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.

A few years later home from college, I was thrown awake in the wee hours in 1968 when word came that RFK, like his brother, had been gunned down by an assassin after winning the California primary, largely on an anti-Vietnam War platform.

Few remember now, but to the peace movement, Bobby's entrance in the race had seemed opportunistic coming after Eugene McCarthy had weakened Lyndon Johnson's re-election bid in Democratic primaries. But the assassination, less than two months after the killing of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., opened a grim new chapter of social unrest that was to define the 1960s.

Enter Edward Kennedy. The youngest Kennedy was elected to replace John in the Senate in 1962. But political pros dismissed him as a Massachusetts favorite son and instead speculated on RFK after John Kennedy's death.

Now at a funeral for Robert at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan, all eyes turned to Ted, the last brother standing.

Robert Kennedy, he said in a choking voice that only added power and defiance to his words, should "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."

The eulogy cast the Kennedy family in emotional and new political terms — they would be ever after the unwavering center of activist Democratic thinking.

Events, though, kept intruding.

In 1969, on the same day that man landed on the moon, I remember grimacing as newspapers interrupted space-age history with headlines that Kennedy had left the scene of a fatal accident at Chappaquiddick. The political damage semed fatal as well, and though he was routinely re-elected in Massachusetts, Kennedy was, at best, a could-have-been in.presidential politics after that.

Nostalgic pushes for Kennedy were mounted in 1972 and 1976, but it wasn't until 1980, his reputation enhanced by years of Senate work, that Kennedy tried to regain the White House for the family. It was an uphill battle, leading a party revolt against Jimmy Carter, who was unpopular and centrist but who was, after all, the president.

By then I was a political reporter at Madison Square Garden, watching as Kennedy's concession speech concluded with "and the dream shall never die," a bolt of thunder that brought the Democrats to their feet.

Later, Kennedy stepped on history again, wandering out on the stage and seemingly ignoring Carter during the convention's triumphant finale. Whether a snub or just bad podium logistics, the moment became a symbol of Carter's uneasy relationship with liberal Democrats.

In all these glimpses, whether seen as a high school or college student, or as a reporter and later, an editor at USA TODAY, the Kennedys were a relentless storyline. There were new tragedies, the deaths of two of Robert Kennedy's sons, David, from a drug overdose and Michael in a skiiing accident, and the death of John Kennedy Jr. and his wife in a plane crash.

But behind those sensational headlines, and after his desultory wave to the crowd at Madison Square Garden, Ted Kennedy was getting down to work. Away from the will-he-or-won't-he speculation, Kennedy worked on civil rights, on education, on health care and immigration. He was far to the left of many in the Senate, but knew the institution so well that he was able to work with conservatives such as Orrin Hatch and others.

The youngest of the Kennedys, the kid senator from Massachusetts, had become the grownup.

John and Robert, in truth, served only briefly, and their New Frontier is remembered only by those of a certain age. And while there are Kennedy nieces and nephews, children and grand-children all keeping politics in the family, it is Ted Kennedy, in the end, who for nearly half a century carried the brightest torch of all to become a true American icon.