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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Today we wrap up our full bio conversation about the book Ted Kennedy: A Life by John A. Farrell. In his career, Farrell was a journalist with the Boston Globe. That's when he covered the Senator for Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy, who was on the job for 47 years, having been elected nine times.

During his time as a senator, Ted Kennedy helped establish the minimum wage, Medicare, the Americans with Disabilities Act, Pell Grants, getting 18-year-olds the right to vote. While he was a dynamic senator, there was always, always the lurking question of whether or not he would run for president, and if he would survive it. He did in 1980 when Kennedy challenged incumbent Jimmy Carter.

The race got personal, as we'll learn in the book. It was a fight that some Democrats feared hurt the party. Kennedy gave a famous The Dream She'll Never Die speech conceding to Carter, only mentioning him once at the convention. Carter, of course, lost the 1980 contest to Reagan. Kennedy returned to the Senate. His later years were a productive period for the Senator.

Kennedy lived long enough to campaign once again for a young, brainy, hope-inducing senator choosing to support Barack Obama in 2008. He made one of his final public speeches at the DNC that year, just three months after being diagnosed with the brain cancer that would take his life in August of 2009.

Ted Kennedy: As I look ahead, I am strengthened by family and friendship. So many of you have been with me on the happiest days and the hardest days. Together we have known success and seen setbacks, victory, and defeat, but we have never lost our belief that we are all called to a better country and a newer world. I pledge to you that I will be there next January on the floor of the United States Senate when we begin the great country.

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Alison Stewart: Here is our final conversation with John A. Farrell about his book, Ted Kennedy: A Life.

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We can't end this conversation without talking about Ted Kennedy running for president. It's always been lurking in the shadows, would Ted Kennedy run for president? Was it safe for Ted Kennedy to run for president? Once Ted Kennedy decides to run for president, he poses a challenge to President Jimmy Carter. He and Jimmy Carter did not like each other, and that's mild. They weren't just rivals, they really didn't like each other. What was behind that?

John A. Farrell: Part of it I think was cultural. It wasn't just Carter, it was also Carter's Georgia Mafia. The Georgia Pius Baptist tradition that Carter showed was not the Irish Catholic tradition that Tip O'Neill or Ted Kennedy espoused. Carter came in as a reformer.

That did not sit well with the Democrats in Congress who thought that with this big majority after Watergate that they should be paving the streets back home with gold. Here's this guy from Georgia talking about, "I'm never going to lie to you. We have to tighten our belts on energy. We need a balanced budget." There were political differences as well. I'm very harsh on Jimmy Carter in the book.

I think part of that is that when Jimmy Carter decided he was going to run for president, which was back around '71 or '72, he decided that Ted Kennedy was the obstacle that was the biggest obstacle in his way. Therefore, from the start, saw Kennedy as an obstacle that had to be removed, that had to be pushed aside, that had to be defeated, that had to be cut down in size.

Even when Ted did not run in 1972 or 1976, I think that it's human nature that once you define you have a political enemy that over time you develop a personal contempt as well. I think that it was if you think about it in terms of what a good democrat and a good liberal should have done. After Ted Kennedy challenged Jimmy Carter and the Iranian hostage crisis of the fall of 1979, allowed the country to unite behind Carter, and allowed Carter to whip Kennedy in the Iowa caucuses in the New Hampshire primary.

It was clear that Ted Kennedy could not win. He should have gotten out instead of continuing to fight a Democratic president and opening the door to the Conservative wave that took over American politics for another 20-plus years. You have to definitely pin some of that on Kennedy but on the other hand, Jimmy Carter was priggish. It's hard to say and it's hard to look at the image he has crafted since he left the presidency, but he was also hypocritical.

He was definitely a holier-than-now guy who had two standards, one for his own when it came to protecting brother Billy who ran into trouble that year, and another for other politicians who he could look down on with contempt because they were pals, they were politicians like Kennedy and O'Neill.

