Alison Stewart: Full Bio is our monthly series when we have a continuing conversation about a deeply-researched biography to get a full understanding of the subject. This week, we are discussing Ted Kennedy: A Life by John A. Farrell. Farrell has written biographies of Tip O'Neill, Clarence Darrow, and his 2017 bio of Richard Nixon was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Ted Kennedy: A Life goes into great detail about Kennedy's legislative successes and failures, his family, Chappaquiddick, his liberal leadership, and his unexpected rise to be the leader of a family plagued by tragedy. In his career, Farrell was a journalist with The Boston Globe, and that is when he covered the senator from Massachusetts who was on the job for 47 years. Today, we begin with Kennedy's entry into the family business, politics.

First, Ted worked to help get his brother John elected to Congress, then the presidency, which led patriarch Joseph Kennedy to pull a move that would both help and hurt his youngest son's run for JFK's empty Senate seat. Joe Kennedy used his considerable power to have a Kennedy ally installed in that vacated Massachusetts Senate seat so that Ted, who was just 28 at the time, could run for it when he was old enough, and that's what he did when he was 30 years old. Let's get into my conversation with John A. Farrell about Ted Kennedy: A Life.

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Alison Stewart: Among Ted Kennedy's family duties in the family business was to help his brother John get elected senator. What skill did Ted Kennedy possess that was helpful to the Kennedy brand?

John A. Farrell: Well, he may have been the best-looking. He certainly was the most hearty, athletic, hail-fellow-well-met, hand-shaking pol of the family. He could give a speech. He could go into a bar, down some beers, and make you feel like he was your buddy in ways that JFK and RFK could not. It famously was said by his father that he had all the affability of an Irish cop, and by his brother John that Ted was the best natural politician in the family.

He had these good looks. He had the speech-making ability. He had this amazing drive built around family, not letting his brothers and his father down, working 20-hour days on the campaign trail as a candidate himself and probably even longer when he was doing it for his brothers, so that was the great appeal that he had. The photos of those three together are astonishing.

There's one famous photo of them coming out of the surf. I guess it was in Florida. It's like three Adonises coming out of the water and crossing the beach. Three amazingly handsome young men. It all fed into that time in American life where the picture magazines Look and Life and The Saturday Evening Post were doing these big, glamorous photo sprays.

That moved right on into the era of television, where somebody with charisma and photogenic looks like John Kennedy could prosper with this new medium right into today's age of celebrity where JFK became the equivalent of Elvis, became Maryland, became all the other one-name iconic celebrities. Teddy became one of them as well. You had money. You had looks. You had that great ability to campaign and get along with the common guy and it all made for a very potent politician.

Alison Stewart: Got the sense that he was the nicest. I know people who had actually been in school with Robert Kennedy. He was not a pleasant guy. They used a different word [laughs] and John was intense but that Ted was a nice guy.

John A. Farrell: He was. Again, being the last of nine children, you have to learn to get along. Because the brothers in their childhood were feeling such intense pressure and there was no feeling that he was going to ever have to bear these burdens himself, he could be more relaxed, more friendly, although he had one grandfather.

Rose's father was John Fitzgerald, Honey Fitzgerald, the mayor of Boston, congressman from Massachusetts, who was just known as the classic shake-your-hand, pat-you-on-the-back Irish pol. Of all the brothers, Teddy was the closest to that Fitzgerald connection of the old Irish-American politics, certainly not the machine politics, but being able to shake a hand of one person while patting another one on the back while smiling at a third person across the room. He was very, very good at that.

Alison Stewart: My guest is John Farrell. The name of the book is Ted Kennedy: A Life. It's our choice for Full Bio. Once JFK became president and installed RFK as attorney general, who decided that Ted should be the senator for Massachusetts?

John A. Farrell: That was Joseph. That was dad's decision. This was the point in life where Ted and his new wife, Joan, actually looked at each other and said, "We had such a great time campaigning out West," which was his responsibility during the primaries. "Maybe we pick up and we go to Arizona, we go to Montana, and we start a new life there. I get into politics and I try to run for a Senate seat on my own." Instead, Joseph, fulfilling a prediction he had made, believe it or not, when Ted was still in law school, said, "No, now that one is president and one is going to be attorney general, the third son is going to be the senator because we paid for that seat and it's ours and we're going to keep it in the family."

