Edward Kennedy in His Own Words

Twenty-five years ago you were the boy senator. Now you're one of the old bulls in the Senate. How did it feel to grow up in that institution and witness all kinds of changes firsthand? How does it feel now?
I find it exciting now. We're able to get votes and focus attention on what we're doing. And that's a lot different from when I served on the Judiciary Committee in the Sixties, which was under Democratic control. We were addressing the civil-rights agenda, and we saw then that the chairman and members of the party were committed to subverting what were the real areas of need in the country. It was an enormously frustrating period, given what the needs were. So this, I find, is an exciting time.

What about the country in general?
As in the early Sixties, I see the country moving toward a more active period in terms of both the needs of the country and the willingness of the people to try and deal with issues in a responsible way. We saw that when we were out in Chicago talking to Citizen Action, which is the largest grass-roots group in the country. To feel their energy in dealing with the domestic agendas and to look at the numbers of dues-paying members — something's happening, and as always, the politicians are the last ones to sense it. But I feel it and see it, so I think this is a very interesting period — particularly after the previous six years, when we were basically an institution that was not dealing very substantially with a lot of problems. It was a period of status quo and retreat in many ways.

How has the Senate changed in the past two decades?
think that the Senate's become less efficient in terms of producing new landmark legislation, but it has also become more open and willing to test ideas and to deal with some important issues where the administration is really out of step. For example, we had the situation where the administration was so out of step with the country on the issues of apartheid in South Africa that we were able to alter national policy, in terms of the legislative branch, in a very significant way. I don't think that could have happened in the Sixties, when the Congress and the Senate had difficulty altering the policy in Vietnam. The country separated itself from the president, and it still took an interminable period of time to end it.

That was, in a sense, a failure on the part of the senators.
Exactly. I think that the Senate then was a different institution. It was more efficient — and that was the up side. Even with all of the inefficiency today, there's a willingness to raise questions and get some kind of reaction. I mean, it would be inconceivable to me that you would have had the Senate taking such critical steps fifteen or twenty years ago. I think that has been the important change. The transition began with the Vietnam War, and then came the extraordinary upheavals, the assassinations and the loss of leadership during the Watergate period. All of that had an enormous impact. Today, there's more questioning, more demands for openness and less willingness to leave it to others to make decisions that are going to affect people's lives — all of which is healthy.