ted kennedy biography 2022

Review: Ted Kennedy, in a new biography, is better — and worse — than you thought

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Ted Kennedy: A Life

By John A. Farrell Penguin Press: 752 pages, $40 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

When Ted Kennedy feared that flunking a Spanish test would make him ineligible to play football at Harvard, he sent a friend in his place in hopes of securing a higher score. It was the second time Kennedy had tried this ploy, but this time it failed and he was expelled. His father, an imperious patriarch who dreamed of dynastic power for his sprawling family, was apoplectic.

“There are people who can mess up in life and not get caught,” he told his son. “You’re not one of them.”

It was a truth that helped define the future politician, who is freshly illuminated in John A. Farrell’s biography, “Ted Kennedy: A Life,” out this week.

His three older brothers — Joseph, John and Robert — died in war or at the hands of assassins . But Teddy lived long enough for his flaws to be fully exposed. All are laid bare in this book — the drinking, the infidelity, the selfishness, the casual cruelty, the emotional isolation.

The central riddle of Kennedy is how these weaknesses existed alongside the benevolence, loyalty, perseverance and wisdom that made him one of the most influential senators in modern American history. This is, after all, the same man who declared “I define liberalism in this country” years after abandoning a young woman at the bottom of a pond during a car crash in Chappaquiddick , Mass.

“His brothers were icons, frozen in youth and time,” Farrell writes. “To him now fell a more arduous duty: to carry that fallen standard, over decades, and deliver.”

Without a doubt, Kennedy often stumbled. And yet he also delivered, time and again, on civil rights, healthcare, immigration and more. More than just a personal profile, Farrell’s book revisits the origins of policy debates that still divide the country. Kennedy’s fingerprints are on almost all of them.

Ted Kennedy’s milestones and missteps

The senator leaves a deeper imprint than most presidents, even if tragedies temper his triumphs.

Aug. 27, 2009

Farrell’s book is also a character study of the ways the personal and the political can overlap and conflict. Kennedy may have withstood a series of scandals, but they also undermined his effectiveness as an advocate for liberal causes.

One of the clearest examples came in 1991. Restless late at night, Kennedy dragooned his son and nephew into joining him for drinks at a bar; each brought home a young woman. One of them accused the nephew of rape. The trial ended in acquittal, but not before becoming a media sensation that cast a harsh spotlight on a family that had shed its Camelot glow.

Right around this time, Clarence Thomas was nominated to replace Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. When Anita Hill accused Thomas of sexual harassment, Kennedy was in no position to help lead the fight against him. He passed his time at the confirmation hearings by doodling sailboats, and Thomas was confirmed.

“It really did come to a head in those hearings: this disconnect between many of the principles he had espoused publicly and the things that he had allegedly done personally,” Hill told Farrell.

Kennedy’s upbringing was simultaneously gilded and twisted. His family’s wealth afforded him every educational opportunity; he also faced cruelty and maybe even molestation in boarding school. His mother, Rose, was often absent and disinterested; his father, Joseph Sr. , domineering and demanding. When Kennedy became engaged to his first wife, his mother got her name wrong in a congratulatory note.

As the youngest of nine siblings, Ted was not viewed as a natural leader, and he became accustomed to acting deferential and pleasing others. So while his older brothers John and Robert struggled in the hidebound Senate, Teddy thrived in its clubby and hierarchical environs.

“Getting there early and staying late was all and everything in the U.S. Senate,” Farrell writes. “It was then a sump of aged men with liver spots, claws, and bourbon breath, who strode the chamber with reptilian gait and hailed one another with mellifluent courtesies.”

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Kennedy was only 30 when he became a senator, and he remained one until his death from cancer at 77. He was relentless until the end, fueled by passion for liberal causes but never hesitating to cut deals with conservative colleagues.

Farrell, a former reporter and editor at the Boston Globe, previously wrote biographies of Richard Nixon , Clarence Darrow and Tip O’Neill. He acknowledges in an afterword that it was daunting, if not foolhardy, to attempt a new book about Kennedy. Thousands of books have been written about his family, and Kennedy is already the subject of a two-part biography by Neal Gabler .

Even several years after Kennedy’s death, many of his papers remain under wraps, and Farrell writes that he “weighed surrender.” It’s to readers’ benefit that he did not give up, and his book is a monument to patience. Farrell mined historical archives from North Carolina to Kansas to California and many points in between. The result of his research is nearly 600 pages — not counting an extensive index and collection of source notes — that burst with detail.

Farrell manages to unearth new tidbits about one of the most scrutinized lives in American politics. A close reading of a family confidant’s papers reveals that after Mary Jo Kopechne’s death at Chappaquiddick, one of Kennedy’s sisters believed he wanted “to find some way to cover it all up.” (The confidant, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., left this out of his own memoirs, perhaps a reflection of his loyalty to the Kennedy family.)

The author also unearthed some of Kennedy’s diary entries, including his description of meeting with Samuel Alito when he was a Supreme Court nominee. Asked about Roe vs. Wade, Kennedy wrote in his diary, Alito said, “I think it’s settled” and “I’m a believer in precedents.” Seventeen years later, Alito would author the court decision overturning the nationwide right to abortion.

By this point, Kennedy was considered a “lion of the Senate.” In earlier years, he had paid a price for his longevity, struggling to adapt to conservatism’s resurgence and more aggressive scrutiny of his personal behavior. But now endurance had its benefits. In the final stage of his life, he helped assemble the healthcare legislation that Barack Obama would sign into law after Kennedy’s death, capping one of the great crusades of his career.

Kennedy expected everyone to pitch in to help push the law over the finish line, even a former advisor who protested that he was too old.

“I’ve got brain cancer,” Kennedy said. “I’m still fighting.”

