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.

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"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."

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Kirk is a former chair of the Democratic National Committee and a one-time aide to Kennedy; he remains close enough to the family that he's the current head of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation. The late senator's widow and sons had put their weight behind Kirk for the appointment.

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The man Garrett says will get the nod from Patrick is Paul Kirk, a former chair of the Democratic National Committee who was a close friend and aide to Kennedy -- he worked for him for years, chairs the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation and was the master of ceremonies at one memorial service for the senator. Kirk has gotten the endorsement of Kennedy family members, including the senator's widow, Victoria, and his two sons.

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Whoever Patrick picks won't be in office for long -- a special election will be held early next year, and the winner will replace the interim senator. But whoever Patrick picks will likely have a big role to play in healthcare reform, which was Kennedy's primary focus towards the end of his life and is the reason for the speed with which the majority Democrat state legislature has moved.

The change overturns a law made not long ago, when the governor of Massachusetts was Republican Mitt Romney. At the time, legislators were concerned that if Sen. John Kerry won the presidency, Romney would get to name his replacement. But with Patrick, a Democrat, in office, and with Kennedy's death depriving Senate Democrats of a potentially pivotal 60th vote, there was a push -- led, before his death, by the late senator himself -- to rewrite the law again.

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Republicans, who are a small minority in the Massachusetts Senate, had been using a delaying tactic to keep the bill from coming to the floor for a debate. Now, though, they seem ready to concede.

“I don’t know that there’s a lot to be gained by continuing to delay just to delay it. That’s not what we’re about. We’re trying to give people time to weigh in. We got the weekend out of it," Senate Minority Leader Richard Tisei said, according to the Boston Globe.

The delaying tactic the GOP has been using is traditionally only allowed three times; Republicans have used it twice. But, the Globe reports, they probably won't bother to try it again on Tuesday. Instead, they'll allow debate. From there, it probably won't be long until a vote, and then Patrick will move quickly to appoint a new senator.

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But now thanks to Ted Kennedy's new memoir, published today and excerpted in Politico, one of the strangest arguments in favor of the ban has come to light. In the book, Kennedy relates the tale of an Oval Office meeting early in the Clinton administration with all the Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee. Kennedy writes:

The last senator to speak was Robert Byrd, and he came up with a new one on all of us... He informed us, with many ornate flourishes, that there had been a terrible problem in ancient Rome with young military boys turned into sex slaves. I don't remember the exact details, but I think the story involved Tiberius Julius Caesar being captured and abused and used as a sex slave. He escaped and then years later he sought vengeance and killed his captors.

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If the GOP's congressional leadership could have picked anyone to criticize Obama for his citation of Kennedy, though, Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele would probably the last person on the list.

Steele came out with that criticism in an interview with the Washington Times on Thursday. He managed not to stick his foot in his mouth too badly (something of an accomplishment for him), but still, the attack floundered -- it felt forced, like even Steele wasn't convinced.

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The letter is dated May 12, 2009, which, according to Obama, is "shortly after [Kennedy] was told that his illness was terminal."

Dear Mr. President,

I wanted to write a few final words to you to express my gratitude for your repeated personal kindnesses to me – and one last time, to salute your leadership in giving our country back its future and its truth.

On a personal level, you and Michelle reached out to Vicki, to our family and me in so many different ways. You helped to make these difficult months a happy time in my life.

You also made it a time of hope for me and for our country.

When I thought of all the years, all the battles, and all the memories of my long public life, I felt confident in these closing days that while I will not be there when it happens, you will be the President who at long last signs into law the health care reform that is the great unfinished business of our society. For me, this cause stretched across decades; it has been disappointed, but never finally defeated. It was the cause of my life. And in the past year, the prospect of victory sustained me-and the work of achieving it summoned my energy and determination.

There will be struggles – there always have been – and they are already underway again. But as we moved forward in these months, I learned that you will not yield to calls to retreat - that you will stay with the cause until it is won. I saw your conviction that the time is now and witnessed your unwavering commitment and understanding that health care is a decisive issue for our future prosperity. But you have also reminded all of us that it concerns more than material things; that what we face is above all a moral issue; that at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country.

And so because of your vision and resolve, I came to believe that soon, very soon, affordable health coverage will be available to all, in an America where the state of a family’s health will never again depend on the amount of a family’s wealth. And while I will not see the victory, I was able to look forward and know that we will – yes, we will – fulfill the promise of health care in America as a right and not a privilege.

In closing, let me say again how proud I was to be part of your campaign- and proud as well to play a part in the early months of a new era of high purpose and achievement. I entered public life with a young President who inspired a generation and the world. It gives me great hope that as I leave, another young President inspires another generation and once more on America’s behalf inspires the entire world.

