Timeline: How Teddy Kennedy's life of triumph and tragedy defined America
Edward “Teddy” Moore Kennedy was the last of nine children born to Rose and John P. Kennedy, quite possibly this country’s one true political dynasty. He served in the senate for nearly 47 years, and his life was defined — and helped define — American history.
The accomplishments (in bold) and tragedies that defined Teddy Kennedy:
1932: Kennedy is born in Boston on February 22.
1956: Graduates from Harvard.
1958: He marries Virginia Joan Bennett.
1959: Receives law degree from the University of Virginia.
1960: Kennedy’s brother, John, is elected President of the United States. Kennedy becomes assistant district attorney in Suffolk County, Massachusetts.
1962: He is elected to the U.S. Senate.
1963: President John F. Kennedy is assassinated on November 22 in Dallas, Texas.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
1964: He gives his first speech in the Senate on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that becomes law in July and bans segregation in public places. However, that year, Kennedy is in a plane crash that results in him breaking his back. His aide and the pilot die in the crash.
1965: Kennedy leads the charge to pass the Immigration Act of 1965 which outlaws immigration quotas that unfairly favored immigrants from Europe.
1968: Kennedy’s brother, Robert, is assassinated on June 5 while running for president.
1969: The infamous Chappaquiddick incident. Kennedy veers off a bridge in Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts. He is able to get out of the car, but a woman traveling with him, Mary Jo Kopechne, can not and she drowns. Kennedy didn’t alert police until after Kopechne’s body is found and he apologizes in a nationally televised statement.
1970: He submits a bill in Congress that would create a national health insurance system that would cover every American. He is also at the forefront of getting the voting age dropped from 21 to 18 years.
1971: Kennedy assumes the role of Chairman of the Senate Health Subcommittee.
1972: Champions Title IX Amendment of the Education Amendments of 1972, which greatly enhances women’s ability to partake in college athletics.
1978: Heads a successful movement to deregulate the airline industry and increase competition between the major carriers.
1979: He becomes Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
1980: Kennedy squares off against incumbent President Jimmy Carter in a heated battle for the Democratic nomination. Kennedy eventually loses and gives a memorable concession speech.
1982: Kennedy divorces his first wife, Virginia Joan Bennett. He is also the main sponsor of the Voting Rights Act Amendments, which leads to more minority representatives in Congress and state legislatures across the country. He decides not to run for president in 1984.
1987: Is at the head of an unsuccessful filibuster that aims to block Ronald Reagan’s nominee, William Rehnquist, from becoming Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
1989: Is at the forefront of the fight to pass the Americans with Disabilities Act.
1991: His nephew, William Smith, is accused of rape, and a major media frenzy begins.
1992: He marries Victoria Reggie.
1995: His son, Patrick is elected as to the 104th Congress.
1996: Works to increase minimum wage and to provide workers with greater insurance coverage when changing jobs.
1999: Kennedy’s nephew, John, along with John’s wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and her sister, Lauren Bessette, die in a plane crash near Martha’s Vineyard.
2002: Works with President George W. Bush and co-sponsors “No Child Left Behind” legislation, which Bush signs into law. The law aims to improve student performance.
2008: He announces his support for then Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential bid. In May, Kennedy announces that he has been diagnosed with brain cancer.
2008: He gives a final endorsement of Obama at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, a speech now considered by many to be his “national goodbye.”
2009: The Senator dies at his home in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts on August 25.
Sources: MSNBC, NPR, Sen. Kennedy’s Senate Page, and the Telegraph.
Ted Kennedy rented a brothel in 1961
The FBI claims that a year before his Senate election, Kennedy rented a Chilean brothel while on fact-finding trip
Edward "Ted" Kennedy, former U.S. senator from Massachusetts (D).
An FBI file contends that a young Edward M. Kennedy arranged to rent a brothel for a night while visiting Chile in 1961, a year before he was elected to the Senate.
The previously redacted State Department memo, dated Dec. 28, 1961, was released by Judicial Watch, a Washington-based organization that said it obtained it through a Freedom of Information lawsuit.
According to the memo, the Massachusetts Democrat made arrangements to rent the brothel “for an entire night” in Santiago earlier in 1961. “Kennedy allegedly invited one of the Embassy chauffeurs to participate in the night’s activities,” according to the memo.
One State Department official described Kennedy as “pompous and a spoiled brat,” according to the memo. Kennedy was making a fact-finding trip to several Latin American countries. “Kennedy met with a number of individuals known to have communist sympathies,” the memo said.
Kennedy was a 29-year-old assistant district attorney in Boston at the time of the trip. He was elected to the Senate in 1962 and served more than four decades until his death in 2009.
Kennedy’s family members had no immediate reaction to the release of the memo.
The documents from Judicial Watch provide no indication of the source of the allegations or whether the FBI believed the allegations were true. Judicial Watch said it waged a “tough” fight with the Obama administration for access to the previously secret documents.
Last June the FBI released more than 2,300 pages of documents from Kennedy’s file, many of them containing information about various death threats against Kennedy and his family. Some of the material was redacted by the FBI.
Some of the threats prompted investigations, some resulted in warnings to Kennedy or local law enforcement authorities. There is no indication any attempts were carried out.
Kennedy family members were given a chance to review and to raise objections to the documents before they were released last June. The FBI has additional documents on threats to Kennedy, possibly thousands more pages, that it plans to make public once the agency finishes reviewing them.
The family has no legal power to keep information withheld, the FBI has said, but the bureau does consider privacy concerns on a case-by-case basis.
Carter: Kennedy was drinking before 1980 snub
The former president's newly released presidential diary includes an interesting observation about a famous moment
Jimmy Carter, left, shakes hands with Sen. Edward Kennedy on the podium at the Democratic National Convention in 1980.
