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[Today's Newspaper] from [Los Angeles Times]

[Obituaries]
Edward Kennedy dies at 77; 'liberal lion of the Senate'
The Massachusetts Democrat was the last surviving son in a legendary political family. He was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2008.
By Rich Simon and Claudia Luther
August 26, 2009 | 12:10 a.m.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat and icon of American liberal politics who was the last surviving brother of a legendary political family, died late Tuesday at his home in Hyannis Port, Mass., his family announced. He was 77.

Kennedy had been in declining health since having a seizure in May 2008. Subsequent tests determined that he had a malignant brain tumor.

Kennedy had not been to the Capitol since April, missing the passage in June of his groundbreaking measure to regulate tobacco. In July, he could not participate in the drafting of healthcare legislation in his role as chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

He did not attend the funeral for his sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who died Aug. 11, or a White House ceremony during which he was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

"We've lost the irreplaceable center of our family and joyous light in our lives, but the inspiration of his faith, optimism, and perseverance will live on in our hearts forever," his family said in a statement.

A popular figure on both sides of the aisle in the Senate, Kennedy electrified his colleagues in July 2008 when he appeared briefly to vote on a measure to stave off a cut in Medicare fees to doctors who treat seniors, military personnel and their families and others. The measure passed on a 69-30 vote.

Kennedy was greeted with a wild reception from the party faithful in August 2008 on the first night of the Democratic National Convention in Denver. He addressed the gathering in a strong, steady voice, predicting that "this November, the torch will be passed to a new generation of Americans," a reference to Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, who was elected president three months later. Kennedy's endorsement of Obama in January 2008 was credited as an important validation of the senator's bid to win the nomination against Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

"The Kennedy family and the Senate family have together lost our patriarch," Harry Reid, the Senate's Democratic leader, said in a statement.

Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House, also expressed her sorrow in a statement. "Senator Kennedy had a grand vision for America, and an unparalleled ability to effect change," she said.

As the standard-bearer for the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, the square-jawed "Ted" or "Teddy" Kennedy believed in government's ability to help solve people's problems, and over the decades he learned how to wield power in the Senate to move the government in that direction. He found numerous ways to work with Republican administrations and senators to fashion significant legislation on issues he cared deeply about.

Kennedy became a national figure after his brothers, President John F. Kennedy and presidential hopeful Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, were assassinated in the 1960s. Many Americans still yearned for a Kennedy who could occupy the White House, and they looked to the youngest of the Kennedy brothers to fulfill those hopes.

But his public image and political fortunes suffered an indelible stain on July 18, 1969, when he drove his Oldsmobile off a bridge into the water on Chappaquiddick Island in Massachusetts. He survived without serious injury, but his female passenger, 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, died. In a lapse of judgment that was never fully explained, Kennedy sought the help of friends and advisors and delayed reporting the accident to police for 10 hours.

Nothing he did afterward could wipe out the public memory of that lapse. Though he filled his life with decades of work for progressive causes, and though he became the beloved patriarch of his large and often troubled family, his behavior following the incident at Chappaquiddick still held the power to stun.

Partly because of lingering questions about his actions and his relationship with Kopechne, Kennedy did not run for president in 1972 and 1976. In 1980, apparently believing that enough time had passed, he launched a fierce primary challenge against unpopular President Jimmy Carter that roiled the Democratic Party. Republican Ronald Reagan defeated Carter handily in the general election.

After that last foray into presidential politics, Kennedy concentrated his efforts on the Senate, becoming one of that body's most effective members.

Though his most cherished legislative goal of universal health insurance eluded him, Kennedy helped write a number of laws that ranged from making it easier for workers who change or lose jobs to keep their health insurance, to giving 18-year-olds the right to vote, to deregulating the airlines, helping lower airfares.

He several times spearheaded legislation to raise the minimum wage and, in the early 1970s, wrote the law creating Meals on Wheels, which delivers meals to seniors. He was influential in reforming immigration laws and in expanding Head Start programs.

In 1982, he helped gain an extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and he was a principal sponsor of the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which negated Supreme Court decisions that made it more difficult for minorities to win lawsuits charging job discrimination by employers. In 1990, he worked with then-Sen. Robert J. Dole (R-Kan.) to gain passage of the landmark Americans With Disabilities Act giving disabled Americans greater access to employment, among other things. That same year, he was author of the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act providing funds for community healthcare and support services.

And every major education law passed since the 1960s bears Kennedy's imprint, according to the National Education Assn., which gave Kennedy its highest award in 2000.

"Americans have so much affection for the Kennedy family, and they often fail to see past the legend and the celebrity," the group's then-president, Bob Chase, said at the time.

Through sheer energy and willingness to focus, Kennedy could challenge presidents and galvanize legislators of both parties around a given issue.

Following in the footsteps of his brother Robert, he was an early opponent of U.S. participation in the Vietnam War in the 1960s. In the 1970s, he criticized Carter's energy policy. In 1987, he was central to the defeat of Reagan's nomination of conservative Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court, delivering a powerful denunciation of the president's choice on the Senate floor. He also fought Reagan over cuts to social programs and, in 1989, Kennedy denounced President George H.W. Bush's incursion into Panama to oust strongman Manuel Noriega.

In 1993, Kennedy worked with newly elected President Bill Clinton to gain passage of a bill to allow employees to take time off from their jobs to care for a newborn child or deal with a family illness. And in 2001, he teamed with newly elected President George W. Bush to gain passage of the No Child Left Behind legislation to strengthen educational standards through increased testing and other federal incentives to local school districts.

No matter if the Democrats were in the majority or the minority, Kennedy remained activist and outspoken, sometimes berating the GOP for not addressing social issues.

Once asked what his best quality was as a legislator, he answered: "Persistence."

"He deserves recognition not just as the leading senator of his time, but as one of the greats in [the Senate's] history," New York Times reporter Adam Clymer wrote in his 1999 biography of Kennedy.

Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, the conservative Utah Republican who once described some of Kennedy's legislation as "socialism in embryo," said on the occasion of Kennedy's 70th birthday celebration in 2002 that one of the reasons he had originally run for office was to get Kennedy out of office.

"As the past 26 years have amply indicated, I have failed, and I have come to appreciate that the country is better for it," said Hatch, who over the years found common ground with Kennedy on education and health issues and even co-sponsored a bill to allow the creation of cloned embryos to provide stem cells under strict federal oversight.

Edward Moore Kennedy was born Feb. 22, 1932, in Brookline, Mass., to great wealth and even greater expectations. The youngest of nine children, he was the son of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., a self-made millionaire who descended from Irish immigrants and rose to become the U.S. ambassador to Britain. Ted's mother, Rose, was the daughter of John F. "Honey" Fitzgerald, a former Boston mayor.

Though Kennedy's life was privileged, it was filled with tragedy almost from the beginning. When he was 12, his brother Joe Jr., a Navy pilot, was shot down over England during World War II. When he was 16, one of his sisters, Kathleen, died in a plane crash. Earlier, when he was 9, his mentally retarded sister Rosemary was sent to an institution; she died in 2005.

Kennedy went to Harvard University but as a freshman was expelled after having a friend take a Spanish exam for him.

This early indication of "blurred judgment," Kennedy biographer Max Lerner wrote in 1980, set a pattern of "confusion, blunder, remorse, expiation, rebuilding, that was to be repeated on a larger canvas." Significantly, Kennedy's father was able to suppress the story from the newspapers until Ted ran for the Senate 11 years later.

CONTINUED ON newslat2

news20090826lat2

[Today's Newspaper] from [Los Angeles Times]

[Obituaries]
Edward Kennedy dies at 77; 'liberal lion of the Senate'
The Massachusetts Democrat was the last surviving son in a legendary political family. He was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2008.
By Rich Simon and Claudia Luther
August 26, 2009 | 12:10 a.m.

CONTINUED FROM newslat2

After being expelled from Harvard, Kennedy enlisted in the Army, rising to private first class and winning an honorable discharge in 1953. He was accepted back at Harvard and graduated in 1956. He graduated from law school at the University of Virginia three years later.

Kennedy plunged into politics almost immediately, serving as campaign director for the Rocky Mountain states in John Kennedy's 1960 drive for the presidency.

He then took a job as assistant district attorney in Suffolk County, Mass., and, in 1962, he ran against a prominent Democrat, state Atty. Gen. Edward McCormack, for the unexpired Senate term vacated when JFK won the presidency.

The campaign gave the younger Kennedy his first brush with political hardball: McCormack, a veteran politician and nephew of House Speaker John W. McCormack, portrayed his challenger as a lightweight who was trading on his family name.

"If your name was [merely] Edward Moore [instead of Edward Moore Kennedy], your candidacy would be a joke," McCormack told him during a debate.

But Kennedy's name was Kennedy, and he won the primary. He went on to beat Republican George Cabot Lodge, the son of former Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.

Kennedy arrived in the chamber at age 30, the minimum age required for a senator.

With one brother in the White House and another, Robert, as U.S. attorney general, it was not out of the realm of possibility at the time that there could be a run of three successive Presidents Kennedy.

Kennedy was in Washington when he received word that the president had been shot to death in Dallas. It was the beginning of another string of tragedies for the family.

On June 19, 1964, a private plane flying Kennedy from Washington to Springfield, Mass., crashed, killing an aide and the pilot. Kennedy sustained a broken back, forcing him to campaign for his first full Senate term from a hospital bed. He won the election with almost 75% of the vote.

Then, on June 5, 1968, his brother Robert, then a New York senator, was shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on the night that he won the California Democratic presidential primary; he died the next day. Kennedy delivered an eloquent, often-quoted eulogy at the funeral in Washington, praising his brother in a breaking voice as "a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it."

After Richard M. Nixon narrowly won the presidency in 1968, Kennedy became the early favorite to mount a challenge four years later.

The accident at Chappaquiddick the following year crushed those ambitions. As Lerner wrote in "Ted and the Kennedy Legend: A Study in Character and Destiny" (1980), this self-inflicted wound, more than any other event, "blocked his path to the White House, called his credibility into question and damaged the Kennedy legend." Kennedy had flown to Chappaquiddick that July 18 to sail in a regatta and later throw a party for six young women who had worked in Robert Kennedy's presidential campaign. Chappaquiddick is near Martha's Vineyard, an island off the Massachusetts coast.

According to an account given by Kennedy in a televised speech carried nationwide a week after the accident, the party went on until the early hours. Kopechne, one of the campaign aides, wanted to go back to Martha's Vineyard, where the group was staying. Kennedy volunteered to drive her to the ferry.

But, Kennedy recounted, he took a wrong turn and drove the car off a narrow wooden bridge and into a tidal pond. The car toppled over on its roof. Kennedy said he tried to rescue Kopechne and that he had suffered a "cerebral concussion as well as shock" in the accident, which might explain "the various inexplicable, inconsistent and inconclusive things I said and did," including his failure to notify authorities for 10 hours. This delay, he said, was "indefensible."

This explanation, doubted by many, came after Kennedy had been in seclusion for several hours after the accident with a large number of political and legal advisors. At the same time he made his statement, Kennedy also announced that he was pleading guilty to leaving the scene of an accident, for which he received a suspended two-month jail sentence and had his driving license taken away for a year. He put his political fate in the hands of his constituents.

The incident marked, as President Nixon privately gloated at the time, "the end of Teddy," at least as a viable presidential foe. "That will be around his neck forever," Nixon later told his White House chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman.

Kennedy surprised many by easily winning reelection to the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts in 1970, albeit by a smaller margin than in 1964.

But, as Nixon predicted, Chappaquiddick would curtail further presidential aspirations, as his most serious attempt in the 1980 Democratic primary contest finally made clear.

Kennedy had tangled repeatedly with Carter over national health insurance and energy policy, but the decision to mount a liberal challenge to an incumbent Democrat was nevertheless startling.

