The liberal lion is doing everything in his power to make fellow Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry the next president.

08:06 AM EDT on Tuesday, July 27, 2004

BY SCOTT MacKAY
Journal Staff Writer

Journal photo / Mary Murphy Senator Kennedy leads the crowd in singing "Sweet Rosie O'Grady," one of his mother's favorite songs, at the dedication of the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway, which will supplant the old, elevated Central Artery, a highway whose successor was built underground.

BOSTON -- The rivulets of sweat dripped down his forehead and onto the Democratic Party's most recognizable crimson face yesterday morning, as Sen. Ted Kennedy's baritone bellowed a verse from an Irish ditty his mother favored.

"I love sweet Rosie O'Grady," Kennedy led the crowd of more than 500 in singing. "And Rosie O'Grady loves me."

Kennedy was the emcee for yesterday's dedication of a new park, the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway, named in honor of Kennedy's mother, the late matriarch of Massachusetts' first family of Democratic politics.

On stage with Kennedy were his sisters Eunice Kennedy Shriver and Jean Kennedy Smith. Seated near the stage under a billowing white tent at the celebration in Boston's North End were scores of family members, including Sargent Shriver, who suffers from Alzheimer's disease and is one of the last of the living New Frontier liberals.

In the audience were many other Medicare-age supporters from Kennedy's many campaigns and his family's storied past.

F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American life. He never met Ted Kennedy.

At 72, Kennedy has one foot planted in history as he celebrates a Democratic National Convention that he was instrumental in bringing to his home state. There is no escaping his legacy in a convention city where every other street displays a 1960 campaign poster of his brother, John F. Kennedy.

Tonight, Kennedy will show that his other foot is walking toward the future; this convention is not necessarily his swan song, because he is doing everything in his power to make his fellow Massachusetts senator, John F. Kerry, the next president.

Kennedy will address the convention this evening. "I've got a good talk that I'm still working on," Kennedy said in a brief interview yesterday. "It is going to tell the real story, the reason why people ought to have confidence in John Kerry . . . and the values Senator Kerry stands for."

Kerry aides say they want convention speeches to be positive and not contain caustic anti-President Bush rhetoric that might turn off undecided voters. They want Kerry seen as a family man, a decorated Vietnam War veteran, a devoted father and husband, a crime-fighting prosecutor and a man committed to public service via his 20 years in the Senate.

When asked whether he intends to carry the fight to Mr. Bush, Kennedy said, "I'll be making my case."

Late last year, when Kerry's campaign was in disarray, Kennedy went to the rescue. He sent his Senate office chief of staff, Mary Beth Cahill, over to run Kerry's political operation.

"Every week he would call and say he was coming out on the weekend," Cahill recalled in an interview yesterday, speaking of Kennedy's many trips to help Kerry campaign in Iowa's leadoff caucuses. "He was the first senator to endorse John Kerry and he backed that up with his physical presence whenever we asked for it."

In the twilight of an illustrious career, Kennedy has been reinvigorated by his role in Kerry's effort and the Boston convention.

"He is more energized than I've seen him in years," said his son, U.S. Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy of Rhode Island's 1st District. "This convention could have been his last hurrah, so to speak. But something has happened with this Kerry campaign, and I think he is looking at this being his second chapter."

"If Kerry makes it, he knows he will be Kerry's point man," says Patrick Kennedy. "He will be the most important senator on the Hill."

KENNEDY HAS KNOWN tragedy. He is the only man in his family to get to the age when his hair turns gray. One brother, Joseph, died in World War II military service. Brothers John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy were in their 40s when they were killed by assassins.

There was, of course, more than family fate. Kennedy's own chances of ever following his brother to the White House were probably doomed in 1969, when a car Kennedy was driving went off a bridge on Martha's Vineyard, and a young passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, died.

He has endured marital troubles -- he is divorced from his first wife, Joan Bennett Kennedy -- and spent years drinking too much and womanizing. Ten summers ago, Kennedy was so overweight he burst the seams of his suits, his stalwart liberalism seemed an anachronism and he was in danger of losing his seat to Mitt Romney.

Kennedy rebounded. His marriage to Victoria Reggie helped, say those close to him. "She has given him so much in the way of stability and solid companionship," said Patrick Kennedy.