This week marks the publication of Jimmy Carter’s private journal of his presidency, “White House Diary.” The entries are often brief, but Carter does offer an interesting account of one of the most widely discussed moments of his doomed 1980 reelection effort: Ted Kennedy’s apparent snub of him on the final night of the Democratic convention in New York, just after Carter had delivered his acceptance speech.
“Afterward,” Carter writes in his diary, “Kennedy drove over from his hotel, appeared on the platform along with a lot of other people, seemed to have had a few drinks, which I probably would have done myself. He was fairly cool and reserved, but the press made a big deal of it.”
They sure did — and for good reason. Kennedy’s challenge of Carter for the ’80 nod was unusually bitter and protracted. Even though Carter won twice as many delegates in the primary and caucus season, Kennedy fought all the way to the August convention, attempting to convince delegates to support a rule change that would have allowed them to vote their conscience on the first ballot — instead of being forced to cast a ballot for the candidate they’d been pledged to during the primary season. Only when this effort failed did Kennedy back down and end his campaign (with what was probably the best speech of his career). So it was only logical that the press would watch the body language closely when the two men came together onstage after Carter’s acceptance speech two nights later — and Kennedy’s discomfort was obvious. As the Washington Post reported it:
When Kennedy did arrive, wearing that familiar tight-lipped smile his traveling press corps has come to call “the smirk,” he strode into the crowd of Democratic officials already on the podium, gave Carter a perfunctory shake of the hand, and walked away to the side of the platform.
There followed a comical ballet in which Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter and House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill Jr. (Mass.) all tried futilely to lead Kennedy back to center stage for an arms-up pose with the president.
When Kennedy went to the left side of the platform to raise a fist toward his Massachusetts delegation, Carter made a beeline to join him and struck the same pose. But Kennedy’s arm had come down a split-second before Carter’s shot up.
You can watch some of Kennedy’s snub of Carter in this video:
Carter has already rasied eyebrows while promoting his diaries. In a “60 Minutes” segment that aired over the weekend, he told Lesley Stahl that “we would have had comprehensive healthcare now, had it not been for Ted Kennedy’s deliberately blocking the legislation that I proposed” as president. “It was his fault,” Carter added. “Ted Kennedy killed the bill.”
Steve Kornacki writes about politics for Salon. Reach him by email at SKornacki@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @SteveKornacki More Steve Kornacki
New FBI docs show Kennedy death threats
The FBI releases previously secret files concerning death threats against the late Sen. Edward Kennedy
Most of the secret FBI files on the late Sen. Edward Kennedy being released Monday concern death threats against the longtime senator.
Alex Brown of the FBI’s records management division said the FBI would post some 2,000 pages of previously secret pages about the Massachusetts Democrat on the agency’s website.
The release of the documents has been highly anticipated by historians, scholars and others interested in the life and long public career of one of America’s most prominent and powerful politicians.
The Associated Press and other media organizations requested the documents through Freedom of Information Act requests.
Kennedy faced death threats when he ran for president in 1980 and before that in the years following the assassinations of his older brothers.
President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was slain in Los Angeles on June 6, 1968.
The deaths of his two older brothers cast a long shadow on Kennedy’s life, and prompted fears he too would be targeted by an assassin’s bullet.
After his brothers’ assassinations, Kennedy wrote in his memoir “True Compass” released last year, that he was easily startled at loud sounds, and would hit the deck whenever a car backfired.
Kennedy, who served in the Senate for nearly half a century, died in August 2009 after a yearlong struggle with brain cancer. He was 77 and the last surviving brother of the famed political family.
——
Online:
Coakley wins primary to replace Kennedy
The Massachusetts state attorney general won the Democratic nomination easily; she's likely to win the general too
Tuesday night, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley won the Democratic primary in a special election to replace the late Sen. Ted Kennedy. If all goes as expected, she’ll win the general election, held early next year, and be sworn in to the Senate.
Coakley was the front-runner going into the night, but her margin of victory was still impressive. In a four-way race, Coakley still managed to pick up a plurality of 47 percent, beating Rep. Michael Capuano’s 28 percent and the 13 percent and 12 percent that Alan Khazei and Stephen Pagliuca were able to pull in, respectively.
Beyond just giving Coakley the opportunity to take Kenedy’s place in the Senate, Tuesday’s vote represented a milestone for Massachusetts: This is the first time either party has nominated a woman for one of the state’s Senate seats.
Voters picking a successor for Kennedy
A primary's held in the race to replace Ted Kennedy in the Senate
Voters are heading to the polls in Massachusetts Tuesday, in the first step towards picking a longer-term replacement for the late Sen. Ted Kennedy. This vote is just the primary — the general won’t be held until early next year — but given the Democratic advantage, it will all but decide the final outcome.
The race has flown under the radar thus far, largely because state attorney General Martha Coakley has consistently been favored in polls. She’s running against Rep. Michael Capuano, Boston Celtics co-owner Stephen Pagliuca and Alan Khazei, who started the community service organization City Year.
There is one interesting dynamic to the race. Former President Bill Clinton endorsed Coakley recently. That pits him against former Gov. Michael Dukakis, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1988; Dukakis is backing Capuano.
Currently, Kennedy’s seat is held by Paul Kirk.
Page 1 of 13 in Ted Kennedy
The Presidential Election Quiz 
The people behind Citizens United 
Santorum Dials 911 for Sex Police 
The latest lies in the war on choice 
There is no ethical smartphone 
Is a Greek debt default still inevitable? 
Birth control: The right’s still winning 
How Viola Davis took Meryl Streep’s Oscar 
Bathrooms: the new transgender battleground 
Our nation of moaners 
A very pornographic Rick Santorum 
The death of chick lit 
The futile search for meaning in “Linsanity” 
