biography
| name: |
Kennedy, Edward M(oore)
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known as Ted Kennedy
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1932– )
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| biography:
| US senator, born in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, youngest son of Joseph Kennedy. Raised in a family that placed a high priority on achievement, he persuaded a Harvard classmate to sit an exam for him and was suspended. After serving in the army, he finished Harvard and went on to graduate from the University of Virginia Law School (1959). Only 30 years old when he ran for the US Senate seat his brother John had vacated, he began his long term (Democrat, Massachusetts, 1963). A staunch liberal, he sponsored bills on immigration reform, criminal code reform, fair housing, public education, health care, AIDS research, and a variety of programmes to aid the poor. On the Senate judiciary committee, he upheld liberal positions on abortion, capital punishment, and racial bussing. After the assassinations of his brothers John (1963) and Robert Kennedy (1968), he was widely regarded as a potential president. In 1969 he became the youngest-ever majority whip in the US Senate, but his involvement the same year in a car accident at Chappaquidick, MA in which a woman companion (Mary Jo Kopechne) was drowned, dogged his subsequent political career, and caused his withdrawal as a presidential candidate in 1979. He continued to be one of the most outspoken advocates for liberal positions, and by the time of his second marriage in 1992 he seemed to have matured and mellowed in his personal life. |
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