Nov 5, 2017 3 min read

Sen. Ted Kennedy, called the “Lion of the Senate” by admirers, was barely a lion cub when he ran for his first term in that office in 1962, having just turned 30 years-old, the minimum age necessary to run. That Kennedy would win the election was, to most observers in his home state of Massachusetts, a foregone conclusion given his family’s wealth and political connections, which included his brother Jack, who was president of the United States. In fact, having recently vacated that same Senate seat to become president, Jack had arranged for one of his college roommates, Benjamin Smith, to replace him in the Senate with the understanding that Smith was merely “keeping the seat warm” for Teddy.

Additionally, the White House helped run Kennedy’s campaign, beginning with his Democratic primary race against Eddie McCormack, Massachusetts’ popular two-term attorney general. In a state as liberal as Massachusetts, winning the Democratic nomination for almost any political office usually meant winning the election, so President Kennedy’s (and Teddy’s) brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, was soon directing Justice Department staff to dig up as much dirt as possible on McCormack, who had far more experience in politics than Teddy. In addition to his two terms as attorney general, McCormack had a distinguished military career, which is why Kennedy’s defense secretary, Robert McNamara, had Pentagon staffers digging through McCormack’s military service record to see if there was anything usable against him (there wasn’t).

McCormack also graduated first in his class at Boston University’s School of Law, in sharp contrast to Teddy, who had been expelled from Harvard University for cheating after getting a classmate to take an exam for him.

Although that was initially hushed up, during the campaign The Boston Globe threatened to expose it, so the White House spent nearly a week negotiating with the Globe editors as to how to run that story, which finally ran under the milquetoast headline, “Ted Kennedy Tells About Harvard Examination Incident.”

McCormack also was badly outspent in the race. While the Kennedy campaign, fueled by Papa Joe Kennedy’s millions, flooded the newspapers and airwaves with political ads touting Teddy, McCormack’s campaign, run by his father, could barely afford a paid staff, forcing McCormack and his father to handle many of the menial details themselves.

And so, with the unparalleled political power of the White House and the vast wealth of his family behind him, Teddy easily dispatched McCormack, and this week in 1962 he easily defeated the Republican candidate, George Cabot Lodge, to become a U.S. senator, whereupon, ironically, but to his credit, one of his priorities was to look out for the politically powerless and the poor.