Unblushing Senator Ted just blowing in the windmills

By ROGER FRANKLIN Herald correspondent

NEW YORK - Long ago, when values were different and children better behaved, it was common for mothers to admonish their little darlings against making rude faces in public.

"Be careful the wind doesn't change," they would caution, invoking the old wives' wisdom that a sudden shift in the weather would transform junior into a gargoyle.

We don't know if Rose Kennedy ever looked up from her rosary and issued that advice to youngest son Teddy, now the senior senator from Massachusetts. But if she did, the embarrassed grimace he has been wearing lately makes it obvious that he did not listen.

And just as she might have warned, it has all been the wind's doing - along with his until-now unqualified demands for clean, renewable energy sources.

Now it takes an awful lot to bring a blush to Senator Ted. In fact, he seems to thrive on it.

Thrown out of Harvard for lying and cheating, he made the logical career choice and secured a seat in Congress. A few years later, still covered with the mud of Chappaquiddick and his scandalous indifference to the fate of Mary Jo Kopechne, he decided the United States needed his sort of leadership in the White House.

Even after being photographed in flagrante delicto with a teenage admirer aboard a speedboat off the beach at Cannes, the fun-loving politician did not blush.

More recently, the lard-packed legislator has lent his name to a public-service campaign promoting healthier eating and more exercise.

The only time he is known to have followed this advice himself, incidentally, was at a drunken dinner in a Washington restaurant, where the food went untouched but not the waitress.

Thrown across the table, she was embraced by a giggling Kennedy and his senatorial pal, Christopher Dodd, until the pair were hauled off by the maitre d' and chef, the latter reportedly brandishing a cleaver.

Not to worry. As Kennedy would say in that clipped Boston accent, when it comes to forgiveness, he has always been "very fotchinet".

Just lately, however, the reserves of goodwill that have underwritten his escapades are running a little short in some quarters, particularly among environmentalists who cannot afford to spend their summers at Martha's Vineyard.

His fall from grace began about 12 months ago, when a group of alternate energy enthusiasts announced plans for 170 windmills, each more than 120m tall, to be erected in the shallow waters of Nantucket Sound.

The promoters claim it would power almost half a million homes and businesses, even in nothing better than a moderate breeze.

It is the sort of project a veteran supporter of green energy and sustainability - a man such as Kennedy, in other words - might have been expected to embrace even faster than a serving girl.

In Washington, he has always been an outspoken voice for clean power, endorsing bills that provide tax benefits and grants for technologies ranging from methanol and geothermal generators to solar collectors and, of course, wind.

Until now, however, those towering pylons and pin-wheeling rotors had always been built in somebody else's backyard. Now that they are to dot the horizon he is so fond of admiring through the bottom of a Chivas-tinted glass on the porch of his retreat at nearby Hyannisport, alternate energy no longer strikes him, nor many of Cape Cod's other silvertailed summer residents, as such a good idea.

Sea birds would be chopped into pillow stuffing by the impellers' three-armed blades, they have warned.

Not true, responded US conservation bureaucrats, who explained that modern wind turbines rotate at a slow and stately pace.

Well, the critics responded, what about "turbine glint", the previously unknown hazard caused by the sun bouncing off spinning rotors? It could distract motorists and lead to dreadful car accidents, confuse whales and prompt nervous breakdowns in seagulls and terns.

By the time officials refuted those arguments with case studies and approved the erection of a test turbine, opponents had been reduced to claiming that the windmills would shatter the Cape's human ecology.

The year-round locals, the fishermen whose wives serve as their summer maids, would starve when the windmills scared the fish away.

And if that was not bad enough, there was the most dire threat of all to the Cape's delicate culture: the local yacht club would have to lay out a new course for the Hyannis-Nantucket Regatta, the one keen sailor Teddy Kennedy seldom misses.

That was when Kennedy decided to take a stand. Clean energy might be well and good, but an unobstructed view is even better.

Supported by fellow Senator John Kerry, whose summer shack just happens to share the same view, Kennedy has demanded a three-year moratorium while consultants study the windmills' impact on the sex lives of sand worms.

Perhaps drawing on his own experiences off the Riviera, he has claimed that mechanical vibrations may cool the creatures' urge to mate. It is an old tactic in Washington, where Kennedy has formerly used it to immobilise the nuclear power industry in a tangle of red tape.

The move has riled environmentalists who do not own property on Cape Cod and given Republicans a weapon in November's congressional elections.

Should Kennedy worry? Probably not. After all his other scrapes, he knows one thing for sure about the environment of his home state: voters will forgive a Kennedy for just about anything.