Growing up in Massachusetts, the Kennedy's are a part of your outer life, like snow. Or excellent thin crust pizza. Or the annual turn of autumn leaves. Massachusetts proudly claims the Kennedy's and it's been a marriage of several decades. The State even had to export one Kennedy to Rhode Island because there wasn't enough room for more in Boston proper.

Chappaquiddick had happened the year before he came to our house. With the lack of consequences usually reserved for royalty, diplomats or dictators, Kennedy was allowed to literally and figuratively walk away from his responsibility in the drowning death of Mary Jo Kopechne. And he still thought he could be president of the United States.

He was testing the waters and making the rounds and hitting up the small towns of New England to garner interest and support for his re-election to the Senate and his plans to run for President in 1976. The Kennedy mystique was such that my republican father was helping him. He came on board as an Area Coordinator and organized some talks locally. That's how Ted ended up at our house one night.

Edward "Teddy" Kennedy, whose sexual picadillo's make Bill Clinton look chaste, managed to become a career politician in puritan New England; he's a man who walked away from a woman drowning in his car and didn't report it for 18 hours; he is a practicing catholic on paper, but in real life he vehemently supports partial-birth abortion and achieved the unfortunate goal of breaking all 10 commandments by age 50. [As one Bostonion put it: "As long as you're not a woman or a viable fetus, you might be safe from Ted."] He cruised on the Kennedy name and the Kennedy money his whole life. In one of the Kennedy biographies there is a short exchange between the spiraling -down- into -alcoholism Joan, his wife and Jackie. Joan is devastated by Ted's serial adultery, Jackie responds with an acceptance of John's similar relationships with a sad world-weariness.

My father was in charge of Danvers, Beverly, Marblehead, Salem and Peabody. They gave him 10 names to start out with and he hit the ground running.

"All you had to say to anyone was "The Senator wants this" or "The Senator wants that" and it was done," recalls my father. Dad put up signs, organized phone banks and it was all volunteer. He met Mr. Crimmins, Ted's driver, an older man who had been with him since before Chappaquiddik. Ted's people would give Dad a number to call to organize a function and when he'd call it the first question would always be, a la Soprano's: "Who gave you this number?" Loyalty was the currency that made the Kennedy machine function.

On March 6th, 2009, an article in Britains Mail Online by Mary Ellen Synon gives a great wrap-up of Kennedy's character, "flawed from the start." She wrote the article because the Tories are raging at Kennedy's upcoming knighthood and she says they are right. One big argument they have that you don't often hear in the U.S. is his allignment with the Irish Republican Movement. And his friendship with Gerry Adams. But she goes on to outline his life's failures: cheating at Harvard, being expelled, being reinstated due to Family pressure (money). His many DUI's. His seat on the senate that his father Joe bragged: "It's mine. I bought it." She goes into detail into Mary Jo's death. At the inquest it was estimated that Mary Jo had stayed alive for about 25 minutes as she sucked the last oxygen out of the air bubble in the car. That would have been enough time to rescue her, if Kennedy had called for help.

One night Dad got a call. They wanted Ted to give a town meeting talk locally. Any suggestions? Dad suggested Willis E. Thorpe elementary school and they had him organize it. After the talk, Ted's staff needed to meet with him before he flew off to Washington or Hyannis. Where could they meet? Dad suggested our house and before you could say Suzie Chapstick! the local cops, a helicopter and about 25 secret service men circled our house and block. It was not protocol for all senators but because both of his brothers had been assasinated, he was given secret service for life. The primary thought by local cops, according to my father, was always: "he ain't gonna die on our watch."

Mr. Kennedy was a gentleman that evening; my parents served coffee to all and they had their staff meeting in our livingroom. My mother got me out of bed at 10:00pm to "meet the next president of the United States!" He asked me a couple of questions and back to bed I went. He talked a lot about special olympics in those days because his sister Eunice had just founded them 2 years previously.

For anybody who wonders if Politicians really affect our lives for one day or for years to come, Kennedy is a good example of why that answer is yes. When all is said and done, one of Kennedy's main legacies will be the opening up the Borders of the U.S. in 1965.

"The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (Hart-Celler Act, INS Act of 1965, Pub.L. 89-236) abolished the national-origin quotas that had been in place in the United States since the Immigration Act of 1924. It was proposed by Emanuel Celler, co-sponsored by Philip Hart and heavily supported by United States Senator Ted Kennedy.^[1]

In the Democratic-controlled Congress, the House of Representatives voted 326 to 69 (82.5%) in favor of the act while the Senate passed the bill by a vote of 76 to 18. Opposition mainly came from Southern legislators. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the legislation into law.The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 became law on July 1, 1968. Along with the act of 1952, it serves as one of the parts of the United States Code until this day.

During debate on the Senate floor, Kennedy, speaking of the effects of the act, said, "First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same.... Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset.... Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia.... In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think.... The bill will not flood our cities with immigrants. It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs."^[2] The act's supporters not only claimed the law would not change America's ethnic makeup, but that such a change was not desirable.^[1]

In reality, the Act did result in a flood of new immigration from non-European nations that did change the ethnic make-up of the United States.^[3] Immigration doubled between 1965 and 1970 and doubled again between 1970 and 1990.^[1]

In Massachusetts and on the Democrat side of the aisle in Washington, it is considered blasphemy to tell the truth about Ted Kennedy. But as Jonathon Keats said recently, "If I wasn't blaspheming, I wouldn't be doing my job."

John Kerry recently generously took $5,813,000 of tax payer money for the creation in Boston of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the Senate. The Kennedys' personal wealth is famous and insidious and 5 million dollars is chump change to people like Caroline Kennedy. Perhaps she could find it in her heart to fund it herself and for once, give the taxpayers a break.