Review: Jerry Brown gets the biography he deserves

Veteran Times journalist Jim Newton’s graceful “Man of Tomorrow: The Relentless Life of Jerry Brown” doubles as a history of postwar California.

May 8, 2020

Megerian is the White House reporter for the Associated Press and a former staff writer for The Times.

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TED KENNEDY

by John A. Farrell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 25, 2022

An exemplary study of a life of public service with more than its share of tragedies and controversies.

Farrell delivers a comprehensive biography of the late senator.

Ted Kennedy (1932-2009), writes biographer and former White House correspondent Farrell, was “a warm, playful human being who loved dogs, good times, song, and devilry.” As a young man, he was health-conscious, abstemious, and a hard worker, though the least of a family deeply embedded in politics. His habits and mindset changed after the assassination of his brothers John and Bobby, when, as one family friend put it, “Much against his will…[Ted] was suddenly the head of this extraordinary family, a position he never aspired to and never expected.” He bore that burden by womanizing and drinking, which became a troublesome hallmark. His political career was not always successful. Working on JFK’s presidential campaign, he found himself in above his head, and the Denver Post blamed him for Kennedy’s loss in Colorado. During that time, though married, he tried to seduce a woman named Judith Campbell only to be bested in the effort by JFK, who “reveled…at having beaten Teddy to the prize.” His first run for public office stirred up outrage among some for the offense of “trading on his brother’s name.” Yet, in his decades in the Senate, he forged working alliances on both sides of the aisle and helped craft significant legislation—e.g., the foundations of the Affordable Care Act. Farrell looks closely at some little-known aspects of Kennedy’s career, including his refusal to run as Hubert Humphrey’s vice president in 1968, which, Farrell suggests, might have enhanced Kennedy’s role as a national candidate and certainly would have changed the course of history. As this lengthy but engrossing narrative reveals, Kennedy, whom Senate colleague Alan Simpson called “one of the orneriest sons of bitches around,” got plenty done, including adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare.

Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-525-55807-1

Page Count: 752

Publisher: Penguin Press

Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | HISTORY | POLITICAL & ROYALTY | UNITED STATES | POLITICS | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | GENERAL HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

The osage murders and the birth of the fbi.

by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann ( The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession , 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

GENERAL HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | UNITED STATES | FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | HISTORY

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by David Grann

BOOK TO SCREEN

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children. 

He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions. 

Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006

ISBN: 0374500010

Page Count: 120

Publisher: Hill & Wang

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY

More by Elie Wiesel

by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen

by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal

by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel

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The Man Who Became the ‘Lion of the Senate’

John A. Farrell’s “Ted Kennedy” is a sympathetic take on a complex life.

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TED KENNEDY: A Life, by John A. Farrell

In 1982, Richard Nixon, the subject of John A. Farrell’s previous biography, mused that of all the Kennedy brothers, Edward was “the best politician. … He’s gregarious, he loves it, he’s warm.” Politically and otherwise, Ted Kennedy is much more congenial terrain than Nixon was for Farrell, who finds the most essential part of him in the spirit of his maternal grandfather, Boston’s rollicking Irish mayor John Fitzgerald: “The Honey Fitz in Ted was always ready to surface.”

But that component had to brave all kinds of emotional obstacles in order to break through. The son of a bulldozing father and cold, self-satisfied mother, Ted Kennedy, the family’s youngest child, spent much of a clowning youth being dandled and teased and convinced of his inferiority within the huge clan. An incipient playboy, temporarily expelled from Harvard for cheating (twice), he should have amounted to very little. The family’s later violent tragedies would sometimes make him speak of his own experience in “the second person — guarded against revelation, distancing himself from feelings.”

Farrell can, in his sympathy for his subject, let Kennedy’s core failings seem incidental, to soften terrible behavior with a kind of dictional lotion (Kennedy’s “hunger for ameliorating sensation”) and to dispense forgiveness even before laying out the particulars of an offense.

After running his brother Jack’s 1960 presidential campaign in the Western states, and with no more government experience than an assistant district attorney’s post, Kennedy was pushed by his father to enter Massachusetts’ nepotistic 1962 Senate race. He ran in the Democratic primary against Edward McCormack, nephew of the House speaker, and then, in the November general election, against George C. Lodge. The whole force of the White House carried him along: President Kennedy likely appointed an Italian as his secretary of health, education and welfare to help with one voting demographic, and the Washington fixer Clark Clifford was tasked with “handling the Harvard cheating story.”

When Ted arrived in Washington, he adhered to his family’s restrained liberalism (President Kennedy refused to let him attend the 1963 March on Washington), and he later managed to maintain a more civil relationship with Lyndon Johnson than his brother Robert did.

For all the eventual genuineness of his liberal fervor, as well as the diligence he could practice amid his own dissipations, it’s hard to escape the impression that Kennedy often had to ask others what he should think and what he should do. To some extent his life was more staffed than lived. During the mid-1970s, one aide advised: “Obviously you should do something unique and spectacular. I don’t know yet what that will be, but we’ll come up with it.” Soon enough, another young staffer named Stephen Breyer led him to the issue of airline deregulation, in those days a potential boon to consumers. The accomplishments did accrue, and Farrell does a particularly good job of highlighting the largely forgotten work Kennedy did on behalf of the world’s refugees.

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National Book Foundation > Books > Ted Kennedy: A Life

Ted Kennedy: A Life

Longlist, national book awards 2022 for nonfiction.

John A. Farrell is the author of Richard Nixon: The Life , which won the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography and the New-York Historical Society Barbara and David Zalaznick Book Prize in American History. More about this author >

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An enthralling and ground-breaking new biography of one of modern America’s most fascinating and consequential political figures, drawing on important new sources, by an award-winning biographer who covered Kennedy closely for many years.

