Ted Kennedy - Profile Of A Survivor By William H. Honan

The least rewarding of the Edward Kennedy books this season (the best is Burton Hersh's The Education of Edward Kennedy, p. 236; the other, David Lester's Ted Kennedy: Triumphs and Tragedies, p. 230), this reads very much like the three New York Times Magazine articles from whence it came. Honan does spare us reiteration of the well-known biographical details, centering rather on three recent personal/political shocks -- the senatorial whip contests, Chappaquiddick, Robert's death -- and ballooning it with airy and apparently erroneous speculation that Kennedy is indeed an active unannounced presidential candidate for '72. Re the latter, Honan is a caricature of the small-time reporter in big-story heat: for instance, traveling with the Senator during his five-state western tour last fall, Honan notes after a speech in Bismarck, ""The applause was thunderous and prolonged. I jotted down in my notebook 'He's running.'"" Conclusions about EMK phenomena are equally insipid: after Bobby's murder, ""Ted felt not just grief but guilt -- guilt for having triumphed over (by surviving) his older brother""; the whip defeat ""hurt, but the damage was minor""; Chappaquiddick left him scarred but not crippled. And the final chapter is absolutely hagiographic -- Honan serving up such candy corn as Ted is a ""conscientious family man"" because last Halloween he took the kids trick-or-treating and he remembers the dates of their birthdays (no mention of those bruited tales of wenches and whiskey). His future? . . . ""moments of trial in which Ted Kennedy will think he sees the face of Jack when it is only mist, or hears the voice of Bobby when it is just the wind."" Pretentious and jejune.