The Kennedys' Most Irish Son

[babylonsister]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-08-26/the-kennedys-most-irish-son/?cid=hp:featureline


The Kennedys' Most Irish Son

by Mike Barnicle

snip//

“When you’re out on the ocean,” I asked. “Do you ever see your brothers?”

“Sure, all the time, all the time,” he answered, his voice a whisper. “There’s not a day I don’t think of them. This is where we all grew up.”

And this is where it came to an end, the long dynastic thread woven through world wars, politics, scandal, and redemption. At 77, Edward Moore Kennedy was a man who learned to live with his flaws, his failures, and a prematurely ordained future that never was and, after 1969, could never be.

He was the most Irish of four brothers, had the loudest laugh and the biggest voice. He was familiar with pain, emotional and physical. He was sentimental, given to song, poetry, and painting. His own hand-painted watercolors adorn the walls of his house.

snip//

And his penance, if you will, was to serve as a surrogate for three dead brothers and the cargo of lost and wounded children left in the wake of war and assassination; to lose and immerse himself in the freedom of being a legislator rather than be shackled by a myth or become a political vessel for others driven by dreams of dynasty.

He carried his Cross through all the decades, carried it with honor and nobility. He heard every slur, each slander, lost his only quest for the Oval Office and emerged from defeat with a deeper knowledge of who he was and what was meant to be: a life lived in the United States Senate, to negotiate, deal, and fight for laws that simply changed how we lived.

Now the house by the sea, a place once filled with high hopes and even higher ambition, is quiet. And last night’s dusk arrived with a brutal truth: This man who came through the fire of life, scarred but whole, is silent forever, while the fog of memory, seven decades deep, becomes legend on the summer wind.

[Dennis Donovan]

1. Very nice article from Barnicle...

:thumbsup: Rec'd.:hi:

[liberal N proud]

2. The next 3 days are going to rough

Is there enough tissue to soak our tears?

[whathehell]

3. Beautiful.