1970s
At the end of 1968, Kennedy had joined the new Committee for National Health Insurance at the invitation of its founder, United Auto Workers president Walter Reuther. In May 1970, Reuther died and Senator Ralph Yarborough, chairman of the full Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee and its Health subcommittee, lost his primary election, propelling Kennedy into a leadership role on the issue of national health insurance. Kennedy introduced a bipartisan bill in August 1970 for single-payer universal national health insurance with no cost sharing, paid for by payroll taxes and general federal revenue.
Despite the Chappaquiddick controversy, Kennedy easily won re-election to the Senate in November 1970 with 62% against underfunded Republican candidate Josiah Spaulding, although he received about 500,000 fewer votes than in 1964.
In January 1971, Kennedy lost his position as Senate Majority Whip to Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, 31–24, probably because of Chappaquiddick. He later told Byrd that the defeat had allowed Kennedy to focus more on issues and committee work, where he could exert influence independently from the Democratic party apparatus. Kennedy began a decade as chairman of the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee.
In February 1971, Nixon proposed health insurance reform—an employer mandate to offer private health insurance if employees volunteered to pay 25 percent of premiums, federalization of Medicaid for the poor with dependent minor children, and support for health maintenance organizations. Hearings on national health insurance were held in 1971, but no bill had the support of House Ways and Means and Senate Finance Committee chairmen Representative Wilbur Mills and Senator Russell Long. Kennedy sponsored and helped pass the limited Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973. He played a leading role, with Senator Jacob Javits, in the creation and passage of the National Cancer Act of 1971.
In October 1971, Kennedy made his first speech about The Troubles in Northern Ireland: he said that "Ulster is becoming Britain's Vietnam", advocating for the withdrawal of British troops, called for a united Ireland, and declared that Ulster Unionists who could not accept this "should be given a decent opportunity to go back to Britain" (a position he backed away from within a few years). Kennedy was sharply criticised by the British and Ulster unionists, and he formed a long political relationship with Social Democratic and Labour Party founder John Hume. In scores of anti-war speeches, Kennedy opposed Nixon's policy of Vietnamization, calling it "a policy of violence [that] means more and more war". In December 1971, Kennedy strongly criticized the Nixon administration's support for Pakistan and its ignoring of "the brutal and systematic repression of East Bengal by the Pakistani army". He traveled to India and wrote a report on the plight of the 10 million Bengali refugees. In February 1972, Kennedy flew to Bangladesh and delivered a speech at the University of Dhaka, where a killing rampage had begun a year earlier.
The Chappaquiddick incident had greatly hindered Kennedy's presidential prospects, and shortly afterwards he declared he would not be a candidate in the 1972 presidential election. Nevertheless, polls in 1971 suggested he could win the nomination, and Kennedy gave thought to running. In May he decided not to, saying he needed "breathing time" to gain more experience and take care of his brothers' children, and that "it feels wrong in my gut." Nevertheless, in November 1971, a Gallup Poll still had him in first place in the Democratic nomination race with 28 percent. George McGovern was close to clinching the Democratic nomination in June 1972, when various anti-McGovern forces tried to get Kennedy to enter the contest at the last minute, but he declined. At the 1972 Democratic National Convention, McGovern repeatedly tried to recruit Kennedy as his vice presidential running mate, but Kennedy turned him down. When McGovern's choice of Thomas Eagleton stepped down soon after the convention, McGovern again tried to get Kennedy to take the nod, again without success. McGovern instead chose Kennedy's brother-in-law Sargent Shriver.
In 1973, Kennedy's 12-year-old son Edward Jr., was diagnosed with bone cancer; his leg was amputated and he underwent a long, difficult, experimental two-year drug treatment. The case brought international attention among doctors and in the media, as did the young Kennedy's return to skiing half a year later. Son Patrick was suffering from severe asthma attacks. The pressure of the situation mounted on Joan Kennedy. On several occasions, she entered facilities for treatment of alcoholism and emotional strain, and was arrested for drunk driving after a traffic accident.
In February 1974, Nixon proposed more comprehensive health insurance reform—an employer mandate to offer private health insurance if employees volunteered to pay 25 percent of premiums, replacement of Medicaid by state-run health insurance plans available to all with income-based premiums and cost sharing, and replacement of Medicare with a federal program that eliminated the limit on hospital days, added income-based out-of-pocket limits, and added outpatient prescription drug coverage. In April 1974, Kennedy and Mills introduced a bill for near-universal national health insurance with benefits identical to the expanded Nixon plan—but with mandatory participation by employers and employees through payroll taxes—both plans were criticized by labor, consumer, and senior citizen organizations because of their substantial cost sharing.
