U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy has lost his battle with brain cancer, dying at his Hyannis Port home at the age of 77.
Edward “Ted” Kennedy was the ninth and youngest child of America’s most fabled family, so his notoriously powerful father Joseph likely had no grand ideas about Ted’s future, not in the way he did for first-born son Joseph Jr. and John Fitzgerald. Rather, Edward Moore Kennedy grew up bereft of the burden of great expectations. That he would nonetheless go on to become the greatest Kennedy of them all is both a testament to his character and a reminder of the hideous tragedies that gave him the opportunity in the first place.
With his passing, the liberal left has lost its most esteemed elder statesman, while the republican right is without its most feared and respected adversary.
By the way, here are 10 random facts about Ted Kennedy. I found this kind of interesting…
The first thing you didn’t know about Ted Kennedy is that he could have won a Super Bowl (provided he stayed with the Packers for 10 years after the organization tried to recruit him).
At 6-foot-2 and over 200 pounds, Ted was the baby of the family in name only. While attending prestigious Milton Academy (where the brother he idolized — Bobby — had also gone), Ted played offensive end on the football team, and he would do so when he got to Harvard as well. During his junior year, his tough-as-nails game on the gridiron was getting noticed and in 1955 he was a highly touted prospect and courted by the Green Bay Packers, who would win the league’s first two Super Bowls starting in 1966.
Ted Kennedy, however, wasn’t tempted. Rather, he told the team he was flattered but that he “planned to go into another contact sport, politics.”
It wouldn’t be wholly inaccurate to say that before he campaigned to win his brother’s Massachusetts Senate seat in 1962, Ted Kennedy had never held a job. Normal folks start out with paper routes, but only a Kennedy would — or even could — enter the workforce as a United States Senator.
As we remember Ted Kennedy, we’re happy to tell you three more things you didn’t know about the man even though it was his first real job, it would be the only one he ever needed. Ted Kennedy kept that Senate seat until the day he died, and his body of legislation, stretching over 47 years, is among the most impressive in congressional history. Brothers John and Bobby may have left deeper impressions on the nation’s cultural identity, but we’ll never know what they might have achieved. Maybe they would have been great disappointments; who knows? Only Ted would see his potential through to the end, and the enormous contributions he made to every pixel on the broader American landscape easily eclipse the combined achievements of his older, more celebrated brothers.
Losing his brother Jack to assassination in 1963 was tough on Ted, but Bobby’s murder was absolutely crushing; some scholars trace his future alcoholism to Bobby’s 1968 assassination. Nonetheless, Ted stood up and assumed a grand political birthright that was never designed for him. He also believed it was his responsibility to look out for the entire Kennedy family; to be a father figure to John and Bobby’s combined 13 children; and, if you believe Peter Evans’ 1986 biography Ari: The Life and Times of Aristotle Socrates Onassis, it was also his responsibility to look out for his widowed sisters-in-law. To that end, Evans claims Ted Kennedy went so far as to negotiate the prenuptial marriage contract between Jackie Kennedy and Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis.
President Kennedy had not even been dead a year when Teddy boarded a chartered flight to take him and a few others home to Massachusetts from Washington. The flight was uneventful, although by the time they began their descent into Barnes Municipal Airport, visibility was so poor that the pilot was forced to fly by reading his instrument panel only; in other words, he was flying blind. During final approach the plane suddenly went into a steep dive and crashed into an apple orchard, killing the pilot and an aide.
Although he suffered a broken back, among a host of other injuries, Ted was lucky to have survived at all, and the Kennedys narrowly avoided another family tragedy.
The last thing you didn’t know about Ted Kennedy is that his family’s massive influence stretched into the heavens.
JFK had been the nation’s first Irish Catholic president, and the Kennedys were known to practice staunch Roman Catholicism (or at least go to church and give that impression). Thus, all the Kennedy kids received First Communion when they were old enough, and Ted was no different. The ritual, which commemorates the Last Supper and Christ’s self-sacrifice, is a very important Catholic rite of passage, and apparently Joseph insisted it be performed by no less an authority than the Vicar of Christ himself, Pope Pius XII.
Source: Askmen
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