[ALOCHONA] Re: Bangladesh lost a true friend:Ted Kennedy

Dear Alochok Shamim

All democrats join you Shamim in paying respect to this great man.

But respect for Edward Kennedy is in abundance and he would be happier if we could apply his life in some way to improving the condition of our country. Applauding greatness is good and easy. Learning from greatness is better and difficult. I join you and all Bangladeshi politcial activists in chosing the easier option.

Care to mention what our politcians have learnt from Edward Kennedy since his visit some four decades ago? You know what I'm going to write don't you?

For now though we pray for the eternal salvation of the Senator and thank him for a lifetime of working for the betterment of humanity.

Regards

Ezajur Rahman
Kuwait

--- In alochona@yahoogroups.com, Shamim Chowdhury <veirsmill@...> wrote:
>
> I pay my humble respect to this great world icon, a political lion
> named Ted Kennedy.
> Farewell Ted, a true friend of Bangladesh.
> Sincerely
> Shamim Chowdhury
> Maryland, USA
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> 'Bangladesh lost a true friend'
>
>  
>
>  
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Wed, Aug 26th, 2009 11:23 pm BdST
>
>  
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Dhaka, Aug 17 (bdnews24.com)--Senator Edward Kennedy was a supporter of Bangladesh's liberation war, when the US administration opposed it; the country lost a true friend with his demise, former foreign secretary Faruk Chowdhury told bdnews24.com.
>
> "Edward Kennedy brought the woes of the Bangladeshi refugees during the liberation war in 1971 before the eyes of the world," said Chowdhury as he paid his tribute.
>
> The senator also submitted a report to the US senate on the plight of the Bengali refugees in India, added the former bureaucrat.
>
> "I am saddened at the death. He will remain always in every Bengali's heart for his deeds."
>
> Edward, brother of John F Kennedy, died at the age of 77 early Wednesday (BdST), at his home in Boston, Massachusetts, after a long battle with cancer.
>
> One of the most influential and longest-serving senators in US history, who came to be known as the "Lion of the Senate", Edward Kennedy took the helm of one of America's most fabled political families after his brothers' assassinations.
>
> Prime minister Sheikh Hasina and leader of the opposition Khaleda Zia issued condolence messages on Wednesday, recalling his role in mobilising world opinion for Bangladesh.
>
> "The people of Bangladesh will remember his contribution forever," said Hasina.
>
> She expressed her deep sympathy for the members of the Kennedy family, the US government and people.
>
> Khaleda Zia said the late senator was "a humanist and democratic personality".
>
> "The people of Bangladesh will remember him forever for the role he played in mobilising world opinion in favour of Bangladesh liberation war".
>
> 'Champion of human values'
>
> Foreign minister Dipu Moni, in a statement, said Kennedy's ability to work across the political divide had earned him respect from all across the globe, not his name.
>
> "His absence will be felt not only in the United States, but far beyond".
>
> In Bangladesh, Dipu Moni said, Kennedy would be rated as a "legend and a true champion of freedom, liberty and human values".
>
> "Senator Kennedy will be particularly remembered in Bangladesh for his unqualified support to our struggle for freedom and his empathy for the distressed millions in the refugee camps in 1971.
>
> Kennedy personally supported the struggle of the Bengalis when the US administration sided with the Pakistanis.
>
> "He went to the post-war refugee camps in Bangladesh on February 14-15, 1972 and visited mass graves to pay homage for our martyrs," Faruk Chowdhury, who was chief of protocol in the newly born nation that year, told bdnews24.com.
>
> He described Kennedy's arrival in the old airport: "Commerce minister M R Siddiquee along with his wife were present at the airport to welcome Edward Kennedy. He came with his wife Jenny Kennedy."
>
> "Kennedy was on the first list of our foreign friends, who visited Bangladesh soon after independence," he said.
>
> "Kennedy met with then the prime minister Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman on February 14 at Ganabhaban. The next day he visited president justice Abu Sayed Chowdhury at the Bangabhaban."
>
> Having accompanied Kennedy during his two-day trip to Bangladesh, Chowdhury remembers his schedule to this day.
>
> "Kennedy went to Kushtia as a foreign friend of our liberation struggle. He the war refugees there, talked to them and witnessed their sufferings."
>
> "He also went to visit injured freedom fighters at Dhaka Medical College Hospital," he added.
>
> Twilight of a political dynasty
>
> When he first took the Senate seat, previously held by his brother John, in 1962, he was seen as something of a political lightweight with a famous name.
>
> Yet during his nearly half century in the chamber, Kennedy became known as one of Washington's most effective senators, crafting legislation by working with lawmakers and presidents of both parties, and finding unlikely allies.
>
> At the same time, he held fast to liberal causes helping to enact measures to protect civil and labour rights, expand healthcare, upgrade schools, increase student aid and contain the spread of nuclear weapons.
