Sacred playground

Viewed as part of the saga of this remarkable family, Nantucket Sound is the essential tableau in the political fortunes of the Kennedys.

By Jack Coleman

Why are you fighting the wind farm proposed for Nantucket Sound?, New Mexico Sen. Jeff Bingaman supposedly asked his Senate colleague Ted Kennedy, of Massachusetts.

"This is Jack's sacred sailing ground," Kennedy responded to his fellow Democrat, according to columnist Robert Novak. (Novak's source was a congressional aide, although Kennedy and Bingaman have denied to Novak that the exchange took place.)

About the time I read Novak's column, in early May, I noticed the above redesign of the Web site for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, in Boston. Going to the site now, you first see a vista of windswept ocean. Then you hear an excerpt from Kennedy's inaugural address as the scene shifts to images of the library, the White House, and JFK.

I called the library and was told that the redesign had nothing to do with Cape Wind's proposal to build 130 wind turbines in Nantucket Sound. The idea, I was told, came from the husband of Caroline Kennedy, Edwin Schlossberg, an author and artist.

I'll take the library spokesman at his word, but anyone is free to draw his or her own conclusions. What I see is a subtle correlation being drawn between John Kennedy's experiences on Nantucket Sound and his ascension to the White House. How so?

Nearly everyone who follows politics knows that JFK loved sailing. What fewer people know is just how good he was at it.

Kennedy was "an ardent sailor since the time he was so small his parents on the shore could barely see his head above the gunwales," wrote Robert J. Donovan, in "PT 109: John F. Kennedy in World War II."

With skills honed by his fiercely competitive older brother, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., JFK won a Nantucket Sound sailing championship as a youth and was a member of the Harvard College team that prevailed in the 1938 intercollegiate sailing competition, with brother Joe also on the winning crew. Among those they defeated were two future America's Cup skippers.

Sailing the Sound, JFK saw his future

JFK at the helm of PT 109 in the South Pacific during World War II

In the summer of 1941, John Kennedy sailed to Edgartown Harbor and saw something that changed his life: a PT boat. Within months -- and before Pearl Harbor -- he enlisted in the Navy and was sent to Melville, R.I., for PT-boat training. He was soon training other personnel.

If Kennedy was so skilled at the helm, skeptics may counter, his PT boat would not have been rammed by a Japanese destroyer, killing two of his crew. Yet whether or not Kennedy was negligent in losing his vessel, he was instrumental in saving the lives of the 10 surviving crew members.

The Kennedys parlayed JFK's war-hero status in his subsequent political campaigns as he hopscotched from the U.S. House to the Senate to the White House.

Did Kennedy's wartime heroics get him elected president? Impossible to know for certain, but since he won by only 114,000 votes in 1960, taking PT 109 out of the equation probably elects President Richard Nixon eight years early.

Viewed as part of the saga of this remarkable family, Nantucket Sound is the essential tableau in the Kennedys' political fortunes. Think how often you've seen photos of them sailing, or playing football with the sound just beyond them, their smiling faces embodying health, optimism, "vigah."

But while the waters off Cape Cod have given abundantly to the Kennedys, these same waters have also cruelly taken from them. First came the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, in 1969, when Edward Kennedy seemed to show more concern with keeping his presidential hopes alive than with saving a passenger in his car.

Thirty years later (almost to the day), the Kennedys' best prospect for returning to the White House, John F. Kennedy Jr., crashed off Martha's Vineyard at the helm of a plane he was too inexperienced to safely fly -- taking with him his wife and sister-in-law.

By this spring, Ted Kennedy had become the most prominent opponent of an offshore wind farm that he might be expected to support -- only this one hits too close to home. As if arranged by fate in a Greek tragedy, the project is proposed for Nantucket Sound, within view of the Kennedy compound, several miles away.

Kennedy may still succeed in killing Cape Wind through back-room machinations in Washington. And if he does, I believe he'll destroy something else: whatever political aspirations remain for the Kennedys.

Because it wasn't assassins in Dallas and Los Angeles that ended Camelot. The myth was alive even after the deaths of John and Robert Kennedy: in Edward, the last remaining Kennedy brother. What eventually killed Camelot were the Kennedys' self-inflicted wounds in the waters off the Cape and islands.

Which makes it all the more perverse that the sacred sailing ground in our memory of JFK has become a sacred playground to his youngest brother. Where John F. Kennedy invoked a New Frontier and we reached for the stars, Edward M. Kennedy reveres that familiar horizon, and we turn away in disdain.

Jack Coleman, a former Cape Cod Times political reporter, is a writer and editor who supports the wind farm proposed for Nantucket Sound at windfarmersalmanac.com. He is also media adviser to the Clean Power Now citizens' advocacy group based on Cape Cod. This op-ed was first published yesterday in The Providence Journal. The views Coleman expresses here are his and not necessarily those of Clean Power Now.