2003 Boston Globe article on E. Kennedy - interesting and some great quote from other senators

[Muttocracy]

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/magazine/articles/2003/01/05/kennedy_unbound/?page=full

This 2003 article could feed dozens of posts. The Boston Globe posted a link to it with their coverage of Kennedy. I actually don't like the tone of much of the article (author trying very hard to sound clever, but coming out snarky). However, it has some beautiful quotes of and about Kennedy, including some nice ones from McCain about Kennedy.

...

Three years ago, McCain (along with Feingold) was named the recipient of the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award for the work the Arizona senator had done on campaign finance reform. The private dinner the night before the Boston ceremony conflicted with the 11th birthday of McCain's son, Jimmy.

" said to me, `I'll make sure he has a good time,' " McCain recalls. "So we brought him up here, and he got a ride on a Coast Guard cutter around the bay, and he had two different birthday cakes, and people sang `Happy Birthday' to him twice, and he had an unforgettable time.

"To me, in so many ways, that epitomized Ted Kennedy - this incredible outreach to a little boy who, I mean, what is he to Ted Kennedy? It was remarkable to me."

...

On April 27, 2001, a bus carrying band members from the Oak Hill Middle School in Newton overturned on a highway in the Canadian Maritimes. Four children were killed. In Washington, a man whose child went to Oak Hill boarded an airplane in order to hurry home. He saw Edward Kennedy on the plane. The man told him what had happened. That's where he was going, the senator had replied.

At the school, volunteers gathered from all over Newton to help out. Along one wall, they'd hung broad swatches of blank white paper so that the children could express their sorrow and say their goodbyes. On the second afternoon of the melancholy vigil, a volunteer looked out and saw Kennedy, alone in the hallway, no aides around him and no cameras in sight. He was slowly, carefully, reading every single message left by every grieving child.