Alison Stewart: He does this by installing a placeholder in John's vacant seat to give Ted enough time to grow up and literally be old enough to run. You say there was a team described as "trying to make him a senator." What were his imperfections as a candidate? We talked about his strengths. He was a good campaigner, but what were the imperfections?

John A. Farrell: The imperfections was that he was so young, he was so raw, he did not come across as a sophisticated candidate like his brother John or as a tough, mean guy like Bobby, so he was seen as a lightweight. In a very famous debate with Eddie McCormack, it was the 1962 senate race. It was Teddy versus Eddie. Eddie McCormack was the nephew of the Speaker of the House, John McCormack. It was Irish royalty versus Irish royalty. It attracted a tremendous amount of attention.

It was the issue. Was Teddy Kennedy mature enough? He didn't have the record that Eddie McCormack had. Everybody said over and over again, "This was nepotism. He was being handed this seat," because the Kennedys thought they were entitled to it like a bobble that would just pass down around the family on Christmas night. At a famous moment in this debate between Teddy and Eddie, McCormack said, "Ted, if your name was Edward Moore, you wouldn't be here, that your candidacy is a joke."

For a moment, everybody thought the election was over. The attack was so lethal and effective in the hall, but on television and radio, it came across as bullying. By this point, the Irish Americans of Massachusetts were so in love with the Kennedy family because these were the champions who had shown how far the Irish could go in America that they were ready to forgive Teddy of anything. The verdict was that Ed McCormack had been mean, had been a bully. Rather than tear down Teddy's candidacy, it actually helped promote it.

It was clear very quickly from the phone calls that were happening that night. Ted Kennedy always told a story, which appeared in the newspapers at the time, so I believe it's true. The next morning, he was campaigning. As he was shaking hands in a factory or bakery, one of the guys behind the counter said, "Hey, Kennedy, I understand that you've never worked a day in your life." Teddy braced himself for what the next line was going to be, and the guy said, "Let me tell you. You haven't missed a thing."

Alison Stewart: [laughs] Well, let's listen to a campaign song from early in Ted Kennedy's race for senator. Let's listen.

[song Hey, Massachusetts by Mitch Miller playing]

Hey, Hey, Hey, Massachusetts, Ted fits the bill.

And one vote from you sets Kennedy on the Hill.

A young, strong and abled, fair-minded man.

He's ready and willing to fight for you,

As no other candidate can.

So what do you say, mighty may state?

Let's take a stand.

Go all the way, state.

Kennedy by demand.

If you want to be sure that your points deserve

Beyond Election Day.

Vote correct, elect, be fair. Hey.

Alison Stewart: You describe him as working really hard, doing the groundwork. One detail is that he visited 1,300 of the 1,719 delegates that he would do the groundwork. What was his pitch about himself? We heard that song. How did Ted Kennedy pitch himself?

John A. Farrell: He can do more for Massachusetts. Massachusetts was undergoing a tough economic time, making the transition from the old factory era to what would, in the near future, become the Route 128, the East Coast version of Silicon Valley. It was a hard transition at the time. What he was saying was that, "Hey, if I'm elected your senator and my brother's in the White House, we're going to get some great stuff for Massachusetts. I can do more for Massachusetts." It was very crude appeal, but it definitely worked when combined with that sort of sympathy and sympathy that the Irish-American voters had for him.

Alison Stewart: That said, his brothers were not capital-S supportive of this at all. JFK withheld support until he realized this was going to be good for him. RFK was not for it. What was behind this dynamic? This is Shakespearean.

John A. Farrell: [chuckles] It's definitely a Shakespearean. The great threat was that the average voter would say that the Kennedys are showing that they feel entitled and a US Senate seat should not be handed around like this. It should be earned, and that two Kennedys in the highest ranks of American politics were fine, but putting that third one in there-- and then there were old jokes about, "Well, after John did his eight years, Bobby would come in for eight years, and then by that time, Teddy would be ready for the presidency as well."