He walks gingerly these days, wincing as the pain in his back flares up, as it often does. His back has never totally recovered from a fracture suffered in a small plane crash in Western Massachusetts in the 1960s.

He has lost weight recently, with the help of a daily swimming regimen, his wife said yesterday.

How much weight has he lost? "We're not counting pounds; we're counting trends," said Victoria Reggie Kennedy.

KENNEDY WAS FIRST elected to the Senate in 1962; his brother was in the White House. He has been reelected every six years since. There was an ill-fated 1980 run for the presidency; he lost his party's nomination to Jimmy Carter.

Kennedy made peace years ago with the reality that he would never be elected president. He has devoted his career to legislation, particularly in advancing the causes he has long championed: helping organized labor, increasing access to health care, favoring civil rights and increasing support for education.

"He maintains this incredible energy," said Sen. Jack Reed, of Rhode Island. "He has the passion and energy of someone who has been there for 42 weeks, not 42 years."

Kennedy has an inner toughness and resilience, say those who have worked with him. "One of his gifts is that he is able to pull himself up off the canvas time and again, whether in the face of family tragedy or politically," said Paul Kirk, a former Kennedy aide and national chairman of the Democratic Party.

Over more than four decades in the Senate, Kennedy has served in both the majority and the minority, and understands how relationships must be maintained among senators, Kirk says.

Kennedy, a Roman Catholic, also has a strong religious faith, Kirk says. "He doesn't talk about it, but a strong faith is one of the things that keeps him going."

Kennedy, whom Kirk describes as a "fiercely loyal" political figure, is known to provide succor to friends and allies in need. A good example, says Adam Clymer, a former New York Times reporter and Kennedy's biographer, is former President Bill Clinton.

When Clinton was at his gloomiest during his 1999 impeachment, Kennedy would call the White House. "You couldn't have a better friend," Clinton said of Kennedy. "I mean, he is loyal. People have been loyal to him, and understanding, and he's had to ask for forgiveness a time or two and so he gives as good as he's gotten on that."

Clinton said Kennedy's advice was always simple: "It's just sort of get up and go to work, just keep going and remember why you wanted the job in the first place."

It has been a career that spans a time when torchlight parades and speeches from flatbed trucks were the primary election tools to the era of the Internet.

KENNEDY IS a throwback, says Clymer. "He certainly has fewer people he intensely dislikes than Bob or Jack Kennedy [had]. The Senate is a place he thrives in, and his brothers didn't."

Kennedy started his career in a different Senate. Staffs were smaller and television was not an everyday presence.

"When the staffs were smaller, senators depended much more on each other," says Clymer. "You had to schmooze with other senators, and that is something that comes easily to him."

Brothers John and Robert did not have the patience for the ripe pomposities and endless debate about parochial issues that dominate Senate discussion.

"He isn't unaware of the foolishness of the Senate, but he has a higher tolerance for it," says Clymer.

Kennedy is known as a witty man and a wonderful mimic; Rhode Islanders laugh when they watch him imitate 96-year-old Frank DePaulo, of Providence, who took Patrick Kennedy under his wing when the younger was a Providence College student readying for a run for General Assembly.

"He is a sentimental person, melancholy, very Irish," says his son Patrick. "Beneath the self-deprecating humor is a sense of fatalism that underlies everything. There is this, 'You have to make the best of it now, enjoy yourself because you know how arbitrary life can be.' "

"You have to learn to cope with it all," says Patrick Kennedy. "I don't know how he does it."

PATRICK KENNEDY says longtime Washington hands tell him that his father has a knack for loosening up Kerry, who has a reputation for being reserved, even standoffish. "Kerry can kind of playfully go after my dad and make fun. They take it that way."

A joke Kerry told often in Iowa and in the New Hampshire primary goes like this:

"Someone asked me what it felt like, whether it was really hard to live in the shadow of Ted Kennedy," Kerry said in New Hampshire one day in January while stumping with Kennedy. "He asked me what it was like to know that in all of my life, I would never have an amazing legislative record like Ted Kennedy. He asked me if I was jealous of the fact that I was serving with a living legend.

"And it was Teddy who asked me that," Kerry said.

The story always drew laughs, especially from Kennedy.

Yesterday, Kennedy ended the tribute to his mother by saying, "She was a beautiful flower in our family."

Then he wiped the tears from his eyes and limped off the stage toward the handshakes and backslaps of his admirers.