Personal Aside: The Liberal Establishment Tries to Dignify Ted Kennedy to Match His Brothers—But It’s a Lost Cause.

The liberal establishment…rooted in the Ivy Leagues and confirmed in the mass media…are trying to give Ted Kennedy a send-off that will make him imperishable in history as it supposes his brothers will continue to be, with headlines like “The Last Lion” and “A Torch Extinguished”—but it’s a lost cause in the long sweep, with John, Robert and with Ted. Sooner or later America will understand what has been published often by courageous journalists but not digested by the foppish lefty romantics: that the entire Kennedy dynasty from Old Joe to the mediocrities in this current generation is fabricated out of a desire to create a bogus royal family to justify liberaldom and statism while ignoring generations of womanizing, alcoholism, debauchery, cynicism and decadence, nothing less.

I’ll give the liberals that the family will indeed be long remembered in history…but when the gloss wears off, it will be recalled by disillusioned Americans as not unlike the Catholic Borgias, the Valencian-Italian noble family prominent during the Renaissance…Cesare, Lucrezia, Giovanni and Juan Castellar.., remembered today for corruption including adultery, simony, theft, rape incest and murder by poison (of the litter one indeed become a saint, Francis: to whom I nominate the late long suffering Rose who had to put up with her husband’s and boys’ wicked follies).

One of the Borgias was elected Pope, Rodrigo, an outrageous conniver and pervert who became Alexander VI, about whom the late Robert Novak mused that the Catholic church must indeed be divine to have survived evil personages among which Rodrigo was principal. (Indeed it must be as well as to survive a litany of spineless prelates today who got their miters by murmuring lefty sentiments in a post-Vatican II era of modernistic nihilism, notably Roger the Lodger, L. A.’s Cardinal Mahony whose prattling praise of Teddy you heard yesterday and whose commissioning of a hugely over-priced cathedral where he occupies the central throne was designed to hide his shameless under-the-rug dealings with pedophiles in his diocese).

It’s notable that the séances on TV about Ted ignored his criminal guilt in allowing an innocent girl to die in his mother’s car turned upside down in a pond where it landed due to his frivolous debauchery while he cringed from bringing the accident to the attention of the police in order to save his political career—a signal event of callousness unrivaled in U. S. political history.

The story of the so-called Kennedy Dynasty starts with Old Joe [1888-1969] who gained a fortune through stock market, commodity investing, real estate acquisition and wanton bootlegging which involved importation of alcohol into the U. S. during prohibition after he and James Roosevelt, FDR’s son, traveled to Scotland to buy distribution rights for Scotch whiskey. The stock brokerage business gave him expertise in dealing with the unregulated market of the day which under today’s rubric would convict him to insider trading and market manipulation. He made millions in the Libby-Owens-Ford stock pool, an arrangement that allowed Kennedy and his colleagues to use scarcity of LOF stock to drive up the value of his holdings and utilizing inside information and lack of public knowledge to reward himself.

This and his political dexterity with FDR to enable his company to become exclusive American agent for Gordon’s Gin and Dewar’s Scotch in 1933 before prohibition ended and led him to invest in the Hollywood film industry, garnering huge profits from merging several acquisitions into Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) Studios made him one of the richest men in the world. His work in Hollywood gave him extensive experience on the casting couch where he became a heavy-breathing bespectacled billionaire middle-aged predator to any starlet who took to his fancy—while at the same time he gave huge sums to the Boston archdiocese, corrupting it, importuning it to turn a blind eye to his scandalous behavior and enabling him to cavort as a leading Catholic layman. But he mainly settled down with an inamorata, Gloria Swanson to whom he became business manager…once traveling to Europe on an ocean liner with Swanson ensconced in one suite and Kennedy and his wife in another…the deal being that Kennedy could make rapid nocturnal visits to be with Swanson.

