Both events hurt the president’s support at Harvard. Gitlin said that Kennedy “had lost his glow” in the eyes of campus Democrats.
As frustration grew, so did left-wing groups like Tocsin, which had been promoting more liberal foreign policy since Kennedy’s inauguration and began to organize protests and demonstrations, according to Gitlin.
“There were many protest rallies,” said Gitlin of the campus after the events in Cuba. “We filled Emerson D with 300 people...we could do that very quickly.”
Thus, at least within the gates of Harvard Yard, Ted was hitching his wagon to a president whose popularity was waning. As the September 18 primary approached, major segments of the Harvard community declared support for McCormack, Kennedy’s opponent and the state’s attorney general.
In McCormack’s camp was a group of professors, led by Mark DeWolfe Howe ’28 of Harvard Law School. Howe’s group was soon joined by the Young Democratic Club of Harvard College, despite the fact that the Young Dems were, according to students and the club’s actions, a group of relatively moderate Democrats.
“Many of us thought that Ted Kennedy had no qualifications for the office and no relevant experience,” remembered Henry F. Greene ’63, former president of the Young Democrats, adding that the group was impressed with McCormack’s more progressive platform. Echoing his peers, Greene added that Kennedy “was a viable candidate only by virtue of being the president’s brother.”
A MAN AND HIS LEGACY
While on November 7 the Editorial Board of The Crimson lamented that Kennedy would not be a “thoughtful, independent voice in the senate” or a “representative who comprehends the magnitude of civil rights, civil liberties, and unemployment problems facing America,” Ted would become the fourth-longest serving senator and an icon of progressivism.
He provided influential support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964—which had been proposed by his brother, the President, before he had been assassinated—and, among other things, went on to be the Senate’s champion of education and health care reform.
In 1964, The Crimson Editorial Board endorsed Kennedy for reelection. Former opponents of Ted’s senate campaign acknowledged that they later supported his tenure.
“For what it’s worth, I have increasingly thought over the years that few events in American campus politics have ever so dramatically proven how wrong a campus politician can be in thinking he or she knows much about our politics,” Greene, the former president of the Young Dems, wrote in an email. “I have come to very much regret my opposition to Ted Kennedy’s election in 1962, just as I have simultaneously come to think he was one of the greatest Senators in our history.”
—Staff writer Matthew Q. Clarida can be reached at clarida@college.harvard.edu. Follow him on Twitter @MattClarida.