When Father Joe wants Ted in the Senate in 1962, Jack, now president, dutifully agrees. His devotion to Jack is 'hero worship' and those 'impossibly sunlit days' of Camelot were among the happiest of his life. When the roll call of states came at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, he delivered Wyoming, whose votes gave his brother the party's nomination. He rode a bronco and went off a ski jump.

In 1960, then a new lawyer, Ted ran JFK's presidential campaign out west. At Harvard, he cheated on a Spanish exam. He was a daredevil, a jock, a jester and a lousy student, which may have had something to do with his attending 10 schools between 19 and being terrorized by classmates and teachers. In the beginning, he didn't look serious. For the pudgy, pasty nomadic Ted, who spent his early life struggling to 'catch up' with everyone else, it is a clarifying tough love. Father offers straight talk ('never violate people's privacy') and sound advice ('after you have done your best, then the hell with it'). He is the wise father, the purveyor of Solomonic advice, who is 'eternally and solely, To his uncritical son, he is not the ambassador, financier, bootlegger, blackguard, anti-Semite and appeaser. But unlike the sardonic Jack, who resented his mother's absences and called her 'a nothing,' sweet Ted expressed only adulation. Riding horses with his father, racing sailboats with Jack, campaigning with Bobby his family was his life.

We know they never lose, never cry and never complain.īut now we hear it from Ted with new authority. We know they fight with each other, tease each other, protect each other.

The saga of the Kennedys - their self-contained universe of rivalry, excellence, toughness, loyalty - is not new.

True compass by edward m kennedy