the rix mix

Long-winded speakers at Ted's memorial Friday evening. Former Iowa Senator John Culver sounded like he'd been hitting the Jameson's, with his crazy story of sailing with Ted when they were classmates at Harvard. John Kerry reminded us why he narrowly lost the election in 2004, a numbing speechifier. John McCain gave the impression he really wasn't an intimate friend, unless he & Ted had been boozing, womanizing pals before Ted sobered up with Vicki. But Orrin Hatch, clean-living Mormon, did have a peculiar, special relationship. Carolyn Kennedy Schlossberg delivered the most coherent & well-crafted, if not the most interesting, testimonial, with a beginning, middle, ending. I was very impressed with the improvised fills of the off-camera pianist as the chorus filed on & off stage. Boston Community Chorus got off to a rough start on "Just a Closer Walk With Thee," but you could hear them pull it together, by the end they were so rocking they couldn't stop. Was Joan Kennedy short-changed? She is the mother of Ted's children, & she is surely grieving, too.

It was Vicki who saved Ted's butt; their relationship is profiled in a New York Times piece, "Kennedy's closest confidante." Recall Ted's condition & situation in 1991, the dissolute, aging playboy of the Palm Beach scandal; a famous politician apparently approaching the functional end of a long career, inviting election defeat if he couldn't straighten up. & there was no reason at the time to believe he would.

Here's the complete text, prefaced by William Wordsworth's own commentary, of Character of the Happy Warrior, quoted by President Obama at the funeral mass. Far from Wordsworth's best, the old poet tries to distance the 1806 poem from British Naval hero Lord Nelson, with whom it had become connected in the public perception.

Labels: in the news, obituary