Ted Kennedy, Irish-American History Buff

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Ted Kennedy and family photographed in 2004.

Photo by Courtesy of Independence National History Park

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 “Is there anyone you’d like to dedicate this book to?”

The voice on the telephone was my publisher, David Kane, president of American History Press.  He was about to start printing copies of the 50th anniversary edition of the book that made me an historian, Now We Are Enemies: The Story of Bunker Hill.

For a moment I was back a half century, reading letters and diaries at the Massachusetts Historical Society, talking to people who had ancestors in this battle, which had made the American Revolution and independence possible.   I was writing the first book on Bunker Hill in almost 100 years. Two World Wars had overshadowed the story of the nation’s founding. It had become a shadowy mix of myths and glittering phrases, unattached to the realities the men of 1775 had confronted. 

I had been determined to change that grossly deficient mindset. To a considerable extent I succeeded. Now We Are Enemies had been glowingly reviewed in over sixty newspapers and magazines.  The Chicago Sunday Tribune gave it the front page of its book review. It was a main selection of the Literary Guild and Reader’s Digest condensed it, winning the attention of an estimated 40 million readers.

Suddenly I had an answer to my publisher’s question. “I want to dedicate it to Senator Ted Kennedy.”

I could sense David Kane’s surprise. He was aware of the senator’s recent death, of course. But he did not realize Mr. Kennedy was part of a dimension of this book that was intimately linked with my identity as an Irish-American  writer.

In my mind, I was back six years now – in 2004.  I was picking up the telephone to hear a woman asking me a question: “Do you have a few minutes to talk to Senator Kennedy?”

 “Of course,”  I said.

In ten seconds the senator’s wonderful baritone, tinged with a rich Boston accent, was on the line. “Tom? David McCullough says you know more about the American Revolution than anyone else in the country.  Would you like to take me and my wife and thirty or forty other Kennedys around Philadelphia and out to Valley Forge?”

The senator explained why he was doing this. As a boy, his grandfather John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, the former mayor of Boston, used to take him around the city, from Old North Church to Faneuil Hall to Paul Revere’s house, and out to Bunker Hill where a soaring  granite obelisk commemorated the battle.  Honey Fitz filled young Teddy’s head with stories about the men and women who had made each place important. The senator had never forgotten the experience. Now he was the senior Kennedy and he was trying to pass on this tradition to the next generation. For more than a decade, he had been taking the family on these “history-trips.”

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