Ted Kennedy died on August 25th last year; the following is our post on the day after:
Nearly everyone I am close to lives in a time zone ahead of mine. Except my friend Ellen who called me about 11:15 PT last night and told me. Even with a fifteen months’ “heads up” about Ted Kennedy having brain cancer, I was stunned that Kennedy–the only one of Joe Kennedy Sr.’s four boys to not die violently and young–had died. So this did hit me. My first vote for a Republican presidential candidate ever last November–John McCain–was not the sea change in my ideas, instincts or emotions I had thought. I don’t expect anyone under 45 or so to understand. Below is exactly what we wrote last year, on May 22, 2008, in this post, the day after it was disclosed that Kennedy was ill:
To be Irish is to know that, in the end, the world will break your heart.
–Daniel Patrick Moynihan
Call me a cultural stereotype. A boomer. A limousine liberal. I don’t care. Ted Kennedy being diagnosed with malignant cancer of the brain floored me. I don’t even know why. Long ago, Duke University, which changed my life in a number of ways, awarded me my first paid desk job to work for Wisconsin’s Senator Gaylord Nelson. With some help from my father, I rented an overpriced and horrible little apartment across the street from the hospital on Washington Circle where I had been born 21 years earlier, and excitedly entered the world I’d been seeing on television since I was in my early teens growing up in the Midwest. That first sunny Monday morning in May, I walked all the way to work, zig-zagging down Pennsylvania Avenue, and then up Constitution Avenue, well over two miles total, just to take it all in.
But I walked in a hurry.
Edward Moore Kennedy (1932-2009)