And so it ends.

I was born in Massachusetts and am old enough to remember where I was (sitting in a kindergarten classroom) the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. My memory of that day, and the days that followed, are as vivid as any I have. By the time Bobby Kennedy was murdered five years later, my family was living in northeast Ohio, Taft country, and, after the initial shock wore off, our thoughts turned to Ted, the sole surviving Kennedy brother. His eulogy for Bobby at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City in June 1968, a soaring piece of rhetoric that has lost none of its power to inspire (even if its call to action went largely unheeded), signaled another passing of the torch. And we knew, in our bleeding liberal hearts, that it made Ted a marked man.

He knew it, too. As he told reporters in Alaska, where he'd been campaigning for Bobby, after learning his brother had been killed: "They're going to shoot my ass off the way they shot Bobby's." Still, as Garry Wills writes in his 1986 book The Kennedy[...]

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