Ted issued a statement of the family’s “unspeakable grief,” lowered the flag to half-staff and then went to the side of the person he knew would be suffering most. This put an end to the hope that anyone would be found alive. On Sunday, Coast Guard Rear Admiral Richard Larrabee switched to a search-and-recovery effort. The Senator reached Hyannis Port the next day and began the vigil. But he got only the voice of a friend whose air conditioning had broken down and who, at John’s invitation, was staying in his Tribeca apartment. But by nightfall on that Friday, when no one in Hyannis Port had heard from John and Carolyn, it was Ted who called John in Manhattan, hoping he had not left. On the day that he would help launch a frantic search for his nephew, Ted was leading a fight in the Senate for a more expansive Patients’ Bill of Rights. This wasn’t, ‘Let’s have 10 family members get up and say the torch is passed, time for a new generation.’ None of that. There was no rhetoric of the kind Ted Kennedy used at the 1980 Democratic Convention, when he said, “The dream shall never die.” A Kennedy friend who was there told TIME, “I’ve seen this family in other sad circumstances, and I’m telling you, this was different. “He was lost on that troubled night, but we will always wake for him, so that his time, which was not doubled but cut in half, will live forever in our memory and in our beguiled and broken hearts.”īut there is one thing he did not promise, and that’s what separated this day of mourning for the Kennedys from all the others.
And he promised that this family, at least, this old and bruised and sturdy family, would stand by in an eternal wake. “He and his bride have gone to be with his mother and father, where there will never be an end to love,” Kennedy said. It was there in the practiced cadences, the defiant wit, the stubborn Catholicism that insists on seeing all the way to the gates of heaven. Thomas More in New York City, we could not hear the quiver in his voice. Last week, when he again stepped up to a pulpit, this time to eulogize his nephew behind the closed doors of the Church of St. He has done it so often and so well that we remember him most fondly for the goose-bump lines in his eulogies he shines brightest in the darkest suit. When a bullet has struck or a plane has crashed, Senator Ted Kennedy has been left to marry his family’s private tears to those of the nation.