When I came back to Washington to be The Times' chief congressional correspondent in 1991, I was looking for a book subject, and Ted Kennedy stood out for two reasons.
Ted Kennedy is the only person alive who might know more than we do about Chappaquiddick, and he may not.
A Reagan appointee, Justice Kennedy is no liberal, as he has shown on issues from affirmative action to corporate campaign spending. But he has repeatedly sided with gay litigants before the court.
Harvard's Kennedy School of Government asked me to serve as a fellow at its Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy. After my varied and celebrated career in television, movies, publishing, and the lucrative world of corporate speaking, being a fellow at Harvard seemed, frankly, like a step down.
You know, it's very clear, as one looks back on history again of the Cold War that, following the crisis in Cuba, following the Khrushchev - beating down of Jack Kennedy in Vienna, that President Kennedy believed that we had to join the battle for the Third World, and the next crisis that developed in that regards was Vietnam.
Harvard is nerd rehab. You have to check yourself in. Those who seek a school filled with self-proclaimed 'nerds,' seek elsewhere. Dropping the H bomb may brand you as an intellectual or a Kennedy. But it will not give you much nerd cred. And that's a good thing.
I guess my claim to fame is I've now gaveled Ted Kennedy to order twice.
There were no jobs created in America from 1945, when the war ended, through 2003. How could there be? Taxes were too high. Preposterously so under Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan (who left office with a 28 percent rate on long-term capital gains) and Bush the Elder.
I worked in the Senate in the 1970s. I worked for the Labor, Public Welfare Committee, and we had Ted Kennedy and my old boss, Bill Hathaway, and Walter Mondale.
The murder of John Kennedy in broad daylight in the streets of an American city remains, to me, an unsolved crime.
