White-haired, red-faced, cheerfully garrulous, outgoing, pugnacious when nec- essary, portly: in his last years Senator Ted Kennedy strikingly resembled the Irish-American politicos of old, particularly his maternal grandfather, John Fitzgerald, ‘Honey Fitz,’ twice mayor of Boston.
White-haired, red-faced, cheerfully garrulous, outgoing, pugnacious when nec- essary, portly: in his last years Senator Ted Kennedy strikingly resembled the Irish-American politicos of old, particularly his maternal grandfather, John Fitzgerald, ‘Honey Fitz,’ twice mayor of Boston. Kennedy was well aware of the likeness, and his account of Honey Fitz is one of the most enjoyable passages in this memoir; but he did not go so far as to concede that he was more of a Fitzgerald than a Kennedy. Readers will form their own opinions.
Yet the dominant theme of the book is the burden and difficulty of becoming a Kennedy, as if it were a profession with a fiendishly exacting entrance exam (Kennedy was not always good at exams, and notoriously was detected when cheating for a Spanish exam at Harvard).
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