And from the start, it was clear that Kennedy had miscalculated, that questions about Chappaquiddick would not go away.

Although he stayed in the race until the very end, he could claim nothing more than having damaged Carter's chances against Reagan.

Kennedy turned his talents to the Senate. A master legislator, he seemed to reach his full potential in his continued efforts to champion the poor, abused and deprived. When his party was out of power in the Senate, Kennedy adjusted to being a member of the minority and, backed by one of the best congressional staffs in Washington, was able to get things done that others could not.

For example, in 1996, working in tandem with Sen. Nancy Kassebaum (R-Kan.), he pushed through legislation that guaranteed Americans the right to buy health insurance and limited the length of time that an insurer could deny coverage for a specific "preexisting" medical condition.

Also in 1996, Kennedy spearheaded legislation to raise the minimum wage, achieved largely because of his willingness to couple that liberal cause with a package of business tax cuts that Republicans favored.

In 1999, he sponsored and passed legislation to allow the handicapped to work without losing Medicaid health benefits. And he was one of the Senate authors of the "patients' bill of rights."

Though in 2000 he worked with President George W. Bush on strengthening education standards, Kennedy did not abandon the frayed banner of liberalism. In early 2002, he was one of only a handful of Democrats to openly call for repeal of parts of the Bush tax cuts enacted the previous year.

In the end, he would live decades longer than his brother John, who died at 46, and his brother Robert, who died at 42. Before and after his 24-year marriage to Joan Bennett ended in 1983, Kennedy had a well-earned reputation for drinking and carousing with women. In the spring of 1991, he was forced to testify in the trial of his 30-year-old nephew, William Kennedy Smith, who was charged with having raped a woman near the family beach house in Palm Beach, Fla., after a late-night drinking bout with his Uncle Ted at a local bar. Smith, the son of Kennedy's sister Jean and her late husband, Stephen Smith, was acquitted.

In October 1991, Kennedy made a public apology of sorts at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, in which he said he recognized "the faults in the conduct of my private life."

"I realize that I alone am responsible for them, and I am the one who must confront them," he said. Unlike his brothers, he said, he had been given "length of years and time," and he said he was determined "to give all that I have to advance the causes for which I have stood for almost a third of a century."

In 1992, Kennedy married Washington lawyer Victoria Reggie, a move that friends said settled and re-energized him. The 6-foot-2 senator kept more conventional work hours while also stepping up his work pace in the Senate.

"People measure me against my brothers' 'performance,' " Kennedy said in a 1983 New York Times interview. "It's always been with me. But I like to believe that during the time I've been in the Senate that I've made some contribution. I take some satisfaction in that. My brothers were very much their own people. I like to think that I'm my own man."

Besides his wife, Kennedy is survived by his daughter, Kara Kennedy Allen, his son Edward Jr. and another son, Patrick, who followed his father into politics, serving in the House representing Rhode Island. Kennedy also is survived by grandchildren and sister Jean Kennedy Smith.

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[Today's Newspaper] from [The New York Times]

[Obituaries]
Edward Kennedy, Senate Stalwart, Dies
By JOHN M. BRODER
Published: August 26, 2009

Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, a son of one of the most storied families in American politics, a man who knew triumph and tragedy in near-equal measure and who will be remembered as one of the most effective lawmakers in the history of the Senate, died late Tuesday night. He was 77.

The death of Mr. Kennedy, who had been battling brain cancer, was announced Wednesday morning in a statement by the Kennedy family, which was already mourning the death of the senator’s sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver two weeks earlier.

“Edward M. Kennedy – the husband, father, grandfather, brother and uncle we loved so deeply – died late Tuesday night at home in Hyannis Port,” the statement said. “We’ve lost the irreplaceable center of our family and joyous light in our lives, but the inspiration of his faith, optimism, and perseverance will live on in our hearts forever.”

President Obama issued a statement acknowledging Mr. Kennedy’s accomplishments. “An important chapter in our history has come to an end,” the statement said. “Our country has lost a great leader, who picked up the torch of his fallen brothers and became the greatest United States senator of our time.”

Mr. Kennedy had been in precarious health since he suffered a seizure in May 2008. His doctors determined the cause was a malignant glioma, a brain tumor that often carries a grim prognosis.

As he underwent cancer treatment, Mr. Kennedy was little seen in Washington, appearing most recently at the White House in April as Mr. Obama signed a national service bill that bears the Kennedy name. Last week Mr. Kennedy urged Massachusetts lawmakers to change state law and let Gov. Deval Patrick appoint a temporary replacement upon his death, to assure that the state’s representation in Congress would not be interrupted by a special election.

While Mr. Kennedy was physically absent from the capital in recent months, his presence was deeply felt as Congress weighed the most sweeping revisions to America’s health care system in decades, an effort Mr. Kennedy called “the cause of my life.”

On July 15, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee, which Mr. Kennedy headed, passed health care legislation, and the battle over the proposed overhaul is now consuming Capitol Hill.

Mr. Kennedy was the last surviving brother of a generation of Kennedys that dominated American politics in the 1960s and that came to embody glamour, political idealism and untimely death. The Kennedy mystique — some call it the Kennedy myth — has held the imagination of the world for decades, and it came to rest on the sometimes too-narrow shoulders of the brother known as Teddy.

Mr. Kennedy, who served 46 years as the most well-known Democrat in the Senate, longer than all but two other senators, was the only one of those brothers to reach old age. President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert F. Kennedy were felled by assassins’ bullets in their 40s. The eldest brother, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., died in 1944 at the age of 29 while on a risky World War II bombing mission.

Mr. Kennedy spent much of last year in treatment and recuperation, broken by occasional public appearances and a dramatic return to the Capitol last summer to cast a decisive vote on a Medicare bill.

He electrified the opening night of the Democratic National Convention in Denver in August with an unscheduled appearance and a speech that had delegates on their feet. Many were in tears.

His gait was halting, but his voice was strong. “My fellow Democrats, my fellow Americans, it is so wonderful to be here, and nothing is going to keep me away from this special gathering tonight,” Mr. Kennedy said. “I have come here tonight to stand with you to change America, to restore its future, to rise to our best ideals and to elect Barack Obama president of the United States.”

Senator Kennedy was at or near the center of much of American history in the latter part of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st. For much of his adult life, he veered from victory to catastrophe, winning every Senate election he entered but failing in his only try for the presidency; living through the sudden deaths of his brothers and three of his nephews; being responsible for the drowning death on Chappaquiddick Island of a young woman, Mary Jo Kopechne, a former aide to his brother Robert. One of the nephews, John F. Kennedy Jr., who the family hoped would one day seek political office and keep the Kennedy tradition alive, died in a plane crash in 1999 at age 38.

Mr. Kennedy himself was almost killed in 1964, in a plane crash that left him with permanent back and neck problems.

He was a Rabelaisian figure in the Senate and in life, instantly recognizable by his shock of white hair, his florid, oversize face, his booming Boston brogue, his powerful but pained stride. He was a celebrity, sometimes a self-parody, a hearty friend, an implacable foe, a man of large faith and large flaws, a melancholy character who persevered, drank deeply and sang loudly. He was a Kennedy.

Senator Robert C. Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, one of the institution’s most devoted students, said of his longtime colleague, “Ted Kennedy would have been a leader, an outstanding senator, at any period in the nation’s history.”

Mr. Byrd is one of only two senators to have served longer in the chamber than Mr. Kennedy; the other was Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. In May 2008, on learning of Mr. Kennedy’s diagnosis of a lethal brain tumor, Mr. Byrd wept openly on the floor of the Senate.

Born to one of the wealthiest American families, Mr. Kennedy spoke for the downtrodden in his public life while living the heedless private life of a playboy and a rake for many of his years. Dismissed early in his career as a lightweight and an unworthy successor to his revered brothers, he grew in stature over time by sheer longevity and by hewing to liberal principles while often crossing the partisan aisle to enact legislation. A man of unbridled appetites at times, he nevertheless brought a discipline to his public work that resulted in an impressive catalog of legislative achievement across a broad landscape of social policy.

Mr. Kennedy left his mark on legislation concerning civil rights, health care, education, voting rights and labor. He was chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions at his death. But he was more than a legislator. He was a living legend whose presence ensured a crowd and whose hovering figure haunted many a president.

Although he was a leading spokesman for liberal issues and a favorite target of conservative fund-raising appeals, the hallmark of his legislative success was his ability to find Republican allies to get bills passed. Perhaps the last notable example was his work with President George W. Bush to pass No Child Left Behind, the education law pushed by Mr. Bush in 2001. He also co-sponsored immigration legislation with Senator John McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee. One of his greatest friends and collaborators in the Senate was Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican.

Mr. Kennedy had less impact on foreign policy than on domestic concerns, but when he spoke his voice was influential. He led the Congressional effort to impose sanctions on South Africa over apartheid, pushed for peace in Northern Ireland, won a ban on arms sales to the dictatorship in Chile and denounced the Vietnam War. In 2002, he voted against authorizing the Iraq war; later, he called that opposition “the best vote I’ve made in my 44 years in the United States Senate.”

At a pivotal moment in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries, Mr. Kennedy endorsed Senator Obama for president, saying Mr. Obama offered America a chance for racial reconciliation and an opportunity to turn the page on the polarizing politics of the past several decades.

“He will be a president who refuses to be trapped in the patterns of the past,” Mr. Kennedy told an Obama rally in Washington on Jan. 28, 2008. “He is a leader who sees the world clearly, without being cynical. He is a fighter who cares passionately about the causes he believes in without demonizing those who hold a different view.”

Mr. Kennedy struggled for much of his life with his weight, with alcohol and with persistent tales of womanizing. In an Easter break episode in 1991 in Palm Beach, Fla., he went out drinking with his son Patrick and a nephew, William Kennedy Smith, on the night that Mr. Smith was accused of raping a woman. Mr. Smith was prosecuted in a lurid trial that fall but was acquitted.

Mr. Kennedy’s personal life stabilized in 1992 with his marriage to Victoria Anne Reggie, a Washington lawyer. His first marriage, to Joan Bennett Kennedy, ended in divorce in 1982 after 24 years.

Senator Kennedy served as a surrogate father to his brothers’ children and worked to keep the Kennedy flame alive through the Kennedy Library in Boston, the Kennedy Center in Washington and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where he helped establish the Institute of Politics.

In December, Harvard granted Mr. Kennedy a special honorary degree. He referred to Mr. Obama’s election as “not just a culmination, but a new beginning.”

He then spoke of his own life, and perhaps his legacy.

“We know the future will outlast all of us, but I believe that all of us will live on in the future we make,” he said. “I have lived a blessed time.”

CONTINUED ON newsnyt2

news20090826nyt2

[Today's Newspaper] from [The New York Times]

[Obituaries]
Edward Kennedy, Senate Stalwart, Dies
By JOHN M. BRODER
Published: August 26, 2009

CONTINUED FROM newsnyt1

Kennedy family courtiers and many other Democrats believed he would eventually win the White House and redeem the promise of his older brothers. In 1980, he took on the president of his own party, Jimmy Carter, but fell short because of Chappaquiddick, a divided party and his own weaknesses as a candidate, including an inability to articulate why he sought the office.

But as that race ended in August at the Democratic National Convention in New York, Mr. Kennedy delivered his most memorable words, wrapping his dedication to party principles in the gauzy cloak of Camelot.

“For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end,” Mr. Kennedy said in the coda to a speech before a rapt audience at Madison Square Garden and on television. “For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

A Family Steeped in Politics

Born Feb. 22, 1932, in Brookline, Mass., just outside Boston, Edward Moore Kennedy grew up in a family of shrewd politicians. Both his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, and his mother, the former Rose Fitzgerald, came from prominent Irish-Catholic families with long involvement in the hurly-burly of Democratic politics in Boston and Massachusetts. His father, who made a fortune in real estate, movies and banking, served in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration, as the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and then as ambassador to Britain.

