That is a lovely tribute….thank you for your family story. I was writing my grandson last night about ways our families have been touched by the long Kennedy story. I am glad for you that you have that deep personal connection in your heart.

Jane, thank you for sharing.

I know, you do that all the time, but I want you to know that your humanity is the greatest gift which you share with the rest of us.

Your father did the same.

As did MLK.

As did Ted Kennedy.

As do all who love life, liberty, and justice.

DW

If anyone hasn’t seen it, you’ve got to see Kennedy fighting for universal health care at the 1978 Democratic convention. We used to have Dem party leaders like this who were not side-lined.
http://www.mydd.com/story/2009/8/26/203137/006

I think every American who grew up during this time was deeply touched by the Kennedy family, whether they knew it or not. I was six in 1968. My Uncle Jack was killed during Tet, then MLK in April, and by the time RFK was shot in June I was riveted. I still remember Teddy’s speech, and this combination of events is what made me the political person I have been ever since.

You are lucky to have had such good role model!

My wife Erin remembers her parents being very upset and her mother crying when MLK was assasinated. She was only 10 at the time living in Detroit. When we went to Memphis a few years back while we were dating, we went to the Lorraine Motel and Civil Rights Museum and she did something that really kind of surprised and moved me: she got down on her knees and prayed outside of the Motel where there is memorial plaque in front of his room. Surprised because it was not “announced” on her part; moved because of the obvious heaviness of the moment but also because one need not always be in church…

Jane,

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for everything you have done with FDL. You are a hero and a treasure, sharp as a tack with a heart of gold. Excuse me for writing in platitudes.

We need Jane and clones of Jane and Christy and Marcy and so many others who have taken it upon themselves to lead us to a more perfect union. A task that too few who say they are about this actually do it.

I would support anything that Jane does. She has shown herself to be a woman of wisdom and courage and an example for all.

Good on you, Ms Hamsher!

Jane:
Attleboro? I know that place pretty well(well not the inner workings of thr town anyway). You’ve sure lived a lot of interesting place.

Ted Kennedy for some reason was allowed to live out his life and fight for the causes of the common man, something his brothers were not allowed to do.

The power that runs the show will not let a charismatic and right thinking leader emerge who can inspire the people and lead them to a better world.

My sense of Ted was that he know that he would be spared if he remained a “good boy” in the senate where he could be countered by electoral malfeasance and out voted on such key issues as health care and a living wage, war issues and so forth. Despite his passion and eloquence, his decency and his humanity he was respected by not followed toward his vision of a fair and just society.

Unlike so many rich and privileged he gave his life to helping others. That was very noble and something very rare in the wealthy today who consider it noble to endow some charity by writing a check.

I was a young adult in the 60’s, and I don’t think I’ve ever recovered from the assassinations. I realized yesterday that Ted Kennedy was only 6 years older than myself. As a young man, he continued his political career after seeing his two brothers murdered for their politics. That is heroism. In recent years, I saw RFK Jr. up close at an environmental event and realized I was half-expecting a shot to ring out. That didn’t stop Ted.

I also want to thank Jane’s parents. They raised a very wonderful woman!!

This is beautiful. I salute you!

Thank you, Jane, for your thoughts, your work, and your vision. Kennedy’s spirit lives on in many of us.

“the apathy that gave the haters the right to hunt people”

That apathy seems to have come back. Thank you for a moving speech, Jane.

“Where is the moral strength within us?”

Teddy Kennedy was allowed to live because he was believed to have been already killed politically at Chappaquiddick.

Dean, Exactly,,,it is immeasurable how the JFK assassination changed/impacted so many of us of a certain age. When the books started coming out, I read them obsessively ’til I realized I was looking for a different ending. And over the years have watched almost everything I could that was coming on TV. Then the tragedies kept coming. It really is amazing out of all that, and more, Teddy managed to forge ahead and become the beloved patriarch of that family, like the more memories of his gentle strong sad presence when John Jr. died. There is a way we are all in it together. Thanks for your note.

I was in 8th. grade when JFK was killed. My home room teacher sent me to the library for a refernce book and they had the TV on and I remember going back to class and sharing the news. We were even sent home early and began the long vigil of watching the story unfold on TV.

My parents were die hard republicans their entire lives but on that day I completely split from them politically. From 1963 through the turbulent years that followed I became quite outspoken politically, which caused my parents a great deal of chagrin and even embarrassment I suppose.

