Mr. Parker was 34 years previous, a Rhodes scholar with a Harvard legislation diploma, when he joined Kennedy’s workplace in 1969. Scarcely six months earlier, the senator’s brother Robert, a U.S. senator from New York then searching for the 1968 Democratic nomination for president, had been fatally shot in California.
Following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963, Robert’s demise left Ted the one surviving Kennedy son and, as a senator nonetheless in his first full time period, the inheritor to his household’s political legacy.
Over the subsequent 4 a long time, by way of tragedy and controversy, Ted Kennedy emerged as one of the vital consequential senators of his period. He oversaw a big workplace of staffers who shared his dedication to civil rights, social justice and different central tenets of liberalism. However by all accounts, no aide did extra behind the scenes than Mr. Parker to translate Kennedy’s beliefs into laws, or to help him as he assumed his mantle because the “lion of the Senate.”