There were nine Kennedy children, four boys and five girls, with Edward the youngest. They grew up talking politics, power and influence because those were the things that preoccupied the mind of Joseph Kennedy. As Rose Kennedy, who took responsibility for the children’s Roman Catholic upbringing, once put it, “My babies were rocked to political lullabies.”

When Edward was born, President Herbert Hoover sent Rose a bouquet of flowers and a note of congratulations. The note came with 5 cents postage due; the framed envelope is a family heirloom.

It was understood among the children that Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., the oldest boy, would someday run for Congress and, his father hoped, the White House. When Joseph Jr. was killed in World War II, it fell to the next oldest son, John, to run. As John said at one point in 1959 while serving in the Senate: “Just as I went into politics because Joe died, if anything happened to me tomorrow, Bobby would run for my seat in the Senate. And if Bobby died, our young brother, Ted, would take over for him.”

Although surrounded by the trappings of wealth — stately houses, servants and expensive cars — young Teddy did not enjoy a settled childhood. He bounced among the family homes in Boston, New York, London and Palm Beach, and by the time he was ready to enter college, he had attended 10 preparatory schools in the United States and England, finally finishing at Milton Academy, near Boston. He said that the constant moving had forced him to become more genial with strangers; indeed, he grew to be more of a natural politician than either John or Robert.

After graduating from Milton in 1950, where he showed a penchant for debating and sports but was otherwise an undistinguished student, Mr. Kennedy enrolled in Harvard, as had his father and brothers. It was at Harvard, in his freshman year, that he ran into the first of several personal troubles that were to dog him for the rest of his life: He persuaded another student to take his Spanish examination, got caught and was forced to leave the university.

Suddenly draft-eligible during the Korean War, Mr. Kennedy enlisted in the Army and served two years, securing, with his father’s help, a cushy post at NATO headquarters in Paris. In 1953, he was discharged with the rank of private first class.

Re-enrolling in Harvard, he became a more serious student, majoring in government, excelling in public speaking and playing first-string end on the football team. He graduated in 1956 with a Bachelor of Arts degree, then enrolled in the University of Virginia School of Law, where Robert had studied. There, he won the moot court competition and took a degree in 1959. Later that year, he was admitted to the Massachusetts bar.

Mr. Kennedy’s first foray into politics came in 1958, while still a law student, when he managed John’s Senate re-election campaign. There was never any real doubt that Massachusetts voters would return John Kennedy to Washington, but it was a useful internship for his youngest brother.

That same year, Mr. Kennedy married Virginia Joan Bennett, a debutante from Bronxville, a New York suburb where the Kennedys had once lived. In 1960, when John Kennedy ran for president, Edward was assigned a relatively minor role, rustling up votes in Western states that usually voted Republican. He was so enthusiastic about his task that he rode a bronco at a Montana rodeo and daringly took a ski jump at a winter sports tournament in Wisconsin to impress a crowd. The episodes were evidence of a reckless streak that repeatedly threatened his life and career.

John Kennedy’s election to the White House left vacant a Senate seat that the family considered its property. Robert Kennedy was next in line, but chose the post of attorney general instead (an act of nepotism that has since been outlawed). Edward was only 28, two years shy of the minimum age for Senate service.

So the Kennedys installed Benjamin A. Smith II, a family friend, as a seat-warmer until 1962, when a special election would be held and Edward would have turned 30. Edward used the time to travel the world and work as an assistant district attorney in Boston, waiving the $5,000 salary and serving instead for $1 a year.

As James Sterling Young, the director of a Kennedy Oral History Project at the University of Virginia, put it: “Most people grow up and go into politics. The Kennedys go into politics and then they grow up.”

Less than a month after turning 30 in 1962, Mr. Kennedy declared his candidacy for the remaining two years of his brother’s Senate term. He entered the race with a tailwind of family money and political prominence. Nevertheless, Edward J. McCormack Jr., the state’s attorney general and a nephew of John W. McCormack, then speaker of the United States House of Representatives, also decided to go after the seat.

It was a bitter fight, with a public rehash of the Harvard cheating episode and with Mr. McCormack charging in a televised “Teddy-Eddie” debate that Mr. Kennedy lacked maturity of judgment because he had “never worked for a living” and had never held elective office. “If your name was simply Edward Moore instead of Edward Moore Kennedy,” Mr. McCormack added, “your candidacy would be a joke.”

But the Kennedys had ushered in an era of celebrity politics, which trumped qualifications in this case. Mr. Kennedy won the primary by a two-to-one ratio, then went on to easy victory in November against the Republican candidate, George Cabot Lodge, a member of an old-line Boston family that had clashed politically with the Kennedys through the years.

When Mr. Kennedy entered the Senate in 1962, he was aware that he might be seen as an upstart, with one brother in the White House and another in the cabinet. He sought guidance on the very first day from one of the Senate’s most respected elders, Richard Russell of Georgia. “You go further if you go slow,” Senator Russell advised.

Mr. Kennedy took things slowly, especially that first year. He did his homework, was seen more than he was heard and was deferential to veteran legislators.

On Friday, Nov. 22, 1963, he was presiding over the Senate when a wire service ticker in the lobby brought the news of John Kennedy’s shooting in Dallas. Violence had claimed the second of Joseph Kennedy’s sons.

Edward was sent to Hyannis Port to break the news to his father, who had been disabled by a stroke. He returned to Washington for the televised funeral and burial, the first many Americans had seen of him. He and Robert had planned to read excerpts from John’s speeches at the Arlington burial service. At the last moment they chose not to.

A friend described him as “shattered — calm but shattered.”

A Deadly Plane Crash

Robert moved into the breach and was immediately discussed as a presidential prospect. Edward became a more prominent family spokesman.

The next year, he was up for re-election. A heavy favorite from the start, he was on his way to the state convention that was to renominate him when his light plane crashed in a storm near Westfield, Mass. The pilot and a Kennedy aide were killed, and Mr. Kennedy’s back and several ribs were broken. Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana pulled Mr. Kennedy from the plane.

The senator was hospitalized for the next six months, suspended immobile in a frame that resembled a waffle iron. His wife, Joan, carried on his campaign, mainly by advising voters that he was steadily recovering. He won easily over a little-known Republican, Howard Whitmore Jr.

During his convalescence, Mr. Kennedy devoted himself to his legislative work. He was briefed by a parade of Harvard professors and began to develop his positions on immigration, health care and civil rights.

“I never thought the time was lost,” he said later. “I had a lot of hours to think about what was important and what was not and about what I wanted to do with my life.”

CONTINUED ON newsnyt3

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[Today's Newspaper] from [The New York Times]

[Obituaries]
Edward Kennedy, Senate Stalwart, Dies
By JOHN M. BRODER
Published: August 26, 2009

CONTINUED FROM newsnyt2

He returned to the Senate in 1965, joining his brother Robert, who had won a seat from New York. Edward promptly entered a major fight, his first. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Voting Rights Act was up for consideration, and Mr. Kennedy tried to strengthen it with an amendment that would have outlawed poll taxes. He lost by only four votes, serving lasting notice on his colleagues that he was a rapidly maturing legislator who could prepare a good case and argue it effectively.

Mr. Kennedy was slow to oppose the war in Vietnam, but in 1968, shortly after Robert decided to seek the presidency on an antiwar platform, Edward called the war a “monstrous outrage.”

Robert Kennedy was shot on June 5, 1968, as he celebrated his victory in the California primary, becoming the third of Joseph Kennedy’s sons to die a violent death. Edward was in San Francisco at a victory celebration. He commandeered an Air Force plane and flew to Los Angeles.

Frank Mankiewicz, Robert’s press secretary, saw Edward “leaning over the sink with the most awful expression on his face.”

“Much more than agony, more than anguish — I don’t know if there’s a word for it,” Mr. Mankiewicz said, recalling the encounter in “Edward M. Kennedy: A Biography,” by Adam Clymer (William Morrow, 1999).

Robert’s death draped Edward in the Kennedy mantle long before he was ready for it and forced him to confront his own mortality. But he summoned himself to deliver an eloquent eulogy at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.

“My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it,” Mr. Kennedy said, his voice faltering. “Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will someday come to pass for all the world.”

A New Role as Patriarch

After the funeral, Edward Kennedy withdrew from public life and spent several months brooding, much of it while sailing off the New England coast.

Near the end of the summer of 1968, he emerged from seclusion, the sole survivor of Joseph Kennedy’s boys, ready to take over as family patriarch and substitute father to John’s and Robert’s 13 children, seemingly eager to get on with what he called his “public responsibilities.”

“There is no safety in hiding,” he declared in a speech at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Mass., in August. “Like my brothers before me, I pick up a fallen standard. Sustained by the memory of our priceless years together, I shall try to carry forward that special commitment to justice, excellence and courage that distinguished their lives.”

There was some talk of his running for president at that point. But he ultimately endorsed Hubert H. Humphrey in his losing campaign to Richard M. Nixon.

Mr. Kennedy focused more on bringing the war in Vietnam to an end and on building his Senate career. Although only 36, he challenged Senator Russell B. Long of Louisiana, one of the shrewdest, most powerful legislators on Capitol Hill, for the post of deputy majority leader. Fellow liberals sided with him, and he edged Mr. Long by five votes to become the youngest assistant majority leader, or whip, in Senate history.

He plunged into the new job with Kennedy enthusiasm. But fate, and the Kennedy recklessness, intervened on July 18, 1969. Mr. Kennedy was at a party with several women who had been aides to Robert. The party, a liquor-soaked barbecue, was held at a rented cottage on Chappaquiddick Island, off Martha’s Vineyard. He left around midnight with Mary Jo Kopechne, 28, took a turn away from the ferry landing and drove the car off a narrow bridge on an isolated beach road. The car sank in eight feet of water, but he managed to escape. Miss Kopechne, a former campaign worker for Robert, drowned.

Mr. Kennedy did not report the accident to the authorities for almost 10 hours, explaining later that he had been so banged about by the crash that he had suffered a concussion, and that he had become so exhausted while trying to rescue Miss Kopechne that he had gone immediately to bed. A week later, he pleaded guilty to a charge of leaving the scene of an accident and was given a two-month suspended sentence.

But that was far from the end of the episode. Questions lingered in the minds of the Massachusetts authorities and of the general public. Why was the car on an isolated road? Had he been drinking? (Mr. Kennedy testified at an inquest that he had had two drinks.) What sort of relationship did Mr. Kennedy and Miss Kopechne have? Could she have been saved if he had sought help immediately? Why did the senator tell his political advisers about the accident before reporting it to the police?

The controversy became so intense that Mr. Kennedy went on television to ask Massachusetts voters whether he should resign from office. He conceded that his actions after the crash had been “indefensible.” But he steadfastly denied any intentional wrongdoing.

His constituents sent word that he should remain in the Senate. And little more than a year later, he easily won re-election to a second full term, again defeating a little-known Republican, Josiah A. Spaulding, by a three-to-two ratio. But his heart did not seem to be in his work any longer. He was sometimes absent from Senate sessions and neglected his whip duties. Senator Byrd, of West Virginia, took the job away from him by putting together a coalition of Southern and border-state Democrats to vote him out.

That loss shook Mr. Kennedy out of his lethargy. He rededicated himself to his role as a legislator. “It hurts like hell to lose,” he said, “but now I can get around the country more. And it frees me to spend more time on issues I’m interested in.” Many years later, he became friends with Mr. Byrd and told him the defeat had been the best thing that could have happened in his Senate career.

Turmoil at Home

In the next decade, Mr. Kennedy expanded on his national reputation, first pushing to end the war in Vietnam, then concentrating on his favorite legislative issues, especially civil rights, health, taxes, criminal laws and deregulation of the airline and trucking industries. He traveled the country, making speeches that kept him in the public eye.