John A. Farrell’s magnificent biography of Edward M. Kennedy is the first single-volume life of the great figure since his death. Farrell’s long acquaintance with the Kennedy universe and the acclaim accorded his previous books—including his New York Times bestselling biography of Richard Nixon, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize—helped garner him access to a remarkable range of new sources, including segments of Kennedy’s personal diary and his private confessions to members of his family in the days that followed the accident on Chappaquiddick. Farrell is, without question, one of America’s greatest political biographers and a storyteller of deep wisdom and empathy. His book does full justice to this famously epic and turbulent life of almost unimaginable tragedy and triumph.

As the fourth son of the close-knit but fiercely competitive Kennedy clan, Ted was the runt of the litter. Expelled from Harvard University for cheating, he was a fun-loving playboy who nevertheless served his brothers loyally and effectively. It was easy to take Ted lightly, and many did. But when he was elected to the United States Senate at the age of thirty to fill his brother Jack’s seat, something unexpected happened: he found his home and his calling there. Over time, Ted Kennedy would build arguably the most significant senatorial career in American history.

His life was buffeted by heartbreak: the violent deaths of his three older brothers, his own terrible plane crash, his children’s bouts with cancer, and the hideous self-inflicted wounds of Chappaquiddick and stretches of drinking and womanizing that caused irreparable damage to an already fragile first marriage. Those wounds scarred Ted deeply but also tempered his character, and, eventually, he embarked on a run as legislator, party elder, and paterfamilias of the Kennedy family that would change America for the better. John A. Farrell brings us the man as he was, in strength and weakness, his profound but complicated inheritance and his vital legacy, as only a great biographer can do. Without the story this book tells, no understanding of modern America can be complete.

Reading the Best Biographies of All Time

Review of “Ted Kennedy: A Life” by John A. Farrell

13 Sunday Nov 2022

Posted by Steve in Leaders / Politicians

≈ 4 Comments

biographies , book reviews , Edward Kennedy , John A. Farrell , Lion of the Senate , New Releases , Ted Kennedy

“ Ted Kennedy: A Life ” is John Farrell’s just-released biography of the youngest son of Joseph P. Kennedy.  Farrell is a former correspondent for The Boston Globe who has written biographies of Tip O’Neill and Richard Nixon (a Pulitzer Prize finalist and my favorite biography of Nixon among the twelve I read during my journey through the best presidential biographies).

Edward Kennedy (1932-2009) was the youngest of nine children and presumed to be the least likely of the four sons to achieve success or sustain the Kennedy brand. Although famously flawed, Ted was elected to the US Senate at the age of 30 and spent the next forty-seven years mastering its intricacies and advocating for social justice. He was the third longest-serving US senator in American history.

Like Farrell’s biographies of O’Neill and Nixon, this biography of Ted Kennedy is thoughtful, lively and engaging. And despite its 593 pages of text the narrative always moves briskly – rarely covering a topic to the point of exhaustion. While comprehensive, it is less a detailed exploration of Kennedy’s political and personal lives than a meritorious introduction to his political career and review of his personal flaws.

Farrell is a sympathetic biographer, but this is no fawning hagiography. The narrative unflinchingly exposes Kennedy’s numerous self-inflicted flaws including his negligence in Mary Jo Kopechne’s death, his failures during the ensuing cover-up, his shameless womanizing and boorish behavior and his alcoholism. At times, Farrell’s critique is delivered with a softer touch than Kennedy probably deserves.

There are many high points in this book. Among them: excellent background relating to what it meant to grow up “a Kennedy,” a touching look at Ted’s emotional state following the deaths of his brothers, a multi-chapter examination of Chappaquiddick, a revealing exploration of the Kennedy-Carter relationship and an engaging account of his presidential run in 1980.

But readers seeking the ideal combination of insight and readability will find this book imperfect. First, its fast-flowing narrative proves a double-edged sword. The narrative avoids burdensome detail, but there is often a feeling of skimming the tree-tops at the expense of richer context and deeper insight. (But anyone desiring a more detailed treatment of Kennedy’s life can turn to Neil Gabler’s gargantuan series on Kennedy – volume two is due out in 36 hours.)

This brisk walk through Kennedy’s life also minimizes personal moments involving Kennedy’s first wife and his children, particularly when they aren’t central to his legislative career. His divorce from Joan, for example, goes almost unnoticed.

Finally, readers without much background in history will not find much assistance here. Farrell includes just enough context to hold the story together; topics such as Watergate, Vietnam and the Cold War receive surprisingly little direct attention. And, strangely, there is virtually no insight into Kennedy’s view of fellow Massachusetts politician Michael Dukakis or his own race for the presidency.

Overall, John Farrell’s biography of Ted Kennedy is an enjoyable and interesting journey through the life of the “Lion of the Senate.”  It is best for someone seeking a comprehensive introduction to Kennedy without too much detail (and who is already broadly familiar with the events of his era). For others, this biography is likely to prove solid but not fully satisfying.

Overall rating: 4 stars

4 thoughts on “Review of “Ted Kennedy: A Life” by John A. Farrell”

November 13, 2022 at 12:57 pm

Farrell’s excellent biography of Clarence Darrow is recommended.

November 13, 2022 at 1:00 pm

Thanks – that’s the one book by Farrell I haven’t yet read but it sounds quite good.

December 17, 2022 at 5:09 pm

I will second this recommendation. It’s the first book of his I’ve read and it’s very, very good.

November 14, 2022 at 10:35 am

Thanks for this review. I always appreciate your advice concerning what a prospective reader brings to the book, as to whether expectations will be satisfied.

