Elected 1962, seat up 2006 Born: Feb. 22, 1932, Boston Home: Hyannis Port Education: Harvard U., B.A. 1956, The Hague Intl. Law Schl., 1958, U. of VA, LL.B. 1959 Religion: Catholic Marital Status: married (Vicki)

Career:

• Professional: Western states coord., John F. Kennedy Pres. Campaign, 1960; Asst. Dist. Atty., Suffolk Cnty., 1961-62.
• Military: Army, 1951-53.

DC Office: 315 RSOB 20510, 202-224-4543; Fax: 202-224-2417; Web site: www.senate.gov/~kennedy

State Offices: Boston, 617-565-3170.

Committees:

• Armed Services: Emerging Threats & Capabilities; Personnel; Seapower (Chmn.).
• Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (Chmn.): Employment, Safety & Training; Public Health (Chmn.).
• Judiciary: Administrative Oversight & the Courts; Constitution, Federalism & Property Rights; Immigration (Chmn.).
• Joint Economic Committee (2d of 11 Sens.).

Edward Kennedy is approaching his fifth decade as a national celebrity and effective politician. He has had the highs and lows of his personal life followed by millions and criticized vitriolically by many; he has been a presidential candidate and, while still in his 30s, was widely assumed to be the next president. He is third in seniority in the Senate, behind Strom Thurmond and Robert Byrd. His reputation as an idealistic champion of the poor has been burnished by the praise of first-rate celebrators that no American political family has attracted before, and the nation has watched him cope impressively time and again with family tragedy, most recently when his nephew John Kennedy Jr. died in July 1999. To others, he is a symbol of personal immorality and unpunished criminal behavior, a man who has gotten away with things that would have ended the public career of almost anyone else. There is some basis for both views, but neither is an entirely fair picture of this politician, who was re-elected without much fuss in 2000, after a term in which he did much to set national policy even while Republicans controlled the Congress.

The luster of the Kennedys has worn off, in America and even in Massachusetts, and the percentage of Americans who look to the Kennedys for political leadership has grown small; most voters can't remember, or never knew, what made the Kennedys so exciting. Still, there was little in the early life of this youngest of the Kennedy siblings to suggest he would be a major politician, much less for so long. He grew up in Bronxville, New York, a rich suburb with many other rich Catholics, was thrown out of Harvard for cheating on a Spanish exam and served in the Army, returned to earn degrees at Harvard and Virginia Law School, and married a Bronxville girl who never developed a taste for politics. Then his brother was elected president of the United States at 43, and the 28-year-old Edward Kennedy was a national celebrity. His father insisted that he run for the Senate; a JFK college roommate was found to hold the seat until he reached the constitutional age of 30, in 1962. His family money and the enthusiasm among Massachusetts Catholics for this seeming royalty enabled him to beat strong candidates with good political names: Attorney General Edward McCormack, nephew of Speaker John McCormack, in the Democratic primary; George Cabot Lodge, son and great-grandson of senators, in the general. ''He can do more for Massachusetts'' was his slogan, as had been John Kennedy's 10 years before.

After his brothers' assassinations, Edward Kennedy was seen by many as their natural heir, and he could have been nominated for president in 1968, at 36, or in 1972 had he chosen to run. Instead, in the latter year, he gave the first of several stirring convention speeches promoting his trademark liberalism. In 1979 he did run for president, and began the race against incumbent Jimmy Carter far ahead in the polls. But he was unable to articulate his reasons for running, and his candidacy was greeted with adverse reaction to him personally as well as to his policies. It ended in a crushing defeat, relieved only by another stirring convention speech, after which he pointedly refused to raise Carter's hand on the podium. In retrospect, it is plain that Edward Kennedy's presidential chances were ended in July 1969, with the accident at Chappaquiddick. But he has been re-elected with solid margins in Massachusetts, though he did have a closer than usual call against Republican venture capitalist Mitt Romney in 1994.

Kennedy has been a hardworking and practical politician who, after his brothers' deaths, took up the liberal causes and attention to the poor, which had been the focus of Robert Kennedy in the last years of his life. He has worked hard for a quarter century on their behalf without the friendship of a Democratic administration, until the election of Bill Clinton, and since 1994 without the backing of a Democratic majority. As chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee from 1987-94, Kennedy supported teachers' unions; on the Judiciary Committee, he supported pro-choice and feminist groups with energy and enthusiasm. He immediately pounced on Judge Robert Bork's nomination in 1987, but played a lesser role in the Clarence Thomas hearings, which came shortly after an incident when his nephew William Kennedy Smith was arrested and charged with rape in Palm Beach.

In 1992 Kennedy supported Bill Clinton happily and basked as Clinton gave repeated homage to the Kennedy family. Legislatively, Kennedy was productive, though not as much as he wished. He worked to pass direct student loans, AmeriCorps, Goals 2000 and the School-to-Work Opportunity Act. He again sponsored the Family and Medical Leave Act which George Bush had vetoed and which was the first law Bill Clinton signed. He also passed a bill making it illegal to block access to abortion clinics. But he was frustrated on other issues. He sought to prevent states from regulating abortions and to ban the death penalty when imposed disproportionately on criminals of different races; both efforts failed. On health care, a longtime Kennedy cause, he backed a Canadian-style single-payer system. In May 1994 he got a health care bill resembling Clinton's through committee, but that was as far as it went.

