Edward M Ted Kennedy

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), an Irish Catholic in a state with an overwhelmingly Catholic population, learned a bitter lesson this week about the dangers of introducing religion into a political contest. Kennedy, who has served in the Senate for 32 years, is running the race of his life againstconservative Republican Mitt Romney, a former Mormon bishop and a self-made millionaire. Kennedy and Romney are in a virtual dead heat in the Senate race.

Massachusetts Atty. Gen. Martha Coakley announced Thursday that she would run as a Democratic candidate in the special election to succeed the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. Coakley said the state has had a "crisis of confidence" since Kennedy's death last week of brain cancer, and that she believed she could continue to be "an effective voice for the people of Massachusetts." "We've depended on him here in the Commonwealth and in Washington, and we will miss his strength and leadership and his sense of humor.

Police in Palm Beach, Fla., were investigating a report by a 30-year-old woman that she had been raped when visiting the Kennedy family compound there. No charges have been filed and no details were released by the police. In Washington, the office of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) issued a statement saying that Kennedy had been in Palm Beach at the time but had no involvement with the alleged incident.

Joan Waxman happened to be in the nation's capital on an elementary school trip that week in 1963 when John F. Kennedy was buried. She was in town for a wedding when former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died. This weekend, as the body of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy was laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery, Waxman, 53, and her husband, Howard, were moving their son in for his junior year at George Washington University. Before heading back to New Jersey, they decided to pay their respects to the last of the fabled Kennedy brothers after watching his funeral cortege on Saturday.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy didn't stay too long at the dinner in this Boston suburb last Friday night honoring the visiting prime minister of Cape Verde. But as he left the hall filled with hundreds of immigrants from the tiny island nation, Kennedy paused by the door and leaned purposefully into Salah Matteos, the evening's master of ceremonies. "Keep in touch," the senior senator from Massachusetts said with a sudden urgency. "We really want--we need --your help. Help me out."

The woman who charged that the nephew of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy raped her, told police that she attempted to escape but that the nephew, William Kennedy Smith, tackled her, held her down and forced himself on her as she struggled vainly, a police report released Friday discloses.

President Bush has invited members of the Kennedy family to the White House to watch "Thirteen Days," the movie about John F. Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis. Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy of Rhode Island, Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy have accepted the invitation for dinner and a movie Thursday. Also invited were Caroline Kennedy and her husband. Rep.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y), considered a prominent contender to become secretary of State in the Obama administration, was offered an alternative Tuesday -- to be a senior member of the Senate team aiming to overhaul the nation's healthcare system. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), who has announced plans to craft sweeping healthcare legislation next year, asked the former presidential contender to head a working group focused on insurance coverage.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) told a jury Friday how he had taken his son and nephew for a late-night drink March 30 to overcome a melancholy mood, but denied that he heard screams or saw any evidence that his nephew had raped a woman later on the lawn of the family's oceanfront estate. In the fifth day of the William Kennedy Smith trial, the senator's son Patrick, 24, also took the stand to say that he had seen a woman at the family estate later that night with his cousin.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Washington lawyer Victoria Anne Reggie were married Friday evening in a small civil ceremony attended by about 30 close relatives in the living room of Kennedy's house in McLean, Va., according to a spokesman. In keeping with the couple's desire for privacy, the location and timing of the ceremony were not disclosed until after the fact. They evaded what could have been considerably more publicity by marrying in McLean rather than in Nantucket, Mass.

As a soft twilight fell over the nation's capital, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy was laid to his final rest Saturday in a ceremony on a sloping site in Arlington National Cemetery. Kennedy's burial brings America's most famous band of brothers together again. His grave sits 100 feet south of his brother Robert's, and 200 feet from the eternal flame that burns for John, the former president. The senator's funeral cortege followed the same route his brothers' hearses did, from the Capitol to the national shrine across the Potomac River in Virginia, after they were killed more than four decades ago. Eight members of a U.S. military honor guard carried Kennedy's casket from the black hearse and set it down at a freshly dug grave near manicured shrubs and broad maple trees.