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Review: Ted Kennedy, in a new biography, is better — and worse — than you thought

When Ted Kennedy feared that flunking a Spanish test would make him ineligible to play football at Harvard, he sent a friend in his place in hopes of securing a higher score. It was the second time Kennedy had tried this ploy, but this time it failed and he was expelled. His father, an imperious patriarch who dreamed of dynastic power for his sprawling family, was apoplectic.

“There are people who can mess up in life and not get caught,” he told his son. “You’re not one of them.”

It was a truth that helped define the future politician, who is freshly illuminated in John A. Farrell’s biography, “Ted Kennedy: A Life,” out this week.

His three older brothers — Joseph, John and Robert — died in war or at the hands of assassins . But Teddy lived long enough for his flaws to be fully exposed. All are laid bare in this book — the drinking, the infidelity, the selfishness, the casual cruelty, the emotional isolation.

The central riddle of Kennedy is how these weaknesses existed alongside the benevolence, loyalty, perseverance and wisdom that made him one of the most influential senators in modern American history. This is, after all, the same man who declared “I define liberalism in this country” years after abandoning a young woman at the bottom of a pond during a car crash in Chappaquiddick , Mass.

“His brothers were icons, frozen in youth and time,” Farrell writes. “To him now fell a more arduous duty: to carry that fallen standard, over decades, and deliver.”

Without a doubt, Kennedy often stumbled. And yet he also delivered, time and again, on civil rights, healthcare, immigration and more. More than just a personal profile, Farrell’s book revisits the origins of policy debates that still divide the country. Kennedy’s fingerprints are on almost all of them.

Farrell's book is also a character study of the ways the personal and the political can overlap and conflict. Kennedy may have withstood a series of scandals, but they also undermined his effectiveness as an advocate for liberal causes.

One of the clearest examples came in 1991. Restless late at night, Kennedy dragooned his son and nephew into joining him for drinks at a bar; each brought home a young woman. One of them accused the nephew of rape. The trial ended in acquittal, but not before becoming a media sensation that cast a harsh spotlight on a family that had shed its Camelot glow.

Right around this time, Clarence Thomas was nominated to replace Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. When Anita Hill accused Thomas of sexual harassment, Kennedy was in no position to help lead the fight against him. He passed his time at the confirmation hearings by doodling sailboats, and Thomas was confirmed.

“It really did come to a head in those hearings: this disconnect between many of the principles he had espoused publicly and the things that he had allegedly done personally,” Hill told Farrell.

Kennedy’s upbringing was simultaneously gilded and twisted. His family’s wealth afforded him every educational opportunity; he also faced cruelty and maybe even molestation in boarding school. His mother, Rose, was often absent and disinterested; his father, Joseph Sr. , domineering and demanding. When Kennedy became engaged to his first wife, his mother got her name wrong in a congratulatory note.

As the youngest of nine siblings, Ted was not viewed as a natural leader, and he became accustomed to acting deferential and pleasing others. So while his older brothers John and Robert struggled in the hidebound Senate, Teddy thrived in its clubby and hierarchical environs.

“Getting there early and staying late was all and everything in the U.S. Senate,” Farrell writes. “It was then a sump of aged men with liver spots, claws, and bourbon breath, who strode the chamber with reptilian gait and hailed one another with mellifluent courtesies.”

Kennedy was only 30 when he became a senator, and he remained one until his death from cancer at 77. He was relentless until the end, fueled by passion for liberal causes but never hesitating to cut deals with conservative colleagues.

Farrell, a former reporter and editor at the Boston Globe, previously wrote biographies of Richard Nixon , Clarence Darrow and Tip O’Neill. He acknowledges in an afterword that it was daunting, if not foolhardy, to attempt a new book about Kennedy. Thousands of books have been written about his family, and Kennedy is already the subject of a two-part biography by Neal Gabler .

Even several years after Kennedy’s death, many of his papers remain under wraps, and Farrell writes that he “weighed surrender.” It’s to readers’ benefit that he did not give up, and his book is a monument to patience. Farrell mined historical archives from North Carolina to Kansas to California and many points in between. The result of his research   is nearly 600 pages — not counting an extensive index and collection of source notes — that burst with detail.

Farrell manages to unearth new tidbits about one of the most scrutinized lives in American politics. A close reading of a family confidant’s papers reveals that after Mary Jo Kopechne’s death at Chappaquiddick, one of Kennedy’s sisters believed he wanted “to find some way to cover it all up.” (The confidant, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., left this out of his own memoirs, perhaps a reflection of his loyalty to the Kennedy family.)

The author also unearthed some of Kennedy’s diary entries, including his description of meeting with Samuel Alito when he was a Supreme Court nominee. Asked about Roe vs. Wade, Kennedy wrote in his diary, Alito said, “I think it’s settled” and “I’m a believer in precedents.” Seventeen years later, Alito would author the court decision overturning the nationwide right to abortion.

By this point, Kennedy was considered a “lion of the Senate.” In earlier years, he had paid a price for his longevity, struggling to adapt to conservatism’s resurgence and more aggressive scrutiny of his personal behavior. But now endurance had its benefits. In the final stage of his life, he helped assemble the healthcare legislation that Barack Obama would sign into law after Kennedy's death, capping one of the great crusades of his career.

Kennedy expected everyone to pitch in to help push the law over the finish line, even a former advisor who protested that he was too old.

“I’ve got brain cancer,” Kennedy said. “I’m still fighting.”

Megerian is the White House reporter for the Associated Press and a former staff writer for The Times.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times .

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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B09R6W3ZKV
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Press (October 25, 2022)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 25, 2022
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 67694 KB
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About the author

John a. farrell.

