Pair of 'Professional Friends' Form an Unlikely Partnership
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
Lost in the frenzy last week over President Bush's relationship with Kenneth L. Lay, the chairman of the Enron Corporation, was another alliance that is producing some of the best theater in Washington. Call it the curious story of George and Teddy, princelings from rival dynasties with much to gain from a blossoming partnership of convenience and political reward.
"I think we're friends, but I don't assume it's more than sort of professional friends," Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said carefully in an interview on Friday, shortly before calling the White House ties with Enron "very troublesome." Nonetheless, Mr. Kennedy spent an hour on Tuesday talking on Air Force One with Mr. Bush about a patient's bill of rights, stalled legislation that is crucial to both men. Neither can make any deal on the legislation without the other.
"He's easy to communicate with, he's got a good sense of humor, he catches humorous situations quickly and he's engaging and self-deprecating," Mr. Kennedy, 69, said of the president, 55. "He's a very skilled politician."
Mr. Kennedy said his goal was to have Mr. Bush's education bill, a compromise between the White House and Democrats, serve as a model for a patient's bill of rights. However a long shot that might be, Nicholas E. Calio, the president's chief Congressional liaison, said yesterday that the talk between the president and Mr. Kennedy had given new energy to staff-level negotiations over the patient's bill of rights.
"Anytime you're discussing issues, people tend to get entrenched, and somebody needs to blow a little fresh air into the room," Mr. Calio said.
The triumph of the education bill is clearly tantalizing to both sides, particularly after Mr. Bush traveled on a victory lap last week with Mr. Kennedy and the three other legislators critical to the legislation to Ohio, New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Mr. Bush called the group his "merry band of travelers" and lavishly praised Mr. Kennedy, typically a target of Republican attacks, for his work on the bill.
In the very Republican Hamilton, Ohio, where Mr. Bush signed the bill into law, the president called Mr. Kennedy nothing less than a "fabulous" senator. Mr. Bush went further on the senator's home turf in Boston, where he told the crowd that Mr. Kennedy had been with the first lady on Capitol Hill when they first learned of the Sept. 11 attacks.
"I want to thank him publicly, in front of his home folks, for providing such comfort to Laura during an incredibly tough time," Mr. Bush said, as his voice broke a little. "So, Mr. Senator, not only are you a good senator, you're a good man."
The relationship between the two men officially began last year, when Mr. Bush called Mr. Kennedy and other leaders on the education bill to the Oval Office. There the president asked Mr. Kennedy, the senator recalled, if he knew whose desk he was using. It was of course the desk of President John F. Kennedy, which Mr. Bush had taken out of White House storage.
"I was obviously touched," Mr. Kennedy said. The two went on to discuss education reform and quickly bonded, aides said, over such technicalities as "disaggregating the data" in educational testing, a term Mr. Bush learned when he pushed for an education reform bill as governor of Texas.
In fact, the relationship between Ted Kennedy and the Bush family goes back two generations, to Mr. Bush's grandfather, Senator Prescott Bush of Connecticut. In 1959, when Mr. Kennedy was chairman of the Student Legal Forum at the University of Virginia Law School, he called his brother John, then a senator from Massachusetts, for ideas for speakers for the forum. The senator suggested, among others, Prescott Bush, who went down and spent a day with the young law student.
Years later, Ted Kennedy worked with Mr. Bush's father, the first President Bush, on the Americans with Disabilities Act, although that relationship does not seem to have risen to the level of the one that Mr. Kennedy now has with Mr. Bush's son.
But exactly what the scions of America's two most famous political families have in common beyond expedience is hard to judge, as is any evidence that they have bonded over their similar backgrounds. Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, would say last week only that Mr. Bush "enjoys spending time with Senator Kennedy, thinks he has a sharp mind and knows that he's a gifted legislator."
The two, Mr. Fleischer noted, "don't agree on much," including the president's $1.35 trillion, 10- year tax reduction. Mr. Kennedy is expected to call this week for a delay in the next round of tax cuts.
Mr. Kennedy was hardly more forthcoming on any feelings of kinship with Mr. Bush as a fellow dynast. "I think the fact that I've had some association going back a longer time is part of our relationship that I kind of value," Mr. Kennedy said. "I respect the presidency, and I'm also mindful of the historic association that really was personal with me."
As for his alliance with Mr. Bush, Mr. Kennedy cast it in clear Washington terms. "He gets a legitimate claim of leadership," he said, "and the rest of us get what we're committed to."
Or as Mr. Fleischer described the relationship: "I haven't seen them go out and go bowling together."
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