After Diagnosis, Ted Kennedy Determined to Make a ‘Good Ending’ - NYTimes.com

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By MARK LEIBOVICH

WASHINGTON — The once-indefatigable Ted Kennedy was in a wheelchair at the end, struggling to speak and sapped of his energy. But from the time his brain cancer was diagnosed 15 months ago, he spoke of having a “good ending for myself,” in whatever time he had left, and by every account, he did.

As recently as a few days ago, Mr. Kennedy was still digging into big bowls of mocha chip and butter crunch ice creams, all smushed together (as he liked it). He and his wife, Vicki, had been watching every James Bond movie and episode of “24” on DVD.

He began each morning with a sacred rite of reading his newspapers, drinking coffee and scratching the bellies of his beloved Portuguese water dogs, Sunny and Splash, on the front porch of his Cape Cod house overlooking Nantucket Sound.

If he was feeling up to it, he would end his evenings with family dinner parties around the same mahogany table where he used to eat lobster with his brothers.

He took phone calls from President Obama, house calls from his priest and — just a few weeks ago — crooned after-dinner duets of “You Are My Sunshine” (with his son Patrick) and “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” (with Vicki).

“There were a lot of joyous moments at the end,” said Dr. Lawrence C. Horowitz, Mr. Kennedy’s former Senate chief of staff, who oversaw his medical care. “There was a lot of frankness, a lot of hugging, a lot of emotion.”

Obviously, Dr. Horowitz added, there were difficult times. By this spring, according to friends, it was clear that the tumor had not been contained; new treatments proved ineffective and Mr. Kennedy’s comfort became the priority.

But interviews with close friends and family members yield a portrait of a man who in his final months was at peace with the end of his life and grateful for the chance to savor the salty air and the company of loved ones.

Befitting the epic life he led, Mr. Kennedy was the protagonist of a storybook finale from the time of his diagnosis in May 2008. It was infused with a beat-the-clock element: his illness coincided with the debate over health care (“the cause of my life”) and the election of a young president he championed.

Mr. Kennedy raced to complete his legislative work and his memoirs (“I’ve got to get this right for history,” he kept saying), leaned heavily on his faith, enjoyed (or endured) a procession of tributes and testimonials and just recently petitioned Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts to push for a speedy succession so his Senate seat would not be vacant long.

The knowledge that his death was approaching infused Mr. Kennedy’s interactions with special intensity, his friends say.

“He was the only one of the Kennedy boys who had a semi-knowledge that his end was near,” said Mike Barnicle, the former Boston Globe columnist and an old friend who lives nearby on Cape Cod and visited the senator this summer. “There was no gunman in the shadows, just an M.R.I. It was a bad diagnosis, but it allowed for the gift of reflection and some good times.”

Even as Mr. Kennedy’s physical condition worsened over the summer, he still got out of bed every day until Tuesday, when he died in the evening, said Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut and one of Mr. Kennedy’s closest friends in the Senate.

“I’m still here,” Mr. Kennedy would call colleagues out of the blue to say, as if to refute suggestions to the contrary. “Every day is a gift,” was his mantra to begin conversations, said Peter Meade, a friend who met Mr. Kennedy as a 14-year-old volunteer on Mr. Kennedy’s first Senate campaign.

Some patients given a fatal diagnosis succumb to bitterness and self-pity; others try to cram in everything they have always wanted to do (sky-diving, a trip to China). Mr. Kennedy wanted to project vigor and a determination to keep on going. He chose what he called “prudently aggressive” treatments.

“He always admired people who took risks, like Teddy and Kara did,” Mr. Dodd said, referring to two of Mr. Kennedy’s children, who both beat cancer with bold treatments. And he vowed to work as hard as he could to lead a legislative overhaul of the nation’s health care system.

“He was the irrepressible Ted Kennedy,” said Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat, who visited with his longtime colleague last week. “He was determined to get things done, but he also understood he had limitations.”