John A. Farrell (www.jafarrell.com) graduated from the University of Virginia "with distinction" in 1975 and embarked on a prize-winning career as a newspaperman, most notably for The Denver Post and The Boston Globe. He covered every presidential campaign from 1976 through 2012, parts of two wars and the troubles in Northern Ireland. He moved to Washington for the Globe and served as White House correspondent and Washington editor. He has also driven an ice cream truck, shined shoes, waited tables, cared for the animals in a medical laboratory, worked as a construction worker, labored on an Israeli kibbutz and served as a gallery guard at the Masters golf tournament. He has a Ph.D. in history from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. In 2001 he published "Tip O'Neill and the Democratic Century," a biography of the late Speaker of the House which won the Hardeman prize for the best book on Congress. An excerpt was included in "Pols: Great Writers on American Politicians," a 2004 anthology edited by Jack Beatty. Farrell's biography of the great American defense lawyer, "Clarence Darrow: Attorney For The Damned," won the 2012 Los Angeles Times book award for the best biography of the year. His last book, "Richard Nixon: The Life" was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His new book, "Ted Kennedy: A Life," was a long list finalist for the National Book Award.

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John A. Farrell discusses new biography of Ted Kennedy

John A. Farrell’s new biography of Edward Kennedy is the first single-volume exploration into the life of the Lion of the Senate since his death. Farrell’s long acquaintance with the Kennedy universe helped garner him access to a remarkable range of new sources, including segments of Kennedy’s personal diary and his private confessions to members of his family in the days that followed the accident on Chappaquiddick. The book is "Ted Kennedy: A Life."

Ted Kennedy’s Complicated Legacy, from Chappaquidick to Senate Lion

T he town of Pawling, in the foothills of the Berkshires, is some 70 miles north of New York. For more than a century, it has been a haven for the wealthy and the famous fleeing Gotham’s grime and clamor. Jean Kennedy Smith and her husband Stephen owned a pastoral estate there. In the years after her brothers John and Robert were murdered, the Smiths would invite itinerant Kennedys and good friends like the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and his wife Alexandra, to join them. They would hike, gossip, and enjoy fine food and drink. The memories they shared were bittersweet, and yet the time was pleasant.

In November 1972, on the weekend after Thanksgiving, the Smiths and the Schlesingers were joined by Jean’s brother Ted, the senator from Massachusetts. They played tennis and talked politics. A few weeks earlier, President Richard Nixon had scored a landslide victory over George McGovern. Kennedy proposed that “race was the hidden issue of the campaign and felt rather pessimistic about the possibility of stopping the drift of low-income whites, who feel threatened by racial change, into the Republican Party,” Schlesinger wrote. “Ted was especially scornful of Nixon as the first President since Hoover who did not move the racial justice issue forward.”

In the wake of McGovern’s defeat, Kennedy was a favorite for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976. That Sunday morning, Kennedy pulled Schlesinger aside. He had been giving much thought to issues like trade, and the effects of a globalized economy on American workers, Kennedy said. What travel, what speeches, what moves within the party did Schlesinger recommend?

“It was evident that he had already thought about it very carefully and intelligently,” the scholar wrote in his journal. The senator seemed “a much-changed person from the Ted Kennedy of a decade ago. He… is entirely capable of noise and boisterousness; but he is fundamentally much more serious, and…consistently comes back to issues…trade, Ireland, his health program…”

Schlesinger had a publisher’s deadline to meet and departed for Manhattan. Alexandra stayed behind. Just before lunch, she and the Smiths were joined by “a gorgeous Hungarian girl,” Alexandra reported to her husband. “This turned out to be a girl Teddy had picked up on the train from New York to Pawling.” The romance, Alexandra said, “was moving fast.”

Ted Kennedy was 40, married, and the father of three young children. His presidential hopes for 1972 had been snuffed by the scandal over the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, who drowned in his car in a late-night accident on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969. His foes then, and ever after, would wield his reputation as a rake to wound him. But here he was, enticing a young woman on a train.

“How is one to put together the senator, so serious about issues, so absorbed by political strategy, with the playboy, picking unknown Hungarian girls up in trains?” Schlesinger asked his diary. “If fornication were the purpose, he could undoubted find plenty of girls he knows already. Why run the extra risk? Do tensions build up inside him that require this particular outlet? Or is it an inherent lack of self-discipline? Or perhaps he is unconsciously seeking another disaster that might rule him forever out of the Presidency?”

It was a perplexing thing—to identify the causes of the “flaw in someone who has become otherwise a most able and impressive man”— the historian wrote.

Ted Kennedy was the youngest of three brothers who had instrumental roles in the landmark movements for social justice which transfused American politics in the 20th century. At his death in 2009, at the age of 77, he was hailed by Republicans and Democrats, the media, and the President of the United States as the “Lion of the Senate.” In the history of the American republic, only four men have served longer than his 46 years in the U.S. Senate. Given the collaborative nature of American government, it would mean little to cite the thousand bills and amendments that bore Kennedy’s name. He could not have done it alone. But it is valid to list the causes to which he made a significant contribution. His life serves as a lens through which to look at liberalism.

Do poor folk, seniors, children and working families have ready access to affordable health care and prescription drugs? Have the world’s nuclear arsenals been reduced from their menacing Cold War status? Do public schools face higher standards, and receive federal aid? Do young people, blacks and other minorities have access to vote? Have the inequities of the Vietnam-era draft been replaced by a fairer, volunteer army? Do the National Institutes of Health stand guard against diseases like AIDS, or Covid-19? Did the minimum wage keep pace with time? Do women get their fair share of athletic and academic scholarships, and are they otherwise treated as equal to men? Can immigrants of all races bring their families to the U.S.? Are hotels, airports, trains, stores, jobs, schools, and restaurants open to the disabled, to gays, and to darker-skinned Americans?

