with essential health care services.

The FDAMA – FDA Modernization Act of 1997, which regulated prescription drug advertising, food safety, and codified the requirements for access to life saving medicines.

The Bioshield Legislation, which increased federal, state, and local infrastructure for bioterrorism preparedness.

The last collaboration between the two senators was the Serve America Act, which renewed America’s call for volunteer service to meet some of our country’s most challenging problems and needs. David Broder wrote an article in the April 13, 2009 edition of the Washington Post Weekly that chronicles this last collaboration. He wrote:

“Early last year, just as the partisan emotions of the presidential campaign began to rise, the two began talking to each other about their shared interest in national service. The topic was a natural for both. Kennedy’s brother, the late president, had made his Peace Corps proposal a centerpiece of his 1960 campaign and had signed the law making it a reality. Hatch, like many young Mormons, had spent two years as a volunteer missionary for his church.

They quickly agreed on a bill that would combine two quite different approaches to national services.

As Hatch said during the Senate debate, they decided to marry the expansion of traditional voluntary part-time community service, endorsed by generations of Republicans, with increases in government-subsidized, full-time service programs devised by Democratic presidents, beginning with the Peace Corps.”

This bill tripled the size of AmeriCorps, the full-time government-subsidized volunteer program, to 250,000 slots over the next eight years. It also has provigions to increase opportunities for helping local churches, schools, food banks, and community groups to recruit, train and deploy volunteers to organizations that need them.

Ted Kennedy’s effectiveness as a legislator should be examined in more detail. Kennedy had, by the consensus in Washington, the best staff in Capitol Hill. His staff numbers over 100, including interns and visiting fellows, and they came from the great universities of the country: Yale, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and Northwestern. His staff provides the research and the details to Kennedy’s major proposals. The book “Good Ted, Bad Ted” by Lester David, explains Kennedy’s strategy for passing important legislation.

“Kennedy is a superb legislator because he understands the inner workings of Congress the way a great football coach knows how and where to position his players and which plays are likely to succeed, which may fail.

Staff members explained his system: Before a single word of a contemplated measure is put on paper, Ted talks to legislators from both Houses, by phone or in person, and with other parties who have an interest in the issue, to obtain their views, pro and con. Then, after carefully noting where the thorny patches lie, Ted tailors the measures to sidestep them.

His goal is to win the backing of 70 percent of the members of both Houses. It is an important number since a two-thirds vote in the Senate and House can override a veto; the bill becomes immune to a presidential turndown. It also becomes filibuster-proof because two-thirds of the Senate and House can invoke the cloture rule which chokes off the endless speeches that can keep a measure from coming to a vote.

Discussing his legislative technique, Kennedy said, ‘If you’re interested in being effective, it’s important to build coalitions. You have to compromise to make progress.’”

We’ll miss Ted Kennedy’s political skills as important progressive goals are being brought to Congress. Expecially with a tough fight on Health Care, we will miss Ted Kennedy’s leadership and ability to get legislation through the Senate. I’m hoping that the President and the legislators are able to pass a good health care reform legislation with a public option to offer needed alternatives for people who cannot afford private health care insurance. Although I disagree with Orrin Hatch’s opinions on the current health care reform proposals, I am grateful for his collaborations with Ted Kennedy in so many important bills.

Progressives and Their Changing Views of Government

Over the past month, I’ve been noticing a strong anti-government strain to many of the protests in the recent town hall meetings to discuss health care reform. These strong anti-government feelings run very strong among conservatives, while liberals tend to be very strongly pro-government. This is something I’ve always been curious about. How did Progressives and Conservatives come about their positions on the role of government? How has the Left’s view of the role of the federal government evolved over time? I did a cartoon in the August 26, 2009 edition of the Tri-City Voice on the town hall protests.

The argument about the role of the federal government has been around since the beginning of our country, from the debates of the Federalists and Antifederalists over the ratification of the Constitution, to the early debates between Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Party and Thomas Jefferson’s Republican Party. The Constitution was created because of great dissatisfaction with the government that was formed from the Articles of Confederation. The Articles of Confederation was based on the idea that each state would remain sovereign. Article 2 of the Articles of Confederation stated clearly:

“Each State retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.”

