Ted Kennedy

Posted by Karen Tumulty Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 3:12 pm

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Crossposting what I just wrote for our liveblog:

At the Capitol lunch in his honor, President Barack Obama confirmed the reports that Ted Kennedy—who had looked so hale at the inaugural ceremony—had collapsed. Kennedy, who is suffering from brain cancer, had given Obama's presidential campaign a crucial boost a year ago, when he had endorsed him in his primary bid against Hillary Clinton.

Noting that Kennedy had been there when the Voting Rights Act had passed in 1965, Obama said: “Right now, a part of me is with him.”

That history could hardly be more resonant on this day. Kennedy had indeed fought hard for the Voting Rights Act, which had passed in the wake of violence in Selma, Alabama. It prohibited states from putting any "voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure ... to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color."

But what Kennedy called his “maiden speech” in the Senate—his first major address from the floor—had come the year before in 1964, on the Civil Rights Act, where he invoked the fresh memory of his assassinated brother: “My brother was the first President of the United States to state publicly that segregation was morally wrong,” Ted said. “His heart and his soul are in this bill. If his life and death had a meaning, it was that we should not hate but love one another; we should use our powers not to create conditions of oppression that lead to violence, but conditions of freedom that lead to peace.”

The civil rights bill had gone down in filibuster 11 times before. This time, it passed—largely because of backroom maneuvering between Republican Everett Dirksen and Democrat Hubert Humphrey to muster the 27 GOP votes it took to avert yet another death-by-filibuster at the hands of Southern Democrats.

Watching how that deal came together was one of the formative political experiences of Ted Kennedy's political career. Forty years later, on the anniversary of that act, Kennedy noted: “The Senate came together, across party lines, to live up to America's best ideals.”

UPDATE: Our TIME.com story.

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