“It is your misfortune that you are part of such a prodigious family,” the economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote to Kennedy in 1989. “Alone no one would imagine you had an equal.”

Along with civil rights, the crusade for universally accessible health care was “the cause of his life,” said Kennedy. He spent 28 of his 46 years in Congress serving in conservative, Republican presidencies—playing defense against their sustained attack on liberal principles. He managed, like a courier bearing a vital message through a World War I battlefield, to keep that cause intact and take part in its attainment. When Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act in 2010 his thoughts were of his mother, who died young of cancer, and of Ted Kennedy, who had succumbed to brain cancer the previous summer, after helping to craft the final bill. “He was given the gift of time that his brothers were not, and he used that gift to touch as many lives and right as many wrongs as the years would allow,” Obama said, at Kennedy’s funeral. He was “the greatest legislator of our time.”

Kennedy’s engaging personality and political gifts—his jocular temperament; fame and family, one-on-one negotiating skills—were assets in the chamber, as were his way with a song, and his gift for camaraderie. He could storm on the Senate floor—as when he single-handedly launched the successful opposition to the nomination of Robert Bork, a conservative idealogue, to the Supreme Court in 1987.

Yet in a way unimaginable in today’s polarized era, Kennedy as gifted at identifying and recruiting Republican colleagues who were receptive to bipartisan collaboration on health care, civil rights, and other issues. Here is a partial list of the Republican leaders who joined with Kennedy on landmark measures that improved American lives: Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush, Bush, McCain, Dole, Hatch, Romney, Dirksen, Simpson, Javits, Kassebaum, Quayle, Gramm, Graham, Baker, Scott, Lott, Rudman, Weicker, Hatfield, Danforth, Jeffords, Lugar, Brownback and Brooke. In our current divide it is enlightening—indeed, somewhat stunning—to study his legislative success.

Now, when the once-mighty Senate has mortgaged its independence to presidencies, popular idiocies and party donors, Kennedy’s methods are especially worth examination. He leveraged his wealth and fame wisely, spending that family coin like a philanthropic heir, on social justice and expanded health care and other benefits for those who had not been blessed, as he had, with good looks, education, and a family fortune. He began by recruiting top notch talent to his staff. These aides acted as scouts, gathering reports of promising political stirrings on Capitol Hill. With an issue in hand, Kennedy would tap the expertise of noted scholars, scientists, doctors, and business folk— often by inviting the flattered experts to tutoring sessions or “issues dinners” at his home. Kennedy would then prepare, rehearse and study, until he knew the goal, and the ways to get there, as well as any colleague.

Thus armed, Kennedy was ready to drive a bargain. He knew the important senators, of both political parties, and the partisan environment in their states. He knew what personal and political factors could influence them. Was Senator X in trouble with organized labor, or another interest group back home? Did Senator Y have a brother with a learning disability or a personality disorder, that would make the senator more amenable to mental health reform? How about Senator Z, who was facing a tough re-election—wouldn’t his name on a bill with Ted Kennedy, and a bill-signing ceremony at the White House, swing votes? He knew how to exploit the lure of legacy. Senators are men and women of vanity, conceit and ego. Collaboration with a Kennedy earned them a celebrated place in history.

Kennedy’s story is no dull slog through the arcana of legislating, however. It is rich with drama and contention. He was born into great wealth and prominence. Yet his father was absent, his mother cold. He was shipped from boarding school to school. And then much of his adult life was marred by grief and horror.

Consider the blows that fortune dealt him; it is a long list, and almost any one of its entries would serve as a defining—and potentially incapacitating—moment in an individual’s life.

In 1964 Kennedy was rescued near death, with a broken back, from the remnants of an airplane that crashed in an orchard on a foggy night. The pilot and the passenger sitting next to the senator—one of Kennedy’s aides—were killed. Kennedy could not walk for six months and lived in pain for the rest of his years. Such an ordeal, for almost anyone, would be the riveting moment of their lives. For Kennedy, it was almost parenthetical.

Airplane disasters would claim the lives of three members of his family—a brother, a sister and his nephew, John Kennedy Jr. Another sister was enfeebled, mentally, by a surgeon’s error. Ted’s first wife, Joan Bennett Kennedy, suffered from alcoholism. All three of their children—sons Patrick and Ted Jr., and daughter Kara—were stricken by cancer. Pause and imagine: having three children, and all of them contract cancer before they reach middle-age. Kennedy had his own struggle with alcohol, and all three of his children would be treated for substance abuse.

All memorable, commanding events—and all relegated to footnotes by the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy , shot by crazy men, five years apart.

“Where else but in gothic fiction, where else among real people, could one encounter such triumphs and tragedies, such beauty and charm and ambition and pride and human wreckage, such dedication to the best and lapses into the mire of life; such vulgar, noble, driven, generous, self-centered, loving, suspicious, devious, honorable, vulnerable, indomitable people?” the writer and diplomat, Clare Boothe Luce, asked about the Kennedys.

The flawed youngest brother was a sensualist, with a merry disposition, whose privileged upbringing led him to take risks in search of thrills and pleasure—believing that his status and wealth would allow him to wriggle free from consequences. In 1969, after a day of sailing and too much drink, he drove off a crude wooden bridge on Chappaquiddick. His car came to rest, upside down, in nine feet of water. His companion that night, a young woman named Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned. He did not notify the authorities until ten hours had passed, the life was gone from the young woman, and traces of liquor had faded from his bloodstream. He was convicted of leaving the scene of a harmful accident and sentenced to two months in jail. The sentence, as was customary, was suspended. He made a televised appeal to the voters of Massachusetts and was reelected six times thereafter.

