Triumph And Tragedy

by Sean Wilentz - The see-saw life of Edward M. Kennedy

Over the past 40 years, Edward Moore Kennedy was the grand statesman of the Democratic liberalism that emerged out of the 1960s. He was a loyalist to his principles even when those principles fell completely out of fashion. He overcame personal flaws and searing travails to become a masterful legislator, congressional infighter, and builder of unlikely coalitions. Ironically, he achieved all of this only after he had surmounted the political entitlement that made his career possible in the first place. In an even deeper irony, of the three famous and powerful Kennedy brothers, it was youngest brother, Teddy the latecomer, who arguably had the greatest impact on American politics and government. These travails and these ironies gave Kennedy's life dimensions of American triumph as well as of prideful, classical tragedy.
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