After the hard-fought 1994 election, Kennedy returned to a Republican Senate and shifted his focus from expanding government to protecting it from downsizing. In 1995 he defended Medicare and Medicaid from reductions and opposed changes in labor laws. He led the effort to block a limited school choice experiment in Washington, D.C.--taking the side of teachers' unions which wanted to keep children in the D.C. school system. In 1996 he went on the offensive. He pushed the Kassebaum-Kennedy health care bill, an incremental measure to provide portability of health insurance and to limit exclusions for pre-existing conditions; he worked to keep Medical Savings Accounts out, and the bill passed. He tried to add to the Defense of Marriage Act a provision to prohibit job discrimination against gays; this was rejected by only a narrow margin, indicating there may be a majority in the Senate for a gay rights bill some time soon. In 1996, Kennedy strongly supported Clinton, even after the president embraced a balanced budget and signed the Welfare Reform Act, and Kennedy had the pleasure of watching Clinton win and run strongest in Massachusetts. In joint appearances in Boston and New Hampshire, he issued a strong endorsement of Al Gore in January 2000 when he seemed in a close race with Bill Bradley.

Kennedy has continued to be active on health issues, opposing Republican measures and sponsoring some bipartisan initiatives of his own. His bill to allow disabled people to work without losing their health care benefits was passed with wide support in 1999. In March 1999 he opposed the bipartisan "premium support" reform proposed by John Breaux's Medicare commission as the "privatization of Medicare." He supported the Dingell-Norwood bill regulating HMOs and called the Republican version of HMO regulation "a minimalist bill that only the insurance industry could love." He worked unsuccessfully to pass a prescription drug benefit and to fashion a bipartisan medical errors bill. With HELP Chairman James Jeffords, he sponsored a law to protect consumers from counterfeit drugs purchased over the Internet. Kennedy has continued to press for increases in the minimum wage and in Pell grants. He has opposed tuition savings accounts as a threat to public schools. In 2000 he proposed "hate crimes" legislation, primarily, he said, because it would allow federal law enforcement officers to work with state and local authorities. He was a floor manager for the 1965 immigration law, which opened the doors to millions of immigrants, and in 2000 pressed for amnesty for illegal aliens in the United States since 1986 and for giving Central American and Haitian refugees the same refugee status as Cubans.

A decade ago there was talk that Kennedy would relinquish his seat to let his nephew Joe Kennedy run; nothing has been heard about that since the latter left the governor race in August 1997. In September 1999 Kennedy announced that he would run for re-election in 2000 and again in 2006. Serious opposition failed to materialize. Former Governor William Weld declined to run, and moved to New York. Former Treasurer Joe Malone, who ran against Kennedy in 1988, made no moves toward a rematch. Kennedy's 1994 opponent, Mitt Romney, moved to Utah for a three-year stint heading the troubled Salt Lake City Olympic organizing committee. One Republican did arise, Jack E. Robinson, who claimed to be a successful entrepreneur and who lived in Greenwich, Connecticut. But in March 2000 it was revealed that a former girlfriend had obtained a restraining order against him, and soon afterward he was charged his driving away from the scene of an accident on Boston's Jamaicaway. Governor Paul Cellucci made it clear he would not support Robinson, and his petitions were rejected by the secretary of State for insufficient signatures. Robinson denied the charges, and the Supreme Judicial Court put him on the ballot in July 2000. But his hapless candidacy went nowhere. Kennedy won with 73% of the vote, to 13% for Robinson and 12% for Libertarian Carla Howell. In an October 2000 poll voters were evenly split on whether Kennedy should run again in 2006, when he turns 74. But there seems little doubt that he can be re-elected then if he wants to. If he serves out that term, he will have served 50 years in the Senate, more than anyone else in history, assuming that Robert Byrd (who beat Kennedy for majority whip in January 1969) does not reach that milepost before him.

Group Ratings
	ADA	ACLU	AFS	LCV	CON	ITIC	NTU	COC	ACU	NTLC	CHC
2000	90	71	85	71	84	78	12	40	12	0	15
1999	95	--	100	89	38	--	7	47	4	--	--

National Journal Ratings
	1999 LIB	--	1999 CONS		2000 LIB	--	2000 CONS
Economic	90%	--	0%		96%	--	0%
Social	80%	--	19%		79%	--	0%
Foreign	78%	--	13%		72%	--	15%

Key Votes of the 106th Congress
1. Educ. Savings Accts. N 2. Prescrip. Drug Benefit Y 3. Delay Ergonomic Standards N 4. Phase Out Estate Tax N 5. Review Movie Violence Y 6. Gun Show Bckgrnd. Checks Y		7. Ban Part.-Birth Abortion N  8. Broaden Hate Crimes List Y  9. NATO War in Serbia Y 10. Table Cuba Travel Ban N 11. Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty Y 12. Perm. Trade with China Y

Election Results
2000 general	Edward Kennedy (D)	1,889,494	(73%)
	Jack E. Robinson III (R)	334,341	(13%)
	Carla A. Howell (LIB)	308,860	(12%)
	Other	66,725	(3%)
2000 primary	Edward Kennedy (D)	unopposed
1994 general	Edward Kennedy (D)	1,265,997	(58%)
	W. Mitt Romney (R)	894,000	(41%)

Campaign Finance
2000	Receipts	Receipts from PACs	Expenditures
Edward Kennedy (D)	$6,623,179	$864,078	$3,662,652
Jack E. Robinson III (R)	$29,595		$150,430
Carla A. Howell (LIB)	$1,025,364		$1,055,186