Kennedy caught in crosswind

WASHINGTON -- On the afternoon of April 1, 8 miles southwest of the Capitol, Senator Edward M. Kennedy joined more than 60 of his fellow senators at the funeral of Erma Byrd, the 88-year-old wife of Senator Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, Kennedy's colleague of 43 years.

As Kennedy filed out of Memorial Baptist Church in Arlington, Va., another colleague of nearly four decades, Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, approached him and offered a favor.

Stevens, an irascible conservative Republican, told Kennedy, the stalwart liberal Massachusetts Democrat, that he'd figured out a way to block the wind farm proposed for the waters off Cape Cod: Stevens would insert a provision in a sure-to-pass bill funding the Coast Guard that would give the state's governor the ability to veto the project.

''That sounds fine," Kennedy recalled replying, in what he said was a five-second conversation.

The conversation brought to a close an extraordinary chain of events that has drawn scrutiny from Republicans and Democrats alike in recent days. Furious that senators would quietly try to kill a wind farm by attaching such a measure to an unrelated bill, environmentalists immediately cried foul -- and aimed their fury at one of their most steadfast allies: Kennedy.

Kennedy has downplayed his role in securing the measure, saying he did not generate the idea of blocking the wind farm as part of the Coast Guard bill. But Kennedy was clearly pleased with the outcome, and he and Stevens acknowledged to the Globe last week that they had been discussing the matter in the days before the funeral.

''Despite political differences, we're old friends, and we do talk," Stevens said. ''I conferred with him and agreed with him."

The bill Kennedy teamed up with Stevens on was the culmination of an extensive -- though mostly behind-the-scenes -- campaign by Kennedy to block the 130-turbine project that would tower over the water just a few miles from his home in Hyannis Port. At least twice previously in recent years, he has worked quietly with Republican senators to delay or halt the project through other avenues.

Kennedy's ability to work across party lines has won him wide praise in recent weeks, particularly as he seeks to craft a comprehensive immigration bill. Yet to wind power supporters -- including environmental groups that are accustomed to having Kennedy on their side -- the episode involving Cape Wind reveals an ugly flipside to Kennedy's mastery of the legislative process.

''It's the dark side of his bipartisan organizing power," said Seth Kaplan, a senior attorney at the Boston-based Conservation Law Foundation, a group that supports the Cape Wind proposal. ''We have to be building wind power turbines. It is tragic for a master of the Senate like Ted Kennedy to be standing in the way of this most important of movements."

Kennedy strongly defends his actions, saying there was nothing inconsistent or selfish about his motivations. He said he supports the concept of wind power, but he believes this proposal poses a serious threat to the state's fishing and tourism industries. It could also interfere with Coast Guard navigation and Federal Aviation Administration communications, Kennedy said.

He added that the Cape Wind project was given special treatment in last year's energy bill, with a provision that would have put the project on the fast track by exempting it from a series of new requirements for wind projects.

''People ought to be worked up with how Cape Wind was able to get special provisions written in here," Kennedy said. ''That's the secret deal. That's what people ought to be worked up on."

Kennedy said that several days before Byrd's funeral, he sought out Stevens on the Senate floor to remind him of his opposition to Cape Wind, because he knew that negotiators on the Coast Guard bill, who were then close to finishing it, were discussing the potential effects of offshore wind farms on navigation. (Don Young, an Alaska Republican and chairman of the House Transportation Committee, slipped a provision into the House-passed bill that would create buffer zones around shipping lanes where wind farms, including the site Cape Wind wants to build on, would be prohibited.)

Stevens said he agreed with Kennedy's assessment that the state of Massachusetts should be allowed to determine whether a sprawling wind farm should be placed on publicly owned waters off its coastline.

''I think we're right: A state should have something to say about the siting of energy projects off its shore," Stevens said.

But the fact that the provision was inserted without public debate, after being considered by only the handful of House members and senators who were negotiating the Coast Guard bill, has rankled members of both parties.

A group of House members has persuaded House leaders to delay a vote on the bill by at least several weeks. In the Senate, the chairman and ranking Democrat on the Energy Committee say they will try to block the Cape Wind provision when the bill comes to the floor, arguing that the Coast Guard measure shouldn't include a narrow provision designed to block a single wind farm.

They'll be joined by one of the Senate's highest-profile members -- Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who is opposing Kennedy's effort despite their teamwork on the immigration measure -- as well as two New England Republicans, Senators Olympia J. Snowe of Maine and Lincoln D. Chafee of Rhode Island.

Chafee said he suspects the measure landed in the Coast Guard bill because of the close working relationship between Stevens, the Senate's longest-serving Republican, and Kennedy, the second-most-senior Democrat.

''Senator Kennedy has worked with Senator Stevens so long," said Chafee, a supporter of renewable energy whose state is expecting to get an economic windfall from the construction of giant windmills for a nearby site. ''The Coast Guard authorization is not the place to put an objection to the Cape Wind project. Everybody should have a fair crack at it, through hearings and the like."

For some who have tracked past federal tussles over Cape Wind, the push by Stevens and Kennedy is reminiscent of previous battles in which Kennedy has teamed with senators with whom he rarely votes on major issues -- and who represent states that are far from Nantucket Sound.

In 2003, he worked with Senator Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, to try to amend an energy bill with a provision that would have given any governor veto power over offshore wind farms. That's similar to the authority that would be granted to Governor Mitt Romney under Stevens's proposal.

In 2004, Kennedy supported an effort by John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, that would have indefinitely delayed the Cape Wind project by suspending all applications for offshore wind farms until Congress produced a set of guidelines for such projects. Warner tried again to delay the project late last year by seeking to order a study of the impact of offshore wind farms on missile defense and military readiness.

Senate observers contend that Alexander and Warner were acting partly in self-interest: Alexander owns an undeveloped piece of property on Nantucket, while Warner has vacationed on Cape Cod for more than 50 years. But they also may have been collaborating with Kennedy in expectation of future favors from the Massachusetts powerbroker.

Julian Zelizer, a congressional historian at Boston University, said Kennedy is a ''blast from the past" with his ability to trade favors with senators of all political affiliations, despite the fiercely partisan tone of the modern Congress. ''He's using old-fashioned horse trading to advance his agenda," Zelizer said. ''Pure, crass self-interest is a powerful incentive. He gets something for his state, maybe he'll give them something for theirs down the line."

Rick Klein can be reached at rklein@globe.com.