The joking that went on had a keen edge to it. They were afraid that when John Kennedy ran for re-election in 1964 that a Republican would make this feeling of entitlement an issue. You played that wonderful campaign song, which was from an old-- I think Lucille Ball sang that on Broadway. The Kennedys were middlebrow. They were absolutely Broadway show-tune folks, sit around the piano and sing Irish songs and Broadway show tunes. They themselves were not the sophisticated group. They were buddies with Frank Sinatra. Their other campaign song was High Hopes, which was one of Sinatra's songs. That's what that song makes me think of.

Alison Stewart: [chuckles] Let's talk about Ted Kennedy, the rookie senator. What did he do for the people of Massachusetts?

John A. Farrell: Well, he wasn't even a senator for a full year while his brother was president, so he was just getting his feet wet. He went to the Senate, which at that time was dominated by seniority system, which rewarded older white guys since there were no Black senators and only women sporadically in those days. Mostly from the South because the South had this tradition of electing you when you were a young man, promising young man, knowing the seniority system, and then just electing you and electing you and electing you until you got to be a committee chairman. You could do great things for that poor section of the country while, at the same time, maintaining white supremacy.

It was called The Citadel in a famous book about it. In walks the president's little brother with a lot of lights shining on him. There was really only one way he succeed and he could succeed and that he was smart enough to see that and follow it. That was to be the youngest kid again to be somebody who could get along and go along, as the saying went, by going to his elders and listening to their stories and asking their advice and calling them sir and not making impassioned speeches like the later liberal era would demand. At this time, it was, "Stay in line. Be modest. You have a lot to be modest about." He didn't give a meaningful speech in the Senate for two years.

Alison Stewart: One year into being senator, his brother John F. Kennedy is assassinated. Where was Ted on November 22nd, 1963, and then what was his job? What was he tasked to do after he died?

John A. Farrell: He was presiding over the Senate, especially young senators on Friday afternoons get to do that onerous duty of sitting up there with the gavel while one person reads from constituent correspondence into the congressional record. An aide came in and whispered to the senators that were in the chamber and finally came up to the podium and said, "Your brother, the President, he's been shot." His immediate task was to try to get through to the White House, which, of course, anybody who was alive at that time remembers that the country was just absolutely stricken in a way.

It only happened twice in my life. Maybe John Kennedy's assassination and 9/11 and maybe before that. You'd have to go back to Pearl Harbor to get the impact of those hours of that afternoon and of the days that followed because this young president that had been learning on the job but had captured America's imagination, captured a feeling that the country was stagnant, and had to get going again had been stricken down by this crazed lunatic assassin and there was no reason for it. It was twice the catastrophe.

Of course, Jacqueline Kennedy reacted marvelously. Ted's role that weekend was to be a supporting character, was to wear mourning clothes, go up, and be the one who had the tough duty of telling his father that JFK had been shot, which he took a while to do because he wasn't sure that his father, who had already suffered a stroke, that this news would not kill the old man, and then to march in the funeral, march in the parade. Now, he was the second-oldest Kennedy brother. The oldest, Robert, took over the clan.

Ted was assigned things that Robert, who was completely stricken by JFK's death, couldn't do. It felt that Ted Kennedy to be the person who had to raise the money for the Kennedy Library, and also he had to be the one who went and was briefed on the Warren Commission findings on the assassination and had to deal with things like that that Bobby couldn't deal with. Given what followed with Robert's assassination five years later, I thought it was very significant that everybody paid attention to Robert as being the person who was so depressed, so stricken by grief when John was killed.

Nobody paid a lot of attention to how Ted felt. He was supposed to be happy-go-lucky Ted again. He was supposed to bounce back. There wasn't a lot of recognition then or in 1968 to the fact that you had lost two of your most-beloved brothers and the two people that mattered the most to you in this life in horrible public executions, and yet the best that could be said for you was, "Oh, well, he toughed it out. He went sailing or he walked the beach," because, again, there was no tradition of dealing with feelings in that family.

Alison Stewart: We'll continue this conversation about Ted Kennedy: A Life with a discussion of how the newbie Senator Kennedy got to work in the Senate, finding a way to make a difference in immigration for Vietnamese refugees, and the cause of civil rights. This is All Of It.

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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart and we continue our Full Bio conversation with John Farrell about Ted Kennedy: A Life. During his first decade as a senator, Ted Kennedy lost two of his brothers to assassins. Here is Ted speaking at his brother Robert's funeral. RFK was gunned down shortly after winning the California presidential primary.