But when he was mentioned as a possible candidate for president in 1972, he demurred; and when the Democratic nominee, George S. McGovern, offered him the vice-presidential nomination, Mr. Kennedy again said no, not wanting to face the inevitable Chappaquiddick questions.

In 1973, his son Edward M. Kennedy Jr., then 12, developed a bone cancer that cost him a leg. The next year, Mr. Kennedy took himself out of the 1976 presidential race. Instead, he easily won a third full term in the Senate, and Jimmy Carter, a former one-term governor of Georgia, moved into the White House.

In early 1978, Mr. Kennedy’s wife, Joan, moved out of their sprawling contemporary house overlooking the Potomac River near McLean, Va., a Washington suburb. She took up residence in an apartment of her own in Boston, saying she wanted to “explore options other than being a housewife and mother.” But she also acknowledged a problem with alcohol, and conceded that she was increasingly uncomfortable with the pressure-cooker life that went with membership in the Kennedy clan. She began studying music and enrolled in a program for alcoholics.

The separation posed not only personal but also political problems for the senator. After Mrs. Kennedy left for Boston, there were rumors that linked the senator with other women. He maintained that he still loved his wife and indicated that the main reason for the separation was Mrs. Kennedy’s desire to work out her alcohol problem. She subsequently campaigned for him in the 1980 race, but there was never any real reconciliation, and they eventually entered divorce proceedings.

Although Mr. Kennedy supported Mr. Carter in 1976, by late 1978 he was disenchanted. Polls indicated that the senator was becoming popular while the president was losing support. In December, at a midterm Democratic convention in Memphis, Mr. Kennedy could hold back no longer. He gave a thundering speech that, in retrospect, was the opening shot in the 1980 campaign.

“Sometimes a party must sail against the wind,” he declared, referring to Mr. Carter’s economic belt-tightening and political caution. “We cannot heed the call of those who say it is time to furl the sail. The party that tore itself apart over Vietnam in the 1960s cannot afford to tear itself apart today over budget cuts in basic social programs.”

Mr. Kennedy did not then declare his candidacy. But draft-Kennedy groups began to form in early 1979, and some Democrats up for re-election in 1980 began to cast about for coattails that were longer than Mr. Carter’s.

After consulting advisers and family members over the summer of 1979, Mr. Kennedy began speaking openly of challenging the president, and on Nov. 7, 1979, he announced officially that he would run. “Our leaders have resigned themselves to defeat,” he said.

CONTINUED ON newsnyt4

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[Today's Newspaper] from [The New York Times]

[Obituaries]
Edward Kennedy, Senate Stalwart, Dies
By JOHN M. BRODER
Published: August 26, 2009

CONTINUED FROM newsnyt3

The campaign was a disaster, badly organized and appearing to lack a political or policy premise. His speeches were clumsy, and his delivery was frequently stumbling and bombastic. And in the background, Chappaquiddick always loomed. He won the New York and California primaries, but the victories were too little and came too late to unseat Mr. Carter. At the party’s nominating convention in New York, however, he stole the show with his “dream shall never die” speech.

With the approach of the 1984 election, there was the inevitable speculation that Mr. Kennedy, who had easily won re-election to the Senate in 1982, would again seek the presidency. He prepared and planned a campaign. But in the end he chose not to run, saying he wanted to spare his family a repeat of the ordeal they went through in 1980. Skeptics said he also knew he could not fight the undertow of Chappaquiddick.

A Full-On Senate Focus

Freed at last of the expectation that he should and would seek the White House, Mr. Kennedy devoted himself fully to his day job in the Senate. He led the fight for the 18-year-old vote, the abolition of the draft, deregulation of the airline and trucking industries, and the post-Watergate campaign finance legislation. He was deeply involved in renewals of the Voting Rights Act and the Fair Housing law of 1968. He helped establish the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. He built federal support for community health care centers, increased cancer research financing and helped create the Meals on Wheels program. He was a major proponent of a health and nutrition program for pregnant women and infants.

When Republicans took over the Senate in 1981, Mr. Kennedy requested the ranking minority position on the Labor and Public Welfare Committee, asserting that the issues before the labor and welfare panel would be more important during the Reagan years.

In the years after his failed White House bid, Mr. Kennedy also established himself as someone who made “lawmaker” mean more than a word used in headlines to describe any member of Congress. Though his personal life was a mess until his remarriage in the early 1990s, he never failed to show up prepared for a committee hearing or a floor debate.

His most notable focus was civil rights, “still the unfinished business of America,” he often said. In 1982, he led a successful fight to defeat the Reagan administration’s effort to weaken the Voting Rights Act.

In one of those bipartisan alliances that were hallmarks of his legislative successes, Mr. Kennedy worked with Senator Bob Dole, Republican of Kansas, to secure passage of the voting rights measure, and Mr. Dole got most of the credit.

Perhaps his greatest success on civil rights came in 1990 with passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which required employers and public facilities to make “reasonable accommodation” for the disabled. When the law was finally passed, Mr. Kennedy and others told how their views on the bill had been shaped by having relatives with disabilities. Mr. Kennedy cited his mentally disabled sister, Rosemary, and his son who had lost a leg to cancer.

Mr. Kennedy was one of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s strongest allies in their failed 1994 effort to enact national health insurance, a measure the senator had been pushing, in one form or another, since 1969.

But he kept pushing incremental reforms, and in 1997, teaming with Senator Hatch, Mr. Kennedy helped enact a landmark health care program for children in low-income families, a program now known as the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or S-Chip.

He led efforts to increase aid for higher education and win passage of Mr. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act. He pushed for increases in the federal minimum wage. He helped win enactment of the Medicare prescription drug benefit, one of the largest expansions of government health aid ever.

He was a forceful and successful opponent of the confirmation of Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court. In a speech delivered within minutes of President Reagan’s nomination of Mr. Bork in 1987, Mr. Kennedy made an attack that even friendly commentators called demagogic. Mr. Bork’s “extremist view of the Constitution,” he said, meant that “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, and schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of Americans.”

Some of Mr. Kennedy’s success as a legislator can be traced to the quality and loyalty of his staff, considered by his colleagues and outsiders alike to be the best on Capitol Hill.

“He has one of the most distinguished alumni associations of any U.S. senator,” said Ross K. Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University who has worked in Congress. “To have served in even a minor capacity in the Kennedy office or on one of his committees is a major entry in anyone’s résumé.”

Those who have worked for Mr. Kennedy include Stephen G. Breyer, appointed to the Supreme Court by President Clinton; Gregory B. Craig, now the White House counsel; and Kenneth R. Feinberg, the Obama administration’s top official for compensation.

Mr. Kennedy “deserves recognition not just as the leading senator of his time, but as one of the greats in its history, wise in the workings of this singular institution, especially its demand to be more than partisan to accomplish much,” Mr. Clymer wrote in his biography.

“The deaths and tragedies around him would have led others to withdraw. He never quits, but sails against the wind.”

Mr. Kennedy is survived by his wife, known as Vicki; two sons, Edward M. Kennedy Jr. of Branford, Conn., and United States Representative Patrick J. Kennedy of Rhode Island; a daughter, Kara Kennedy Allen, of Bethesda, Md.; two stepchildren, Curran Raclin and Caroline Raclin; and four grandchildren. His former wife, Joan Kennedy, lives in Boston.

Mr. Kennedy is also survived by a sister, Jean Kennedy Smith, of New York. On Aug. 11, his sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver of Potomac, Md., died at age 88. Another sister, Patricia Lawford Kennedy, died in 2006. His sister Rosemary died in 2005, and his sister Kathleen died in a plane crash in 1948.

Their little brother Teddy was the youngest, the little bear whom everyone cuddled, whom no one took seriously and from whom little was expected. He reluctantly and at times awkwardly carried the Kennedy standard, with all it implied and all it required. And yet, some scholars contend, he may have proved himself the most worthy.

“He was a quintessential Kennedy, in the sense that he had all the warts as well as all the charisma and a lot of the strengths,” said Norman J. Ornstein, a political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute. “If his father, Joe, had surveyed, from an early age up to the time of his death, all of his children, his sons in particular, and asked to rank them on talents, effectiveness, likelihood to have an impact on the world, Ted would have been a very poor fourth. Joe, John, Bobby ... Ted.

“He was the survivor,” Mr. Ornstein continued. “He was not a shining star that burned brightly and faded away. He had a long, steady glow. When you survey the impact of the Kennedys on American life and politics and policy, he will end up by far being the most significant.”

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[Today's Newspaper] from [The New York Times]

[Obituaries]
August 26, 2009, 9:05 am
Ted Kennedy’s New York
By A. G. Sulzberger
Associated Press

Edward M. Kennedy addressed the Democratic National Convention in New York City on the night of Aug. 12, 1980, after losing his bid for the party’s presidential nomination.
As a child he called it home. He married here. Eulogized a brother here. And it was in New York — a state that tried to give him the Democratic nomination — that he relinquished his dreams of the presidency.

Edward M. Kennedy, who died Tuesday night at 77, will be remembered as a Massachusetts man — he represented that state in the United States Senate for 46 years with an unmistakable Boston brogue — but he also observed some of the most important moments of his life in New York.

The most well known of those came on Aug. 12, 1980, with his passionate speech at the Democratic National Convention in Madison Square Garden, after his loss in the presidential primary to President Jimmy Carter.

“Well, things worked out a little different from the way I thought, but let me tell you, I still love New York,” he began.

But it was the ending of the speech that stole the show: “For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end. For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

(Mr. Kennedy returned to that same language last August in a speech at the Democratic National Convention in Denver: “And this November, the torch will be passed again to a new generation of Americans, so with Barack Obama and for you and for me, our country will be committed to his cause. The work begins anew. The hope rises again. And the dream lives on.”)

Born in Feb. 22, 1932, Mr. Kennedy spent a significant portion of his childhood in Bronxville, in Westchester County — including the first six years of his life and a later period when he attended the private Riverdale Country School — where his family owned a mansion on Pondfield Road.

In 1941, his parents, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Rose F. Kennedy, sold the house, which they had purchased in 1929, for $130,000, according to county property records. They moved the family back to Massachusetts, but continued to maintain an apartment in New York City.

“The Kennedy family is in many ways a New York family,” said David Nasaw, a professor of history at the City University of New York who is working on a biography of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.

Mr. Kennedy returned to Bronxville in 1958 to marry Joan Bennett, a debutante from the village at the Church of Saint Joseph. (He had met her during a visit to Manhattanville College in Purchase). Their first child — Kara — was born there in 1960 while he was campaigning on behalf of his brother, Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy, according to “Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy,” by a team at The Boston Globe and edited by Peter S. Canellos.

Even as Mr. Kennedy returned to Massachusetts to build his political career, many of his other family members settled in New York. His older brother Robert F. Kennedy was elected to the Senate in New York in 1964. His sisters Patricia Lawford Kennedy and Jean Kennedy Smith lived here, as did countless nieces, nephews and cousins.

After Robert Kennedy was shot following his victory in the 1968 California presidential primary, he delivered a eulogy at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. “My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it,” he said. “Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world.”

Twelve years later, as he followed the path laid by his two older brothers and sought to wrest the Democratic nomination from a sitting president, his hopes had been all but dashed after a string of losses to Mr. Carter. By the time his campaign arrived in New York, he was prepared to deliver a concession speech. “The Last Lion” described the unexpected result:

Kennedy beat Carter in New York by almost 20 points. Ted’s campaign team was stunned. There would be no withdrawal statement. Staffers called it “the miracle.” Kennedy had desperately needed a big, splashy win, and New York gave it to him.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Selected statements by New Yorkers responding to Mr. Kennedy’s death follow.

From Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand:

Senator Kennedy’s dedication for over four decades to help millions of our nation’s children, seniors and families is an inspiration to me, and I am honored to have had the opportunity to serve with him in the United States Senate.

While we have lost an American treasure today, Senator Kennedy’s rich legacy, historic legislative record and deep commitment to positive change for all Americans will continue to be felt for generations to come.

My thoughts and prayers are with the Kennedy family as they grieve over their loss.

From the New York State attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo:

Senator Edward Kennedy fearlessly challenged this country to be better. His loss is tragic, but his legacy will forever endure. It will survive in the generations he transformed, the people he helped, and the country he adored.

From Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg:

There will never be another first family of American politics like the Kennedys, and there will never be another United States senator like Ted Kennedy. Inspired by the noblest of ideals — a life of service in pursuit of justice, equality, and peace — Senator Kennedy’s compassion and charisma were matched only by his extraordinary legislative accomplishments over five decades. It was a great honor to join him last April for President Obama’s signing of the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, which will ensure that his legacy of service will live on in the good works of millions of Americans for years to come.

Senator Kennedy was much more than a great liberal lion and master orator. He was a pragmatist who reached across the aisle to pass legislation that has improved the lives of people around the world. I particularly admired his bipartisan leadership on health care, education, and immigration reform, and he was a critical ally in our efforts to ensure that all 9/11 first responders receive the care and treatment they deserve. But more than all that, I will remember Senator Kennedy as a gracious and generous man, a man with a big heart and a ready laugh, a man who endured terrible family tragedy, and who guided his loved ones — and the whole country — through some of our darkest days.

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[Today's Newspaper] fom [The Washington Post]

[TedKennedy: 1932 - 2009]
Liberal Champion Propelled Family's Political Legacy
Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy Dies at 77 After Cancer Battle
By Joe Holley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 26, 2009; 7:29 AM

Edward M. Kennedy, one of the most powerful and influential senators in American history and one of three brothers whose political triumphs and personal tragedies captivated the nation for decades, died late Tuesday at his home in Hyannis Port, Mass., at age 77. He had been battling brain cancer.

His family announced his death in a brief statement released early Wednesday. "We've lost the irreplaceable center of our family and joyous light in our lives, but the inspiration of his faith, optimism, and perseverance will live on in our hearts forever," the statement said. "We thank everyone who gave him care and support over this last year, and everyone who stood with him for so many years in his tireless march for progress toward justice, fairness and opportunity for all."

President Obama was notified about 2 a.m., aides said, and spoke to Kennedy's widow, Victoria, a short time later. In a statement released Wednesday morning, Obama paid tribute to Kennedy, pointing out that "virtually every major piece of legislation to advance the civil rights, health and economic well being of the American people bore his name and resulted from his efforts. . . .

"Our country has lost a great leader, who picked up the torch of his fallen brothers and became the greatest United States Senator of our time," the statement said. ". . . . Our hearts and prayers go out to" the Kennedy family.

Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, was the last male survivor of a privileged and charismatic family that in the 1960s dominated American politics and attracted worldwide attention. His sister Eunice Kennedy Shriver, founder of the Special Olympics, died two weeks ago, also in Hyannis Port. One sibling, former U.S. ambassador to Ireland Jean Kennedy Smith, is still alive.

As heir through tragedy to his accomplished older brothers -- President John F. Kennedy and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.), both of whom were assassinated -- Edward Kennedy became the patriarch of his clan and a towering figure in the U.S. Senate to a degree neither of his siblings had been.

Kennedy served in the Senate through five of the most dramatic decades of the nation's history. He became a lawmaker whose legislative accomplishments, political authority and gift for friendship across the political spectrum invited favorable comparisons to Daniel Webster, Henry Clay and a handful of other leviathans of the country's most elite political body. But he was also beset by personal frailties and family misfortunes that were the stuff of tabloid headlines.

For years, many Democrats considered Kennedy's own presidency a virtual inevitability. In 1968, a "Draft Ted" campaign emerged only a few months after Robert Kennedy's death, but he demurred, realizing he was not prepared to be president.

Political observers considered him the candidate to beat in 1972, but that possibility came to an end on a night in July 1969, when the senator drove his Oldsmobile off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, Mass., and a young female passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned.

The tragedy had a corrosive effect on Kennedy's image, eroding his national standing. He made a dismal showing when he challenged President Jimmy Carter for reelection in 1980. But the moment of his exit from the presidential stage marked an oratorical highlight when, speaking at the Democratic National Convention, he invoked his brothers and promised: "For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on. The cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die."

Instead of a president, Kennedy became a major presence in the Senate, which he had joined in 1962 with the help of his politically connected family. He was a cagey and effective legislator, even in the years when Republicans were in the ascendancy. When most Democrats sought to fend off the "liberal" label, the senior senator from Massachusetts wore it proudly.

In a statement issued early Wednesday, Sen. Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), the Senate's majority leader, called it the "thrill of a lifetime" to work with Kennedy, describing him as a friend, the model of public service and "an American icon."

He said Kennedy's legacy "stands with the greatest, the most devoted, the most patriotic men and women to ever serve" in the Capitol.

Reid said that in addition to mourning his loss, "we rededicate ourselves to the causes for which he so dutifully dedicated his life."

For decades, Kennedy was at the center of the most important issues facing the nation, and he did much to help shape them. A defender of the poor and politically disadvantaged, he set the standard for his party on health care, education, civil rights, campaign-finance reform and labor law. He also came to oppose the war in Vietnam and, from the beginning, was an outspoken opponent of the war in Iraq.

Congressional scholar Thomas E. Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, described Kennedy's mark on the Senate as "an amazing and endurable presence. You want to go back to the 19th century to find parallels, but you won't find parallels. It was the completeness of his involvement in the work of the Senate that explains his career."

Republicans repeatedly invoked Edward Kennedy for fundraising causes. They portrayed the hefty, ruddy-faced Massachusetts pol as the ultimate tax-and-spend liberal, Big Government in the flesh.

Despite that caricature, he was widely considered the Senate's most popular member and was on congenial terms with many of his Republican colleagues. On a number of issues, he searched for compromises that could attract GOP votes.

He collaborated with a Republican president, George W. Bush, on education reform, with a Republican presidential candidate; Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), on immigration reform; and with arch-conservative senator J. Strom Thurmond (S.C.) on major crime legislation. Only Thurmond, who died in 2003 at age 100, and Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), served longer in the Senate than Kennedy.

Kennedy's congeniality and his willingness to work with the opposition were at the core of his legislative ability. "He was fun; he was considerate to his colleagues," Mann said. "He would take a 20th of a loaf compared to getting nothing."

Kennedy and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) forged a lasting friendship that began in 1981, when Hatch became chairman of what was then the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee. With nine liberals and seven conservatives on the committee, Hatch knew he needed Kennedy's help -- and he got it.

"We have passed so much legislation together," Hatch told a Salt Lake City reporter in 2008. He noted having worked with Kennedy on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, an effort to prevent undue governmental burdens on the exercise of religion, and the Children's Health Insurance Program.

Long before he fell ill, Kennedy made health care a major focus of his career, terming it "the cause of my life." His legislation resulted in access to health care for millions of people and funded cures for diseases that afflicted people around the world. He was a longtime advocate for universal health care and was instrumental in promoting biomedical research, as well as AIDS research and treatment. He was a leader in the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 and the 1996 Kennedy-Kassebaum Bill -- with Sen. Nancy Kassebaum (R-Kan.) -- which allowed employees to keep health insurance after leaving their job.

Health care reform is "a defining issue for our society," Kennedy told fellow senators during a 1994 debate. "Do we really care about our fellow citizens?" It was a question he asked countless times, in one form or another, during his long Senate career. He faced opposition from most Republicans -- and more than a few Democrats -- who insisted that Kennedy's proposals for universal health care amounted to socialized medicine that would lead to bureaucratic sclerosis and budget-breaking costs and inefficiencies.

Receiving a diagnosis in May 2008 of a brain tumor, Kennedy rose from his hospital bed that summer and cast a dramatic vote on the Senate floor in favor of legislation preventing sharp cuts in Medicare payments to doctors. Several Republicans were so moved by his presence that they switched their earlier votes on the bill, giving it a veto-proof majority.
His family had been touched by cancer even before he got his own diagnosis. His son, Edward Jr., lost a leg to bone cancer at age 12 in 1973. His daughter, Kara Anne, was told she had lung cancer in 2003.

A list of major laws bearing his imprint, in addition to health care, fills pages. In 1965, he led the successful Senate floor battle that passed what was popularly known as the Hart-Celler Act, landmark legislation that abolished immigration quotas and lifted a 1924 ban on immigration from Asia.

"This bill really goes to the very central ideals of our country," Kennedy said on the floor of the Senate. The legislation, the most significant immigration reform in four decades, passed both the House and Senate by overwhelming margins.

He was long the Senate's leading voice on civil rights, including the 1982 Voting Rights Act extension, as well as efforts to advance the concept of equality to include the disabled and women in the workplace.

CNTINUED ON newswp2

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[Today's Newspaper] fom [The Washington Post]

[TedKennedy: 1932 - 2009]
Liberal Champion Propelled Family's Political Legacy
Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy Dies at 77 After Cancer Battle
By Joe Holley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 26, 2009; 7:29 AM

CONTINUED FROM newswp1

In 1972, he was a key supporter of Title IX, an amendment requiring colleges and universities to provide equal funding for men's and women's athletics. As a member of the Judiciary Committee, he played an important though indirect role in the 1973 investigation of the Watergate scandal that led to President Richard M. Nixon's resignation. In 1996 and again in 2007, he was the lead Senate sponsor of legislation increasing the minimum wage.

In the 1980s, when a Republican president and Senate mounted a major campaign to roll back programs he had championed, he led the fight to save them. Even in the minority, he worked to expand government's role in providing health care to children, making loans available to college students and extending civil rights to the disabled, among many other embattled initiatives.

Known as Teddy, the youngest son in a powerful family, Kennedy was first elected to the Senate as a 30-year-old. Despite a reputation for callow recklessness and immaturity, he seemed destined for higher office from the beginning. Such a fate seemed even more assured after the assassinations of his brothers in the 1960s.

His oldest brother, Joseph, who was probably headed for a political career, died in a plane explosion while serving in World War II. Brothers John and Robert were killed in their 40s. So it was that the youngest Kennedy, and the last Kennedy brother, was thrust into the role of family patriarch and, ultimately, of elder statesman.

Overcoming an early reputation as a vacuous young man of privilege, as well as a string of debilitating personal tragedies and burdensome expectations that he would fulfill his brothers' broken legacies, Kennedy became his own man in the Senate.

Edward Moore Kennedy was born in Brookline, Mass., on Feb. 22, 1932, the ninth and last child of Joseph P. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. His maternal grandfather, John F. "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, was a mayor of Boston. His paternal grandfather, Patrick J. Kennedy, served in both houses of the Massachusetts Legislature.

His father made millions in real estate, banking, Hollywood films and Wall Street, as well as in liquor during Prohibition. The elder Kennedy served under Franklin D. Roosevelt as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, then as head of the Maritime Commission.

His mother, a devout Roman Catholic, was exposed to the boisterous world of Boston Irish politics early, campaigning as a young girl with her father, the mayor, and meeting presidents Grover Cleveland and William McKinley. Decades later, she became an accomplished campaigner for her sons.

Joseph Kennedy was away during much of his young son's early years, and Ted stayed with his mother in New York, where the Kennedys had moved in 1926. The family was reunited in London in 1938 when Joseph Kennedy was named U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James's, where -- as legions of Kennedy haters would never forget -- he was an outspoken opponent of America's entry into World War II.

From his mother, Ted Kennedy learned the core values of the family's Catholic faith; from his father, he learned to compete. "We don't want any losers around here," Joe Kennedy would tell his children. "In this family, we want winners."