Mr. Kennedy deputized Dr. Horowitz, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, to research all treatment options before deciding on an intensive regimen of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation — hardly a clear-cut choice with an almost inevitably lethal disease and a patient of Mr. Kennedy’s age. Some physicians assembled at Massachusetts General Hospital considered his tumor inoperable — and measured his likely survival time between six weeks and a few months.

Before he traveled by private plane from Cape Cod to Duke University Medical Center for his surgery in June 2008, Mr. Kennedy made sure to put his affairs in order — his will, his medical directives and even his legislative instructions, family members say.

On the way to the airport, he called two Democratic colleagues: Mr. Dodd, telling him to take over a mental health bill he had been working on, and Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland, instructing her to take over a higher education bill he had been shepherding.

“Barbara,” he boomed over the phone, “as if he was at a Red Sox-Orioles baseball game,” Ms. Mikulski said in an interview. Just days after the surgery, Mr. Kennedy began following up with Ms. Mikulski. “He was Coach Ted,” she said.

Mr. Kennedy took no comfort, friends say, in hearing how missed he was in Washington, or how in his absence he had been become something of a “spiritual leader” on issues with which he is identified, like health care. He kept in close touch with his staff and colleagues, and he was engaged in a running conversation with Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, on the delicate subject of whether Mr. Kennedy would be available to vote.

Mr. Reid assured him that he would not ever ask him to come to Washington unless his vote was essential. (His disease and treatments made Mr. Kennedy vulnerable to infections, so wading into crowded areas was risky.) When a crucial Medicare provision came up last summer, Mr. Reid asked Mr. Kennedy if he could make it down.

Mr. Kennedy’s family and staff debated the issue until the senator ended it. “I’ll be there,” he said, according to a member of his staff who was involved in the decision. He received a standing ovation when he returned to the Senate floor, and the bill passed easily after he helped break a Republican filibuster.

Vicki Kennedy fiercely guarded her husband’s privacy, but Mr. Kennedy’s illness had an undeniably public component. His setbacks and hospital visits often drew news media attention. After his emotional speech at last summer’s Democratic Convention in Denver, it was disclosed that he had been suffering from kidney stones and had barely been able to get out of his hospital bed a few hours earlier.

He had to memorize the text of his speech because he struggled to see the teleprompter (his surgery had left him with impaired vision). The seizure Mr. Kennedy had at an Inaugural luncheon at the Capitol led his son Patrick to joke that his father was trying to overshadow Mr. Obama on his big day.

Mr. Kerry remembers Mr. Kennedy telling him on the Senate floor in March that he was having trouble preparing for an event he had been extremely excited for — throwing out the first pitch on opening day at Fenway Park.

While Mr. Kennedy typically told people he felt well and vigorous, by spring it was becoming clear that his disease was advancing to where he could not spend his remaining months as he had hoped, helping push a health care plan through the Senate.

He left Washington in May, after nearly a half-century in the capital, and decamped to Cape Cod, where he would contribute what he could to the health care debate via phone and C-Span. He would sail as much as possible, with as little pain and discomfort as his caretakers could manage.

He also told friends that he wanted to take stock of his life and enjoy the gift of his remaining days with the people he loved most.

“I’ve had a wonderful life,” he said repeatedly, friends recalled.

Mr. Dodd, in an interview, said: “At no point was he ever maudlin, ever ‘woe is me.’ I’m confident he had his moments — he wouldn’t be Irish if he didn’t — but in my presence, he always sounded more worried about me than he was about himself.”

Starting in late July, Vicki Kennedy organized near-nightly dinner parties and singalongs at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. The senator was surrounded in the dining room by his crystal sailing trophies and a semiregular cast of family members that included his three children, two stepchildren and four grandchildren. Jean Kennedy Smith, Mr. Kennedy’s sister, had rented a home down the street this summer and became a regular, too. Instead of singing, she would sometimes recite poetry.

