Editor's note: Born into a family that for decades defined wealth, fame and public service, Edward M. Kennedy became one of the nation's most influential and longest-serving senators. Here is an overview of his life.
By THE REPUBLICAN STAFF
The youngest of nine children, Edward Moore Kennedy was born in Boston on Feb. 22, 1932, into a family that captured America's ideal of the brave, bright and beautiful. The Kennedys became America's first royal family.
The son of Joseph P. and Rose (Fitzgerald) Kennedy, born of Boston political families, Kennedy was raised a Democrat in a large family where the children - clever, daring and intensely loyal to each other, radiated an aura. Their lives were bigger than life.
The senator's life was a course in 20th century American history. In 1938, at six, the senator's family moved to England after his father was named ambassador to the Court of St. James. A year later, England would declare war on Germany.
His oldest brother, Joseph P. Jr., a fighter pilot, was shot down while on a mission during World War II in 1944. His oldest sister, Rosemary, was eventually institutionalized and lobotomized. His second oldest sister, Kathleen, was killed in an airplane crash in Europe in 1948.
In 1963, the second oldest brother, John F. Kennedy, a World War II vet, was elected president. His third oldest brother, Robert F., was the U.S. senator of New York. In 1962, Ted Kennedy made his political debut by winning a state-wide election in Massachusetts to fill the remaining two years of JFK's term. Now all three brothers were married with children living in Washington and presenting a New Frontier to America.
Then suddenly, the Camelot days that romanced America were gone. The magic left, leaving tragedy in its place.
In 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Five years later, during his presidential campaign, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles in 1968.
At 36, Ted Kennedy became the new patriarch of the clan.
"I went from being the youngest (boy) to the oldest," Kennedy said in an interview with The Republican in 1994. "When you are the youngest, you come from the vantage point of being able to observe and begin able to inhale the different patterns of life, of behavior, of values the strengths and weaknesses. You are able to watch while others set the path, set the trail, set the standards."
After his brothers' assassinations, there was enormous pressure to fill the void left by his brothers to run for the presidency. But he heard gunfire at the sound of a car backfire.
Kennedy escaped death himself on June 19, 1964 when a small plane that he, Sen. and Mrs. Birch Bayh and aide Edward Moss were riding in crashed near Barnes Municipal Airport. The pilot and Moss died. Kennedy suffered a punctured lung, three crushed vertebrae and two cracked ribs. He was hospitalized for six months. He began to paint.
It seemed the young senator lost his footing with the deaths of his brothers and he sought to escape the pain by excessive drinking and womanizing. In 1969, a year after the death of his brother, Bobby, Ted Kennedy drove off Dike Bridge on Chappaquidick Island, killing campaign aide, Mary Jo Kopechne, after a private party on the island. Kennedy said he dove into the water to try to rescue Kopechne without success. He left the scene, not reporting the accident to the police until the next morning.
It ultimately destroyed his chances of ever being president and the accident set the senator adrift for the next two decades as he tried to navigate the duties of being a husband, father, surrogate father to his slain brothers' children, son and U.S. senator.
Since Robert Kennedy's assassination in 1968, people had looked to Kennedy to run for president.
In 1980, at the age of 48, he unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination from the first-term incumbent President Jimmy Carter. The party lost the White House to Ronald Reagan.
Kennedy ran an unfocused campaign and only developed a clear vision of his campaign late into it. Still, his 1980 speech at the Democratic National Convention in New York became his political mantra for the remainder of his life despite the troubles in his personal affairs.
Kennedy told America about his liberal Democratic party where "the commitment I seek is not to worn out views but to old values that will never wear out. Programs may sometimes become obsolete, but the ideal of fairness always endures."
And, endurance became Kennedy's signature. If Jack Kennedy was fire and grace, Bobby Kennedy was fire and soul, Edward M. Kennedy's life spoke to a more workaday virtue - endurance.
