The Kennedy brothers through history

— -- From the introduction to the USA TODAY book, "Ted Kennedy: An American Icon," available on newsstands Sept. 3 It can be ordered at kennedy.usatoday.com.

For the Greatest Generation, marching from the Depression through World War II, four-term Franklin Roosevelt was the only president they had ever known.

For Generation X, either a Bush or a Clinton occupied the White House for 20 years.

But for Baby Boomers, forced to choose between Vietnam and Woodstock, America's most enduring political saga began with a president interrupted.

Gunned down in 1963 after less than three years in office, John F. Kennedy's legacy of youth and optimism would take care of itself. But his call to public service and family power would fall to two younger brothers who seemed, at first, awkward and uncomfortable with the Kennedy torch.

Neither Bobby nor Teddy, in the easy vernacular of the 1960s, had JFK's grace, nor his political skills. And few would have predicted that the youngest Kennedy of them all, Edward Kennedy, would overcome his own tragedies, serve in the Senate for 47 years and cast the family's longest and most impactful shadow on Washington.

The Kennedys were a generational bookmark. Political power was treated as a family birthright, as was the Kennedy drive for social change and racial justice, an unerring instinct for the poor and disenfranchised. All this with scandal and disaster looming as a constant and cruel family counterpoint.

Not only do people remember where they were when JFK was assassinated — I was in 10th grade, hearing the news over the high school loudspeaker — but where they were during dozens of other triumphs and tragedies.

In 1964, less than a year after the assassination, I saw Robert F. Kennedy campaigning for the U.S. Senate in the heart of Mt. Vernon, N.Y. a racially divided city in the shadow of the Bronx that was receptive to Kennedy's call for economic equality. I came in at the end, and only saw him for a moment, but Bobby seemed impossibly young and optimistic, his brown hair tousled as crowds rushed not just to shake his hand, but to touch him on the top of a car in the Beatlemania fashion of the day.