>
> Kennedy's death marked the twilight of a political dynasty and dealt a blow to Democrats, who felt they had "lost their patriarch" as tributes poured in from global leaders on Wednesday.
>
> bdnews24.com/sm/fwc/bd/rah/2256h.
>
> WARNING: Any unauthorised use or reproduction of bdnews24.com content for commercial purposes is strictly prohibited and constitutes copyright infringement liable to legal action.
> =========================================================
> =========================================================
>
> Legendary loss:Sen. Ted Kennedy's death puts family dynasty
> in doubt
> The Death of Ted Kennedy: The Brother
> Who Mattered Most
>  
>
>
>
>
> AFP â€" US President Barack Obama(R), seen here with Senator Edward Kennedy, seen here in April 2009, said Wednesday …
>
>
> Play Video Video:Sen. Ted Kennedy Dies at 77 ABC News
> Play Video Video:Carter: Kennedy Was Open and Honest ABC News
> Play Video Video:Reflecting on Sen. Ted Kennedy's Legacy ABC News
> By RICHARD LACAYO Richard Lacayo â€" Wed Aug 26, 10:25 am ET
>
> There was a time 40 years ago, right after the assassination of his brother Robert, when it looked like Edward Kennedy would become President someday by right of succession. The Kennedy curse, the one that had seen all three of his brothers cut down in their prime, had created for him a sort of Kennedy prerogative, or at least the illusion of one, an inevitable claim on the White House. For years he seemed like a man simply waiting for the right moment to take what everybody knew was coming his way.
>
>  
> Everybody was wrong. Ted Kennedy would never reach the White House. His weaknesses - and the long shadow of Chappaquiddick - were an obstacle that even his strengths couldn't overcome. But his failure to get to the presidency opened the way to the true fulfillment of his gifts, which was to become one of the greatest legislators in American history. When their White House years are over, most Presidents set off on the long aftermath of themselves. They give lectures, write books, play golf and make money. Jimmy Carter even won a Nobel Prize. But every one of them would tell you that elder-statesmanship is no substitute for real power.(See pictures of Edward's Kennedy's Life and Times.)
>
>  
> Because Kennedy never made it to the finish line, he never had to endure a post-presidential twilight. Instead, by the time of his death on Aug. 25 in Hyannis Port at the age of 77, he had 46 working years in Congress, time enough to leave his imprint on everything from the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act of 2009, a law that expands support for national community-service programs. Over the years, Kennedy was a force behind the Freedom of Information Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act. He helped Soviet dissidents and fought apartheid. Above all, he conducted a four-decade crusade for universal health coverage, a poignant one toward the end as the country watched a struggle with a brain tumor. But along the way, he vastly expanded the network of neighborhood clinics, virtually invented the COBRA system for portable insurance and helped create the laws that provide
> Medicare prescriptions and family leave.
>
>  
> And for most of that time, he went forward against great odds, the voice of progressivism in a conservative age. When people were getting tired of hearing about racism or the poor or the decay of American cities, he kept talking. When liberalism was flickering, there was Kennedy, holding the torch, insisting that "we can light those beacon fires again." In the last year of his life, with the inauguration of Barack Obama, he had the satisfaction of seeing a big part of that dream fulfilled. In early 2008, when Obama had just begun to capture the public imagination, Kennedy bucked the party establishment. Just before Super Tuesday, the venerable Senator from Massachusetts enthusiastically endorsed the young Senator from Illinois, helping propel Obama to the Democratic nomination and ultimately the White House. (See pictures of Barack Obama behind the scenes on Inauguration Day.)
>
>  
> So does it matter that Kennedy never made it to the presidency? Any number of mere Presidents have been pretty much forgotten. But as the Romans understood, there can be Emperors of no consequence - and Senators whose legacies are carved in stone.
>
> ***************
>
> Rose Kennedy wanted a family. Joe Kennedy wanted a dynasty. They both got what they wanted, but only for a time. Joe had made a fortune in film production, liquor, real estate and stocks. But he wasn't just a businessman. In the scope of his ambitions and schemes, he was something out of Shakespeare. He married Rose in 1914, and as their children arrived, he formed the conviction not only that the boys belonged in public life but that one of them, maybe more than one, should be President of the United States.
>
>  
> This was the atmosphere that Ted was born into on Feb. 22, 1932 - the last of the nine Kennedy children. But from the start, he had three elder brothers as a buffer between himself and the worst of the old man's ambition for his sons. All the same, he grew up at some distance from his parents. Over the years, Joe and Rose had become increasingly estranged. Overweight and lonely, Ted was shuttled through a succession of boarding and day schools, but he grew into an athletic, good-looking teenager, one who ambled into Harvard, where Jack and Bobby had gone before him.
