The Dead Kennedys

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America does a good line in famous families: there were Brian, Carl and Dennis (a.k.a. the Beach Boys), then there was the Jackson Five, the Osmonds, the Olsen twins, etc. Almost as famous as Brian Wilson and his brothers, and nearly as popular in California, were John, Bobby and Ted: the Kennedys.

It is hard to write about America’s most celebrated political dynasty without recycling the countless clichés, set pieces and literary devices that have been used by any number of commentators down the years. In short, in a country that loves a success story, the Kennedy family had everything: the deprived background, the hard-line Catholic background, the mysterious curse that seemed to knock out another one every couple of years and, most significantly, a shared charisma that endeared them even to their bitterest political opponents.

Much has been written about Ted, the most recently-deceased of their line. Mostly, the panegyricists have paid lip service to his flaws (the drinking, the womanising, the small matter of the dead secretary in the upturned car that Ted didn’t consider sufficiently important to report to the authorities) but have veiled their criticisms with gushing torrents of sycophantic praise designed to immortalise the man who, for now, was the last of this great American political aristocracy.

Ted Kennedy was certainly a great orator; arguably he accomplished more in the Senate than many of his colleagues, and much of what he accomplished was designed to advance the cause of the poorest members of American society.

He also supported the cause of Irish republicanism. While the IRA bombed civilian targets on the British mainland, executed those they perceived to be disloyal in front of their families and established a fascinating network of links with progressive and liberal regimes such as those in Lybia and Colombia, Kennedy helpfully suggested that ‘Protestants in Northern Ireland should be given the opportunity to go back to Britain’. He never condoned Irish terrorism as such, but he never openly condemned it either, at least not when it really mattered. The Irish lobby in America was too strong and, traditionally, too staunchly Democrat for him to risk offending it. With all the enthusiasm of those who don’t actually have to live in fear of being bombed, shot, knifed or maimed, the Irish-American community, of which Kennedy was the most prominent member, tacitly (and, often, not-so-tacitly) supported the IRA’s campaign of terror.

After 2001, the word terrorism acquired a new meaning in America. It stopped meaning ‘stuff that happens to other people’ and started to mean ‘stuff that happens to us’. The IRA, who had had their thunder well and truly stolen, began to warm to the idea of political engagement. Kennedy, sensing his chance to win some political credit, was quick to get in on the action. Apparently abandoning his original doctrine of ethnically cleansing Ulster of Protestants (most of whom had been there far longer than the Kennedy family had been in the USA), he stuck his oar in and, somewhat ironically, was even honourarily knighted for his efforts by the Queen against whom he had long railed. In time, once it became clear that the IRA were real terrorists, not just nice, cuddly ‘freedom fighters’, he distanced himself from them and from Noraid, the Irish-American organisation that openly raised funds for them.

Yet, for all that he eventually did to end the violence, it can never be forgotten that for three decades, he had been the acceptable face of a powerful Irish lobby in America that utterly rejected peace in Ulster in favour of a policy of murdering and maiming that was to bring the province to its knees. How many Irish lives, both Protestant and Catholic, would have been saved, one wonders, if Kennedy – certainly the world’s most influential Irish politician and a man with a truly immense sum of political capital to spend – had had the courage, foresight and intelligence to promote peace twenty years earlier.