Ted Kennedy: Like it or not, we live in times of danger and uncertainty. That is the way he lived. That is what he leaves us. My brother need not be idealized or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered simply as a good and decent man who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.

Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will someday come to pass for all the world. As he said many times in many parts of this nation to those he touched and who sought to touch him, "Some men see things as they are and say, 'Why?' I dream things that never were and say, "Why not?'"

Alison Stewart: JFK and RFK were his third and fourth siblings to die young. His brother Joe was killed while serving in World War II and his sister Kathleen "Kick" Kennedy died in a plane crash in 1948. Ted Kennedy was also in a deadly plane crash and barely survived. It happened in 1964, just months after JFK's death. The same year, he was elected to his first full term. Still, he dug into his work in the Senate trying to make a difference in immigration policy and civil rights and he assumed the role of Kennedy family leader. We'll get into all of it with John Farrell, author of our Full Bio choice, Ted Kennedy: A Life.

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Alison Stewart: Let's move on to Ted Kennedy's early years as a senator. You write that Ted Kennedy surrounded himself with some of the great minds, great intellects, and that he studied issues deeply. He used his brain trust to help him with his work. What's an example of this dynamic at work, one that led to an early legislative success for Ted Kennedy?

John A. Farrell: Well, it's interesting because he's insecure because he got these amazing mythic brothers that he has to try to live up to, and yet he has the security of a Kennedy enough to be able to pluck the two or three greatest minds from Harvard Law School or Stanford Law School who come down looking for work. Probably a great example of that, and I don't want to jump ahead too far, but occurs when in the Nixon administration where Richard Nixon appoints two Southern white supremacists to the Supreme Court.

Both are defeated by the Democratic-controlled Senate. In part because Kennedy's staff operating almost on their own almost unilaterally joined with the liberal interest groups and organized a resistance in the Senate by themselves because, by this time, Ted Kennedy himself has his moral armor. As I've said, he was severely dented by the events at Chappaquiddick, and yet his staff was smart enough and powerful enough and influential enough, and with that charismatic name could lead this opposition and help defeat nominees Carswell and Haynsworth.

Alison Stewart: I want to talk about a couple of the issues that Kennedy became involved with. Immigration. He helped bring about changes to the immigration law that would change the country, the Immigration Reform Act of 1965. How did he come to the immigration issue?

John A. Farrell: He had done good work in the Senate. He was now Robert's brother. They both were now in the Senate. Lyndon Johnson was the president and pushing through the Great Society, Medicare, Medicaid, civil rights. He had paid enough dues. The chairman of the Judiciary Committee was a guy from Mississippi named James Eastland. He was resolutely against civil rights. The immigration bill that Lyndon Johnson wanted was, in many ways, a civil rights bill for immigrants.

Eastland solved a lot of problems by giving it to Ted Kennedy to be the chairman. He could win favor with the White House and with the Kennedys by doing so. At a very young age, Ted Kennedy steered this bill through the United States Senate. The bill is amazing. It ended a quota system in which if you were from Asia, you were not allowed into the United States. If you were from Eastern or Southern Europe, you had a lesser chance of getting into the United States than if you were from Germany, or Britain, or Ireland.

If you were from Africa or the Caribbean islands and you had black skin, your chances of getting in were virtually nil. It changed all that and it changed the standards. People at that time said, "Wait a minute. You're really going to water down the natural Anglo-Saxon white majesty of America by doing this." Both Lyndon Johnson and Ted Kennedy said, "Oh no, the reason it's not going to happen that way is because we're going to have family preference."

Family preference at the time was thought to be that all these immigrants from Ireland and Germany and Great Britain would invite their grandchildren, but all these countries were bouncing back and the demand for immigration was not there. When you had an engineer from Taiwan who managed to get into the United States using family preference, he could bring over his nephews or his cousins or his brothers or his parents in the succeeding years.

You found that there were fewer and fewer Irish and British and white Northern Europeans coming into the country and more and more people from around the world. You had this amazing unintended consequence that a bill that had been altered by its opponents in a way to make sure that it didn't happen, in fact, caused much of the rainbowization of America.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about Vietnam. We could talk about Vietnam for another hour and a half. Specifically, I wanted to talk about Ted Kennedy and the refugee crisis and his role in highlighting the pending refugee crisis. How did he come to this issue?