>  
>
> He hadn't been at Harvard long before he screwed up in a way that would come back to haunt him years later. In his freshman year, Kennedy was having trouble with a Spanish class. There was a test coming up, and he needed to do well in order to be eligible to play varsity football the next year. With the encouragement of some of his buddies, Kennedy recruited a friend who was good at Spanish to take the exam in his place. The scheme backfired. The surrogate was caught, and both boys were expelled, though Harvard offered them the opportunity to be readmitted later if they showed evidence of "constructive and responsive citizenship."
>  
>
> Read TIME's 10 Questions with Ted Kennedy.
>
> Read "Teddy & Kennedyism."
>  
>
> Kennedy's abrupt next move was to join the Army, which sent him to Georgia to be trained as a military police officer and then, thanks to his father's intervention, to Paris to serve as an honor guard at NATO headquarters. In the fall of 1953, he was readmitted to Harvard, where he majored in government. After graduation, he went on to study law at the University of Virginia. He was in law school when he met Joan Bennett, a senior at Manhattanville College, a small Catholic school in New York State that his mother and two of his sisters had attended.
>  
> Not much more than a year after they first met, they married. Over the next nine years, they had three children: Kara, Edward Jr. and Patrick. (Joan also suffered three miscarriages.) But by 1982, the combination of her prolonged struggle with alcohol and his infidelities led them to divorce. Joan often found herself burdened by the effort required to fill the role of a Kennedy wife. Years later, sounding a bit like Princess Diana, she told an interviewer, "I didn't have a clue what I was getting into."
>  
>
> What she had gotten into was the Kennedys, a family whose family business was politics. Ted was still in law school when he was made campaign manager for Jack's 1958 bid for a second term as Senator. Though the real decision-making was left to seasoned Kennedy operatives, the campaign put Ted in the field constantly to meet and greet voters. It prepared him for a future, coming soon, in which he would be the candidate. When Jack was elected to the White House in 1960, there were four years remaining in his Senate term. The family wanted Ted to succeed him, but at 28, he was two years below the minimum age for the Senate. So a Kennedy loyalist was chosen to fill the seat for a couple of years while Ted used the time to make himself plausible to the state's voters as a man they should send to Washington. With Jack's help, he attached himself to a Senate fact-finding trip to Africa. He toured Latin America, Israel and Berlin. On Election Day, with 54% of
> the vote, Kennedy beat George Cabot Lodge, a descendant of the Waspiest of New England political dynasties. (Read "Kennedy's Absence Felt on Health-Care Reform.")
>  
>
> Ted had been in the Senate for less than a year when J.F.K. went to Dallas the day Lee Harvey Oswald was lying in wait. Jack's death was more than a personal tragedy for Ted. It was a watershed. It put him one step closer to assuming the Kennedy burden, the perennial quest for the heights. It marked the beginning of his transformation into a true public figure. As a first measure, Ted devoted himself to ensuring the passage of legislation that had been important to his brother, especially the civil rights bill J.F.K. introduced the summer before his death. On June 19, Ted added his vote to the 73-to-27 majority that turned that bill into the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964. Then he headed to the airport to board a private plane that was to take him to the state Democratic Party convention in Springfield, Mass. But as the plane made its descent into a fogbound Springfield airport, it struck a row of trees and somersaulted across an orchard. The pilot,
> Ed Zimny, died at the scene. A Kennedy aide, Ed Moss, died a few hours later. Indiana Senator Birch Bayh and his wife Marvella, who were also on board, survived with minor injuries. Kennedy suffered a broken back and a collapsed lung.
>  
>
> What followed was a five-month recovery, mostly spent immobilized in a hospital bed, and a lifetime of back pain. Yet when he returned to the Senate the following year, Kennedy set to work with the energy that comes to a man who gets a second chance at life. It wasn't long before Ted scored a victory on another of Jack's unrealized goals, the reform of immigration quotas to allow more arrivals from nations outside Northern Europe. One year later, he secured federal support for neighborhood clinics, marking the first time he applied himself to the problem of health care, the signature issue of his public life. (Read "Eunice Kennedy Shriver Dies at 88.")
>  
>
> By 1967, Kennedy had also begun to speak out against the Vietnam War. Exasperation about Vietnam was one of the main reasons his brother Robert decided to seek the presidency in 1968. Then Bobby was shot down as well. His death was a crucial moment of recognition for Ted that the burden of the Kennedy legacy was now his to shoulder. For years he had been the Prince Hal of the Kennedy dynasty, the wayward son who would just as soon not inherit the kingdom. But now, at 36, he was the last of the line. There was no one else.