Since each state was sovereign, states could ignore with impunity legislation that was passed by the Congress. The federal government had no way of forcing states to pay its fair share of taxes, of giving supplies and troops for battle, they could not control settlers interactions with the Native Americans, it could not enforce foreign treaties it signed on American citizens, it could not settle interstate commerce disputes, it could not settle claims on frontier land, and it couldn’t pay off the debts accrued during the war. Americans were increasingly despairing of the ineffectiveness of the American government under the Articles of Confederation.

In the chapter “Is There a ‘James Madison Problem’” from his book Revolutionary Characters, Gordon Woods notes that James Madison and many of the leaders wanted a constitution based on a stronger federal government because of their own bad experiences in state legislatures in the 1780s. Woods wrote:

“Madison’s experience with the populist politics of the state legislatures was especially important because of his extraordinary influence on the writing of the federal Constitution. But his experience was not unusual; indeed, the framers of the Constitution could not have done what they did if Madison’s experience had not bee widely shared. Many of the delegates to the Philadelphia Convention were ready to accept Madison’s Virginia Plan precisely because they shared his deep dislike of the localist and interest-ridden politics of state legislatures. ‘The vile State governments are sources of pollution which will contaminate the American name for ages… Smite them,’ Henry Knox ured Rufus King, sitting in the Philadelphia Convention, ’smite them, in the name of God and the people.’

Not only Virginia but other states as well had been passing various inflationary paper money laws and other debtor relief legislation that were victimizing creditor minorities. All this experience during the 1780s sparked new thoughts, and Madison began working out for himself a new understanding of American politics, one that involved questioning conventional wisdom concerning majority rule, the proper size for a republic, and the role of factions in society. All these new ideas fed into the Virginia Plan, which became the working model for the Constitutional Convention that met in 1787. Crucial to this plan was the Congress’s power to negative or veto all state legislation that in its opinion violated the articles of the Union.”

Many people who argue for a weak central government have pointed to the 10th Amendment as justification for their views. I did some research on the 10th Amendment and found the book James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights by Richard Labunski. One particular debate on the wording of the 10th Amendment was of great importance. On page 230, Labunski wrote:

“Tucker of South Carolina introduced a motion that showed how a single word inserted into an important section of the Constitution could have changed the nature of the document and the nation’s history. Tucker wanted to place the word ‘expressly’ in what would become the Tenth Amendment to confirm that the federal government was one of limited powers. His proposed language would have read ‘The powers not expressly delegated by this constitution…’ The Tucker amendment would have greatly diminished congressional authority under the ‘necessary and proper’ clause, which had granted Congress substantial discretion to carry out the responsibilities assigned by the Constitution. It would become a major issue throughout the nation’s history- going to the heart of how a federal system should allocate power between the states and the central government- that has never been settled.

Madison vigorously objected, arguing that ‘it was impossible to confine a government to the exercise of express powers(;) there must necessarily be admitted powers by implication, unless the constitution descended to recount every minutiae.’ He told his colleagues that this subject had been raised, discussed, and rejected by the delegates at the Virginia ratifying convention. Tucker’s motion was defeated in the committee of the whole, but he would raise it again in the full House, only to see it defeated on a recorded vote by a margin of 32 to 17.”

During this time, most of the progressive American thinkers of the time, from Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Paine, were rebellling from the strong central governments model of the European monarchies. This lead many of them to embrace a relatively anti-government stance. Gordon Wood noted in his book Revolutionary Characters:

“Unlike liberals of the twenty-fist century, Paine and other liberal minded thinkers of the eighteenth century tended to see society as beneficient and government as malevolent. Social honors, social distinctions, perquisites of office, business contracts, legal privileges and monopolies, even excessive property and wealth of various sorts- indeed all social inequities and deprivations- seemed to flow from connections to government, in the end from connections to monarchical government. ‘Society,’ wrote Paine in a brilliant summary of this liberal view in the opening paragraph of Common Sense, ‘ is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness.’ Society ‘promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections,’ government ‘negatively by restraining our vices.’ Society ‘encourages intercourse;’ government ‘creates distinctions.’ The emerging liberal Jefferson view that the least government was the best was based on such a hopeful belief in the natural harmony of society.”