I am 59 years old now and a veteran of grassroots campaigns, war protests etc. but the one defining moment in my political awakening was in that library in 1963.

Jane,

Thank you for sharing this experience. I posted a childhood experience yesterday on BT’s post. I’ll repost.

Senator Kennedy,

Thank you for being my hero the summer I was twelve years old. I was scared and you, with your kids, nieces and nephews came to my rescue.

Thanks for your compliments on my great football arm and your, “I wouldn’t expect anything less from a Buckeye!” shout out. Thanks for showing me that learning how to sail is a joy as long as the captain is a positive teacher with a respect for the student and the sea.

Thanks for treating me as a fellow human being, not just a little kid. You had an ability to instantly show respect and build a friendship through respect. I was not just a kid you helped get back to their parents safely that day. You made me a friend, a family friend, all in a short moment. You modeled how to welcome me to your own children, nieces and nephews and they all followed your lead including me in some great “kids at the beach” fun. Being built up and surrounded by caring adults and peers took all my fear away. I needed that moment. You had the wisdom and understanding to know that need.

Thanks for teaching me how to dig for cohogs. It was fun to win the “biggest cohog find!” and be included in a family moment. I hope the pot of chowder that night was extra wonderful.

I am forever grateful for your kindness and your example of compassion.

Thank you for caring in a moment when you didn’t need to, but you saw my fears were requiring a responsible adult to step in and make sure I was safe. You stepped up for my care and safety.

My thanks just does not seem to capture the import of your care and compassion shown to a stranger, to a child.

Enjoy that a family pot of chowder being made in heaven.

good point. That kind of put a short leash on him.

Fred Hiatt, in a one-day spasm of decency and crocodile tears, had a full page of fond and respectful eulogies. The most ungracious comment came (and this includes a George Will column that contained only one open, partisan attack and no veiled ones), unsurprisingly, from ostensible liberal Richard Cohen as he enumerated his flaws:

“

(he) risked too much and did not have the imagination to ever question a liberalism that desperately needed updating.”

He didn’t have the imagination to imagine that everyone prospers in this country. He didn’t even have the imagination to imagine Iraq as such a threat that we had to invade it (among many things, it’s worth remembering what Kennedy had to say about that).

Thanks Jane. For the tribute, and for continuing in the same tradition of fighting for what this country can and should be.

Interesting, Jane. Thanks for sharing.

I grew up in Cicero IL, when a riot erupted over essentially the same event. I remember vividly my parents admonishing us to stay inside and don’t go near that area. It was late 40’s, early 50’s, as we moved from Cicero in 1951.

I remember being quite frightened, but not knowing why. Frightened of the crowd? Of the blacks? What was going on? No one would tell us why it was so bad. (Nor could they without admitting to racial bias)

I was older than you were then, but not by much.

Good Morning Jane,

I’m sure I should just shut up and second everyone else’s spot on laudatory comments – but …

– I can think of only 3 or 4 times you have mentioned your dad, I recall he was a minister – but dear god Jane, this is so very moving, so inspiring, so unsurprising

as a mama, I have no doubt your father and your mother’s spirits soar – that little eight year old turned out to be a trove of authentic pride and joy

Beautifully said, Jane. Thank you for sharing.

Mom and dad were JFK supporters, and they were heartbroken on that November day. I was 4, and my earliest memory is of the caparisoned Black Jack and John-John’s salute.

The greedy are always with us and willing to kill to maintain the status quo. May God grant each of us the spirit and dignity of the Kennedy’s and our own lady Jane.

Here is why we fight:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Oe_IitLeg4

I hope the tributes to Sen. Kennedy, the re-plays of his many inspired and inspiring speeches and the remembrances of friends and colleagues from across every spectrum of politics and society will help our country and that the politicians on whom we rely for certain change will find what it takes to become better persons.

Ted Kennedy was a great learner and a great teacher. He worked hard.

We need more like him.

Thank you for finding this speech, Jane, and for sharing your experience.

There were many families who were uprooted for standing up in those days.

I often think of what a different world we would be living in if John and Robert Kennedy and MLK would have lived to comb grey hair.

Thanks for sharing the memory in tribute to your dad and Ted.

Dave Chappelle finds racism in Boston “specific”. E.g., Irish on Italian. Now racism in the South, he says, “is magnifique”.