As the Kennedy family shuttled between London, Boston, New York and Palm Beach, Fla., Ted Kennedy studied at a number of private boarding schools before enrolling in 1946 at Milton Academy outside Boston. He was an undistinguished student, although he was an excellent debater, a good athlete and popular with his classmates.

From Milton, he enrolled at Harvard University. Joe Kennedy once warned his youngest son to be careful, Kennedy biographer Adam Clymer wrote, because he was the kind of person who would always get caught. The warning went unheeded. As a freshman, Kennedy asked a friend to take a Spanish examination for him, Spanish being one of his weaker subjects. Both students were expelled.

Afterward, Kennedy enlisted in the Army and served two years in Europe during the Korean War before his discharge in 1953. Jack Olsen, author of "The Bridge at Chappaquiddick" (1970), observed that Kennedy volunteered for military service "with much the same attitude as a European youth joining the French Foreign Legion."

Welcomed back to Harvard, he was able to indulge his passion for football and was a first-team end in 1955, his senior year. Kennedy received an undergraduate degree in history and government in 1956 and received a law degree in 1959 from the University of Virginia.

He plunged into politics in 1958, managing his brother John's successful campaign for reelection to the U.S. Senate. Two years later, he coordinated his brother's presidential primary campaign in 13 Western states.
After John Kennedy's election to the presidency in 1960, Edward Kennedy became an assistant to the district attorney of Suffolk County, Mass.; he was paid a dollar a year. He also began laying the groundwork for his own political career. Traveling at his own expense, he accompanied members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on a fact-finding tour of Africa in 1960.

Before taking office in January 1961, John Kennedy urged Massachusetts Gov. Foster Furcolo to appoint Benjamin Smith II to his vacated Senate seat until a special election scheduled for November 1962. Smith, the mayor of Gloucester, Mass., and the president-elect's college roommate, was immediately labeled as a placeholder until Edward Kennedy reached 30, the minimum age for a U.S. senator under the U.S. Constitution.
That was exactly what happened. The youngest Kennedy announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination three weeks after his birthday, and Smith stepped aside.

His chief rival for the nomination was Edward J. McCormack Jr., the state attorney general and nephew of John W. McCormack (D-Mass.), speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives at the time.

Although Kennedy avoided a potentially damaging campaign issue by revealing his expulsion from Harvard before his opponent could mention it, the primary campaign was bitter. McCormack repeatedly reminded voters that Kennedy had never held elective office and questioned his judgment and qualifications to be a U.S. senator. In the first of two "Teddy-Eddy debates," McCormack tried to turn the Kennedy name against his opponent. "And I ask you," he said, pointing a finger Kennedy, "if his name was Edward Moore -- with your qualifications, with your qualifications, Teddy -- if it was Edward Moore, your candidacy would be a joke. Nobody's laughing, because his name is not Edward Moore; it's Edward Moore Kennedy." McCormack's attacks backfired, and Kennedy won by a margin of more than 300,000 votes. He went on to defeat the Republican nominee, George Cabot Lodge, and was sworn into office in January 1963.

As a freshman senator, Kennedy deferred to his more venerable peers, concentrating on legislation of local interest. That approach began to change on Nov. 22, 1963. He was in the chair, in the absence of the vice president, presiding over a desultory debate concerning a library services bill.

A press aide ran to the floor with a bulletin he had ripped off a teletype machine in the lobby and handed it to the first senator he reached, Spessard Holland (D-Fla.). Then the aide cried out to Kennedy: "Senator, your brother has been shot!"

Kennedy turned pale, gathered his papers together and rushed out to the lobby, where he began making phone calls to the White House and to his brother Robert, the attorney general. Confirming the news of the shooting, Edward Kennedy hurried home to Georgetown and told his wife Joan, who had heard nothing.


That night, he and his sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, flew from Washington to Hyannis, Mass., where their father lay half-paralyzed with a stroke. The family had not told him; in fact, they tried to keep the news from him. Only when he asked that the television be turned on the next morning did Kennedy tell his father that his eldest surviving son was dead.

John Kennedy's assassination helped make his youngest brother's reelection almost inevitable, despite his relatively sparse Senate record, but he almost lost his life in the process. Flying to Springfield, Mass., to accept the nomination of the state's Democratic convention, his twin-engine plane crashed in an apple orchard seven miles short of its destination. The pilot died instantly, and Kennedy was pulled from the mangled wreckage with a broken back, three broken ribs and a collapsed lung. An aide to Kennedy also died in the crash.

The first doctor who saw him cautioned that he might be paralyzed for the rest of his life. After a few days, doctors determined that he had suffered no permanent nerve damage.

CONTINUED ON newswp3

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[Today's Newspaper] fom [The Washington Post]

[TedKennedy: 1932 - 2009]
Liberal Champion Propelled Family's Political Legacy
Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy Dies at 77 After Cancer Battle
By Joe Holley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 26, 2009; 7:29 AM

CONTINUED FROM newswp2

His wife, mother and Kennedy family functionaries campaigned for him as he spent long months of recovery lying on his back. After his fellow Democrats nominated him by acclamation, he won the general election against a relative unknown, by 1,129,000 votes.Kennedy's initial foray into health care issues came in 1966 after he became aware of the difficulties facing Boston public-housing residents who had to rely on the city's teaching hospitals. Although they lived only four miles from the hospitals, it took them up to five hours to get there and back on buses and subways, including the time it took to wait in an emergency room.

In August 1966, he visited a community health clinic opened by two Tufts University medical school professors on two renovated floors of an apartment in the housing project. Within a couple of months, Kennedy managed to get money through Congress for a program of community health centers. By 1995, there were more than 800 centers in urban and rural areas, serving about 9 million people.

As a brother of a president on the front lines of the Cold War, he initially expressed "no reservations" about the American military commitment in Southeast Asia. That support began to wane after two trips to Vietnam and as U.S. involvement escalated toward the end of the decade.

He said years later, as quoted in Clymer's 1999 biography of the senator, that a trip he made to Vietnam in 1968 was the turning point. It left him troubled, he said, by the casualties the United States was causing and "the failure of the Vietnamese to fight for themselves." He came to believe that the Vietnam War was "a monstrous outrage."

By 1968, his brother Robert, then the junior senator from New York, had become the standard bearer of the antiwar movement. Some antiwar Democrats were urging Robert to run in Democratic primaries against President Lyndon B. Johnson. Edward Kennedy, who had grown close to his brother during their time in the Senate together, advised against it. He argued that a run in 1968 could not succeed and that it would damage his brother's chances for the 1972 nomination. Privately, he also was afraid that his brother would be assassinated.

On March 15, 1968, Robert Kennedy announced that he was running not "merely to oppose any man but to propose new policies." On June 5, 1968, Sirhan B. Sirhan, a Christian Palestinian outraged by Robert Kennedy's support of Israel, shot him in the head in the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.

After the assassination, Edward Kennedy temporarily withdrew from public life. He delivered the eulogy at his brother's funeral in New York City's St. Patrick's Cathedral and then spent the next 10 weeks sailing, often alone off Cape Cod, brooding about the loss his family had endured. He considered leaving politics altogether.

Returning to his senatorial duties in August 1968, he made ending the Vietnam War his top priority. He offered a four-point plan that included an unconditional bombing halt in North Vietnam and unilateral reduction of American forces.

Over the next few years, he made scores of antiwar speeches around the country. He condemned President Nixon's "Vietnamization" strategy -- in which the South Vietnamese took over more responsibility for military operations -- as "a policy of violence" that "means war and more war."

He supported every end-the-war resolution that came before the Senate until the U.S.-backed Saigon government fell in 1975.

In 1969, he wrested the post of Senate majority whip from Russell B. Long, a powerful Senate veteran from Louisiana. Winning by five votes, Kennedy at 36 became the youngest majority whip in the history of the Senate.

He lost the position to Byrd of West Virginia in 1971, in part because tallying votes and tending to tedious detail were not among his strengths, but also partly because of his preoccupation with a scandal two years earlier that claimed the life of a young woman and changed forever the arc of his political career.

On July 18, 1969, Kennedy attended a small get-together of friends and Robert Kennedy campaign workers on Chappaquiddick, a narrow island off Martha's Vineyard.

Late that night, the car he was driving ran off a narrow wooden bridge and plunged into a tidal pool. His only passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, one of the "boiler room girls" in Robert Kennedy's 1968 campaign, drowned.

Kennedy, who failed to report the incident to police for about nine hours, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of leaving the scene of an accident. He received a two-month suspended sentence and lost his driver's license for a year.

In a televised speech on July 25, six days after Kopechne's death, Kennedy confessed to being so addled by the accident that he was not thinking straight. "I was overcome, I'm frank to say, by a jumble of emotions: grief, fear, doubt, exhaustion, panic, confusion and shock," he said.

Kennedy's public statement did little to quell rumors about what actually happened. For years, speculation about the multilayered mystery was almost as intense as that surrounding the assassination of his brother, the president.

Although Kennedy denied rumors of intoxication or a "private relationship" with the young woman, lingering doubts about the incident ended, at least for a few years, any presidential ambitions the senator might have had.

He easily won reelection to the Senate in 1970, and by the late 1970s, the Chappaquiddick incident had faded enough that Democrats were again talking about a Kennedy challenge to a faltering Carter presidency. A 1978 Gallup poll showed that rank-and-file Democrats preferred Kennedy over Jimmy Carter the incumbent by 54 to 32 percent. Kennedy decided to run, but his brief, inept campaign managed mainly to wound the Democrat already occupying the White House.

The fatal wound to Kennedy's presidential hopes came during an hour-long interview with Roger Mudd on Nov. 4, 1979, when the CBS journalist asked him the most basic of questions: "Why do you want to be president?" His muddled, stammering response -- Kennedy "made Yogi Berra sound like [Israeli statesman] Abba Eban," columnist Mark Shields observed -- made the question moot from that moment on.

He stayed in the race until the 1980 Democratic National Convention in New York's Madison Square Garden, where the party faithful got a glimpse of the candidate who might have been when he delivered one of the great speeches of his career. In powerful, ringing tones, his "dream shall never die" speech called on the party to recommit itself to vintage Democratic values.

"Programs may sometimes become obsolete, but the idea of fairness always endures," he proclaimed. "Circumstances may change, but the work of compassion must continue. . . ."

He congratulated Carter and then concluded his speech with the passion and defiance that had become vintage Kennedy: "For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end. For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die."

Delegates leaped to their feet. Their uproarious demonstration lasted more than half an hour.

With the White House out of reach, Kennedy gave himself to the Senate and relied on a staff that most observers considered the best on Capitol Hill. His aides stayed longer than most assistants in other offices, in part because Kennedy entrusted them with responsibility and relied on their expertise. Occasionally, he supplemented their salaries from his own funds to keep them from leaving.

In 1987, he took the lead in opposing President Ronald Reagan's nomination of Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court. Kennedy portrayed Bork, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, as a right-wing activist and helped doom the nominee. "In Robert Bork's America," Kennedy said, "there is no room at the inn for blacks and no place in the Constitution for women; and, in our America, there should be no seat on the Supreme Court for Robert Bork."

His unsuccessful opposition to the high court nomination of Clarence Thomas in 1991 was less vocal, partly because he was preoccupied by an incident in which a nephew, William Kennedy Smith, was arrested and charged with rape in Palm Beach, Fla. (Smith was acquitted.)

The senator and his wife, Joan Bennett Kennedy, who struggled with alcoholism for many years, divorced in 1982 after 24 years of marriage. Tales of public drunkenness, womanizing and loutish behavior dogged him for the next decade. At the same time, he conscientiously carried out his role of family patriarch. As the oldest surviving Kennedy male, he was not only father to his own three children but also surrogate father to more than two dozen nieces and nephews.

