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In advance of that announcement, Ted Kennedy is already putting the screws to Democratic Senators and Congressmen, competing with Carter for their endorsements. The pressure from both rivals is heavy and direct, and some Democratic politicians try to please both. As Kennedy left the Senate floor one day, a well-known Democrat who has already announced his support for Carter beckoned the Senator aside. The Democrat passed Kennedy a list of people in his home state who might help him campaign. Said Kennedy: "He's playing both sides. There's a lot of that. People are staying loose."
Kennedy's formal announcement will open a major new chapter in the alternately tragic and triumphant saga of the nation's most eminent modern political dynasty. Americans have gone through the bright hopes of Camelot and the dark night of two Kennedy assassinations. They were both titillated and dismayed by the spectacular dramas of Jackie's widowhood and remarriage and by Mary Jo Kopechne's death at Chappaquiddick.
They have even begun to follow the tribulations of a whole new generation: young Teddy's cancer, David's drug problems and Joe's driving accidents. Now, the Senator from Massachusetts is reasserting the family's claim to the White House.
Not in this century has a challenger overthrown an incumbent President of his own party. But Ted Kennedy thinks he is the natural force—indeed the only possible Democratic force—to fill that vacuum.
Every poll shows him with nearly a 2-to-l lead over Carter among Democrats and independents. Carter has disappointed almost every constituency that put him in office. And those constituencies, especially the blacks, Hispanics and working-class white ethnics who form the spine of the Democratic Party, seem ready to invest many of their hopes in Ted Kennedy.
They have done so partly because of a nostalgia for his brother's Administration, for Camelot. Says California Pollster Mervin Field: "Kennedy's popularity is an accumulated, generational perception. He is part of the American culture." No matter that John Kennedy blundered into the Bay of Pigs and first widened the war in Viet Nam and saw almost none of his main legislative proposals pass Congress. Americans have a sense, says Theodore H. White, the chronicler of Presidents, "that Jack Kennedy's Administration was the last one in which it seemed that politics could give people control of their destiny."
In Florida, TIME National Political Correspondent John Stacks was interviewing State Comptroller Gerald Lewis about Kennedy. Reports Stacks: "Soon it was clear that he was not just talking about Ted Kennedy but about John Kennedy and Bob Kennedy and Camelot and the antiwar movement and God knows what other half-remembered moments of modern Democratic politics. Had he ever met Ted Kennedy? 'No, I haven't,' he answered, and it made no difference to him that this is a different Kennedy."