Senator Edward Kennedy
(2 of 8)
You could hear the silence, and I could see people crying across the hall as he finished: "For me a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end. For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."
I saw it all again on that journey to Denver in 2008. He was taken to a hospital almost as soon as we arrived, was released and then was rushed back again. He was in agony--not from the cancer but from a sudden attack of kidney stones. He was determined to speak to the convention and left his hospital bed just a little more than an hour before his appearance, which much of the press and most delegates regarded as improbable or impossible. I stood and cried as he walked onto the stage. In 1980, he had gone there at the end of a long, hard quest through the primaries. This night was the expression of a lifetime's undiminished commitment, the culmination of three weeks of drafting and daily practice sessions--we live only 25 minutes apart on Cape Cod--and then a harrowing day and a half in Denver. It was courage and conviction about the true purpose of politics that brought him to this moment. He passed the torch to Barack Obama--to whose candidacy he had given a decisive endorsement the winter before. And he touched millions of hearts one more time: "The work begins anew, the hope rises again, and the dream lives on."
On the plane back to Hyannis, we swapped stories. One was about my cutting the speech in half just hours before he gave it to make it easier for him to get through. He looked at the cuts and teased me: "You took out some of my favorite parts." He laughed, this indomitable man who had given his life to the dream--the dream that in many ways, because of him, does live on.
Shrum was a Kennedy press secretary and speechwriter
Of Memory And the Sea BY MIKE BARNICLE
Here was Ted Kennedy, 74-year-old son, brother, father, husband, Senator, living history, American legend. He was sitting on a wicker chair on the front porch of the seaside home that held so much of his life within its walls. He was wearing a dark blue blazer and a pale blue shirt. He was tieless and tanned on a spectacular October morning in 2006, and he was smiling too because he could see his boat, the Mya, anchored in Hyannis Port harbor, rocking gently in a warm breeze that held a hint of another summer just passed. Election Day, the last time his fabled name would appear on a ballot, was two weeks away.
"When you're out on the ocean," he was asked that day, "do you ever see your brothers?"
"Sure," Kennedy answered, his voice a few decibels above a whisper. "All the time ... all the time. There's not a day I don't think of them. This is where we all grew up. There have been some joyous times here. Difficult times too.
"We all learned to swim here. Learned to sail. I still remember my brother Joe, swimming with him here, before he went off to war. My brother Jack, out on the water with him ... I remember it all so well. He lived on the water, fought on the water."