|a Legislators |z United States |v Biography. Perceptive and carefully reported, drawing heavily from candid interviews with the Kennedy family and inner circle, 'Last Lion' captures magnificently his life and historic achievements, as well as the personal redemption that he found. |a Dismissed as a spent force in politics by the time he reached middle age, Ted Kennedy became the most powerful senator of the last half century and the nation's keeper of traditional liberalism. |a Includes bibliographical references (p. |a Last lion : |b the fall and rise of Ted Kennedy / |c by the team at the Boston Globe, Bella English. The Kennedy brand of liberalism was rediscovered by a new generation of Americans.|a DLC |c DLC |d BTCTA |d YDXCP |d C#P |d UPZ |d BWX |d CDX |d JRS And as his health failed, he anointed the young and ambitious presidential candidate Barack Obama, whom many commentators compared to his brother Jack. Once a symbol of youthful folly and nepotism, he transformed himself in his later years into a symbol of wisdom and perseverance. Political rivals turned his all-too-human failings - drinking, philandering, and divorce - into a condemnation of his liberal politics.īut as the presidency eluded his grasp, Kennedy was finally liberated from the expectations of others, free to become his own man. The death there of a young woman from his brother's campaign would haunt and ultimately doom his presidential ambitions.

Late one night in the summer of 1969, he left the scene of a fatal automobile accident on Chappaquiddick Island. Canellos and his team of Boston Globe reporters show in this revealing and intimate biography, the gregarious and least academically successful of the Kennedy boys has witnessed greater tragedy and suffered greater pressure than any of his siblings. But Ted Kennedy - the youngest of the Kennedy children and the son who felt the least pressure to satisfy his father's enormous ambitions - would go on to live a life that no one could have predicted: dismissed as a spent force in politics by the time he reached middle age, Ted became the most powerful senator of the last half century and the nation's keeper of traditional liberalism. No figure in American public life has had such great expectations thrust upon him, or has responded so poorly.

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Last Lion by Peter S. Canellos