For many of those mourning Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) during his funeral and burial today, what gives special meaning to his life is not only his record of legislative accomplishments but his perseverance through a lifetime of scandal and hardship. For others, however, no record of achievement will compensate for Kennedy's mistakes and personal failings. The 1969 Chappaquiddick episode -- in which he fled the scene after his car went off a bridge, carrying Mary Jo Kopechne to her death -- was arguably the most unforgivable of the blemishes on his career.

Senior Democrats in Washington and Massachusetts have thrown their support behind a proposal to appoint a temporary replacement for Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, whose death Tuesday has left his chief cause -- national health insurance -- with one less vote. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Thursday endorsed the plan to change the state's law to allow an interim appointment before a special election, when a candidate will be chosen to serve out the last three years of the Massachusetts Democrat's term.

In an extraordinary outpouring of public emotion, thousands of people solemnly lined state highways and city streets Thursday to pay their last respects to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the legendary scion of America's most storied political dynasty. They came from Argentina and Ireland, from New York and New Hampshire. But mostly they came from across Massachusetts -- the state Kennedy dominated for nearly five decades -- many to weep or pray as his flag-draped casket was transported in a poignant procession from the family compound in Hyannis Port to his fallen brother's presidential library in Boston.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's death leaves a void in the firmament of American politics, one that will be difficult to fill -- not only because the Democratic Party has no understudy ready for his role, but also because Congress has changed so much in the more than four decades of his career. Kennedy was the polestar of old-fashioned Democratic liberalism, the constant point against which much of his party measured itself. "The commitment I seek is not to outworn views but to old values that will never wear out," he told the 1980 Democratic convention.

Edward M. Kennedy was in San Francisco celebrating his brother Robert's victory in California's 1968 Democratic presidential primary when a gunman assassinated the candidate at his election-night party in Los Angeles. Twelve years later, the Massachusetts senator vanquished President Carter in another California primary -- yet effectively lost his own bid for the party's White House nomination that same night. In decades of campaigns, Kennedy marched with farmworkers and other Californians in battles for civil rights and labor advances.

Florida police detectives questioned Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) Sunday regarding the alleged rape at the Kennedy family's Palm Beach, Fla., home. They told the senator he was not a suspect in the case, a Kennedy spokesman said. "The Palm Beach police have informed Sen. Ted Kennedy that neither he nor his son, Patrick, are suspects," spokesman Paul Donovan told reporters waiting outside Kennedy's suburban Washington home.

The death of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy was the first of a liberal politician of legendary stature since the rise of the cable news networks and as such it brought out their biases in slightly new ways. MSNBC, which has increasingly positioned itself as the anti-Fox, covered his death wall-to-wall and most often sounded the heroic note. CNN, staking out the middle, made it the day's main, but not only story. And Fox News, which had to measure respect for the dead against its habitual rightward spin, made its feelings known by treating it, for the most part, as just another of the day's news events (though the lead story, to be sure)

The death of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy was the first of a liberal politician of legendary stature since the rise of the cable news networks and as such it brought out their biases in slightly new ways. MSNBC, which has increasingly positioned itself as the anti-Fox, covered his death wall-to-wall and most often sounded the heroic note. CNN, staking out the middle, made it the day's main, but not only story. And Fox News, which had to measure respect for the dead against its habitual rightward spin, made its feelings known by treating it, for the most part, as just another of the day's news events (though the lead story, to be sure)

Ted Kennedy wakes up mornings in his house on Cape Cod to a packet of news clippings put together by his wife. If there's a hearing going on in Washington, he watches on his computer. Five hundred miles away, Congress is wrestling with historic legislation to give every American access to quality healthcare. It is the moment the Massachusetts Democrat has worked toward for 46 years.