Ted Kennedy, R.I.P.
The New York Times is reporting that the influential, long-time senator has died of brain cancer. ABC has a list of accomplishments from his 46 years in the Senate, while Reuters puts his death in the context of the current health-care battle, which Kennedy called "the cause of my life." And The Boston Globe, in the midst of recounting the senator's outsize role in the last few decades of American politics, recalls his failed Presidential ambitions after a scandal involving a car accident:
Kennedy's White House aspirations may have doomed by his actions on the night that he drove off a bridge at Chappaquiddick Island and failed to promptly report the accident in which a woman died. When Kennedy nonetheless later sought to wrest the presidential nomination from an incumbent Democrat, Jimmy Carter, he failed in his quest. But that failure prompted him to reevaluate his place in history, and he dedicated himself to fulfilling his political agenda by other means, famously saying, "the dream shall never die."
CNN has a roundup of reactions from political notables, including Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Nancy Reagan, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is married to Kennedy's neice, Maria Shriver.
Ted Kennedy made frequent appearances in Reason: Nick Gillespie wrote about Kennedy's Serve America Act here, and examined about the evolution of the Kennedy clan here. Jesse Walker asked who killed the Kennedys here. Sam MacDonald wrote about the Patients' Bill of Rights, which Kennedy helped craft with John McCain, here.
