Moon Landing and Chappaquiddick

Forty years ago this weekend, two events marked the end of the Kennedy era--Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, as JFK had promised, and his brother Ted drove off a bridge at Chappaquiddick to signify the end of Camelot.

"I believe," President John F. Kennedy had told Congress the year Barack Obama was born, "that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth."

For those old enough to remember, that juxtaposition of Apollo 11 and Chappaquiddick will always mark the 1960s as a reminder of the essential truth about politics: high ideals being pursued by flawed human beings.

The jubilation over the moon landing ("one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind") was tempered back then by the trauma of a president's brother, and likely future candidate himself, involved in the death of a young woman and a scandal worsened by attempted coverups and a Nixonlike Checkers speech to save a political career.

Looking back 40 years later, does all this confirm Martin Luther King's contention that "the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice," as often cited now by the first African-American president in history?

Chappaquiddick destroyed Ted Kennedy's hopes for the White House and led to 40 years of honorable service in the Senate, ending now with a terminally ill man devoting his remaining strength to the cause of health care reform.

Are the Kennedys' moral books balanced? A Higher Power will have to make that judgment.

Obama's Checkers Speech

The new politics can take a leaf from the very old tomorrow night at the 21st Democratic debate. Just as Richard Nixon saved his vice-presidential candidacy in 1952 from news of a secret political slush fund, Barack Obama has to explain away Antoin Rezko as an obstacle to his campaign's momentum.

For weeks now, the darker side of the Clinton machine has been hammering him with accusations about the Chicago slumlord, and the Former First Lady herself invoked the dreaded name during the last debate.

Yesterday there was another drip of Rezko bad news as Obama's campaign upped the amount of contributions being given to charity to almost $150,000.

Obama's style precludes maudlin Nixon props like his wife's cloth coat and the family dog, but he would be well-advised to prepare his own one-minute version of the Checkers speech to unload the Rezko albatross.

It isn't enough to pass his patron off, as Obama did at the last debate, as someone for whom he did "a few hours" of legal work. Their association has persisted for years and, now that Rezko will be in the headlines facing federal corruption charges, Obama should get out ahead of the issue with his own mea culpa, particularly about the fixer's role in buying the Obamas' home.

In June 2005, Rezko and Obama bought adjoining properties. The senator paid $1.65 million for a Georgian revival mansion, while Rezko bought an adjacent, undeveloped lot for $625,000. Six months later, Obama paid Rezko $104,500 for a strip of his land.

The presidential candidate expressed regrets over the transactions to the Chicago Sun-Times in 2006: "I consider this a mistake on my part and I regret it...(W)hile I tried to pay close attention to the specific requirements of ethical conduct, I misgauged the appearance presented by my purchase of the additional land from Mr. Rezko."

Now he has to tell American voters and take away ammunition for attacks on his character that will keep coming until or unless he does. Nixon showed the way.

History Lessons: Mitt, Huckabee and Hillary

This week, Presidential candidates who are trying to sell the future are involved with echoes from the past.

Mitt Romney's Texas speech, meant to invoke John F. Kennedy, drew on Nixon's Checkers speech as well, using his family to validate himself, insisting on his own virtue and pandering to his audience in a way JFK would have disdained.

His sermon is getting mixed reviews on the right--a Pat Buchanan rave and a John Podhoretz pan--but, like Nixon, Romney seems to have kept his candidacy from going down tubes.

Mitt's nemesis, Mike Huckabee, is getting the Dukakis treatment with accusations of being naïve in freeing a murderer-rapist to kill again. But the Republican preacher is a lot faster on his feet and smoother than the Democrats' 1988 candidate, and he has already started to convert his Willie Horton problem into a failure of "the system" rather than his own.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton is faced with reminders of the 1948 campaign, in which an over-confident Thomas E. Dewey, anointed by the public opinion polls, ran a cautious campaign and was overtaken by "Give 'em Hell, Harry" Truman.

As Truman himself said, "The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know."