A Patchwork Orange (con't.)

The retirement of Patrick Kennedy has struck a chord with many. While conservatives are happy to see a liberal pack his bags, pangs of melancholy for the man persist.

There is a sense that the young congressman never really “fit in” in Washington.

That’s no excuse for his mistakes and vitriol learned all too well from his father (see: Thomas, Clarence; Bork, Robert etal.)

Fifty years after JFK was elected president, we may, finally, be seeing an end to a strange political malady that afflicted not only Patrick, but his father, the late Sen. Ted Kennedy.

Garry Wills wrote an excellent book about it, and its title says it all: The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power (1981). Ted, Wills writes, was fine with keeping “alive some memories,” but seemed to “dwindle beside the shadowy evocations.”

Ted, Wills concludes — and, we argue, Patrick — ultimately was “at his best when he is not running.” A “sense of freedom” grew “on him as his chances faded.”

Wills, of course, was writing about Kennedy’s 1980 presidential campaign, but he could have been describing the son circa 2010.

Kennedy, Wills continues, “performed his best when he was showing his mettle as a survivor, not bidding to take over.

Forced by fame, by his name, toward power, he tightens up.

Allowed to back off, he relaxes.

This is not surrender. . ."He seems to be acquiring a sense of power’s last paradox — that it is most a prison when one thinks of it as a passepartout. When one thinks of it as a prison, one is already partway free.”

Today, in his own way, Patrick Kennedy is “partway free."