I first crossed paths with Ted in 1960 at the For God And Country parade in Lawrence, MA. Prior to Mary Joe Kopeckni. My older brother ran over and shook his hand. Ted was a very fine and dapper young man with a bright future. But the time you shook his hand, his life had taken a very different trajectory. He’d become a walking dead zombie puppet.
Yes, there was a brief period when he still felt enough shame and guilt to be a zombie. But eventually his liberal self-righteousness reared its great big Irish head and he drank his shame into oblivion so he could resume ruining the nation.
That evening I met him, he was on a street corner in Philadelphia, about to enter the local political hangout/restaurant, and his handlers were encouraging him to gladhand around, but as I said... dead fish. Dead eyes. One of the wiseguys in the neighborhood yelled out, “He couldn’t save one girl from drownin’ — how the f*** is he gonna save da country?” And the handlers whisked him inside.