Even as Mr. Kennedy became frustrated about his limitations, friends say his spirit never flagged. “This is someone who had a fierce determination to live, but who was not afraid to die,” said Representative Bill Delahunt, a Democrat and a Kennedy friend whose district includes Cape Cod. “And he was not afraid to have a lot of laughs until he got there.”

In recent years, friends say, Mr. Kennedy had come to lean heavily on his Roman Catholic faith. In eulogizing his mother, Rose Kennedy, in 1995, he spoke of the comfort of religious beliefs. “She sustained us in the saddest times by her faith in God, which was the greatest gift she gave us,” Mr. Kennedy said, his voice stammering.

He attended Mass every day in the year after his mother’s death and continued to attend regularly, often a few times a week.

The Rev. Mark Hession, the priest at the Kennedys’ parish on the Cape, made regular visits to the Kennedy home this summer and held a private family Mass in the living room every Sunday. Even in his final days, Mr. Kennedy led the family in prayer after the death of his sister Eunice on Aug. 11. He died comfortably and in no apparent pain, friends and staff members said.

His children had expected him to hold on longer — Mr. Kennedy’s son Patrick and daughter Kara could not get back to Hyannis Port in time from California and Washington.

But the senator’s condition took a turn Tuesday night and a priest — the Rev. Patrick Tarrant of Our Lady of Victory Church in Centerville, Mass. — was called to his bedside. Mr. Kennedy spent his last hours in prayer, Father Tarrant told a Boston television station, WCVB-TV.

Mr. Kennedy had told friends recently that he was looking forward to a “reunion” with his seven departed siblings, particularly his brothers, whose lives had been cut short.

“When he gets there, he can say ‘I did it, I carried the torch,’ ” Mr. Delahunt said. “ ‘I carried it all the way.’ ”

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In the Senate, Small States Wield Outsize Power

By Alec MacGillis
Sunday, August 9, 2009

Wonder why President Obama is having a hard time enacting his agenda after sweeping to victory and with large congressional majorities on his side?

Look to the Senate, the chamber designed to thwart popular will.

There is much grousing on the left about the filibuster, the threat of which has taken such hold that routine bills now need 60 votes. Getting less attention is the undemocratic character of the Senate itself.

Why, for example, have even Democratic senators been resistant on health-care reform? It might be because so many of the key players represent so few of the voters who carried Obama to victory -- and so few of the nation's uninsured. The Senate Finance Committee's "Gang of Six" that is drafting health-care legislation that may shape the final deal -- without a public insurance option -- represents six states that are among the least populous in the country: Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, Maine, New Mexico and Iowa.

Between them, those six states hold 8.4 million people -- less than New Jersey -- and represent 3 percent of the U.S. population. North Dakota and Wyoming each have fewer than 80,000 uninsured people, in a country where about 47 million lack insurance. In the House, those six states have 13 seats out of 435, 3 percent of the whole. In the Senate, those six members are crafting what may well be the blueprint for reform.

Climate change legislation, which passed in the House, also faces daunting odds. Why? Because agriculture, coal and oil interests hold far more sway in the Senate. In the House, the big coal state of Wyoming has a single vote to New York's 29 and California's 53. In the Senate, each state has two. The two Dakotas (total population: 1.4 million) together have twice as much say in the Senate as does Florida (18.3 million) or Texas (24.3 million) or Illinois (12.9 million).

Was this really what the founders had in mind? One popular story tells of Thomas Jefferson asking George Washington what the Senate's purpose is. "Why did you pour that coffee into your saucer?" Washington asked in return. "To cool it," Jefferson replied. To which Washington said, "Even so, we pour legislation in the senatorial saucer to cool it." A nice tale. But what if the coffee gets so cold that no one bothers to drink it? Or if the Senate takes its coffee black in a country that opted overwhelmingly for sugar and cream?

