By Darrell Laurant
Media General News Service

The main thing I remember from my Oct. 3, 1983, interview with Ted Kennedy was that he seemed nervous.

We were seated at a table on the concrete shore of the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s swimming pool – just me, the now-late Massachusetts senator and photographer Mark Bailey. Maybe because Mark and
I were the only media people allowed to view this landmark meeting between left and right,
Kennedy might have thought we worked for Jerry. Or perhaps he feared I would ask about Chappaquiddick.

I do recall him saying this: “We exist in a society of clichés.”

In 1983, Falwell and Kennedy were clichés in their own right. The media considered Kennedy the go-to guy for the national liberal perspective, while Falwell had his finger on the pulse of religious conservatism.

Why Kennedy came to Lynchburg to meet Falwell and speak at Thomas Road Baptist Church is a little hazy in my memory. I think it stemmed from the fact that Kennedy had received a Moral
Majority membership card in the mail and sent Falwell a jovial letter about it.

Meanwhile, the reason Mark and I earned special status had less to do with Jerry’s love for our newspaper at the time than his idea of journalistic equality.

“I couldn’t let Time in and not Newsweek,” he said, “or AP and not UPI, or CBS and not NBC. The only thing to do was just admit the local paper. That seemed fair.”

This put Mark, who now handles multimedia content for The News & Advance, in an awkward position. The schedule had Kennedy eating dinner at Falwell’s house off Sandusky Drive in the late afternoon and speaking to the Liberty Baptist College student body in the evening.

“All these photographers from AP and UPI and the Times-Dispatch were here waiting to cover the speech, but they didn’t know anything about the dinner,” Mark recalled. “We were sworn to secrecy, so when the other photographers kept asking me if I wanted to go out to eat with them, I had to keep telling them I had another assignment.

“I felt a little uncomfortable about it.”

As we reported in the next morning’s paper: “Just before 6 o’clock, four gleaming black cars rolled up the circular drive beneath the 200-year-old trees. Kennedy emerged from one of them, accompanied by his 23-year-old daughter, Kara, and Moral Majority’s vice president for communications, Cal Thomas (now a nationally syndicated columnist).

‘”Cal and I have already had our debate,’ Kennedy said.

“The entourage swept in the front door, down through the sunken living room and out onto the patio. There, Falwell busied himself introducing Kennedy to a number of Thomas Road Church, Liberty Baptist College and Moral Majority officials (”This is my gang”) and pointing out the distant Peaks of Otter.”

As we all milled around, Macel Falwell, Jerry’s wife, noted: “It’s been a little hard to prepare for this. First, there were 15 people coming. Then it was 17, then 20.”
Fortunately, there was still enough beef Wellington, broccoli, potatoes and fresh strawberries to go around.

At his talk that night, Kennedy told Falwell that if he extended curfew for the Liberty students an extra hour, he would listen to the next “Old Time Gospel Hour” program.
Behind the podium, he used a succession of Biblical quotes and asked his audience to be tolerant. (Unlike the student body of Kennedy’s alma mater, Harvard, where Falwell was heckled when he spoke there earlier in the year).

“We must never judge the fitness of individuals to govern on the basis of where they worship,” Kennedy said. “Today’s Moral Majority could become tomorrow’s persecuted minority.”
Kennedy and Falwell remained friends after that meeting, and Kennedy wrote Jerry Falwell Jr. a recommendation to law school.

Presumably, Mark also made peace with his fellow photographers, who were gathered at the front gate of Falwell’s house as we drove in and out.

“They were making playful, throat-cutting gestures at us as we left,” he recalled.

Funny – I don’t remember the playful part.

Laurant is a staff writer for The News & Advance in Lynchburg, Va.