The guilt he bore, mingling with his other griefs, turned Kennedy toward a life of frenetic activity, some of which led to the bottom of a glass, comely companions and a tabloid roasting, and some to his restless, ceaseless pursuit of legislative accomplishment. His constituency, seeing this, cut him slack—in ways unimaginable in the #MeToo era. On the day in 1993 that Kennedy became the longest-serving senator in Massachusetts history, Martin Nolan of the hometown Boston Globe turned to Shakespeare, likening Kennedy to Sir John Falstaff, and quoting the fat knight’s plea to Henry V.

“If to be old and merry be a sin, then many an old host that I know is damned,” said Falstaff. “No, my good lord…for sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff and therefore more valiant, being, as he is old Jack Falstaff, banish him not….Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.”

As his biographer, I came to my own literary analogy. I found him, in his quest for redemption, much like Joseph Conrad’s flawed protagonist, Lord Jim—a young naval officer who, in a moment of panic, flees a ship jammed with terrified passengers caught in a maelstrom, and so is consigned to a life of atonement. “When yet very young, he became chief mate of a fine ship,” Conrad wrote, “without ever having been tested by those events that show in the light of day the inner worth of a man…not only to others but also to himself…`I shall be faithful,’ he said…letting his eyes wander upon the waters, whose blueness had changed to a gloomy purple under the fires of sunset.”

As part of my research, I searched Schlesinger’s unpublished diaries, discovering that the historian had recorded Kennedy’s private accounts of the accident on Chappaquiddick. In public, Kennedy attributed the ten-hour delay between the accident, and his reporting it to the police, as the product of a shocked and confused state of mind. But after talking to her brother in the days after the accident, “Jean thinks that he panicked—that he hoped…he could find some way to cover it up,” Schlesinger told his diary.

“It was not, she says, that he was worried about the Presidency:`He didn’t want to be President. He was sure that he would be killed if he became President.’”

“It was rather that he could not bear the thought of letting down the family, of destroying all that Jack and Bobby had done,” Schlesinger wrote. “What happened to John and Robert Kennedy was beyond their control, while Edward Kennedy’s wounds are self-inflicted…He is accusing and punishing himself.”

“The diving was very difficult: the water was black, the current swift and filled with blinding sand. None of them could see the body,” Schlesinger wrote. “Everyone agrees that Ted was not drunk in any serious sense. But he did have three drinks, and it might be argued that this amount of liquor, small as it was, constituted the margin that propelled the car off the bridge.”

Kennedy’s behavior had historic consequences. He ducked confrontations with Nixon over Watergate, and Supreme Court appointments. Doomed by the “character” issue, his 1979-80 primary challenge to a Democratic president paved the way for Reaganism. And, like no time since the accident on Chappaquiddick, Kennedy’s political standing was shaken by events in Palm Beach in 1991, when his nephew—who Kennedy had roused from bed for some late-night carousing—was accused of rape. The scandal—and the intense examination of Kennedy’s personal behavior that followed—muzzled the liberal lion at the historic instant when Clarence Thomas, a Supreme Court nominee, faced accusations of sexual harassment from Anita Hill, a former aide.

As a political reporter for the Boston Globe , I covered Kennedy through the Palm Beach scandal, the Thomas-Hill hearings, the 1994 re-election campaign and the senator’s curative marriage to his second wife, Vicki. At one point, I proposed that Kennedy resembled a great white shark, ever moving, propelled by the realization that to pause, to reflect, would be to drown in sorrow. A few days later, in the mail, came his sketch of a great white, signed: “Ted the Shark.”

Our frenzied celebrity culture and the undying commercial value of the Kennedy saga has combined, over the years, to be enormously distortive. “As I’ve grown older I have begun to marvel…at how much of my life I have spent among ghosts,” wrote Ted Kennedy’s niece, Amanda Smith, in a thoughtful introduction to a volume of her grandfather Joseph’s correspondence. “They are such restless spirts as only the strange 20th century cocktail of celebrity, technology and collective memory could produce…revivified for eternity in documentaries, news footage, miniseries and their reruns.” It pushed Ted and his family into the realm of Elvis, Marilyn and the Beatles, said Smith, “in the Oz of superstardom.” Her family, Smith reckoned, has generated more words than anyone or any one event—with the possible exceptions of Jesus Christ, or the American civil war.

Ted Kennedy was unique among his brothers in that he was granted the gift of years. This exposed him, however, to the deconstruction of the New Frontier, and the colossal proliferation of late 20th century celebrity scandal mongering. The two older brothers were frozen by death. Not so with Ted. The world got to see him comb gray hair. The question asked by Schlesinger in his journal—How to correlate the lion with his flaws?—remains unanswered. The dialectic has failed to produce a reliable consensus.

This much is certain, I concluded. He never got to choose his life. He was the last-born, the jokester, promoted by violent fate to pick up a fallen standard. His forays were marked by self-destruction. He did worst when the odds looked good, shined brightest when the cause seemed lost.

“On you, the carefree youngest brother fell a burden a hero would have begged to be spared,” Onassis once write to her brother-in-law. In private, she suspected that he had an urge “to self-destruct,” she once said, “from the fact that he knows he will never live up to what people expect of him.”

When Kennedy campaigned for the presidency in 1980, “he was running because it was expected of him,” said his friend, college roommate and Senate colleague, John Tunney. Kennedy had just “half his heart and half his mind in the campaign.” Kennedy won just 38 percent of the vote in the Democratic primaries.

He never saw the Oval Office. His legacy will always be tainted by his failures. And yet, above all, his is a towering, parabolic story of resilience. Through a life of grief and guilt and physical suffering, Kennedy spurned despair. He persevered. His goals, as even his ideological foes came to recognize, were generous and compassionate—“to make gentler the human condition”—he liked to say, echoing the ancient Greeks. It was no small goal; no small life.