Kent Conrad, Democrat from North Dakota (pop. 641,481, third smallest), chairman of the Budget Committee and one of the Gang of Six, does not see any problem. Asked whether it is appropriate that his vote counts as much as those of senators from states 20 times as large, he was flummoxed. "One would hope that people would support the Constitution of the United States," said Conrad, who was reelected with 150,000 votes in 2006, when Virginia's Jim Webb needed 1.2 million votes to win. "This was the grand bargain that was struck when the Founding Fathers determined the structure and form of the United States Congress." He added: "Are you proposing changing the Constitution?"

Well, maybe. Regardless, there's nothing wrong with taking a closer look at how things came to be the way they are. The fact remains that, hallowed as it is, the Senate is as much a product of bare-knuckled, self-interested politics as last week's fight over military earmarks. In Philadelphia in 1787, the smaller states favored the New Jersey Plan -- one chamber with equal representation per state -- while James Madison argued for two chambers, both apportioned by population, which would benefit his Virginia.

The delegates finally settled on the Connecticut Compromise, or the Great Compromise. Seats in the lower chamber would be apportioned by population (with some residents counting more than others, of course) while seats in the upper chamber would be awarded two per state.

The idea was to safeguard states' rights at a time when the former colonies were still trying to get used to this new country of theirs. But the big/small divide was nothing like what we have today. Virginia, the biggest of the original 13 states, had 538,000 people in 1780, or 12 times as many people as the smallest state, Delaware.

Today, California is 70 times as large as the smallest state, Wyoming, whose population of 533,000 is smaller than that of the average congressional district, and, yes, smaller than that of Washington D.C., which has zero votes in Congress to Wyoming's three. The 10 largest states are home to more than half the people in the country, yet have only a fifth of the votes in the Senate. The 21 smallest states together hold fewer people than California's 36.7 million -- which means there are 42 senators who together represent fewer constituents than Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein. And under Senate rules, of course, those 42 senators -- representing barely more than a tenth of the country's population -- can mount a filibuster.

"You have this automatic disequilibrium," said Donald Ritchie, the official Senate historian. "It's clearly inequal. There's no sense of equality except in the sense that the states are equal." Was this what the founders wanted? "I think they would have a hard time imagining how big the country got," he said. "I'm not sure they knew the full ramification of that decision."

For the first few decades in Congress's history, the more democratic House was where the action was. "The authors of the Constitution really thought the House would be the driving engine, and the Senate would just be the senior group that would perfect legislation that came up from the House," Ritchie said.

But after the Missouri Compromise of 1820, it was clear that the battle over slavery would be fought in the upper chamber. After the Civil War, the Senate became the bastion of the GOP as the party pushed to admit pro-Republican states to the union. Nevada was admitted in 1864 to help ratify the Civil War amendments despite being virtually empty; the Dakotas joined in 1889, split in two to provide more votes in the Senate and the Electoral College; Wyoming joined a year later with 63,000 residents.

With these added votes in the Senate and the Electoral College, the Republicans dominated throughout the late 19th century despite Democratic strength in the House. High tariffs, land giveaways in the West, lax regulation of railroads and a pro-business Supreme Court were all thanks partly to the underpopulated new states, says MIT historian Charles Stewart III.

A few decades later, the politics had flipped, and it was the South relying on the Senate -- and the filibuster -- as a bulwark against civil rights legislation. In any case, the Senate's preeminence was established, even as the Britain's House of Lords and upper chambers in other countries' legislatures lost sway. Add the rise of the filibuster and the fact that small-state senators tend to stick around longer, gaining powerful chairmanships under the seniority system, and you've got today's change-resistant Senate.

"We now have probably the most powerful upper house of any legislature," Ritchie said. "Combine that with the inequality, and it creates some peculiar situations."

Not all small states are GOP strongholds. (Hello, Vermont, Delaware and Rhode Island.) And it's true that Obama won the 2008 nomination thanks in part to racking up caucus victories in states such as Idaho and Wyoming.

