Contrast with the virulent hatred expressed by the left for Novak on his death.Ted Kennedy and I didn't occupy much political space in common, but I always admired his ability to build coalitions for the things he believed in, assemble a first-rate staff and bravely represent a coherent point of view. He was also a man who would answer your questions forthrightly and then invite you to have a drink.
In his last months, he and his wife Vicky also found time to come to the aid of a fellow cancer sufferer — my old boss and friend Bob Novak. He died only a week ago from the same type of brain tumor that felled Senator Kennedy. When the conservative columnist was diagnosed last year, Vicki Kennedy reached out to Novak with the lessons they'd learned about treatment. "He and his wife have treated me like a close friend . . . and urged me to opt for surgery at Duke University, which I did," Novak wrote in one of his last published columns. "The Kennedys were not concerned by political and ideological differences when someone's life was at stake, recalling at least the myth of milder days in Washington."
The loss of two great men I knew to the same disease in the space of a single week certainly fills me with a greater appreciation for the brief time all of us have on this earth.
Goldberg on liberals on Kennedy.
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Nevertheless I cannot forgive Kennedy for his lies about Robert Bork in his famous speech to the Senate in 1987 that sunk Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court.
Reagan was stunned by Kennedy's intemperate and rapid attack (which came 45 minutes after Bork's name was submitted) and rightly so:
"Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-ally abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren would not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of teh federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy."
Certainly Kennedy had some serious "issues" which need to be honestly included along with the rest of his legacy and not airbrushed out (though no doubt many on the left will attempt to).
Human beings come in three types: flawed, very flawed and deeply flawed. Kennedy was somewhere in the middle.
Was he not a scion (OK - the third-rate scion, but, after the murder of his brothers, he was 'the scion') of a major organized crime family?
I have never understood how 'The Kennedys' could possibly be accepted into society - and even elected into positions of power. Perhaps the decline in the moral standards of our society can be traced (in part - or, perhaps, this was yet another symptom) to the idolization of 'the rich' - even if they known to be inexorably linked to organized crime.
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