An e-mail:

Kathryn:
The good wishes you and your correspondent show towards Rep. Kennedy are very generous and praiseworthy. Certainly the video NRO posted of Kennedy’s rather humble and gracious farewell inclines me to feel the same way.
But if, as you seem to suggest, the larger rationale for his departure at this time involves his personal troubles, then by rights he really should have stepped down long ago. Politics should not be sport, as you say, but neither should it be a casual undertaking. I hand it to Rep. Kennedy that he ran and got elected as a very young man; but after a few terms, he could have stepped aside to deal with his manifest problems, and to encourage the next generation of ambitious young men to take their place, for a time, in Congress. Our democracy would be better off if this were the norm, and a daresay many of our representatives, not just Kennedy, would be better off, to