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The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power By Garry Wills Little, Brown, 265 pp., $13.95

Edward Kennedy, it seems, is not such a bad fellow—a decent bird in a gilded cage. The cage is power; and the conditions of Kennedy’s inherited power constrain him. His ruthless, social-climbing father taught him and his brothers to win, but now that he is the last of them, Teddy’s heart isn’t in it. He didn’t want to run in 1980, but he had to. He blew the campaign against Jimmy Carter early on; then, oddly, he showed his real mettle, when things were hopeless. Garry Wills says you could see him “subtly growing.”

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Joseph Sobran

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The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power By Garry Wills Little, Brown, 265 pp., $13.95

Edward Kennedy, it seems, is not such a bad fellow—a decent bird in a gilded cage. The cage is power; and the conditions of Kennedy’s inherited power constrain him. His ruthless, social-climbing father taught him and his brothers to win, but now that he is the last of them, Teddy’s heart isn’t in it. He didn’t want to run in 1980, but he had to. He blew the campaign against Jimmy Carter early on; then, oddly, he showed his real mettle, when things were hopeless. Garry Wills says you could see him “subtly growing.”