So, I wrote this to thank you one last time as a friend- and to stand with you one last time for change and the America we can become.

At the Denver Convention where you were nominated, I said the dream lives on.

And I finished this letter with unshakable faith that the dream will be fulfilled for this generation, and preserved and enlarged for generations to come.

With deep respect and abiding affection,

[Ted]

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But at the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Open Market blog, Kennedy is being honored by John Berlau as a deregulator. (Italics mine)

But for a brief, shining moment, in the mid to late 1970s, Kennedy viewed smaller government as the most compassionate answer in one area of economic life: transportation. Kennedy was the prime mover in Congress behind the airline and trucking deregulation bills that were signed by President Jimmy Carter. He saw the impact of regulation in these industries as protecting entrenched companies from competition, and decided that the liberal, compassionate thing to do was to deregulate to give consumers lower prices and more choices.

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Biden:

Kerry:

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If ever there was any opportunity like that for Obama, it was the memorial service for Sen. Ted Kennedy on Saturday morning, and he really did rise to the occasion. The president's 15-minute eulogy for his friend and key supporter was at once funny, inspiring and sad. Video is below; the full text as prepared for delivery follows.

The full text:

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"[I]t was President Obama himself who suggested that seniors who don't have as long to live might want to just consider taking a pain pill instead of getting an expensive operation to cure them," said Huckabee. "Yet when Sen. Kennedy was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer at 77, did he give up on life and go home to take pain pills and die? Of course not. He freely did what most of us would do. He choose an expensive operation and painful follow-up treatments. He saw his work as vitally important and so he fought for every minute he could stay on this earth doing it. He would be a very fortunate man if his heroic last few months were what future generations remember him most for."

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Kennedy worked hard for what he became. Those qualities that meant so much in the Senate — from his marvelous gift for friendship to his eagle eye for intellectual talent to his strategic parliamentary skills — surely could have served very different purposes than the important causes he adopted as his own. All that passion, charm, exuberance and competitive drive might have been directed toward much smaller things. Or he might have turned away from the harshness of politics, which often placed his own flaws under unforgiving scrutiny, instead sailing his boat and tending the monuments to his fallen brothers John and Robert.

Now much is being said and written about supposed contrasts with those otherKennedys, who are remembered as more pragmatic and less progressive than he. Much is being said and written, too, about how unpromising and aimless he seemed during his youth, when he was ushered so comfortably through Harvard, the Army and into the Senate, and then the prolonged adolescence that brought misconduct, embarrassment and the tragedy at Chappaquiddick.

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We nonetheless continue to be fascinated by the Kennedy mystique. Will there ever be another dynasty like this one? How did it achieve its prominence? Why are liberals such as the Kennedys still missed even in a country that has turned more conservative? To mourn Edward Kennedy is inevitably to raise and try to answer questions like these.

Part of the Kennedy mystique is surely due to the unusual nature of the family. Remember Roger Clinton? What about Neil Bush? The Kennedys, it is frequently said, were a political dynasty. Yet the Bush family constitutes one as well, and during that brief period when Hillary Clinton appeared to be the frontrunner for the 2008 Democratic nomination, the Clinton name was also burnished with dynasty status. While other families have many who seek power, however, none has had the success of the Kennedys. John, Robert, and now Teddy will all be remembered as major figures in American history. No one can say that about Hugh Rodman or Marvin Bush. Most parents would be happy to have one successful child. Joe and Rose Kennedy produced a slew of them.

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The day the liberal icon died, it was easy to see that was the version progressives hoped would play out. "Today, we pick up the torch and recommit ourselves to health insurance reform," a top House Democrat, Chris Van Hollen, said. "Let us continue his cause," Service Employees International Union president Andy Stern urged. "Let us take action this year to pass healthcare reform." Nearly every group and every lawmaker working to pass healthcare reform had the same message: Let's go finish Teddy's legacy and do this.

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But what really struck me about Byrd's statement was the non-political part of it at the very beginning: "I had hoped and prayed that this day would never come. My heart and soul weeps at the loss of my best friend in the Senate, my beloved friend, Ted Kennedy."

Statements from politicians are, as a general rule, not exactly the most sincere things ever written. But there's no doubting Byrd's sincerity here, because last year, shortly after Kennedy was diagnosed with the cancer that would end up taking his life, Byrd spoke about his friend on the floor of the Senate. Whatever you feel about the two men and their politics, I think it's impossible not to be touched by what ensued, an all-too-rare truly, deeply human moment in Washington. Byrd breaks down talking about Kennedy's illness, and his heart and soul truly do appear to be weeping. The video is below.

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