'Camelot' fades with Kennedy's passing

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By Andrea Billups

In many ways, he was the last man standing, straddling a mythic family mantle of fame and a vaunted career of political service, all the while wearing the crown of Camelot decades after its heyday.

His family was American royalty, conjuring visions of handsome brothers tossing a football in an age of innocence, long before Watergate laid bare the sins of ego and power on the presidency.

Click here to see a timeline of Mr. Kennedy's life.

In death, the senator's death brought to a close a storied political era -- of assassinations, Jackie O, Palm Beach, Chappaquiddick -- and a lifetime of both tragedy and public service.

He was a rich, sailing, East Coast blue blood, well-connected and much dissected, who could have walked away from Washington long ago yet didn't. While his personal foibles and his celebrity sometimes outpaced his significant work in Congress, Mr. Kennedy lived the life in public service that he and his brothers, John and Robert, accepted as their lot in life.

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Mr. Kennedy was hailed as "a natural heir to a legacy," an "indispensable patriarch," a surrogate dad to a litany of fatherless Kennedy children and, for those who knew him, a "rock" on which his clan leaned -- even as it was diminished by notoriety and heartache. Some now argue that living up to the Camelot myth was too heavy a burden, even for a man accustomed to repeated loss.

Born the youngest of nine children into a politically connected Irish-Catholic family, he stood in the shadow of gifted brothers and carried the pressure of his scion father, Joseph, whose namesake and oldest son died in a World War II plane crash in 1944. What followed was a succession of woes involving his siblings, whose own histories carried great drama and sparkling promise.

Ted Kennedy graduated from Harvard but not before he was kicked out for cheating. He joined the Army for two years to redeem himself before returning to campus to earn a degree. He was in the middle of the class academically at the University of Virginia law school, where he met his first wife, Joan.