Peter Kanellis
speaker
250 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 26 May
Peter Kanellis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And, you know, one by one, they were sidelined or killed.
And I think he felt this tremendous burden to sort of live the life that they were denied and to try to achieve some of the things that they had wanted to achieve, almost doing it sort of in their name and in their memory.
If you combine that, though, with the tremendous expectations that went along with a Kennedy name after Jack Kennedy's assassination, it's almost kind of intolerable to think about it because it wasn't just grieving for the brothers and worrying about the brothers and wanting to follow in the brothers' footsteps.
It was essentially inheriting this giant infrastructure of thousands of people around the country that identified with the Kennedy political establishment or the Kennedy political message because many of them were academics and intellectuals and not actual sort of footworkers in politics.
And they had believed after Jack Kennedy had died that Bobby Kennedy was next in line, that Bobby would become president, that all of them would then return to their roles sort of reconstituting the new frontier in a Robert Kennedy presidency probably beginning in 1969.
And after Robert was assassinated, those –
expectations of all these high-powered people centered on Ted.
Now, Ted was not a great intellect.
Ted was not somebody who enjoyed talking to poets and artists and tenured professors in the way that Jack Kennedy did.
But here's this awesome responsibility, this tremendous sense of grief, this tremendous sense of legacy, and this tremendous sense of responsibility to thousands of people who he probably couldn't even relate to.
And this expectation that it was the presidency or nothing.
You know, they all were expecting to go right back into the White House and Ted was going to be their their vehicle.
Senator Kennedy was at the center of four of the most consequential legislative initiatives, really, of the second half of the 20th century.
He was a co-sponsor and a key sponsor of the Immigration Act that has dramatically changed the racial and religious texture of America.
He was the Democratic point man for years on the Senate Judiciary Committee and memorably led the charge against Robert Bork and was really the Democratic point man on justice issues.
We all know that he was also the leading senator on health care and that he referred to universal health care coverage as being the cause of his life.
There were other points in his career when he was the leading human rights advocate in foreign policy, instrumental in areas like Northern Ireland, but also, you know, trekking to Bangladesh to call attention to a sort of forgotten genocide in the 1970s.
So...
Across a very impressively wide area of policy, Kennedy functioned as the Democratic point man.
He also, because of the Kennedy money, the Kennedy prestige, the Kennedy name, he attracted the greatest talent to his Senate office.
Showing 161–180 of 250 · page 9 of 13
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