What Obama must now do is to articulate a clear, distinct course of policy.
The first time I met him, on a boat trip along the coast in Florida at Easter 1962, just before he was manoeuvred into the Senate by family clout, arguably before he had reached the qualifying age, he and his first wife, Joan, were as beautiful as young gods. They were tanned and toned in seersucker, the very image of the American rich on vacation.
The last time I saw him, at a fundraising lunch in Boston in the late 1990s, he was ravaged - face brick-red, boozer's nose and eye, grossly overweight, but still charged with rare charm and formidable energy. This was the image that characterised his later years, until his death on 25 August 2009 at the age of 77.
In a Newsweek article he wrote after he had been diagnosed with a brain tumour, called "The Cause of My Life", Kennedy listed just some of the medical and psychological disasters he and his family had survived, among them the plane crash that broke his back and several ribs, a son's leg amputated for one cancer, and a daughter treated for another.
He might have mentioned a sister's crippling by a (possibly unnecessary) frontal lobotomy, the death of a brother, a sister-in-law and a nephew in separate plane crashes, and the murder of his two brothers.
His point in the article was that he and his family survived in part because of his congressional insurance, in part because of his family's great wealth. He understood that many other Americans less fortunate than him, were wiped out financially by healthcare costs, or simply died miserably for lack of the money to pay for care. That was why, he was saying, healthcare was, of all his liberal causes, the one that meant most to him, and it is true that in his forty-seven years in the Senate reform of the American healthcare system was his absolute top priority.
By: Godfrey Hodgson was director of the Reuters' Foundation Programme at Oxford University
tags : Edward Kennedy, Obama, United States
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