In a 1991 speech at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, Kennedy made an apology of sorts for his personal misconduct. "I recognize my own shortcomings, the faults in the conduct of my private life," he said. "I realize that I alone am responsible for them, and I am the one who must confront them."

CONTINUED ON newswp4

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[Today's Newspaper] fom [The Washington Post]

[TedKennedy: 1932 - 2009]
Liberal Champion Propelled Family's Political Legacy
Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy Dies at 77 After Cancer Battle
By Joe Holley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 26, 2009; 7:29 AM

CONTINUED FROM newswp3

Kennedy seemed to regain his footing, personally and politically, after his marriage in 1992 to Victoria Anne Reggie, a lawyer from a Louisiana political family. She survives, along with Kennedy's sister; three children from his first marriage, Kara Anne Kennedy, Edward M. Kennedy Jr. and Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy (D-R.I.); two stepchildren; and four grandchildren.

In 1994, Edward Kennedy defeated a Senate challenge by Republican businessman Mitt Romney and never faced another serious battle for his seat.

Although his party lost the White House six years later, Kennedy remained in the thick of the legislative action. President Bush's signature piece of domestic legislation, the No Child Left Behind bill, was going nowhere in early 2001, when Kennedy, who had put his mark on nearly every education law since the 1960s, declared his support. He considered the bill a worthy effort to increase public-school accountability through rigorous standardized testing.

With Kennedy and Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) corralling skeptical Democratic votes, the most important education legislation in decades became law in early 2002.

Six years later, the law's renewal faced widespread opposition from those who considered No Child Left Behind a balky and unworkable intrusion into local control of schools. Kennedy again came to its rescue, despite his deep and bitter opposition to the Bush administration on a number of issues. He argued that the law had made schools better but that it had flaws that needed to be fixed.

On most other issues, most notably the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Kennedy was bitterly opposed to the Bush administration. He once said that his proudest Senate vote was his 2002 vote against authorizing Bush to use military force against Iraq.

"There was no imminent threat," he said in a 2004 speech at the Brookings Institution. "This was made up in Texas, announced in January to the Republican leadership that war was going to take place and was going to be good politically. This whole thing was a fraud."

In January 2008, at a rally at American University, Kennedy endorsed the presidential candidacy of another early opponent of the war, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.). Declaring that "it is time for a new generation of leadership" in America, he passed over his friend, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), who also sought the Democratic nomination for president. Kennedy campaigned for Obama until suffering a seizure that May.

Three months later, Kennedy left his hospital bed and flew to the Democratic National Convention in Denver. Slowly making his way to the podium to the cheers, and tears, of 20,000 rapturous fellow Democrats, he proclaimed, in a voice still strong, "a season of hope."

Delegates of a certain age heard echoes of his brother's 1961 inaugural address and of his own impassioned speech in Madison Square Garden nearly three decades earlier.

"This is what we do," he proclaimed. "We scale the heights; we reach the moon."

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[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[News > Media > BskyB]
Bill Bailey birdwatching show to be screened on Sky1
Comedian will reveal 'glorious British landscapes and rare native birds' in Bill Bailey's Big Bird Watch
Leigh Holmwood
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 26 August 2009 09.38 BST Article history

The six-part Bill Bailey's Big Bird Watch, made by independent production company Fever, will see the former Never Mind the Buzzcocks team captain reveal "glorious British landscapes and rare native birds", according to the broadcaster.

Bailey is one of a number of established stars snapped up by Sky1's new controller, Stuart Murphy, to front shows for the channel's autumn and winter lineup.

Murphy has also signed Big Brother presenter Davina McCall to host Sky1's new dancing reality competition.

McCall will present the nine-part Just Dance, her first show for the satellite broadcaster, which aims to find the UK's best amateur dancers through a series of nationwide auditions.

The show, being made by independent producer Shine TV and its subsidiary Princess, is due to air in January at the same time as the expected next series of Celebrity Big Brother, which McCall also fronts, although she is understood to have worked out a deal so the two programmes do not clash.

Holby City actor Angela Griffin will lead a push into daytime programming by Sky1, with a new daily stripped live talkshow, Angela and Friends.

Made by independent producer Crackit, the afternoon show will feature showbiz stories, lifestyle trends and special guests.

Former Blue Peter presenter Gethin Jones will also front a new afternoon quiz show, Sell Me the Answer.

Upcoming Sky1 drama will include 12 Days of Christmas, a dozen eight-minute silent films.

Love Actually star Bill Nighy has already signed up to star in one of the films, as have writers including Neil Gaiman and Guy Hibbert.

New factual series Your Hobby or Mine?, made by Princess Productions, will pit unfashionable hobbies against each other.

Sky1 has also secured the rights to new US comedy Modern Family. The 20th Century Fox produced show, which is due to air on ABC from the autumn, features three different kinds of families and how they raise their children.


[Environment > Cimate Camp]
Police to photograph Climate Camp demonstratorsOrganisers urge protesters not to show their faces to cameras

All environmental protesters attending the Climate Camp demonstrations today will be photographed by police, although organisers have told activists that they do not need to co-operate by showing their faces.

Senior officers said the tactic of recording images of those taking part in high-profile demonstrations would continue, with members of so-called Forward Information Teams being present at the six initial meeting points and the final secret camp destination, once it is identified.

Campers have been warned to watch out for police photographers, and are expected to respond by blocking their views with placards and banners and taking pictures of the photographers themselves.

The demonstrations will be the first test of public order policing since the G20 protests, when the Met was criticised for its heavy-handed tactics. Police have signalled a change in approach since the April demonstrations, which resulted in the death of Ian Tomlinson, but are to continue filming and photographing those attending. A third of the public believe filming protesters is an invasion of privacy, according to a YouGov poll of 2,000 people published yesterday.

Chief Superintendent Helen Ball, of the Metropolitan police, said taking photographs of protesters remained an important tactic.

She said police would also stop and search anyone they were suspicious of, but it is likely any such actions will be kept low key.

Ball said: "At the moment we will be photographing people on arrival at the camp because it is important for us to know if there are people coming who want to cause violence and disorder.

"We will not be routinely stopping and searching everybody going into the camp and we have briefed officers carefully on searching people and what the spirit of the operation is."

Police have made a last-minute plea for organisers to tell them where the camp will take place.

"We are putting in a neighbourhood policing team for the periphery of the camp and for the local community.

"But we have not been able to go further than that because we do not know where it is going to be."

Up to 30 officers based at the Met's Lambeth control room will oversee developments at the Climate Camp via a network of CCTV cameras.

Operators have access to more than 12,000 cameras across the capital, plus live feeds from the force's three helicopters.

Senior officers have split control-room operators into teams, watching different parts of London, until the final campsite is identified.

The control room will be packed with up to 150 people at the weekend, as the force oversees the Notting Hill carnival, its biggest annual policing event.

About 200 extra officers have been drafted in from five forces - Gwent, Cheshire, North Wales, West Mercia and City of London - to bolster numbers at the camp.

The police operation, dubbed Operation Bentham, is in the spotlight after angry clashes marred demonstrations during the April G20 meeting of world leaders in London.

The force will use a mobile police station, helicopter-mounted loudhailer and Twitter account to improve links with protesters.


[Copenhagen climate change summit 2009]
Rich countries must be prepared to make deeper cuts in emissions: Prescott
Former deputy prime minister launches climate change campaign and calls for equalisation of emissions per capita
Press Association
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 26 August 2009 11.09 BST Article history

Developed countries will have to take the lead in fighting climate change by carrying a greater share of the burden of reducing emissions, John Prescott will say today.

Securing a deal at Copenhagen later this year "will be 10 times more difficult than Kyoto", said Prescott, the Council of Europe's "rapporteur" on climate change, and a Kyoto protocol negotiator.

The former deputy prime minister will say at the launch in east London of a new climate change campaign called "New Earth Deal":

"Securing a deal at Copenhagen will be 10 times more difficult than Kyoto.

"We believe that any deal negotiated must consider the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.

"That means that social justice and the reduction of poverty must be at the very heart of any agreement. It also means equalising greenhouse gas emissions per head in each country.

"The climate change we're experiencing across the world has been caused by the richer developed countries. They must now recognise the central principle that the polluter pays.

"But since climate change affects all nations whatever their size, wealth or population, a consensus is absolutely necessary for a binding and sustainable agreement.

"Failure is not an option at Copenhagen and that's why our Europe-wide campaign will be galvanising public opinion to lobby governments to make that deal."

The campaign will include a Road to Copenhagen Climate Change Conference to be held at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg in September.

It will be attended by politicians and environmentalists from more than 60 countries, and will be opened by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change chair Rajendra Pachauri and feature a contribution from former US vice president Al Gore.

There will also be a social networking website where people can learn about the issues, follow the campaign on Twitter and Facebook, do their own climate change deal and have it automatically sent to their Council of Europe politician and the environment minister for their own countries.

The campaign will also feature a tour of schools and educational establishments where Prescott and other members of the Council of Europe assembly will deliver a presentation on climate change and listen to young people's concerns.

On Sunday, Prescott risked the wrath of green campaigners by warning a "plan B" may be necessary if agreement is not reached between the main parties. "A lot of people fear that if you moved away from those [2020 and 2050] targets you would get the NGOs screaming and shouting, 'you have sold out', but I had to ignore them to get the deal at Kyoto'," he said.

news20090826gc2

[News] from [guardian.co.uk]

[World news > Edward Kennedy]
Senator Ted Kennedy dies aged 77
One of the most influential and longest serving senators in US history had battled brain cancer since May 2008
Mark Tran and Lee Glendinning
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 26 August 2009 08.51 BST Article history

Ted Kennedy, the last surviving brother of America's leading political dynasty, has died of a brain tumour at the age of 77.

Edward Kennedy was the senior US senator from Massachusetts and a liberal stalwart of the Democratic party. At the time of his death he was the third longest serving senator of all time.

"Edward M Kennedy, the husband, father, grandfather, brother and uncle we loved so deeply, died late Tuesday night at home in Hyannis Port (Massachusetts)," the Kennedy family said in a statement.

"We've lost the irreplaceable centre of our family and joyous light in our lives, but the inspiration of his faith, optimism and perseverance will live on in our hearts forever."

The US president, Barack Obama, called Kennedy "the greatest United States senator of our time", praising his work on civil rights, health and improving the economic wellbeing of all Americans.

He thanked Kennedy for "his wise counsel in the senate" and his support in last year's presidential race.

Ted Kennedy was diagnosed with brain cancer in May 2008.

Like his two assassinated brothers – President John Kennedy and the presidential candidate Robert Kennedy – he had been expected to scale great political heights.

But his career was significantly blighted by the Chappaquiddick incident of 1969 in which the car he was driving ran off a bridge and plunged into the water, killing Mary Jo Kopechne.

Kennedy's death marks the twilight of a political dynasty and deals a blow to Democrats as they seek an overhaul of the healthcare system, one of Kennedy's personal goals.

John Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, and their brother, Senator Robert Kennedy, was fatally shot while campaigning for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination. The fourth brother, Joe Kennedy, was a pilot killed in the second world war.

When Ted Kennedy first took the Senate seat previously held by John in 1962 he was seen as something of a political lightweight who owed his ascent to his famous name.

Yet during his near half-century in the chamber Kennedy became known as one of Washington's most effective senators, crafting legislation by working with lawmakers and presidents of both parties and finding unlikely allies.

At the same time he held fast to liberal causes deemed anachronistic by the centrist "New Democrats" and was a lightning rod for conservative ire.

He helped enact measures to protect civil and labour rights, expand healthcare, upgrade schools, increase student aid and contain the spread of nuclear weapons.

"There's a lot to do," Kennedy told Reuters in 2006. "I think most of all it's the injustice that I continue to see and the opportunity to have some impact on it."

After Robert Kennedy's death, Ted was expected to waste little time in vying for the presidency. But then came Chappaquiddick. Kopechne drowned after crash on the Massachusetts resort island after a night of partying.