This view persisted among liberals into the 1850s. Henry David Thoreau wrote in his essay On the Duty of Civil Disobedience:

“I heartily accept the motto, ‘That government is best which governs least;’ and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,- ‘That government is best which governs not at all;’ and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.”

While the American liberals of the 18th and early 19th century believed in a weak central government, this belief among liberals began to change after the Civil War. Two events brought this about. One of the things that caused a change in liberalism’s view of the government was the fight for equal rights of African Americans. After the Civil War, the Congress, through the leadership of Radical Republicans like Charles Sumner, passed a series of laws to help grant equal citizenship to the newly freed slaves, chief among them the 14th and 15th Amendments and the Civil Rights Bill of 1875. When Reconstruction ended and federal troops withdrew from the South, African Americans saw those rights taken away as the local and state governments began to pass segregation and Jim Crow laws and African American leaders began to be harassed by the local Klu Klux Klan. The culmination of the loss of rights was the Supreme Court decision Plessy versus Ferguson. From that time onwards, civil rights activists agitated to force the federal government to intervene in protecting the rights of the black community.

Another thing that forced a reevaluation among some portions of the Left is the growth of corporations and trusts and its expanding control over the lives of all aspects of America. As men like J.P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie worked to create industries that gained untold of profits and gained control of large control of large segments of the American economy, the average American felt less control over their own lives. Rebecca Zurrier’s book Art For the Masses describes the fears of many progressives towards the corporations and trusts:

“Since the late nineteenth century the suspicion had been growing among Americans from all walks of life that the democratic rights of economic and political equality could no longer be attained in a capitalist society.

…the left gained strength between 1871 and 1917 as part of the growing pains accompanying America’s transformation from an agrarian nation of small communities into an urban, industrial society. Growth brought hardship on a scale unimagined before: between one-third and one-half of the population lived in poverty during this period. The ideas of free competition and economic progress that had prevailed in the older society proved inadequate to guarantee the welfare of individuals working for wages in a factory. The doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism preached only the producer’s right to unlimited growth and the investor’s right to a profit, with no sense of obligation to those who might suffer in the process of making that growth and that profit possible.

…With a popularized version of ’social Darwinism’ providing moral justification, employers not only paid men less than enough to live on but hired women and children for even lower wages to work twelve- hour days, eighty hour weeks, under conditions that resulted in more than 570,000 industrial accidents each year- and provided no compensation for injury or layoffs. Efforts to form unions met with violent resisteance from employers and ushered in an era of labor strife: nearly 10,000 strikes and lockouts occurred between 1881 and 1890. At the same time, the absence of any sort of government regulation enabled a few men to accumulate huge fortunes and permitted the consolidation of industry into a few powerful trusts. By 1910, 1 percent of the population controlled 47 percent of the nation’s wealth.”

The left during that time developed many different philosophies in response to those economic conditions. Progressive Republicans and Democrats worked within their parties to try to bring about reform to the capitalist system. Socialists and anarchists felt the capitalist system was beyond redeeming and worked to replace it with economic systems that promised to more equitably redistribute the nation’s wealth. The Populists share the goals of shifting the balance of economic power more towards the rural and farming interests. An encapsulation on these various modes of thought could be found in the philosophies of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Eugene Debs. David Traxel, in his book Crusader Nation, wrote about the differences in the progressivism of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson:

“Policy toward the enormous concentration of economic power in the trusts was one of the points of contention in their differing visions of America’s future. Roosevelt believed that this increase in size and power of corporations was inevitable under modern economic conditions; they were here to stay, and the way to control them was through an equally strong central government armed with clear regulatory powers. Wilson, advised by the brilliant Boston lawyer Louis Brandeis, argued that these huge entities should be dismantled, not regulated. Only then would small enterpreneurs and businessmen have a chance to make their own fortunes.”