But since Obama took office, senators from the wide-open spaces have asserted themselves against him over and over. Conrad opposed his plan to cut subsidies for wealthy farmers. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) pushed to focus transportation funding in the stimulus bill on rural areas and last week blocked the lifting of sugar tariffs to protect the ethanol industry.

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) sought cuts in stimulus funding for the states; Nebraska is not suffering the kind of deficits bigger states are. He's also resisted Obama's student loan reforms -- Nelnet, a big loan provider, is based in Nebraska, which wouldn't mean much in the House, where Nebraska has three votes out of 435, but means a lot in the Senate. Similarly, on health care, a network of small Montana hospitals boasted to the Wall Street Journal last week that it has daily contact with Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), who is leading the Gang of Six -- influence it could never hope to have in the House.

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) has declared that the cap-and-trade bill will require even more concessions to agriculture, while a group of rural Midwestern utilities that represents 4 percent of the nation's customers is mobilizing to lobby their small-state senators. The bill passed the House by only seven votes; getting it through the Senate "is going to be the House vote in spades," said Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.

When Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood testified before a Senate committee in June about the need for investments in public transit, he got affirmation from Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.). But Lautenberg was canceled out by John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), from a state 6 percent the size of New Jersey. "We have significant reservations in Wyoming about Washington coming and saying in all its wisdom, 'This is how we want people living,' " Barrasso said.

And then there's the Senate's age-old distortion of distributive politics, in which goodies are doled out on anything but a per-capita basis. California, Illinois, New York and New Jersey are among the 10 states that get the least back per tax dollar sent to Washington; Alaska, the Dakotas and West Virginia are among those that get the most.

Looking on the bright side is Bruce Katz, director of the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program, which promotes policies that recognize that most Americans now live in major metro areas. The Senate may not be representative, he said, but many members have gone beyond their small-state roots to represent the national interest.

John Melcher, a Democrat who represented Montana in the Senate from 1977 to 1989, also takes a sanguine view. I ran into him while covering Obama's swing through Montana in April 2008. After a beautiful bus drive from Missoula along the Clark Fork River, the campaign convoy arrived in the old mining town of Butte, which has fewer people living in it now than in 1910. At the M&M Cafe, where Obama stopped in to shake hands, it took me a while to realize that the octogenarian man I was speaking with was a former U.S. senator -- though the odds of that in a state with fewer than 1 million people were better than elsewhere.

I called Melcher last week to ask him about the Gang of Six and the influence he had held in the Senate. He had not had the sway of his predecessor, Mike Mansfield, the Senate's longest-serving majority leader, but it had not escaped him that his power in the august body was disproportionate to the size of his state. Not that he saw anything wrong with that.

"Small-population states and large land areas have quite a bit of influence," he said. "It's proved to be okay, and hasn't hurt the country. We've had astute leaders in low-populated states, they haven't abused their power."

He paused. "But of course I'm saying that from an admittedly biased point of view. I'm a Westerner. And I think it's fine."

http://macgillisa@washpost.com

Alec MacGillis is a reporter on the national staff of The Washington Post.

Minnesota Supreme Court Declares Franken Winner in U.S. Senate Race

By Perry Bacon Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 1, 2009

The Minnesota Supreme Court yesterday declared comedian-turned-politician Al Franken the winner of the state's U.S. Senate race, ending an eight-month-long election saga and giving Democrats a 60-seat majority that theoretically would allow them to block GOP filibusters.

In a unanimous ruling, the court rejected Republican Norm Coleman's legal arguments that some absentee ballots had been improperly counted and that some localities had used inconsistent standards in counting votes. The ruling led Coleman to concede his Senate seat to Franken, who could be sworn in as soon as next week, when the Senate returns from a recess.

"The Supreme Court has spoken. We have a United States senator," Coleman said in a news conference outside his home in St. Paul. "It's time to move forward."

Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) signed the election certificate declaring Franken the winner yesterday evening.

