Ted Kennedy

Scenes from an Epic Life

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• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781439138069
• eBook ISBN: 9781439148723
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito politico

The extraordinary life of senator Edward Moore Kennedy captures two vivid stories: one is of an iconic senator who experienced the greatest of triumphs and the most devastating of losses, and the other is a chronicle of the most dramatic moments in our recent American history, including the assassination of a president and the struggle for civil rights. Through more than two hundred stunning black-and-white photographs pulled from the pages of The Boston Globe and its extensive archives, Ted Kennedy: Scenes from an Epic Life provides a gorgeous visual account of Ted's incredible journey from his joyous birth to the tragic announcement of his battle with brain cancer, including highlights from his childhood in New York, Hyannis Port, and London; his days at Harvard and in the Senate; and his roles as devoted brother, husband, father, uncle, and grandfather.

In this unique collection, archival materials and fresh interviews combine to create a richly detailed portrait of the man known to many as Uncle Ted. Vibrant photographs, most never before published in book form (and many unseen for decades), as well as essays and quotations illustrate the man and the statesman from a perspective that is both intimate and objective. It is a collection in which Ted's closest and keenest observers provide the context necessary to appreciate his place in this most famous of American families.

Here you will find, among the many unforgettable photographs featured in these pages, contributions by such illustrious names as Stan Grossfeld, Ulrike Welsch, Ollie Noonan Jr., Paul J. Connell, and Ted Dully. Featured essays include the reflections of the Globe's former Washington bureau chief, Martin F. Nolan, and longtime photojournalist Bill Brett. Their images and words bear eyewitness testimony that will resonate with anyone who lived through the Camelot years or simply seeks to understand the Kennedy mystique. Ted Kennedy: Scenes from an Epic Life has no equal because Ted Kennedy's long, complicated relationship with the press has no equal. It is the rarest kind of pictorial history: it is history in the making.

The Early Years At Home with the Kennedys

Fun at Palm Beach, 1936. Jack shoulders Teddy as Bobby crouches below.

I am reminded of our awesome responsibility each time I gaze from the windows of my office in Boston. I can see the Golden Stairs from Boston Harbor where all eight of my great-grandparents set foot on this great land for the first time. They walked up to Boston’s Immigration Hall on their way to a better life for themselves and their families.

—Senator Edward M. Kennedy on the floor of the U.S. Senate on May 21, 2007, during a debate on immigration reform legislation

In 1886, Patrick Joseph “P. J.” Kennedy, a successful saloonkeeper and investor in banks and real estate, was elected a state representative out of Ward Two in East Boston. In November 1894, John Francis “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, fourth oldest in a family of twelve children, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives for the first of his three terms in that body.

Over the following two decades, both men, children of parents who had left a starving Ireland in the mid-1800s, lived true to form: “P. J.” kept his own counsel as ward boss in East Boston while continuing to sit in the Legislature, and the garrulous and flamboyant “Honey Fitz” came home to Boston from Washington to run for the mayor’s chair, which he won twice.

But it was with their children that the two men made their biggest marks on history: on October 17, 1914, Rose Elizabeth Fitzgerald and Joseph Patrick Kennedy were married. The scene at Cardinal William O’Connell’s private chapel was the first chapter in a remarkable American story.

Joe Kennedy, a Boston Latin School and Harvard College graduate, was a quick study and a dynamo, in person and across an office desk. His work ethic and instinct for profit-making stood him in good stead as he moved quickly in the years after his marriage to find stability and security for his offspring—five girls and four boys, the last and cheeriest of whom was Edward Moore “Ted” Kennedy, born in 1932. Between 1914 and the year of Ted’s birth, Father Joe earned millions, finding excitement and profit in such wide-ranging endeavors as banking, shipping, real estate, moviemaking, the stock market, brokerages, liquor, and government. And when the stock market crashed in late 1929, Joe Kennedy was one of the few who prospered and moved beyond the carnage.

After serving for fourteen months as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first chairman of the new Securities and Exchange Commission, Kennedy was nominated by FDR to one of diplomacy’s most glamorous positions: U.S. ambassador to Great Britain.

