Ted Kennedy
As the fourth son of the close-knit but fiercely competitive Kennedy clan, little Teddy was almost an afterthought, the runt of the litter--if he didn't disappoint, it was because so little was expected of him. Expelled from Harvard for cheating, Teddy was a fun-loving playboy who served his brothers loyally and effectively, but no one would have anticipated his being voted into the Senate at the age of 30 in a special election to fill his brother Jack's seat on his own merit. It was easy to take Teddy lightly, and many did. John Farrell candidly depicts all the good reasons people had to gauge the youngest Kennedy brother as a reckless good time boy. But in the United States Senate, something happened that surprised many people: he found his home, and he found his calling. Not immediately, and not without setbacks, but over time, he would build arguably the most significant career of any Senator in American history. Through raging storms, the Senate was his safe harbor.
Ted Kennedy's life was buffeted by relentless heartbreak: the violent deaths of his three older brothers, his own terrible plane crash, his children's bouts with cancer, and of course the hideous self-inflicted wounds of Chappaquiddick and stretches of drunken womanizing that inflicted irreparable damage on an already fragile first marriage and his vulnerable children. Farrell is unflinching in probing the life's darker chapters. Those wounds scarred Teddy terribly. But they also tempered his character, and especially after he discarded his ambitions to become President, he embarked in the last quarter century of his life on a run as legislator, party elder, and paterfamilias of the Kennedy family, that would bring him enormous satisfaction and change America for the better in a number of ways.