Lecherous Old Joe instructed his sons to the ways of the adulterous world and was responsible for all of them living lives of scandal and debauchery while buying off favors from a conniving and subservient clergy. He was not that way with his daughters allowing Rose, his patient and un-canonized saint of a wife, to instruct them in chastity. He wanted much for his sons, especially the presidency.

As is well known, after his oldest son Joe, Jr. was lost in World War II, Old Joe took the spindly, often ill John and manufactured him into a politician…although John would have preferred to be a journalist. When Old Joe got the ambassadorship to Britain (a disastrous appointment by FDR given Kennedy’s Irish-distilled hatred of the English), he pushed, prodded and kicked John to travel the continent…which John did in a convertible loaded with his friends. Then Old Joe alienated everyone in Britain by saying that it didn’t have the will to win the war with Hitler…and likely the U. S. wouldn’t have the guts, either—so he was recalled. John went to Harvard and wrote his senior thesis on the Munich debacle between Neville Chamberlain and Hitler. But Old Joe wasn’t about to let it serve as an ordinary thesis. He paid his old pal Arthur Krock, the renowned Washington bureau chief of The New York Times, to add a lot of flourishes and research. Unsurprisingly, John graduated magna cum laude and Old Joe had his kid’s ghost-written thesis published as a book, “Why England Slept.”



More Later on the Kennedy Dynastic Fraud.

I’ll continue this exposition on the dynastic Kennedy fraud some other time. Now as a parting salute to Randy Old Ted, I’ll relate my own dealing with him—in 1977 when I had been spectacularly unsuccessful landing a Kennedy fellowship at Harvard’s Kennedy Institute of Politics. I was 47 and a veep of Quaker Oats and wanted to get the fellowship which would be the first time a business lobbyist ever got a fellowship in that prestigious institute. Having come off a stint as a liberal with the Commerce Department, I thought I could sew up the appointment by getting several liberal sponsors: so I got Newton Minow, JFK’s old FCC chairman; UN ambassador Andrew Young, about whom I produced a film documentary on his congressional race which was financed by Quaker and aired on NBC; then Rep. Paul Simon (D-Ill.) It wasn’t enough.

Disgusted, I visited with the assistant executive director of the Kennedy Institute of Politics who was Doris Kearns Goodwin, a Ph.D who was preparing her first book of reminiscences during his close internship with Lyndon Johnson. I had tried twice before to get a fellowship and she signaled that I was about to be turned down a third time. I asked her why. She said the Institute was not about to name as a fellow a corporate lobbyist. I asked why not in the name of God? Corporate lobbyists have been prevalent in U. S. politics since the nation’s founding. But she didn’t have much of an answer, being a lefty herself who was deeply suspicious of corporate lobbyists who were Republican.

“Look,” she said, tiring of my importuning. “The final say-so comes from the Senator [Sen. Ted Kennedy]. If you want to, you can see him when he stops in here next Wednesday but don’t think necessarily that’ll get you in.”

I flew back to Cambridge Tuesday night, got a room and met Kennedy at about 10 a.m. Wednesday. He was unimpressed until I told him that while I was waiting to join Quaker as an executive, I was set up to travel with Sen. Everett Dirksen on his listening tour throughout Illinois in 1964. Kennedy perked up his ears because Dirksen was a good friend of JFK when both were in the Senate and helped John Kennedy inestimably after Kennedy got to the White House.

I wish I could say that my depth and breadth of government got me the fellowship but it didn’t. It was a by-chance mention of one of Dirksen’s prime scatological expostulations. I told Teddy that Dirksen used to refer to people he thought were stupid…including Victor Smith the then GOP state chairman… as being “dumb as dogshit.” I said I had never before imagined how dog excrement could be used to explain one’s lack of intellectual acuity but nevertheless it seemed illustrative.

Ted Kennedy exploded with laughter and laughed so hard I thought he would never stop. He then said:

“You know—both my brothers used that expression and I always wondered where they got it! It must have been from Old Ev! I’ll be damned.”

He wiped the tears of laughter from his eyes and said, “Okay, you’re in. Tell Doris you’re in. That story did it.”