Kennedy's image took a major hit after it emerged he had failed to immediately report the accident to authorities. He pleaded guilty to leaving the scene and received a suspended sentence.

Kennedy eventually ran for his party's presidential nomination in 1980 but lost to the incumbent president, Jimmy Carter.

His presidential ambitions thwarted, Kennedy devoted himself to the Senate, where he was the moving force behind several important pieces of legislation on social issues, such as a rise in the minimum wage.

Kennedy's endorsement in the 2008 Democratic primary – much to the disappointment of Hillary and Bill Clinton – was seen as a huge boost to Obama's campaign. Obama said that as president he benefited from Kennedy's "encouragement and wisdom" even as the senator battled brain cancer.

Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, said Kennedy would be "mourned not just in America but in every continent".

The US Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, said it was "the thrill of my lifetime" to work with Kennedy. "Senator Kennedy's legacy stands with the greatest, the most devoted, the most patriotic men and women to ever serve in these halls ... The liberal lion's mighty roar may now fall silent, but his dream shall never die."

Tributes came from across the political spectrum – testimony to his ability to form close bonds with political opponents. The former first lady Nancy Reagan said: "Given our political differences, people are sometimes surprised by how close Ronnie and I have been to the Kennedy family. In recent years Ted and I found our common ground in stem cell research, and I considered him an ally and a dear friend. I will miss him."

Orrin Hatch, Republican senator from Utah, said: "Today America lost a great elder statesman, a committed public servant and leader of the Senate. And today I lost a treasured friend. Ted Kennedy was an iconic, larger than life United States senator whose influence cannot be overstated. Many have come before and many will come after, but Ted Kennedy's name will always be remembered as someone who lived and breathed the United States Senate and the work completed within its chamber."

news20090826nn

[naturenews] from [nature.com]

[Nature News]
Published online 26 August 2009 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news.2009.862
News
Renewable technologies increase energy sprawl
Biofuels will have the greatest impact on land use and habitat, study finds.
Amanda Leigh Mascarelli

{Biofuel crops could carpet an area the size of Indiana by 2030.Getty}

Millions of hectares of land will be needed to meet growing energy demands in the United States over the next two decades, according to new 'energy sprawl' estimates. The researchers behind the study say that biomass production for fuel or electricity generation will have the biggest impact on landscape and habitats.

The broad analysis of potential US energy and climate-mitigation scenarios compared the land and habitat impacts of various energy mixes — from nuclear power to biofuels — resulting from an array of policy options. The study is published this week in PLoS ONE¹.

In a supplement to the paper, the authors re-ran their estimates to take account of the likely impact of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, also known as the Waxman-Markey bill. The bill, which is awaiting approval by the US Senate, includes a cap-and-trade system to regulate greenhouse gases.

The researchers estimate that regardless of whether the Waxman-Markey bill were enacted, the amount of land affected by energy development by 2030 will be between 21-70 million hectares — an area which is, even at its lower bound, about the size of the state of Wyoming.

"A cap-and-trade bill may have some incremental effect in increasing energy sprawl, but most of the development that's going to happen is because of other laws that are already in place," says study author Robert McDonald, a landscape ecologist with The Nature Conservancy, a non-profit environmental organization based in Arlington, Virginia.

Those other laws include the US renewable fuel standard, which requires that the volume of renewable fuel blended into gasoline is increased from 34 billion litres in 2008 to 136 billion litres by 2022. That increase will require an area of between 19 and 31 million hectares — the largest component of McDonald's projected energy sprawl, despite the fact that biofuels are expected to comprise less than 5% of the country's total energy budget.

The US Energy Information Administration predicts that ethanol derived from corn alone might reach annual production levels of 39 billion litres by 2030. McDonald and his colleagues calculate that this would require more than 9 million extra hectares of land to be planted with corn (maize), an area about the size of the state of Indiana.

McDonald notes that not all of this development will necessarily result in habitat loss or affect virgin habitat. For instance, a farmer who grows one type of crop on his land might simply switch to growing corn for biofuels.

Climate or habitat?

Although there is an extensive body of data about the way that climate change could affect habitats and biodiversity, few studies have evaluated the impact of future energy development on land-use and habitat, says Jimmie Powell, a policy expert at The Nature Conservancy and a co-author of the study.

"If we are to prevent serious, damaging climate change, it will require one of the largest land-use changes in the history of the country," says Powell. "Because the change is so big, it's important that we do it carefully to minimize the environmental impacts of these new energy resources."

The authors outline several ways of reducing carbon emissions while limiting energy sprawl. These include energy conservation to reduce the need for additional energy and land use; proper siting of energy projects to reduce their impact on important habitats and endangered species; and a flexible cap-and-trade system that allows for offsets that would provide incentives for low-carbon-emitting activities.

Martha Groom, a conservation biologist at the University of Washington, Bothell, who was not involved with the study, agrees with these conclusions. "I'm someone who believes that habitat change is as big a threat to our world today and our society as is climate change," she says.

Groom is optimistic that policies can be shaped to promote options that have the least impact on land use and habitat change, such as algae for biofuels, but adds that boosting energy efficiency is crucial. "We can't emphasize enough that energy conservation may end up being one of our cheapest ways to do this."

References
1. McDonald, R. et al. PLoS ONE doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0006802 2009

news20090826bn

[One-Minute World News] from [BBC NEWS]

[Asia-Pacific]
Page last updated at 07:25 GMT, Wednesday, 26 August 2009 08:25 UK
Korea family talks set to resume
Red Cross officials from South Korea have crossed into the North for talks which could allow families divided by the border to begin meeting again.

The reunions have been suspended for almost two years, because of the worsening ties between the two nations.

This new round of negotiations reflects a recent improvement in relations between the two sides.

If the three-day talks are successful, family meetings could resume as early as October.

The BBC's John Sudworth in Seoul says that for hundreds of thousands of Koreans, separated from their relatives by war in the 1950s, time is running out.

The North and South are still technically at war, as a peace treaty was never concluded at the end the inter-Korean conflict.

Limited numbers

The talks are being held in the North Korean resort of Mount Kumgang.
"Since it is a meeting being held after a year and nine months, the main topic is the dispersed family issue," chief South Korean delegate Kim Young-chol said.

Even if talks are successful, it is likely that only a fraction of those families on the waiting list will be able to see their relatives in the highly emotional but all-too-brief meetings, our correspondent says.

Only about 100 families from the 100,000 or so searching for their relatives are likely to be involved.

In the early part of the decade about 16,000 families were briefly reunited.

The countries regularly held Red Cross talks to discuss family reunions and other humanitarian issues until late 2007.

However the reunions were stopped after South Korean President Lee Myung-bak took office in February 2008 amid North Korean anger at his policy of ending unconditional aid handouts.

He has tied a resumption of aid to progress on North Korean nuclear disarmament.

But in recent weeks, tensions have thawed slightly between the two neighbours.

Last week, Northern officials attended the funeral of South Korea's ex-President Kim Dae-jung.

US former President Bill Clinton also had talks in the North, where he secured the release of two American journalists.

North Korea also announced this month it will ease restrictions on cross-border traffic imposed last year amid the rising tension.


[Asia-Pacific]
Page last updated at 08:40 GMT, Wednesday, 26 August 2009 09:40 UK
Australia island gas deal sealed
Australia has given final approval for a huge natural gas project to be built on an island nature reserve off west Australia.

The project on Barrow Island will be run by US oil firm Chevron, and partners Royal Dutch Shell and Exxon Mobil, and will supply gas to China.

The companies have agreed to protect the local fauna, especially turtles.

However, environmentalists have criticised the A$50bn ($42bn; £25.6bn) project, known as the Gorgon gas field.

Barrow Island is home to a number of endangered, rare and endemic species, including the Barrow Island mouse and the flatback turtle.

Exxon Mobil earlier signed a $41.8m deal to export gas from its share of the project to PetroChina over 20 years.

The deal, to sell 2.25 million tonnes of gas over two decades, is the biggest resources deal in Australia's history.

It comes at a time of tension with China, Australia's biggest export market, over the arrest of an Australian Rio Tinto mining executive for alleged commercial espionage.

Environment Minister Peter Garrett said he was aware of both the economic size of this proposal, but also its potential environmental impact.

"The conditions I have placed on this proposal will make sure that there is no significant [environmental] impact," Mr Garrett said in Canberra.

"Barrow Island has been the location of industrial activities for some decades," he added, saying he had imposed 28 environmental conditions.

But Green politicians reacted angrily to the decision, saying Mr Garrett was signing off on the destruction of a unique environment.

"No environmental conditions can protect the environment of this island," Greens Senator Rachel Siewert said.

"And it is a nonsense for Minister Garrett to hide behind such conditions. It is inevitable that the island will be degraded."


[UK Business]
Page last updated at 11:23 GMT, Wednesday, 26 August 2009 12:23 UK
New high-speed rail plan unveiled
Network Rail has proposed a new £34bn ($55bn) high-speed railway line linking Scotland and London by 2030.

The line will serve Birmingham and Manchester, getting passengers from Glasgow to London in just two hours and 16 minutes, the rail firm said.

It rejected several alternative routes, including the east of England.

The proposed new High Speed 2 line will still need to be approved by the government, which is conducting its own rail network review.

The new line would become the country's second high-speed rail link after the line that runs from London St Pancras to the Channel Tunnel, run by the Eurostar service and connecting to high-speed lines in continental Europe.

New line

Network Rail's proposed new line linking Glasgow and Edinburgh with London, on which trains could travel as fast as 200mph, will also serve Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham.

{ JOURNEY TIMES FROM LONDON
Birmingham: 45mins, down from 1h 22mins
Liverpool: 1hr 23mins, down from 2hrs 8mins
Manchester: 1hr 6mins, down from 2hrs 7mins
Edinburgh: 2hrs 9mins, down from 4hrs 23mins
Glasgow: 2hrs 16mins, down from 4hrs 10 mins
Source: Network Rail}

It would cut travelling between London and Birmingham to 45 minutes, from a best time of one hour and 22 minutes currently.

Rail passengers would also be able to get to Liverpool in one hour and 23 minutes, from two hours and eight minutes now.

Network Rail, the company that runs Britain's rail infrastructure, said the new line would require more than 1,500 miles of rail, sleepers and ballast, as well as 138 bridges over roads and current railway lines.

Network Rail says the new line is required to ease the pressure on Britain's railways. It says passenger numbers have rocketed by 40% over the past decade, and that by 2024, many existing lines will be at full capacity.

Transport Secretary Lord Adonis told the BBC that high-speed links were vital for the future.

"This report makes a powerful case for high-speed rail in Britain," he said.

Lord Adonis said the company set up by the government to prepare a high-speed rail plan will take "full account" of the proposals and deliver a report by the end of the year.

Currently, the route proposal will be between London and the West Midlands, with options to extend the line to Scotland and the north of England.

Alternative options

The Conservatives' shadow transport secretary, Theresa Villiers, welcomed the announcement.

"Today's announcement provides further evidence that we need to take high speed rail to the north," she said.

"Unlike Labour, our high speed rail ambitions go north of Birmingham and we call on the Government to match our commitment."

Network Rail said it had rejected routes that would have taken the new line via Leeds and Newcastle upon Tyne, as well as a route that included Leicester and Sheffield and another option through Bristol and Cardiff.

It based its decision on a 12-month study involving 20,000 hours of work and more than 1,500 pages of analysis.

The firm said that the line would account for 43.7 million journeys per year by 2030, which would result in 3.8 million fewer vehicle journeys and fewer carbon dioxide emissions.

"If, as research suggests, up to three times as many passengers will be travelling on our railways by 2020, then it is important that we move quickly in planning today for the rail network of tomorrow," said Scotland's Transport Minister Stewart Stevenson.