Ted Kennedy

I nearly titled this post "The Last Kennedy" because Ted was the last of the legendary brothers. Some called him the least of them, but his legacy is far greater than JFK and RFK's. A less glamorous, less tragic figure. Unlike them he isn't forever young. Ted's record in the Senate improved the lives of ordinary Americans enormously, in less noticeable ways, expanding safety nets and protecting rights. Bobby and Jack led more conspicuously by being activist and photogenic, but Ted did the long work writing the bills and building the alliances to get them enacted. Ted Kennedy appears only once in A Book of Ages, at age 37. That tragic early morning on Chappaquiddick defined his life in the minds of many people, but it didn't end his work. That is a different kind of heroism. The kind of thing novelists write about.

PT 109

On August 3, 1943, John F. Kennedy’s PT boat was cut in half by a Japanese destroyer. Despite his own injuries, Lt. Kennedy managed to save the lives of most of his crew. He was 26. He'd grown up a child of privilege but dogged by poor health, not unlike the another boy president, Theodore Roosevelt. The hero of the family was always Jack's older brother, Joe Jr., who would die in combat in August, 1944. JFK appears five times in A Book of Ages.

Uncle Walter

For those of you who haven't looked at a paper today, the last great anchorman died yesterday. When I was a kid I thought Walter Cronkite and Walt Disney were the same man. Both were moustached, avuncular authority figures who appeared on TV. Everybody looked the same in suit and tie.

Cronkite appears four times in A Book of Ages. Joining CBS at age 33, reading a special bulletin on November 22, 1963, and then, in 1968, forever associating the words "Vietnam" and "stalemate," demonstrating the immense power of television news. Nobody was ever trusted like we trusted Walter Cronkite, except maybe Ronald Reagan, but Uncle Walter didn't fudge numbers or blame pollution on trees or confuse folklore with fact. Cronkite didn't joke about nuclear war into open microphones.

The last entry about Walter Cronkite in my book appears at age 88: Cronkite had an office and a consulting contract with CBS, but was seldom consulted. He was thinking about starting a blog.