The tragic makings of a liberal lion

Truth really can be stranger than fiction. Anyone reading Ted Kennedy's posthumous memoir, which came out last week less than a month after he died, cannot fail to be struck by this. The book is a self-deprecating and at times painfully honest account of a life marked by repeated tragedy - some of it self-inflicted.

It is an odyssey that has to be read to be believed. So much of it is so familiar - from the assassinations of his two elder brothers, Jack and Bobby, to the disgrace of Chappaquiddick, right up to Ted's dramatic "I smell chaaaaange in the air" endorsement of Barack Obama. Yet it comes across as fresh.

The youngest of nine children and the only male to survive past middle age, Ted was raised in an autocratic setting. His father, the stern Joe Kennedy, who attained great wealth by selling all his shares a few months before the 1929 crash, was intolerant of failure. "You can have a serious life or a non-serious life, Teddy," Joe told his teenage son after he was caught misbehaving. "If you decide to have a non-serious life I won't have much time for you."

Yet it was also eye-poppingly privileged. Before Ted was born, his mother, Rose, who lived to 104, was voted the best-dressed woman in America by a group of New York critics. Asked why she never had a quarrel with her husband, Rose said: "I just say 'yes dear' and then I go to Paris."

Ted's first communion was administered in the Vatican by Pope Pius XII. When the family wanted to see a film they descended to the basement of their grand Cape Cod home having been couriered the reels from Walt Disney himself. When Jack and Bobby wanted to test out a home-made parachute they cajoled the chauffeur's son into being a guinea pig (he survived with a heavily sprained ankle).

The Kennedy siblings were to the manor born. The boys were also preternaturally driven. All of them, that is, except Ted, who seemed content, as he put it, to "hero worship" his brothers from his position as the least handsome, least athletic, least academic and most accident-prone of them all. Caught cheating in an examination, he was sent down from Harvard. A spell in the army knocked some humility into him.

But the real making of the man was his response to the tragedies of the 1960s - at first going off the rails, then later painstakingly emerging from the shadows of his effortless brothers to become a figure in his own right and one of the greatest senators America has produced.

"I tried to stay ahead of the darkness," he writes of the period following Bobby's death in 1968. "I drove my car at high speeds; I drove myself in the Senate; I sometimes drove my capacity for liquor to the limit."

One outcome was the car accident in Chappaquiddick, which resulted in the drowning of a young debutante in a scandal that nearly wrecked Ted's career. He believes the shock of that news hastened his father's death - knowledge that continued to haunt the dying senator 40 years later. "The pain of that burden was almost unbearable," he writes.

If the measure of politicians is the impact they have had on people's lives, Ted was arguably the most consequential of all the Kennedys. Few senators have as much to their name, from the Disability Act, to the No Child Left Behind Act, to his support for cancer research, the minimum wage, safety in the workplace and the rights of immigrants, legal and illegal. Not to mention his strong influence on the Northern Ireland peace process.

Lacking in glamour, Ted made decency his hallmark. The only time this reviewer exchanged words with him was at a reception at the British embassy. At the event, Ted spoke of an evening in Belfast he had recently attended where disabled Catholic and Protestant girls sang in a choir. His voice cracked several times in the retelling.

At the close of the memoir, the senator writes of his young grandson, Teddy, for whom "nothing seemed to go right" in his attempts to sail. "We might not be the best, Teddy, but we can work harder than anyone," the grandfather said. Teddy Junior persevered and eventually won a prize. The grandfather wrote: "You couldn't even button up Teddy's coat because his heart was so filled with pride."

As intended, the exchange serves well as an epitaph for the youngest of that great generation of Kennedys - a flawed scion of privilege, for whom tragedy was his life's tutor.

The writer is the FT's Washington bureau chief

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