Kennedy to Receive Public Service Award from former President Bush

by David Tamasi

WASHINGTON - Most fall Friday evenings at Texas A&M University are consumed with speculation on the next day's football game. But this Friday, all eyes in College Station will be on two different quarterbacks, as former President George Bush presents Massachusetts Senator Edward M. Kennedy with "The 2003 George Bush Award for Excellence in Public Service."

Any event featuring the patriarchs of the country's two most prominent political families would merit attention. But against the backdrop of Kennedy's recent comments about former President's son -- President George W. Bush -- and his handling of the war in Iraq, the ceremony could be uncomfortable.

A spokesman for the former President brushed off any suggestions that the affair at the Bush Presidential Museum, which honors the older Bush, would be tense.

"Former President Bush is going to talk about the debate [in Washington]," said Bush spokesman James McGrath. "He will put it in perspective."

McGrath hinted the former President would suggest that political disagreements need not be personal.

The Bush Library Foundation Committee nominated Kennedy for the award last fall, and the former President "was enthusiastic about it the second he heard it," McGrath said.

Kennedy's record of public service stretches back more than four decades. He had a brief stint as assistant district attorney in Suffolk County before winning his first Senate race in 1962 to fill the seat once held by his brother, then-President John F. Kennedy. For a very brief time, he served alongside Sen. Prescott Bush, the current President's grandfather.

Kennedy, 72, is second in seniority in the upper chamber, and has often been the leading advocate in Congress on behalf of the poor, the elderly and the young. He has been his family's patriarch since the age of 36, when his brother Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated during a 1968 presidential run.

It is his long record of service to his country that landed Kennedy the award nomination about a year ago -- just around the time he was voting against granting the current President authority to wage war on Iraq.

Since then, Kennedy has emerged as one of the harshest and most vocal critics of the President's foreign policy in Iraq. Enraging Republicans last month, Kennedy told the Associated Press that the war was "a fraud" that was "made up in Texas." He followed that diatribe with another hostile critique of the President on the Senate floor during debate on the administration's $87 billion request for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Before the war, week after week after week we were told lie after lie after lie," Kennedy said.

McGrath said that while some Republicans disagreed with the former President's decision to grant an award to Kennedy, the "award is not for excellence in conservatism, but public service."

Some conservative activists complained to the Bush Presidential Museum that the award should not go to Kennedy in light of his recent criticism of the younger Bush, McGrath said. But, Sen. Saxby Chambliss, a Georgia Republican who serves on two Senate committees with Kennedy, said he was "not aware" of any GOP senators who objected.

The White House had no comment on the issue.

This is not the first time Kennedy has taken on a wartime Republican President. His biographer, former New York Times reporter Adam Clymer, wrote that in June 1971, Kennedy charged that then-President Richard M. Nixon was "delaying serious" peace efforts in Vietnam to "coordinate them with his re-election campaign."

"The only possible excuse for continuing the discredited policy of Vietnamizing the war seems to be the President's intention to play his last great card for a peace at a time closer to 1972, when the chances will be greater that the action will benefit the coming presidential campaign," Kennedy said. At the time, the elder Bush was America's ambassador to the United Nations, charged with carrying out Nixon's policies.

In 1988, Kennedy took on the elder Bush - then the vice president -- more directly as he campaigned against Bush and on behalf of the Democratic presidential nominee, then-Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. In a rousing speech at the Democratic National Convention, Kennedy sarcastically asked delegates "Where was George?" when the Reagan administration was embroiled in an arms-for-hostages scandal known as Iran-Contra.

Conversely, Kennedy was the only Democrat to appear at the Rose Garden ceremony when the first President Bush signed a civil rights bill in October 1991.

Kennedy often sets aside partisan differences to work with Republicans on legislation important to him. He did so most recently in 2001, when he worked with the current Bush administration on an education reform law called No Child Left Behind.

Kennedy spokesman David Smith said the senator was "very much" looking forward to the awards ceremony Friday night and would be traveling with "several family members" to Texas to receive the award. Notably absent will be the Kennedy family's newest entrant to elected office: incoming California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.