Speak not only good of the dead

By David Nordell

De mortuis nil nisi bonum -- speak only good of the dead -- is an old Latin proverb oft used as a pretext to gloss over the less salubrious aspects of someone’s character and actions after his death. I was very much reminded of this saying during the orgy of praise a week ago for the late Senator Ted Kennedy, both during the funeral services and in the media. And indeed, notwithstanding the many ugly rants from American far-right commentators about Kennedy’s "ultra-liberalism" (an expression that definitely puzzles Europeans, for whom liberalism means something entirely different), Kennedy did a great deal of good during his very long career as a legislator, much of it in partnership with an ostensibly very unlikely co-lawmaker, the highly conservative senator from Utah, Orrin Hatch.

But there were definitely two groups of people who must have expressed the strongest possible reservations, and probably curses too, about the eulogies that the great and the good, from President Obama down, poured on Kennedy’s memory. One, clearly, is the family and friends of Mary Jo Kopechne, whom Kennedy abandoned to a watery death at Chappaquiddick. The other, much larger but less in the public eye, is the families and friends of the thousands of British soldiers and civilians, especially civilians from Northern Ireland, killed during the ’Troubles’ from the ’60s to the ’80s.

For all that Time magazine recalled Kennedy’s role in Northern Ireland as a peacemaker who encouraged the reconciliation process that more or less stopped the killing, he started out as a firm supporter of Irish nationalism and the Catholic struggle against British rule. Political support in itself would have been legitimate, however much it jibed with the official policy of the USA’s closest ally; and this political support was only natural for a proud Boston Irish Catholic. But even leaving aside the rumours that the Kennedy clan actually contributed money to the Irish Republic Army, Ted Kennedy was definitely responsible for a grave sin of omission that cost many lives in Northern Ireland and on the mainland. Simply put, as the de facto leader of the large and powerful Irish Catholic community of the United States, he could and should have spoken out clearly against the organised collection of money there to buy weapons for the Republican cause; and he could and should have initiated legislation to outlaw it. By not doing so, he colluded in a major terror financing operation lasting for years that was aimed, not at destabilising some enemy of the USA such as Russia or Cuba, but the United Kingdom, the country at whose side American soldiers fought in two world wars (and where his father was American ambassador during the second war). He had the clout in his community to say "let the six counties of Ulster be reunited with the South, but not at the price of British or Protestant blood, only through negotiation," and he didn’t. Nor, to the best of my knowledge, did he ever express regrets about his collusion in the bloody civil war.

I don’t know what price Kennedy will have to pay on the far side of the Pearly Gates for this and his other sins of omission. But bank compliance officers and CEOs already face potential jail time in many countries for failing to stop or report money laundering and terror financing activities. Kennedy, of course, was Kennedy and would have got away with it. He always did.

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