Not much has changed.

I also, often, think the same about Malcolm X and John Lennon, bgrothus.

I wonder.

What a world it would be …

DW

On the day that Kennedy spoke, I was with a group of students who went to the roof of a dormitory and watched the smoke from East Baltimore and West Baltimore as ragtop trucks of the 82nd Airborne patrolled the streets of the well-to-do neighborhood where the college was located.

One of the ironies of the time that I had not noticed until this video was the narrative of complacency and apathy in the signature year of the 1960s. Yes there was great apathy but that was because it was the backdrop to hard-fought changes in American society. But the apathy was more numbness from the shocks of the civil rights movement, assassinations, a glorious war going quickly bad, the exposure of poverty in the midst of plenty, an airing out of all of America’s dirty laundry. The information was overwhelming, causing withdrawal or rage. A common mood of we who grew up in the 1950s was that in hammering “American values” into us as a “defense against Communism”, we had be lied to. It was a major discovery of hypocrisy, the shock of which persists in the current cynicism.

It is also curious to me how even Kennedy framed the blind rage that erupted in the cities after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King as a tactical mistake of some unnamed leaders. It was a rhetorical defense of a shaken establishment of which he was one of the more forward-looking leaders, but it reflects the disconnection inherent in even the best of noblesse oblige. That should be humbling to anyone on this blog who has not experienced firsthand discrimination, poverty, fear of hatemongers. It is this disconnection more than the psychological condition of apathy that we should worry about. Without having the framing of the discourse to say it, that’s what Senator Kennedy (or his speechwriter, or both–I hear the cadences of Theodore Sorenson in the speech) was struggling to talk about – the disconnection of peer experience, the exclusion implied in the word “exclusive community” or “exclusive neighborhood”, valued then and now as the place to live, work, and bring up kids.

Thank you, Jane for finding this. It is one of an exceptional collection of clips from Senator Kennedy’s career. And as striking as the news coverage of the Kennedy and Nixon healthcare plan in which the Nixon plan sounds like the Baucus plant except Baucus’s covers 65% instead of Nixon’s 70%.

Tarheel, excellent points.

At 62 now I was politically conscious to see the red scare after the end of the Great War morph into the monster America has become – the nuclear stand off with the USSR, the cold war, the proxy wars with the horrible tragedy of SE Asia, the assassinations of brilliant leaders, the rise of unfettered free market crony capitilism, the end of jim crow which was alive and well in this country through too much of my life, and the dominance of the national security state at the service of global corporations.

I have lived through the destruction of the American dream, replaced by a marketing of debt servitude as the new freedom, when in fact it was a kind of slavery hardly different from the plantations of the south. I have seen the nations of Europe who have been waring for a millennium led by kings and despots come together a stand up a system which supports it’s citizens without crushing freedom. It’s not perfect, but it’s not domination by the state, the communism and “socialism” which we were made to fear. We have seen the French ridiculed despite the fact that the French on any objective analysis have better lives, work less, have better health, better health care, better food, free and better education, longer lives, lower infant mortality, higher literacy, less poverty, longer vacations, guaranteed maturity benefits, in general a higher standard of living by any metric.

We need to have a dose of truth and realty as Ted mentions in that speech. America has gone astray and is NOT fulfilling her promise of the founding documents.

I was tempted to point out the cloistered existence of the Kennedy family, but passed on that point.

Excellent comment, btw.

Thanks for sharing that moving story. Your father must have been fearless. It is not an easy thing to speak truth to power when such tremendous consequences result. Raising a young family and losing your ability to provide for them is dire indeed. I am grateful to him. It is these anonymous acts of courage from (extra) ordinary people that have helped to make the best of our country possible.

I wish our “leaders” could be so fearless.

Jane, Thank you for posting that. What comes from the heart goes to the heart.

Sounds like your dad was a pretty special guy. He’d be proud of his daughter.

I wonder if Mary Jo Kopechne has any fond memories of Ted Kennedy? Oh, that’s right, she drowned while Ted went home and slept.

I think every American who grew up during this time was deeply touched by the Kennedy family, whether they knew it or not. I was six in 1968.

I was a month old when Ted Kennedy entered the senate

so Ted has been a fixture of my government for almost my entire lifetime

I’d say he certainly affected my life in ways that I don’t know about

Thank you Mr Kennedy