He married Joan Bennett in 1958 and had three children together: Kara, Edward M. Jr., who lost a leg to cancer as a youngster, and U.S. Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy, D-R.I., who suffered serious childhood asthma and cancer. The senator became an expert on asthma and learned how to inject his sons with hypodermic needles for their cancer treatments. His marriage to Joan Kennedy ended in 1982.
Despite Ronald Reagan's wide popularity and 12 years of a GOP White House, Kennedy worked with Republicans in getting laws through Congress that benefited working families. He shepherded through bills that gave health insurance to children, increased the minimum wage, allowed portable pensions for workers and held drug companies to higher standards.
He became embroiled in another scandal in 1991 when a nephew was tried but acquitted for rape. According to the news reports, Kennedy had roused his nephew and son from their beds to go out drinking the Friday evening of Easter weekend at the family home in Palm Beach.
Later that year, Kennedy made a "mea culpa" speech at Harvard University, apologizing for "the faults in the conduct of my personal life."
It was his life's bottoming out. But, as in other dark moments of his life, he endured.
A year later, he married Victoria Reggie, a divorced mother with two school-aged children. Their marriage had romance. They performed for Kennedy staff at reporters during Christmas skits, they vacationed with the Clintons and brought two Portuguese water dogs into the family, Splash and Sunny.
His most difficult race came in 1994 when former Massachusetts Gov. W. Mitt Romney, at the time an energetic, intelligent and squeaky clean political newcomer, challenged him. Kennedy pulled himself together and won by 58 percent of the vote by remaining true to his code, running as a liberal and telling folks that the role of government should be to improve the lives of working families.
Since that time, Kennedy enjoyed huge legislative successes in laws that help the middle and working class access affordable health care, pay for college, protect pensions and create jobs.
While involved in the Northern Ireland conflict for 30 years, Kennedy traveled to the heart of "the Troubles" in January 1998 with his wife and his sister, Jean Kennedy Smith, the U.S. ambassador to Ireland, during a fragile moment of the peace accord. During a speech in Derry, he told families who had loved ones killed in the fight between Catholics and Protestants that their healing would begin if they chose to live on. In Belfast, the senator told teenagers that he valued the efforts of young Americans who shaped the civil rights moment and the anti-war movement in America, telling them, "Your generation has the most to win and the most to lose."
As he aged, he emerged as the family's pallbearer. He buried his mother, Rose. He gave the eulogy at his brother Robert's funeral. He buried two of Robert's sons, Michael who was killed in a skiing accident, and David who died of a drug overdose.
But when John F. Kennedy, Jr., the beloved son of the slain president, was killed in a plane crash in July 1999 with his wife, Caroline, and her sister, America seemed to appreciate the full measure of pain the senator had endured during the span of his life.
He lived his days at full throttle. He kept a back-breaking Senate schedule. He entertained his senate colleagues, friends and staff with stories he acted out, often making himself the punch line. He sang Irish songs at senior centers. On Capitol Hill, he railed away at the conservative presidential appointees. But George W. Bush had just moved into the White House and when the president invited Kennedy and his family to watch a new movie about the Bay of Pigs, a nuclear missile crisis his brother the president had to handle with Cuba in the early 1960, Kennedy graciously accepted.
In the 21st century, Kennedy was arguably the fiercest opponent to the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq in March 2003. Kennedy voted against the Senate resolution - with 22 other Senators -- in October 2002 to give Bush the authority to wage war. Months after the invasion, Kennedy told reporters that "there was no imminent threat. 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 June 2001, the Democrats were handed an unexpected gift when former Vermont Sen. Jim Jeffords defected from the GOP, thereby shifting the balance of power to Democrats by a one-vote margin.
The day before he reclaimed his Senate chairmanship, Kennedy met with the president and later emerged from the White House telling reporters about legislation to fund public education at historic levels and make health care affordable. More recently, he turned his attention to immigration and health-care reform.
As he said two decades earlier, "the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die."