Kennedy’s audience at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government rewarded the speech with a standing ovation. But critics dismissed it as a mea minima culpa. “Shortcomings” and “faults” were as close as Kennedy came to acknowledging the womanizing, the carousing and the Palm Beach rape case that made him a joke–and kept him largely silent–during the Clarence Thomas hearings. “I didn’t expect him to grovel, but his situation requires something more,” said Gary Orren, professor of public policy at the Kennedy School.
Still, for a Kennedy it showed uncharacteristic introspection. Friends say he has recently sought them out for counsel–not on public matters but on personal ones. “I don’t really remember him ever talking about himself this way,” says one. With his 60th birthday approaching, Kennedy has a perspective denied his brothers. Unlike them, he said, in the speech’s most moving section, “I have been given length of years and time. "