Adapted from Farrell’s Ted Kennedy: A Life , published by Penguin Press

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Ted Kennedy. By John Farrell. Penguin Press; 752 pages; $40

Against the Wind. By Neal Gabler. Crown; 1,264 pages; $45

W hen he first ran for the Senate in 1962, Edward Moore Kennedy had just turned 30, the minimum age for entry into the upper chamber. His brother, John , 15 years his elder, was president; another brother, Robert , was attorney-general. The Kennedys were keen to keep the Massachusetts Senate seat in the family. Had his name been truncated to Edward Moore, his opponent chided, his candidacy would be a joke. Kennedy often recalled a notable campaign stop at a bakery in South Boston. “Hey Kennedy”, a baker called out to him, “they say you haven’t worked a day in your life.” Kennedy readied himself for the coming broadside. “Lemme tell you”, said the man, “you haven’t missed a thing.”

Ted Kennedy won the seat and remained a senator until his death in 2009 . And he did work, perhaps harder than any of his peers. For two decades speculation swirled about whether he would run for the White House. But he spurned Hubert Humphrey’s plea to join him on the ticket in 1968 (so soon after Bobby’s murder), turned George McGovern down in 1972 and eventually decided against a run in 1976, probably his best opportunity. Maybe he lacked the fire in the belly, or feared becoming the third Kennedy to be assassinated. Then there were the questions about his character: the womanising, the drinking and, above all, the stain of Chappaquiddick, where in 1969 a 28-year-old staffer, Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned after Kennedy drove his car off a bridge—and failed to report the accident for nine hours.

When he did run, challenging Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination in 1980, he struggled to articulate why he wanted to be president. He suffered defeat and the Carter-Kennedy confrontation, John Farrell laments, “split their party, crippled the progressive cause for a generation, cost the Democrats their hold on Congress, and put Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office”. So it was in the Senate where Ted would make his mark.

It was a mighty one; two hefty new biographies rate him a giant. “One of the greatest US senators, ever,” reckons Mr Farrell, who covered Kennedy for the Boston Globe , “preserving and advancing progressive ideals through decades of political peril”. Arguably “the most consequential public servant of the last 50 years and the one who did more to help his fellow men and women than any other,” concludes Neal Gabler of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Mr Farrell’s is the pacier work, Mr Gabler’s the more detailed and analytical. Both hail a champion of liberalism (which in today’s fuzzy parlance might be called “progressivism”) at a time when liberalism is under assault .

The youngest of Joseph and Rose Kennedy’s nine children, Ted seemed the least talented of the brothers, stumbling over words and plagued by feelings of inadequacy. The family thought he would never amount to much. At Harvard, fearing he would fail a Spanish exam, he cheated and was expelled. His marriage to Joan Bennett, who struggled with alcoholism, was lonely and ended in divorce.

Still, he could rely on the Kennedy brand and connections, plus a million-dollar trust fund from the age of 21. In the Senate he found his niche. He joined what Mr Farrell describes as “a sump of aged men with liver spots, claws and bourbon breath, who strode the chamber with reptilian gait and hailed one another with mellifluent courtesies”. Kennedy had the patience for the slow grind of legislation and he knew how to cope with a seniority system. He came to master the place and its special chemistry. He was gregarious and politically shrewd. He did not take disagreements personally, so could reach across the aisle to work with Republican opponents. He was also resilient, surviving family tragedies, a debilitating plane crash and personal scandal.

Kennedy championed enlightened reforms. He helped expand voting rights and widened aid for the poor as well as access to health care for children. Indeed, he had a hand in just about every new social law: during his time in the Senate he sponsored 2,552 pieces of legislation and co-sponsored nearly 7,000 others. But as America entered a more conservative era, from 1976 he spent 30 years playing for the defence, fighting for the soul of America.

That is where Mr Gabler picks up the story in “Against the Wind” (Kennedy’s earlier years are the subject of “Catching the Wind”, published in 2020). The apt nautical title comes from a speech Kennedy gave in Memphis in 1978. “Sometimes a party must sail against the wind,” he said. “We cannot afford to drift or lie at anchor.”

The scale of Mr Gabler’s biography invites comparison to Robert Caro’s volumes on Lyndon Johnson, another giant of the Senate. But whereas Johnson relied on arm-twisting to exercise power, Kennedy’s style and aims were different. His influence came through small gestures and endless effort. He was “the kindest and most thoughtful senator”—something no one would have said of Johnson—driven by a sense of “political morality” to act in the interests of the less fortunate.

There would be fewer landmark legislative wins during those decades of defence, though there were some notable ones: he collaborated with George W. Bush to set higher standards for public education, for example, and steered successive rises in the minimum wage. The Lion of the Senate, as he came to be called, wielded outsize influence, not least on foreign policy, from the Soviet Union (pressing for arms control), to South Africa (for an end to apartheid) to Ireland (for peace). Yet the crowning victory on health care, Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act in 2010, would come only after Kennedy’s death.

More than once Kennedy’s wayward personal life threatened to sink him. A new marriage in 1992 proved stabilising. The tireless work continued, as did the conspicuous compassion. He phoned the families of all 187 Massachusetts victims of the attacks of September 11th 2001—long calls during which he shared his own losses.

Being a Kennedy helped Ted get started. But eventually, Mr Gabler argues, he came into his own, escaping the self-possessed Kennedy stereotype of his father and brothers, with all the expectations that came with it, and the shadow of his siblings. “He had always been a Fitzgerald, like his grandfather, more a hardy, affable mess of a man”: a flawed but good person, in this sympathetic telling, who sought to make this a better world. ■

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “The lion of liberalism”

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