The Democrats now have their largest majority in the Senate since 1978, but their ability to prevent filibusters as they attempt to push President Obama's agenda is likely to prove illusory. A pair of prominent Democrats, Sens. Edward M. Kennedy (Mass.) and Robert C. Byrd (W.Va.), have missed a raft of votes this year because of illness and, although Byrd was released from a Washington area hospital yesterday, it is unclear how often either will be present in the chamber.

Efforts to maintain party unity are also hampered by the presence of a clutch of centrist Democrats, such as Sen. Mary Landrieu (La.), who have said they oppose the public option in health-care reform legislation that would seek to create a government program to compete with private insurers. A number of Senate Democrats representing states that rely heavily on manufacturing jobs have also expressed concern about the climate-change bill, another Obama priority, that passed the House last week.

"The idea that you've got 60 reliable Democrats for votes for sweeping policy change simply doesn't work; it's not the reality of it," said Norman J. Ornstein, a congressional expert at the American Enterprise Institute. "The larger challenge for [Senate Majority Leader] Harry Reid or Barack Obama is managing expectations of people who are thinking: When you get 60 votes, you get do to whatever you want. And they most assuredly do not."

In a statement, the White House said Obama looks "forward to working with Senator-Elect Franken to build a new foundation for growth and prosperity by lowering health care costs and investing in the kind of clean energy jobs and industries that will help America lead in the 21st century."

Franken, joined by wife Franni at a news conference in front of their home in Minneapolis, said, "I can't wait to get started." But he played down the importance of his becoming the 60th Democrat in the chamber.

"Sixty is a magic number, but it isn't," Franken said, "because we know that we have senators who -- Republicans who are going to vote with the Democrats, with a majority of Democrats on certain votes, and Democrats that are going to vote with majority Republicans on others. So it's not quite a magic number as some people may say. But I hope we do get President Obama's agenda through."

Although he will be a backbencher in his caucus, he will be thrust almost immediately into one of the summer's highest-profile pieces of political theater, the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. Democrats have been holding a seat on the Judiciary Committee for the Harvard-educated Franken, who will also serve on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, a prime perch in the health-care debate.

The longtime Democratic activist is likely to be a reliable vote for the party on nearly every issue and has largely praised Obama's performance thus far. But beyond the Sotomayor hearings, Franken has indicated that he will attempt to keep a low profile in Washington. In an interview this year, he said he would seek to replicate the model of former senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), who generally eschewed major speeches in her first few years on Capitol Hill to focus on learning the internal dynamics of the Senate and tried to avoid upstaging her colleagues.

"A lot of people have been sort of saying, 'You should really study Hillary's model of being a senator,' " Franken said. "She worked across party lines, wasn't grabbing the microphone."

Before his Senate bid, Franken had gained a reputation as a sharply partisan and acerbic Democrat who mocked Republicans but sometimes worried Democrats with his fiery commentaries on television and radio. After leaving "Saturday Night Live" in 1995, he wrote books, including "Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot" and "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right," and hosted a show on the liberal Air America network.

But he largely downplayed his humor, temper and partisan background in his two-year campaign against Coleman, whom he repeatedly linked to President George W. Bush. Franken said little publicly during the post-election legal process, with an eye toward winning over the 57 percent of Minnesota voters who backed either Coleman or independent candidate Dean Barkley in the Nov. 4 vote.

A few days after the election, Coleman led the race by 206 votes out of almost 3 million cast, but a statewide recount that lasted until January found that after counting absentee ballots that had been improperly excluded, Franken was ahead by 225 votes.

Coleman filed a formal contest of the election in January, resulting in a two-month-long trial at which more absentee ballots were counted, and Franken emerged with a 312-vote lead. Coleman appealed the district court's decision in April.

Yesterday, Coleman acknowledged that Minnesotans were ready to move past the drama.

"The election of November, that was a long time ago; 2008 is over," he said.