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At 75, you can almost trace the decades of adversity in the grizzled, jowly face of Kennedy. It bears testimony to a failed presidential run, years of drinking and womanising, and the fusillade of tragedy and scandal.
Poor, battered Ted: he is to lurid headlines what lightbulbs are to a moth. But, as the surviving patriarch of the closest approximation in America to a royal family, Kennedy was one day always going to have to commit the details of his life and his family to the pages of an autobiography. So the revelation that a book deal has indeed now been done caused no little stir.
According to reports, Kennedy will be paid in the region of US$8m ($10.4m) to deliver this work in 2010.
Someone somewhere must have a lot of confidence in Kennedy - not just to remember all that has befallen him, but that he is willing to share it fully.
They would be the people at Twelve books, a new US imprint that is part of the Hachette publishing empire. They were one of no fewer than nine publishing houses that earlier this month took part in a six-day auction for the rights to the book. A minimum bid of $2m was required to enter the competition.
That they promised to pay four times that sum does not seem to phase them.
"The senator's book is not about the money," said Jonathan Karp, the founder of Twelve. "It's about telling a story that only he can tell. He's both seen history and he's made history. His perspective is unique, and it would be a tremendous loss if he did not put his experiences in writing". The senator, he went on, "intends to be candid".
No one is taking away from Kennedy's astonishing 45 years in the Senate. His is a long list of achievements on Capitol Hill as its greatest champion of liberal causes. He may offer new perspectives on recent American history spanning the civil rights struggle, the closing down of the Vietnam War to the failed presidential candidacy, actively backed by Kennedy, of his fellow Massachusetts senator John Kerry.
He has furthered gay rights and opposed the Iraq War and continues to criticise Guantanamo Bay. It is no wonder, that last year, Time magazine included Kennedy in its list of America's 10 best senators, saying he had, "massed a titanic record of legislation affecting the lives of virtually every man, woman and child in the country."
But it is not so much the American family we want to read about but his.
We can guess at the headings now: Chappaquiddick, failed presidential bid, William Kennedy Smith rape case, Skakel murder case, Harvard expulsion and assassination 1963 and assassination 1968.
The Harvard episode is an early clue to a certain waywardness in Kennedy, the youngest of nine children born to the manically demanding Joseph Kennedy and his wife Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. He was chucked out for cheating on an exam - an ethics exam, no less.
After a spell in the US Army, he was readmitted and did graduate.
In 1962, Kennedy won a special election to the US Senate at the age of 30, where he has remained since. His might have been a career in the shadows of his two elder siblings, John and Robert, but for their early deaths.
According to an earlier book, it was the shooting of Robert at a campaign event in California in 1968 that affected Kennedy more deeply. The greatness of both brothers was thus landed upon the shoulders of Ted. Yet his own script was to make serial, unexpected swerves.
In 1964, he barely survived a plane crash. Then, in 1969, came an event that has arguably marred the rest of his life. Driving across a bridge from the isle of Chappaquiddick to Martha's Vineyard, Kennedy lost control and the car plunged into the water. While he swam to shore, his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne drowned. He pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and received a two-month suspended jail sentence.
Friends and supporters urged Kennedy through the 1970s to run for the White House. In 1980, he finally accepted, daring to challenge the incumbent President and Democratic Party leader, Jimmy Carter. After a promising start, the Kennedy campaign spluttered quickly - opponents repeatedly reminded voters of Chappaquiddick by playing Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge over Troubled Waters at rallies.
The tragedies and scandals have never let up. He has suffered through the deaths of John F. Kennedy jnr in a plane crash and of Michael, son of Bobby, on the ski slopes of Colorado.
In a period when his own drinking habits were fodder for the headlines, he found himself embroiled in rape allegations directed against his nephew, William Kennedy Smith, in Florida. Smith was later acquitted. Another Kennedy nephew, William Skakel, was convicted for murder.
But the US$8m investment could be one of the best in publishing history. Who else could have material so rich, recalling half a century of political life and just as many years of turbulence in his personal life?
- INDEPENDENT
