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The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy
Simon & Schuster
February 2009
On Sale: February 17, 2009
480 pages
ISBN: 1439138176
EAN: 9781439138175
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
No figure in American public life has had such great
expectations thrust upon him, or has responded so poorly.
But Ted Kennedy -- the youngest of the Kennedy children and
the son who felt the least pressure to satisfy his father's
enormous ambitions -- would go on to live a life that no
one could have predicted: dismissed as a spent force in
politics by the time he reached middle age, Ted became the
most powerful senator of the last half century and the
nation's keeper of traditional liberalism.
As Peter S. Canellos and his team of Boston Globe reporters
show in this revealing and intimate biography, the
gregarious, pudgy, and least academically successful of the
Kennedy boys has witnessed greater tragedy and suffered
greater pressure than any of his siblings. At the age of
thirty-six, Ted Kennedy found himself the last brother, the
champion of a generation's dreams and ambitions. He would
be expected to give the nation the confidence to confront
its problems and to build a fairer society at home and
abroad. He quickly failed in spectacular fashion. Late one night in
the summer of 1969, he left the scene of a fatal automobile
accident on Chappaquiddick Island. The death there of a
young woman from his brother's campaign would haunt and
ultimately doom his presidential ambitions. Political
rivals turned his all-too-human failings -- drinking,
philandering, and divorce -- into a condemnation of his
liberal politics. But as the presidency eluded his grasp, Kennedy was finally
liberated from the expectations of others, free to become
his own man. Once a symbol of youthful folly and nepotism,
he transformed himself in his later years into a symbol of
wisdom and perseverance. He built a deeply loving marriage
with his second wife, Victoria Reggie. He embraced his role
as the family patriarch. And as his health failed, he
anointed the young and ambitious presidential candidate
Barack Obama, whom many commentators compared to his
brother Jack. The Kennedy brand of liberalism was
rediscovered by a new generation of Americans. Perceptive and carefully reported, drawing heavily from
candid interviews with the Kennedy family and inner circle,
Last Lion captures magnificently the life and historic
achievements of Ted Kennedy, as well as the personal
redemption that he found.
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