Edward Kennedy

Edward Moore Kennedy (22 February 1932 – 25 August 2009), known as Ted Kennedy, was an American politician who served as a United States Senator from Massachusetts from 1962 until his death in 2009 — a span of forty-seven years that made him one of the longest-serving and most consequential senators in American history. The youngest brother of President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Ted Kennedy lived under the weight of his family’s mythology and tragedy — the assassinations of both brothers, the death of his nephew John F. Kennedy Jr., and the Chappaquiddick incident that ended his presidential ambitions — and responded by building a legislative career of extraordinary substance and durability. His memoir, True Compass (2009), published shortly before his death from brain cancer, is one of the most candid political memoirs of the modern era.

Life and Political Career

Kennedy was born in Boston, the youngest of nine children of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. He was educated at Harvard (suspended for cheating in 1951, readmitted and graduated in 1956) and the University of Virginia Law School. He was elected to his brother John’s Senate seat in 1962, at the minimum constitutional age of thirty.

Kennedy’s early career was overshadowed by his brothers’ more dramatic political lives and by the Chappaquiddick incident of July 1969, in which Mary Jo Kopechne drowned after Kennedy’s car drove off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island. Kennedy’s failure to report the accident promptly — he did not contact police until the following morning — and his televised explanation of the events were widely regarded as evasive and inadequate. The incident permanently disqualified him as a serious presidential candidate, though he made a strong but ultimately unsuccessful challenge to President Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination in 1980.

Legislative Achievement

Kennedy’s legislative record is one of the most substantial in Senate history. He was the principal author or co-author of legislation in virtually every area of domestic policy: civil rights (the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Voting Rights Act extensions, the Civil Rights Act of 1991), health care (COBRA, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, the Mental Health Parity Act), education (No Child Left Behind, the Higher Education Act amendments), immigration reform (the Immigration Act of 1965, which he managed as a young senator), labour standards (increases in the minimum wage), and criminal justice.

His effectiveness as a legislator derived from his mastery of Senate procedure, his willingness to compromise and work across the aisle (he collaborated extensively with Republican senators including Orrin Hatch, John McCain, and George W. Bush), and his staff — widely regarded as the best on Capitol Hill. Kennedy understood that legislative influence comes not from ideological purity but from the ability to get bills passed, and he was willing to accept incremental gains that purists rejected.

The Kennedy Legacy

Ted Kennedy’s relationship to the Kennedy family mythology was complex. He was the youngest, the least intellectually gifted (by his own admission), and the one who was never supposed to be the standard-bearer. The assassinations of his brothers in 1963 and 1968 left him as the family’s political leader — a role he assumed with a sense of obligation that was also a source of enormous psychological pressure. His struggles with alcohol, his troubled first marriage to Joan Bennett Kennedy, and the Chappaquiddick disaster are inseparable from the weight of expectation and grief he carried.

True Compass (2009)

Kennedy’s memoir — written with the knowledge that he was dying of a malignant brain tumour diagnosed in May 2008 — is an uncommonly honest political memoir. He writes frankly about Chappaquiddick, about his drinking, about his failed first marriage, and about the personal costs of political life. He also writes with genuine passion about the issues he cared most about — health care, civil rights, immigration — and about the pleasures of the Senate as an institution. The book is, among other things, a defence of liberalism as a governing philosophy and of the Senate as a deliberative body, both of which were under considerable attack at the time of its writing.

The memoir was a posthumous bestseller; Kennedy died twelve days after its publication date.

Collecting Kennedy

True Compass (2009, Twelve/Hachette) in first edition brings $20–$50. Signed copies — Kennedy signed books at events before his death — bring $50–$150. Items associated with the broader Kennedy family (letters, photographs, campaign materials) are highly collected, but Ted Kennedy material is valued primarily by political memorabilia collectors and Senate historians.