It was towards the end of the campaign in 2006 and we were running well back in the polls. Bill Clinton and Karl Rove, the leaders of the Connecticut AFL-CIO and U.S. Chamber of Commerce -- they had all lined up behind incumbent Senator Joe Lieberman. Then we received a call that Senator Ted Kennedy wanted us to join him at a rally at a senior center in Bridgeport.
When we finally got together, Kennedy's voice was hoarse from another long day on the campaign trail challenging the mindset that had mired us in Iraq and failed to provide affordable healthcare to Americans. Then, with a wry smile, he pushed me forward and announced to the assembled crowd that I would be leading them in a rousing rendition of "When Irish Eyes are Smiling." I was concerned since I couldn't sing and didn't know all the words, but Kennedy's grin just got wider and wider as he egged on the nervous soloist.
Thankfully, with Ted Kennedy, you are never on your own for long.
Later on that day, the press pool asked Sen. Kennedy to respond to Sen. Lieberman's charge that Democrats had abandoned the muscular foreign policy of John F. Kennedy (an argument he has since repeated again and again, most recently in a Wall Street Journal op-ed this week). The Senator bristled that he knew something about his brother's foreign policy, that he had worked with every president since his brother held the office, and that it was George W. Bush and Joe Lieberman who had abandoned the bipartisan foreign policy tradition of our country. He clearly did not appreciate his brother's words being taken out of context.
Sen. Lieberman's latest attack on Democrats this week quotes the famous line from President Kennedy's inaugural, that the United States will "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of freedom." But rather than representing a call to arms, the words of President Kennedy's inaugural argued that America should help countries help themselves, through alliances for economic progress and a United Nations which he called "our last best hope in an age where the instruments of war have far outpaced the instruments of peace." Pledging to keep our military arms "sufficient beyond doubt," in that very same speech President Kennedy called for a new civility in dealing with our adversaries, stating boldly that diplomacy was not a sign of weakness: "Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate."
These words are the ones which have guided our nation's bipartisan foreign policy from JFK to Nixon, from Bush I to Clinton I, and which have been cast aside by the current administration, to catastrophic effect. They are also the words that have guided Senator Obama's critique of the go-it-alone Bush-McCain-Lieberman foreign policy.
Lieberman, McCain and Bush are trying to frame the Obama-McCain foreign policy debate as a replay of Neville Chamberlain versus Winston Churchill; actually, it's more like a debate between Bush I and Bush II. Bush the Elder's foreign policy team has long expressed deep skepticism about Junior's Iraq war policy. In 2002, before the Iraq war, former Bush I National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft penned his own Wall Street Journal op-ed claiming that "an attack on Iraq at this time would seriously jeopardize, if not destroy, the global counterterrorist campaign we have undertaken." Secretary of State Powell argued famously that "you break it [Iraq], you own it" -- half a trillion dollars and tens of thousands of dead and wounded ago. More recently, James Baker's Iraq Study Group was bipartisan and unanimous in calling on America to engage in direct negotiations with Iran and Syria. (And this week, just days after President Bush told the Israeli Knesset that negotiation with enemies was tantamount to appeasement, news broke that Israel has entered into direct negotiations with Syria.)
Are these veterans of past Republican administrations the "old voices of partisanship" whom Joe Lieberman castigates? Are they the "peace at any price" opportunists somehow pulling the Democratic Party out of the historic mainstream?
Of course not.
In reality, America's allies and foreign policy establishment have been shocked to see how far President Bush and his acolytes Senators McCain and Lieberman have taken our country off course. President Truman was not afraid to use force -- but he is best remembered for NATO, the Marshall Plan, and the cold war alliance he crafted which stared down the Soviet Union. Even Winston Churchill famously said that "to jaw-jaw always is better than to war-war."
And when confronted with the prospect of actual weapons of mass destruction on our doorstep in Cuba, President John F. Kennedy balanced diplomacy, sanctions, and the threat of force to carry the day and avoid World War III.
To this day, President Kennedy's brother continues to carry the torch lit by his inaugural speech.
Senator Kennedy had a few more events that day in October 2006. As we sped our way up to Hartford, he tried to catch a break, but his aides handed him a cellphone for a Connecticut radio interview. He rallied, cranking up the vintage Kennedy accent a notch or two: "Oh, that Chris Dodd, he's just riding on his famous name," he said at full throttle. "Me, I earned it the old fashioned way."
He laughed heartily, adding later that his vote against the war in Iraq was the proudest vote he had taken in his long Senate career, and that, yes, his brother would have agreed. Then he hung up, dusted off, and bound out into the evening dusk, ready to carry the torch yet again.