Senator Kennedy

...has died.

"We've lost the irreplaceable center of our family and joyous light in our lives, but the inspiration of his faith, optimism, and perseverance will live on in our hearts forever," the Kennedy family said in a statement. "He loved this country and devoted his life to serving it."

He was expelled from Harvard during his freshman year after he asked a friend to take an exam for him.

After a two-year stint in the Army, Kennedy returned to earn degrees at Harvard and then the University of Virginia law school.

Kennedy enlisted in the United States Army in June 1951. Following basic training at Fort Dix, he requested assignment to Fort Holabird for Army Intelligence training, but was dropped after a few weeks without explanation. He went to Camp Gordon for training in the Military Police Corps. In June 1952, he was assigned to the honor guard at SHAPE headquarters in Paris. His father's political connections ensured he was not deployed to the ongoing Korean War. While stationed in Europe he travelled extensively on weekends and climbed the Matterhorn. He was discharged in March 1953 as a private first class.

Upon his victory in the general election, John vacated his Massachusetts Senate seat. Ted would not be eligible to fill the vacancy until February 22, 1962, when he would turn thirty. Ted initially wanted to stay out West and do something other than run for office right away; he said, "The disadvantage of my position is being constantly compared with two brothers of such superior ability." His brothers were also not in favor of his running immediately, but Ted desired the Senate seat as an accomplishment to match his brothers', and their father overruled them. Thus, the President-elect asked Massachusetts Governor Foster Furcolo to name Kennedy family friend Benjamin A. Smith II to fill out John's term, which he did in December 1960. This kept the seat open for Ted.

"He can do more for Massachusetts", the same one John had used in his first campaign for the seat ten years earlier.

"Kennedy championed health care reform, working wages and equal rights in his storied career," ABC News reports, "For Kennedy, the ascension of Obama was an important step toward realizing his goal of health care reform."

USA Today*:

The arc of Ted Kennedy's 46-year career in the U.S. Senate provides a cautionary reminder of how first impressions can turn out to be woefully wrong.

When Kennedy entered the Senate in 1963 he was widely viewed as callow and unqualified, ridiculed as the playboy baby brother of a glamorous president and a hard-driving attorney general. A distinguished Harvard law professor, Mark De Wolfe Howe, spoke for many when he archly called Kennedy "a fledgling in everything except ambition." The young senator's image suffered further a few years later when a car he was driving after a night of partying in Chappaquiddick, Mass., went off a bridge, killing a young woman passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne.

At the time, many predicted that his political career was over. Yet Kennedy persevered. By the time he died early Wednesday morning, after a valiant battle with brain cancer, he was known as "the Lion of the Senate," lauded by political friend and foe alike as one of the most effective legislators in the nation's history.

In October 1971, Kennedy made his first speech about The Troubles in Northern Ireland: he said that "Ulster is becoming Britain's Vietnam", demanded that British troops leave the northern counties, and called for a united Ireland. Kennedy was harshly criticized by the British, and formed a long political relationship with Irish Social Democratic and Labour Party founder John Hume. In scores of anti-war speeches, Kennedy opposed President Richard Nixon's policy of Vietnamization, calling it "a policy of violence [that] means more and more war."

But in 1979, with Carter in deep trouble at home and abroad, Kennedy announced he would seek the 1980 Democratic nomination. Though the opinion polls were initially heavily in his favour, his campaign was a disaster from the outset. In an extraordinary nationwide television interview, he was completely incoherent when asked why he wanted to be president.

The media were filled with accounts of his long history of sexual misbehaviour, his now notorious use of alcohol and drugs, and the Chappaquiddick accident. Even the deeply unpopular Carter began to win one primary election after another and, though Kennedy continued the battle through to the party convention, he was finally forced to cede the nomination to Carter.

Perhaps with the realisation that he had no hope of ever reaching the White House, Kennedy again made a superb speech to the convention, calling on delegates to fight for the ideals that had informed the party from the days of Franklin Roosevelt. "For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end. For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."

Following his failed presidential campaign, Kennedy and his wife, Joan Bennett Kennedy, divorced in 1982. They had three children.

He was connected with another scandal in March 1991, when a woman accused the senator's nephew, William Kennedy Smith, of raping her at the family's Palm Beach, Fla., estate over the Easter weekend. Kennedy was at the estate at the time the alleged rape occurred. A conservative political group filed an ethics complaint against the senator, alleging he violated Senate rules when he failed to speak with police about the incident, even though detectives had attempted to talk to him.

Smith was later acquitted and the Senate Ethics Committee dismissed the complaint against Kennedy. But the rape accusation and trial became international news and was another blow to Kennedy's prestige.

In an October 1991 speech at the Harvard Kennedy School, Kennedy took responsibility for his actions and acknowledged how those actions blunted his ability as a senator.

"I am painfully aware that the criticism directed at me in recent months involves far more than honest disagreements with my positions, or the usual criticism from the far right," Kennedy said. "It also involves the disappointment of friends and many others who rely on me to fight the good fight.

"To them I say: I recognize my own shortcomings - the faults in the conduct of my private life. I realize that I alone am responsible for them, and I am the one who must confront them."

He added, "I believe that each of us as individuals must not only struggle to make a better world, but to make ourselves better, too."

After the rape case, Kennedy took on the role of statesman, pursuing his own dreams in the Senate. He became a standard-bearer and bipartisan advocate for civil rights, education, protection of children, poverty programs, health care, pensions, minimum-wage law, abortion rights, and immigration.

In July 1992, he married Victoria Reggie, a Washington lawyer and daughter of a longtime Kennedy family friend.

Kennedy was known worldwide for his support of human rights.
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Kennedy was a staunch opponent of the proposed Cape Wind project, which would place 130 offshore wind turbines within sight of the family's Hyannisport compound. Supporters of the project lampooned Kennedy as a hypocrite for his position, but the senator steadfastly maintained he was opposed to giving a private developer access to Nantucket Sound without an appropriate regulatory process.

He was a force behind the Bush administration's chief domestic policy achievement in its first term, No Child Left Behind, the sweeping education bill that mandated testing to measure student progress.
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In early 2008, shortly before his own cancer diagnosis, Senator Kennedy surprised much of the political world by endorsing Senator Barack Obama for president over Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton. The comparisons between Obama and John F. Kennedy were obvious to many, and the endorsement was seen as a passing of the Kennedy torch to the man aspiring to be the nation's first black president.
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Despite his illness, Senator Kennedy made a forceful appearance at the Democratic convention in Denver, exhorting his party to victory and declaring that the fight for universal health insurance had been "the cause of my life."

He'll be buried at Arlington.