Eugene Debs was of a different cloth than the progressivism of Roosevelt or Wilson. Disillusioned from the American economic system after a brutal breaking of a Pullman strike in 1894, Debs believed that the state should hold all the means of industry and that industries would be organized as worker co-operatives so that the average workers would be able to benefit from his or her own labor. Bored of the Marxist idealogy and opposed to the warfare of the classes, Debs hoped instead for a nonviolent change from the capitalist system through the ballot box, gaining over 900,000 votes in his run for the Presidency in 1912 and 1920. In an article that Debs wrote on October 15, 1908, he stated his philosophy on the ordering of the economy:

“The process of industrial evolution that has rendered the capitalist a useless functionary has at the same time evolved an organization, co-operative in character, whereby industry may be carried on without friction for the benefit of the whole people instead of for the profit of the individual capitalist. The conduct of industry will be entrusted to men who are technically familiar with all its processes, precisely as it is now entrusted to managers by the stockholders of a corporation; in short, the whole of industry will represent a giant corporation in which all citizens are stockholders, and the state will represent a board of directors acting for the whole people. Details of organization and performance may well be left to the experts to whose direction the matter will be given when the time comes.”

A last strand of the left had a very different opinion on the role of the government is the anarchists, as represented by Emma Goldman. The anarchists, according to wikipedia, believe the state and compulsory government to be unnecessary and harmful and instead wish for the absense of the state. Emma Goldman was a political activist who fought for worker rights and wrote several essays on the anarchist philosophy. In her book Anarchism and Other Essays Goldman wrote:

Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.

These different strands of leftwing all address the faults of the capitalist system, yet each is distinct. The Progressive philosophies of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson have morphed into the liberalism of the New Deal and the Great Society. Barack Obama’s proposals bear the influence of Roosevelt’s and Wilson’s progressivism. In these recent health care reform debates, Obama is often unfairly accused of being a socialist. Obama’s actions of the past few months have been to prop up the banking system and reform health care as a means to preserve and buttress the existing free market system. A true socialist, like Eugene Debs, would’ve done away with the existing system and replace it with the society owning the means of production.

It seems to me that the conservatives at last month’s town hall meeting have been tapping into the 18th century progressive spirit of Thomas Paine when they express their displeasure of an encroaching federal government. In light of the last 40 years, of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, of Watergate and the Iran Contra scandals, I can understand some of their scepticism of the government, even if I disagree. Liberals who want the government to alleviate the problems that a for profit system of health care has caused have tapped into the spirit of government activism of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. James Chace wrote in his book 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs- the Election That Changed the Country:

“Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson invented the activist modern presidency. TR’s commitment to use Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends was not unlike Wilson’s use of executive power to promote free competition that would prevent big business from stifling local economies. Their legacy was the use of centralized power to create greater democracy. For TR, as for Wilson, Hamilton’s strong government had to be united with the ‘one great truth taught by Jefferson- that in America a statesman should trust the people, and should endeavor to secure each man all possible individual liberty, confident that he will use it right.’”

Remembering Ted Kennedy

In this past week, I’ve been feeling very sad at the death of Ted Kennedy. I share a sense of loss that many people feel over the death of this man who has been such a great progressive Senator for all these decades. But it’s more than that. For many, it’s not just Ted’s death, but the death of a generation of Kennedys that has played such a dominate role in our nations politics for such a long period of time. I am a liberal because of my admiration of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Kennedys. In these past few days I’ve been reading a lot of blogs, post, and newspaper articles from writers saying how much Ted Kennedy has influenced their lives. It’ll be a while before we see his likes again.

I first heard of Ted Kennedy when I was in Junior High School, when he ran in the Democratic primaries against Jimmy Carter. Many people around me were very critical of Ted because of Chappaquidick and it seemed like Ted had the weight of the world on his shoulders whenever I saw him on t.v. I just felt sorry for him. During those years, I admired John and Bobby more than Ted, as he seemed to shrink in comparison to his two brothers. As the years went on, however, and Ted’s legislative achievements became better known to me, my estimation of Kennedy began to really grow.

