Obama’s Kennedy Passes On

(Or Edward Kennedy's Nunc Dimittis)

By Franklin Sone Bayen

Edward Kennedy passed on today. For many, his eulogies would be well-rehearsed sing-songs: “the last surviving brother of the late President John Kennedy”, “the last survivor of the Kennedy political dynasty”, “the only Kennedy of his generation to pass on without tragedy”, etc. But for us Africans, Edward Kennedy will remain long in our hearts for giving his all, even defying his failing health to hand to Africa, America’s stool of power and honor.

Don’t get me wrong. It took Obama’s political savvy, a highly motivated and focused team and several other factors, but chief among those other factors was Kennedy’s endorsement and open campaigning for Obama at a critical time in the Democratic Party primaries in 2008. An American political prince and a high profile, mainstream politician who to his death had served 47 years in America’s legislative upper house, this brother of a beloved and martyred former president threw his weight behind Obama in a way that shocked Hillary Clinton. The bitter reaction of the Clinton’s after the Kennedy move spoke of its significance. It opened the way for - first cautious, later a floodgate of - endorsements by the high and mighty of the American political class.

In American politics, being likened to John Kennedy is a big blanket endorsement. Bill Clinton enjoyed that in his 1992 run for “looking like the Kennedys” and for appearing in a picture as a schoolboy putting a question to the late president. Likewise another Democrat, John Kerry, from Massachusetts like the Kennedys, for having same initials (JFK – John Forbes Kerry, like John Fitzgerald Kennedy) and even for having dated the sister of the late president's wife.

Edward Kennedy gave a bit (perhaps a lot) of that to Obama when he likened that son of a Kenyan to his beloved brother, the late president. Many recalled that another Kennedy, Robert, had predicted or prophesied in 1968 (when he ran for president but fell to an assassin's bullet), that within 40 years, it would be possible for an African American to be president of the United States, far-fetched in the 1960s because of still lingering racial segregation. 2008 marked 40 years on the calendar and Edward Kennedy (the surviving Kennedy prophet) saw that coming to pass before his own eyes. He grabbed the moment and went campaigning vigorously for Obama though ailing with a diagnosed malignant brain cancer. He managed to appear at the Democratic Party Convention to finish the fight for Obama.

Like the biblical Prophet Simeon, Edward Kennedy attended Obama’s inaugural, though it took “crawling all the way” on a wheelchair, to see with his own eyes. When Kennedy was rushed away that day, in crisis, from the inaugural venue, I said to myself that history (legend, rather) was going to repeat itself. I thought the old man (aged 77) would pass on that day, satisfied that he had seen it. I felt he had said his Nunc dimittis servum tuum Domine, like Simeon in Luke chapter 2:

“Now thou dost dismiss thy servant in peace,
O Lord, according to thy word.
Because mine eyes have seen my salvation,
Which thou hast prepared in the face of all peoples,
A Light to the revelation of the
Gentiles and the glory of thy people Israel."

Kennedy held on seven good months after, perhaps waiting to help Obama push through one of his loudest campaign promises – healthcare reform, also Kennedy's pet subject. Now in a cross-party deadlock, every Senate vote would count. Knowing that, but apparently sensing his time to go was nigh, Kennedy wrote to his Massachusetts State authorities, proposing changes to the Senate succession procedure that would enable immediate succession for him once he was unavailable, so that Obama’s reform is not blocked for lack of even one vote (his, Massachusetts’). He might have run out of patience, waiting too long since his Nunc Dimittis to see the health reform. Dying less than a week after that move shows even more that Kennedy gave all for Obama, even his life. He was Obama’s man. He was Africa’s man, our own Prophet Simeon in a foreign land.

In a tribute, Obama describes Kennedy as his mentor. A statement from Nelson Mandela's office salutes Kennedy for his involvement in the struggle against Apartheid "at a time when the freedom struggle was not widely supported in the West." Kennedy was also key in negotiating with Republicans in 2006 to champion the cause for comprehensive immigration reform that would in the long-run grant US citizenship to illegal immigrants including Africans, although, for same reason, Latinos (the biggest immigrant population) would also claim Kennedy as theirs.

And so do the curtains drop over the long and beautiful, though tragic, political story of the Kennedys who gave so much to the Black race, including President Kennedy’s Peace Corps initiative and his initiation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that outlawed segregation against Blacks. An act finally signed only by Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.

So, yet another title for this write up could have been "Africa Loses It's Last Kennedy".