Regrets

by digby

During last week’s funeral events, the fatuous gasbags must have said at least 12,397 times that Ted Kennedy’s “greatest regret” was in failing to agree to Richard Nixon’s health care plan. I had never heard this before, but it was spoken about as if it was not only common knowledge, but the impetus for Kennedy’s alleged shift from principled liberalism to post partisan conciliation, which I had also never heard before.

Turns out, it would be news to Teddy too:

The only actual quote I could find of Kennedy saying anything remotely like this comes from a 2004 interview with Susan Milligan of the Boston Globe in which Kennedy discusses an oral history project with the University of Virginia’s Miller Center:

Kennedy said he would discuss “missed opportunities” as well as accomplishments. For example, Kennedy said, he has wondered whether Democrats should have taken a rare opportunity during the Nixon administration to accept Nixon’s national healthcare proposal. While many Democrats believed the plan was flawed, it may have been better to sign onto it, given that decades later, the nation still has more than 40 million uninsured people, Kennedy said.

“I’ll have to go back and look at whether we should have jumped on that. Did we make a mistake waiting?” Kennedy said.

In The Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy, author Peter Canellos made a similar claim to that of Pearlstein, but he sourced his claim back to the Milligan article.

It’s possible that Kennedy said this privately, but that isn’t how people were portraying it. In fact, the way they said it sounds suspiciously like the sort of thing that was always said about him (“He should have taken Nixon’s deal”) and which was then attributed to him once he became a beloved elder statesman who everyone wanted to claim as their own. All popular politicians are reimagined as villagers once they die.

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