I looked up the internet and found many legislative accomplishments. He authored over 2,500 bills, of which 500 became law. During the 1960s, Kennedy fought for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1968 Fair Housing Act, and was the floor manager for the 1965 Immigration Act. In 1971 he passed legislation quadrupling cancer funds. In 1975 Kennedy sponsored the 1975 Education for All Handicapped People Act, and in 1980 he introduced the Civil Rights for Institutionalized Persons Act, whiched protected the constitutional rights of the elderly, the mentally ill, the disabled, and the incarcerated. In 1990, Kennedy cosponsored with Orrin Hatch the Ryan White CARE Act, which speeded funds for cities most hit by the AIDs epidemic. In 1990 Kennedy wrote the Americans with Disabilities Act prohibiting disability discrimination. In 1993 Kennedy co-authored the Family and Medical Leave Act, requiring businesses to provide unpaid leave for emergencies or births. In 1996 he cosponsored with Kansas Republican Senator Nancy Kassebaum the Kennedy-Kassebaum Act, which allowed employees to keep health insurance for a time after losing job. Kennedy helped President George Bush with the No Child Left Behind Act.

A wonderful Public Radio International internet post chronicles Kennedy’s fight to end apartheid rule in South Africa. I remember this very well during the 1980s, and Kennedy’s fight influenced me to start seeing him in a different light. Kennedy introduced legislation to impose economic sanctions on South Africa. The Anti-Apartheid Act became law in 1986 after Congress overrode a veto by President Ronald Reagan. The Public Radio International post quoted Randal Robinson, a prominent anti-apartheid activist and now a professor of human rights law at the Dickinson School of Law at Penn State University:

“What we did that resulted in the overriding of Ronald Reagan’s veto — the first time in the 20th century that a foreign policy veto of a sitting president had been overridden by the Senate — that could not have happened without Ted Kennedy. He was not just a major force, he was the essential, he was the indispensable force.”

This may just seem like a list of bills, but it’s important that we see just what Kennedy did for the elderly, the poor, the working class, the mentally ill and the marginalize of this nation. Kennedy was a complex man with many flaws, but he was also one of the greatest progressive senators of our time. Detractors are right to bring up the tragedy of Chappaquidick, but I feel that this horrible tragedy must be put in the context of his entire life. I struggled a lot with trying to understand Kennedy’s personal failings and his accomplishments. As I’ve lived my life and struggled with my own failures and mistakes, it has made me empathize more with Ted Kennedy’s failures and the way in which he has had to struggle with it in the public eye. Melissa McEwan wrote a tough but fair post on the struggles she’s had in reconciling the man in the center of the Chappaquidick and William Kennedy Smith scandals and the man who passed so much legislation that benefitted so many average Americans. McEwan’s post encapsulates the mixed feelings I’ve had about this man during most of my life.

Teddy, as he was known, was privileged, in every sense of the word. And he made liberal use of his privilege, in ways I admired and ways I did not. The terrible bargain we all seem to have made with Teddy is that we overlooked the occasions when he invoked his privilege as a powerful and well-connected man from a prominent family, because of the career he made using that same privilege to try to make the world a better place for the people dealt a different lot.

….I can also not forget the myriad ways in which Teddy used his limitless privilege for the betterment of others, as Mustang Bobby so eloquently detailed. He quite genuinely cared about the poor, the sick, the needy, the dispossessed. He was an authentic progressive, who could acknowledge his own privilege and could stand in front of the Senate and talk about the privilege he had that people of color, LGBTQIs, and women lack. He was a great goddamn Senator—and would that the entire Senate, or even just the Democratic Caucus, was filled with people who were as passionate and progressive as he was.

One of the things I most admire about Ted Kennedy is his ability to make friends with those people he disagreed with. He was able to cross the aisle and collaborate with Republicans to pass bills. I end this post with a personal testimony from Orrin Hatch, conservative Republican from Utah and one of Ted Kennedy’s closest friends.