Alison Stewart: From your research, did Ted Kennedy want to be president?

John A. Farrell: Other than what happened in that hour after he and Mary Jo left the party, I think that's the great hidden question about Ted Kennedy's life. Because every time he gets close to the presidency, there's an act of self-destruction or self-sabotage. The further away that he is from the presidency, the better he performs.

My theory as his biographer is that he never thought he could measure up to Jack or his dad, or to Bobby. This feeling of insufficiency and fear at not being able to perform as well as they did caused him to push the chalice away to sabotage whatever he was doing at the time that would bring him close to the presidency. You have, for example, the greatest two speeches that he gives in the 1980 campaign are when he's flat out on his back.

Carter has knocked him out in Iowa and New Hampshire. Kennedy is clearly about to be driven from the race everybody thinks. He gives this speech at Georgetown University rallying the liberal cause and manages to win a couple of primaries and stay in the race. Then Carter knocks him out again that summer with enough delegates to win at the convention. Now, it's totally out of his hands. He's lost. He's given an opportunity to speak to the convention and he gives one of the greatest of three or four speeches that he-- This is saying a lot because he could give a great speech of his life at the Democratic Convention and talks about the dream that will never die.

Ted Kennedy: Someday long after this convention, long after the signs come down, and the crowd stopped cheering and the band stopped playing, may it be said of our campaign that we kept the faith. May it be said of our party in 1980 that we found our faith again. May it be said of us both in dark passages and in bright days, in the words of Tennyson that my brothers quoted and loved and that have special meaning for me now, "I am a part of all that I have met, too much is taken much abides. That which we are, we are. One equal temper of heroic hearts, strong and will to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield."

For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end. For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on the cause and doors, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.

[applause]

John A. Farrell: The closer he is to the presidency, the more he seems to allow the doubt to surface. Once he's clear to him that he's not going to be president, then he seems to shine. When he finally gives up the presidential dream before the 1984 race all of a sudden his record in the United States Senate is stellar.

With this burden off of his shoulders he performs that at the end of his life, he's called the lion of the Senate. It's very hard not to ask yourself that question. A million-dollar question, did he really want to be president? Yes, I think part of him wanted to be because it was breaded into him. He was a racehorse, a Kennedy racehorse, you go for the power. He thought that with the power of the presidency, he could do great things, especially for the underprivileged in America, for minorities in America. Deep inside of him, there was that doubt, there was that self-critique.

Alison Stewart: My guest is John A. Farrell, the name of the book is Ted Kennedy: A Life, it's our choice for full bio. He was so effective in the last years of his life. He engaged the skill and the talent that he had. He became an effective leader leading the way from federal minimum wage, voting rights, consumer protections, equal rights for minorities, women in gay Americans, healthcare.

He led the successful fight to enact COBRA. He and Senator Nancy Kassebaum sponsored HIPAA that let portability of health insurance. He was passionate about CHIP, Children's health insurance program. When you think about Ted Kennedy and healthcare had been his whole career, he'd been very dedicated to it. What was his role in getting to the Affordable Care Act under the Obama administration?

John A. Farrell: I don't make it too explicit in the book because, obviously to get an Act like that through Congress, it requires a president. It requires a speaker with the incredible talents and guts of Nancy Pelosi. It requires Harry Reid working the Senate. It requires an outside game of liberal interest groups in the media and all that.

Ted Kennedy played a major role in many ways. On one level, he embraced this last plank in the New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt's liberal dream of universal healthcare for Americans. He was flexible enough to keep it alive in any guise that he could. If it called for a total government takeover, Medicare for all, he was for it. If that went out of vogue, and he saw the possibility of making a deal with Richard Nixon for a public-private system he was willing to go almost to the end with Nixon on that.

