Word: hersh
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...EDUCATION OF EDWARD KENNEDY by BURTON HERSH 510 pages. Morrow...
...that the post-Chappaquiddick Edward Kennedy is an even more effective and increasingly powerful Senate liberal. He is also conceded to be the best natural politician of the whole remarkable clan-less remote than Jack, far less abrasive than Bobby, and with an unfettered, spontaneous brio all his own. Hersh quotes a family friend as saying that Jack "went weak with pleasure" watching his young brother press flesh with the public...
...political lessons were learned in Jack's campaigns, and later in his own quest for a Massachusetts Senate seat. Hersh savors the local pols who were momentarily crucial to Kennedy. Their quaint political world was to achieve national prominence during the Senator's unfortunate 1964 attempt to get Family Retainer Francis X. Morrissey confirmed as a federal judge. That whole public pratfall-the admission of double legal residences and nonexistent law courses-is played out here, but Hersh can offer no real explanation for it beyond misplaced family piety...
...onrushing disaster. When Jack was killed, it fell to Ted to tell their paralyzed father. It took him a day to bring himself to do it, as it did later to report the accident at Chappaquiddick. The most crushing tragedy, of course, was Robert Kennedy's death. Hersh points to the "strain of rather unusual male tenderness, a kind of unabashed motherliness that crops up among Kennedy men." As the youngest child, Ted loved "high jinks and excited fun and a good many drinks sometimes." His secretary notes that the long hospital stay after his own near-fatal plane...
...HERSH shows clearly how the self-serving attitudes of the Peers commission members mirrored those of the officers and men of the Americal. Peers would not allow Vietnam war opponents to testify, and one of the commission members--who went out of his way to self-righteously upbraid the officers of the Americal--is now himself accused of "failure to comply with written directions in connection with the murder in 1969...of at least five Vietnamese prisoners and electric torture of a sixth...