John A. Farrell: Well, of course, it was a Kennedy-Johnson administration decision to escalate. John Kennedy left office with maybe 16,000 troops in Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson upped that to 500,000 troops before the two younger Kennedy brothers came out in full opposition to the war. Ted Kennedy was looking for issues. He had inherited this little-known subcommittee on refugees and saw this as a way to contribute to the effort by being a helpful critic of the war.

He would go over there and he would look and say, "Well, we don't have enough hospitals for the civilian population." He would come back and Robert McNamara, who was a former Kennedy administration defense secretary and was now Lyndon Johnson's defense secretary, would say, "Oh, okay, we're going to build some hospitals."

Alison Stewart: He's Mr. Fog of War.

John A. Farrell: Yes, exactly. The initial impact that he had was, "How can we win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people better to help win this war?" Then, all of a sudden, as it became clear very quickly by the end of 1965 that there were serious problems in the war, it was impossible for this little subcommittee to ignore the testimony and ignore what they were seeing when they were going over there that there were serious, serious issues about what we were doing, and that bombing and escalation was not going to be an answer. He became more of a vocal critic.

He also took another issue by being the liberal champion for draft reform in the Senate. He had those two little sidetracks while Robert Kennedy, who was also a US senator now, became the more pronounced geopolitical critic of the administration. In some ways, because Ted Kennedy was doing this more obscure work and was coming across as an honest critic who didn't have immediate presidential ambitions of his own like Robert did, he got more credit for the work and his criticism had a considerable impact. Especially when Lyndon Johnson, who always liked Teddy better than Bobby, felt that Teddy was slipping away, that bothered Johnson to no end.

Alison Stewart: I do want to ask about civil rights. Ted Kennedy, as you write in the book, said, "People need to adjust to civil rights." His brothers were cooler to civil rights than he was. Tell us a little bit about how Ted Kennedy worked with New York Republican Jacob Javits on voting rights.

John A. Farrell: I think I need to elaborate a little bit more about when you said that they were cool. They were more than cool and they were ignorant. Civil rights to President John Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy was a major headache. Their hearts were with Black America, but it was an immense political problem in part because of what we discussed about how the Senate was constituted and getting legislation through an alienated Senate run by Southern conservatives.

The civil rights movement forced the issue. They forced Robert Kennedy and John Kennedy to confront it. They had no feel for Black America. As Andrew Young once said, they didn't even have Black maids. They were totally clueless and forced by the civil rights movement to pick up that torch. Basically, I think because of their Irish-American heritage, having been an underdog not too many generations removed, they could have sympathy for Black America that maybe other white Americans did not.

John Kennedy then became the first person to ally the White House with the civil rights movement. Now, he gets assassinated and Lyndon Johnson comes in and says, "We're going to use the civil rights legislation to honor the fallen hero." Ted Kennedy becomes part of that. He's on the Judiciary Committee, but one of the great things that he does is he learns very, very early two lessons in Washington.

One is that you can get a tremendous amount done if you're willing to cede the credit to the other guy that you're working with and, two, that in the United States Senate, even with the huge majorities the Democrats had, that a bipartisan coalition is the strongest way to actually get legislation passed. As one brother and another brother falls away because of assassination, Teddy picks up that legacy and moves leftward with each succeeding year because John Kennedy shifted a little bit to the left because of the civil rights movement.

Robert Kennedy shifted a lot to the left because of the Vietnam War. Now, Ted inherits the new left of the Democratic Party and becomes identified in a way that would have made his father aghast as the liberal conscience of the Democratic Party. In his dad's age, that was Eleanor Roosevelt. In Ted Kennedy's age, it was Ted Kennedy. In the Voting Rights Act and a stream of others to come, the first thing that he did was go out, look across the aisle for that Republican co-sponsor who can stand on the Senate floor with me.

In the case of the Voting Rights Act, they chose to go after something called the poll tax, which the Johnson administration had decided was too problematic. They almost won. Just by almost winning, by almost defeating Lyndon Johnson and Mike Mansfield, the Majority Leader, and getting the poll tax outlawed, he gained a lot of respect. He began to be known as the senator to be reckoned with.

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