As the photogenic Kennedy clan, with adorable young Teddy commanding more than his share of the spotlight, began to gather in London for the introduction of the new ambassador to the king and queen, Adolf Hitler was moving aggressively all over Europe. Kennedy spoke with foreboding about the immediate future, and soon many in Britain and the United States were criticizing him for what they saw as his defeatist posture. War came in September 1939. A year later, Kennedy sailed back home to resume life in New York, Palm Beach, and Hyannis Port, now persona non grata with the Roosevelt administration for his strident isolationist views.

The resilient British proved the ambassador wrong about their imminent demise, and after Pearl Harbor, his sons Joe and Jack and, later, Bobby, directly joined the fight against the Axis powers. One made the ultimate sacrifice—Lieutenant Joe Jr., a naval aviator with twenty-five combat missions over Europe to his account, died in August 1944 during an operational flight.

Joe Jr. had been his father’s hope for a Kennedy to get to the White House. Jack was next. After the war, nursing a heroic reputation and chronic back injuries, he took up the family standard and set his first ever campaign sights pretty high: the Eleventh Congressional District seat in Massachusetts. In the first of many subsequent productions, all Kennedy hands moved on deck to work on the campaign, and their candidate won easily.

For the youngest Kennedy, just seventeen years old when the 1940s closed out, life up to then had been one big drama: several years abroad meeting kings and queens, prime ministers, and a pope; the next five years at home cheering three brothers at war and mourning the loss of one; and the thrill of playing bit roles in the election of his brother Jack to Congress. But college was ahead, and his life would pick up the pace quickly as the 1950s dawned.

Irish-American Roots

The story of the Kennedys and the Fitzgeralds of Boston, two families whose union by marriage early in the twentieth century produced a president of the United States, a U.S. attorney general, and three U.S. senators, has its modern roots in Ireland in the mid-nineteenth century, a land then being laid waste by a devastating failure of the island’s mainstay potato crop and a resulting famine, known as the Great Hunger.

In 1848, Patrick Kennedy bid good-bye to his relatives and neighbors in the village of New Ross in County Wexford and set out for America, where he married Bridget Murphy, also from Wexford, and moved into a home in East Boston, a short distance across the harbor from the city proper. Six years later, Thomas Fitzgerald left behind his village in County Limerick and sailed across the Atlantic to Boston, where he married Rosanna Cox, from County Cavan, and settled in the city’s immigrant-rich North End. Boston was not a hospitable place for immigrants, especially Irish Catholics, during the years when Patrick and Bridget and Thomas and Rosanna were trying to make a living for their large families. The descendants of the founding Puritans controlled the city in every aspect. They were mostly cold to newcomers and had a special antipathy toward the Irish. But the Kennedys and Fitzgeralds persevered, working hard for little money to create lives for themselves along the margins of city life while waiting for a chance to move into the mainstream of civic activity.

It didn’t take too long. Within thirty years, Kennedy and Fitzgerald men were key players in the hurly-burly of Boston’s political arena.

A Fitzgerald family portrait, 1910. From left are Rose, Eunice, John F. “Honey Fitz,” John F. Jr., Thomas, Frederick (seated), Mary Josephine (Hannon), and Mary Agnes.

Patrick Joseph “P. J.” Kennedy and his wife, Mary Augusta (Hickey), center, outside their home in East Boston (date unknown) with two of his sisters.

Joe Kennedy playing on the fields of Harvard. A baseball letterman at the college, he graduated in 1912.

Rose Fitzgerald, in a snappy pose aboard a cruise ship during a school year abroad.

The Kennedys and Fitzgeralds gather at Old Orchard Beach in Maine, where Rose and Joe became friendly while the families vacationed together. “P. J.” is second from left, Rose is on his right, next to her dad, “Honey Fitz,” and Joe is second from right.

Joe and Rose Start a Family

The marriage of the hard-driving son of “P. J.” Kennedy to the attractive daughter of “Honey Fitz” was a social event of high order in 1914 Boston. The ceremony and reception began the saga of an engaging family life beyond the provincial capital of the Puritans; while Rose was tending to their growing family in nearby Brookline and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Colophon
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Senator John Kerry
• Introduction by Martin F. Nolan
• The Early Years: At Home with the Kennedys