In the wake of the Watergate scandal, Kennedy pushed campaign finance reform; he was a leading force behind passage of the Federal Election Campaign Act Amendments of 1974, which set contribution limits and established public financing for presidential elections. In 1974, Kennedy travelled to the Soviet Union, where he met with leader Leonid Brezhnev and advocated a full nuclear test ban as well as relaxed emigration, met with Soviet dissidents, and secured an exit visa for cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. Kennedy's Subcommittee on Refugees and Escapees continued to focus on Vietnam, especially after the Fall of Saigon in 1975.
Kennedy had initially opposed busing schoolchildren across racial lines, but grew to support the practice as it became a focal point of civil rights efforts. After federal judge W. Arthur Garrity ordered the Boston School Committee in 1974 to racially integrate Boston's public schools via busing, Kennedy made a surprise appearance at a September 1974 anti-busing rally in City Hall Plaza to express the need for peaceful dialogue and was met with hostility. The predominantly white crowd yelled insults about his children, hurled tomatoes and eggs at him as he retreated into the John F. Kennedy Federal Building, and broke one of its glass walls.
Kennedy was again much talked about as a contender in the 1976 presidential election, with no strong front-runners among the other possible Democratic candidates. Kennedy's concerns about his family were strong, and Chappaquiddick was still in the news, with The Boston Globe, The New York Times Magazine, and Time magazine all reassessing the incident and raising doubts about Kennedy's version of events. In 1977, the Times described Chappaquiddick as Kennedy's Watergate. In September 1974, Kennedy announced that for family reasons he would not run in 1976, declaring that his decision was "firm, final, and unconditional." Kennedy was up for Senate re-election in 1976. He defeated a primary challenger who was angry at his support for school busing in Boston. Kennedy won the general election with 69 percent.
The Carter administration years were difficult for Kennedy; he had been the most important Democrat in Washington since his brother Robert's death, but now Carter was, and Kennedy at first did not have a full committee chairmanship to wield influence. Carter in turn sometimes resented Kennedy's status as a political celebrity. Despite similar ideologies, their priorities were different. Kennedy told reporters he was content with his congressional role and denied presidential ambitions, but by late 1977 Carter reportedly saw Kennedy as a future challenger to his presidency.
Kennedy held Health and Scientific Research Subcommittee hearings in March 1977 that led to public revelations of extensive scientific misconduct by contract research organizations, including Industrial Bio-Test Laboratories. Serving as the subcommittee chairman, on September 1979 he also addressed concerns about the overuse of Valium, the most prescribed drug in the United States at the time, which Kennedy said it was causing "a nightmare of dependence" in the country, while Hoffmann-La Roche maintained that the drug was safe and efficient.
Kennedy visited China on a goodwill mission in December 1977, meeting with leader Deng Xiaoping and eventually gaining permission for several mainland Chinese nationals to leave the country; in 1978, he visited the Soviet Union and Brezhnev and dissidents there again. During the 1970s, Kennedy showed interest in nuclear disarmament, and as part of his efforts in this field visited Hiroshima in January 1978 and gave a speech to that effect at Hiroshima University. He became chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1978, by which time he had amassed a wide-ranging Senate staff of a hundred. Kennedy and his wife Joan separated in 1978, though they still staged joint appearances.
As a candidate, Carter had proposed health care reform that included key features of Kennedy's national health insurance bill, but in December 1977, Carter told Kennedy his bill must preserve a large role for private insurance companies, minimize federal spending (precluding payroll tax financing), and be phased-in to not interfere with Carter's paramount domestic policy objective—balancing the budget. Kennedy and labor compromised and made the requested changes, but broke with Carter in July 1978 when he would not commit to pursuing a single bill with a fixed schedule for phasing-in comprehensive coverage. Frustrated by Carter's budgetary concerns and caution, in a December 1978 speech on national health insurance at the Democratic midterm convention, Kennedy said regarding liberal goals that "sometimes a party must sail against the wind" and in particular should provide health care as "a basic right for all, not just an expensive privilege for the few."
In May 1979, Kennedy proposed a new bipartisan universal national health insurance bill—choice of competing federally regulated private health insurance plans with no cost sharing financed by income-based premiums via an employer mandate and individual mandate, replacement of Medicaid by government payment of premiums to private insurers, and enhancement of Medicare by adding prescription drug coverage and eliminating premiums and cost sharing. In June 1979, Carter proposed more limited health insurance reform—an employer mandate to provide catastrophic private health insurance plus coverage without cost sharing for pregnant women and infants, federalization of Medicaid with extension to all of the very poor, and adding catastrophic coverage to Medicare. Neither plan gained any traction in Congress, and the failure to come to agreement represented the final political breach between the two. Carter wrote in 1982 that Kennedy "ironically" thwarted Carter's efforts to provide a comprehensive health-care system. In turn, Kennedy wrote in 2009 that his relationship with Carter was "unhealthy" and that "Carter was a difficult man to convince – of anything."
