Catching the Wind

Catching the Wind Synopsis

Edward M. Kennedy was never expected to succeed. The youngest of nine, he lacked his brothers' natural gifts and easy grace.

Yet after winning election to the Senate at the tender age of thirty, he became the most consequential legislator of his lifetime, perhaps even American history. Surviving the traumas of his brothers' assassinations, Ted Kennedy ultimately exerted the greatest effort keeping alive the mission of an active and caring government. He swept into the Senate at the high-water mark of the mid-century New Deal consensus only to watch that model slip quickly away, as a push for limited government rewrote the contract between nation and citizens.

For much of his life, Ted Kennedy was the increasingly lonely voice of American liberalism. That voice found its greatest impact in the laws he passed that wove government firmly into American life, extending aid and opportunity to those in most desperate need. Two thousand pieces of legislation, ranging from health care to education to civil rights, bore Ted's fingerprints.

For five decades, he worked tirelessly to better people's lives; he did this because he felt he owed it to those who suffered, and those with whom he empathized out of his own pain and ever-present sense of inadequacy. But Ted Kennedy always had a dark side. Ted got the gift of years that his brothers did not, but it came with a price: He lived long enough to fail, to sin, to fall in and out of favor.

He was publicly abased--for his womanizing, for the 1969 Chappaquiddick incident in which a young woman died, for his bizarre behavior when his nephew was accused of rape--and forced to ask for forgiveness. In sacrificing the moral high ground, he undermined his entreaties for justice and compassion, and ultimately contributed to the death of the moral authority that had underpinned liberalism since the end of the Great Depression.

The public saw a man who was open and accessible, not the inner turmoil that arguably made him the most complex of the Kennedys and the most far-reaching in his effect on the lives of ordinary Americans. The product of a decade of work and hundreds of interviews, Against the Wind is an essential work of history and biography, a landmark study of legislative genius, and a powerful exploration of the passing of a robust form of government and the man who spent his career protecting Americans from the consequences of that end.