When it came to the Clinton years, and they came up with their own, the Clintons came up, Hillary and Bill came up with their own plan for healthcare. Kennedy embraced that, it was very pragmatic. He kept this goal alive, this dream alive and time and time again, the country would come back to it because it was such an oppressing obvious need. Along the way, he was doing these little fixes. He was doing things like community health centers.

He was doing things like HIPAA like you mentioned with Nancy Kassebaum or the CHIP program with Orrin Hatch bringing insurance for kids. He worked with President George W. Bush on prescription drugs for Medicare. They had not been covered in the early Medicare legislation because he didn't get treated a lot with expensive drugs. By the time George W, took office drug treatments were a major part of American medicine, and they weren't covered by Medicare.

It was a huge price tag and Ted Kennedy helped Bush push that through so that by the time Obama comes along. Ted Kennedy has put in a lot of the props for what later became the Affordable Care Act. He's been keeping the flame alive very carefully. As he sees it, this possibility happening he calls together all the experts again from both industry and government, convenes them in a room, says, "Start working on a bill. Got to have a bill ready for this new president."

As part of his willingness to endorse Barack Obama for the presidency instead of Hillary Clinton who had been his ally in many endeavors, he gets some promise from Obama that national healthcare will be a top priority. Again, it's not like Ted Kennedy and Obama sit in a room and there's each other's palm with a razor blade and shake hands and say, "We're going to do this." There's an implied obligation there, and Obama who saw healthcare as Hillary's issue and did not have a big history with it.

He was educated in that campaign and educated by the people who stood up at town meetings and said, I want to tell you about this. Politicians are pros, they are hard-driven SOBs very often, but they also are human beings. You can hear from talking to Nancy Pelosi or Barack Obama about Ted Kennedy's role, that even though he died before they got across the river Jordan. He stood on one bank and could see the Promised Land and was happy with that, and that his spirit, his invigorating example lived on with them.

This show finally, what a great politician he was to make sure that happened. He wrote letters to be read posthumously to the President and allowed to the country. At the peak of the feeling of, ah, Ted died, what a great guy he was. Here was the voice from beyond the grave saying, if you mean that pass the Affordable Care Act.

President Obama in his own memoir said that after they had celebrated the signing of the Affordable Care Act, he went back up into the White House private quarters late at night. He thought of two things, one was his mom who had died of breast cancer at a relatively young age, and the other was of Ted Kennedy.

Alison Stewart: Ted Kennedy would succumb to brain cancer in 2009. He is remembered in most of the obituaries as Lion of the Senate. Do you believe he's someone who really believed or embodied No bless oblige?

John A. Farrell: [laughs] That's not how I would think of him, I think of him as a very flawed human being. An insecure human being for all the bravado brought up with traditions rather than no bless Oblige brought up with traditions of a defense of the underdog from his Irish American immigrant heritage. One of the guys I interviewed had worked for all three brothers, and he said they were well-fed underdogs with pretty good bite.

I thought that was the best definition of the Kennedy Brothers. Yes, they were well-fed. Yes, they were brought up on Hyannis and went to Harvard. Had the best orthodontist the best Rose brief dinners in the middle of any family could hope for in the middle of the depression. On the other hand, they had that streak of kinship with what the average Americans, or what working family and what minorities, and the downtrodden in America had to face.

Were willing to fight for them. I think people saw that, it's why they write songs about them. It's why they write so many books about him. It's why they return that and the tragedy that accompanies them, that makes this experience story. I think is why they're an eternal fascination. I've had so many people, send me emails and said, I just finished the book. What a story. It is, it's just his life is just an amazing story of this flawed human being thrown into history and ending up doing good things.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is Ted Kennedy: A Life. It is by John A. Farrell. John, thank you for giving us so much time.

John A. Farrell: Ah, are you kidding? It's author heaven.

Alison Stewart: Once again, thanks to John A. Farrell for joining us. Shout out to Full Bio post producer Luke Green and engineer Jason Isaac next month. Shirley Chisholm.

 

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