Private Faces

THE EDUCATION OF EDWARD KENNEDY by BURTON HERSH 510 pages. Morrow. $10.95.

In a campaign year cluttered with political biographies, as well as rehashes of the Kennedy years, this overweight volume might have been passed by. But the clawing among Democratic candidates for the presidency, and then the shooting of Governor Wallace, have brought the Kennedy tragedy to mind, along with the role that Edward Kennedy may yet play at next month's convention.

The author, a sometime novelist and freelancer, is unusually sensitive about both the Senator's political and personal history. He is also a rather flamboyantly bad writer, a reporter who demands equal time for his metaphors and his research. He uses unprecedented candor in dealing with his vulnerable subject, going into Kennedy's drinking and domestic troubles along with his congressional achievements. For his part, the Senator cooperated, granting access to his office and his friends--a course of action that in the long run will probably be no more politically damaging than diving into Poucha Pond encased in an Oldsmobile.

It is generally agreed that the post-Chappaquiddick Edward Kennedy is an even more effective and increasingly powerful Senate liberal. He is also conceded to be the best natural politician of the whole remarkable clan--less remote than Jack, far less abrasive than Bobby, and with an unfettered, spontaneous brio all his own. Hersh quotes a family friend as saying that Jack "went weak with pleasure" watching his young brother press flesh with the public.

Ted's political lessons were learned in Jack's campaigns, and later in his own quest for a Massachusetts Senate seat. Hersh savors the local pols who were momentarily crucial to Kennedy. Their quaint political world was to achieve national prominence during the Senator's unfortunate 1964 attempt to get Family Retainer Francis X. Morrissey confirmed as a federal judge. That whole public pratfall--the admission of double legal residences and nonexistent law courses--is played out here, but Hersh can offer no real explanation for it beyond misplaced family piety.

Indeed, Ted Kennedy's story sometimes seems to be a race between slowly advancing maturity and onrushing disaster. When Jack was killed, it fell to Ted to tell their paralyzed father. It took him a day to bring himself to do it, as it did later to report the accident at Chappaquiddick. The most crushing tragedy, of course, was Robert Kennedy's death. Hersh points to the "strain of rather unusual male tenderness, a kind of unabashed motherliness that crops up among Kennedy men." As the youngest child, Ted loved "high jinks and excited fun and a good many drinks sometimes." His secretary notes that the long hospital stay after his own near-fatal plane crash was the first time in his life that Ted was truly alone.

Shifting Moods. Hersh's account of Chappaquiddick is persuasive because he precedes it with the kind of information seldom found in biographies of living public figures. For months, observers noted that Ted Kennedy had a "tendency to stop in midsentence, shift moods inexplicably, break into unexpected tears." He was remote from his wife Joan who began drinking too, according to Hersh. His driving, always wild, became frightening. On a flight home from Alaska, where he had gone to continue Bobby's campaign on behalf of the state's Indians, he was exhausted, wild and drinking out of control.

The cookout on Chappaquiddick was another night heavy with Bobby's memory and probably unbearable to Ted. Hersh dismisses any notion of sexual attraction between Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne, ungallantly noting that she was "pastier and tougher" than her pictures, and adding that Ted knew plenty of "pushovers"--which Mary Jo was not. He thinks that the Senator simply "had to leave and go someplace" and that Mary Jo's appeal was that she knew Bobby well. Afterward Kennedy was apparently mentally paralyzed. Rather than face the prospect of telling the truth to the Kopechnes or his own family, he retreated into thinking that somehow or other Mary Jo might have survived. Indeed, the inescapable conclusion of Hersh's account is that, whatever his other qualities, Kennedy does not handle extreme pressure well.

Hersh's method in telling his story is an odd mix of strength and weakness. Repeated phrases and italicized words, probably borrowed from Tom Wolfe's more effective style, are intended to heighten situations that hardly need it, but succeed only in cheapening the narrative. On the other hand, Hersh does not resort to innuendo, gossip or ambiguous anecdote. The value of his book is that it combines public events with relevant private material.

One aftermath of Chappaquiddick may be a trend toward revealing more about how politicians actually live. A lot of exhibitionistic prose could result--as well as some curtailed after-hours life in the nation's capital. .Martha Duffy

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.