>
>  
> So when Hubert Humphrey lost to Richard Nixon in the fall, Ted instantly became liberalism's last, best hope. There were people who thought he lacked Jack's intellect or Bobby's passion, that all his life he had merely trawled in their wake. But in his first speech after Bobby's death, he was already sounding the cry that would be the great theme of his political life: "Like my brothers before me, I pick up a fallen standard. Sustained by the memory of our priceless years together, I shall try to carry forward that special commitment to justice, to excellence, to courage, that distinguished their lives." (See pictures of TIME covering Watergate.)
>
> This was the moment when everyone assumed that the presidency would someday be his for the asking. But it was only a moment. On July 18, 1969, Kennedy hosted a reunion for six women who had worked at the center of Bobby's presidential campaign. The gathering took place in a rented cottage on Chappaquiddick Island, just off Martha's Vineyard. Around 11:15 that night, Kennedy asked his driver for the keys to his Oldsmobile so that he could leave the party with Mary Jo Kopechne, 28, a former aide to his brother. According to testimony he gave later at a judge's inquest, he took a wrong turn onto an unlit dirt road and then across a small, unrailed wooden bridge. His car went over the side of the bridge and landed upside down in the water. Kennedy managed to escape. Kopechne did not.
>  
> There are questions about Chappaquiddick that have never been closed. Where was Kennedy going with Kopechne at that late hour? (At the inquest in January, he claimed that he was taking her back to her hotel in Edgartown.) Why did he wait until the following morning, 10 hours later, to report the accident to the police? (He said it was because he had been in a state of shock and confusion.) Was the real reason for delaying the report that at the time of the accident he was drunk? (He insisted he was not.) At the inquest, he testified that after escaping from the car, he dived back into the water seven or eight times in a vain attempt to free Kopechne. Then he made the mile-and-a-half walk back to the cottage, where the party was still underway, collected two male friends and returned with them to the car, where they also attempted to free Kopechne. When that proved impossible, Kennedy decided to return to his hotel across the water in Edgartown. But
> instead of summoning the night ferry, he chose to swim 500 feet across the bay.
>  
> The inquest concluded that Kennedy had lied when he said he was taking Kopechne back to Edgartown. It also ruled that his "negligent driving" appeared to have contributed to her death. By the time the inquest was complete, Kennedy had already entered a guilty plea to leaving the scene of an accident and received a two-month suspended sentence. But it would be truer to say he was sentenced to life under the cloud of Chappaquiddick.
>  
> Had it not been for that night, he almost certainly would have been a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972. He stayed on the sidelines that year and in 1976 as well, even though in the aftermath of Watergate, that looked to be a winning year for the Democrats. It would be, but for Jimmy Carter.
> See TIME's Pictures of the Week.
> (See the top 10 medical breakthroughs of 2008.)
>  
>
> Kennedy found new issues to throw himself into. In 1970 he introduced his first bill to establish a system of universal health-care coverage. He confounded people who thought of him as a doctrinaire liberal by pushing for airline deregulation and for required sentencing of convicted criminals. He promoted arms-control talks with the Soviet Union but also devoted himself to the cause of Soviet dissidents and would-be Jewish ÉmigrÉs.
>  
> It was Chappaquiddick as much as anything else that sabotaged his most serious attempt at the White House: his fight in 1980 to push Carter aside. Almost three decades later, that campaign is still a bit of a puzzle. His ideological differences with Carter never seemed great enough to justify a challenge to a sitting President of his own party. His main complaint was that Carter wasn't moving forward fast enough on health care, "the great unfinished business on the agenda of the Democratic Party," as he called it. In a televised interview on Nov. 4, 1979, just three days before he would launch his campaign, Kennedy gave CBS News correspondent Roger Mudd a notoriously rambling answer to the simple question "Why do you want to be President?" The man who had spent years on a trajectory to the White House still couldn't say exactly why.
>  
> In the end, Kennedy won 10 primaries. Carter took 24, then sailed into the propellers of Ronald Reagan in the fall. But that failed campaign liberated Kennedy. He gave the best speech of his life at the 1980 Democratic National Convention, the speech of a man who had no intention of exiting the public stage. Because the White House was never again a serious option for him, he was free to concentrate once and for all on legislating. (Read "The All-American President: Ronald Wilson Reagan.")
>  
> It was the dawn of the Reagan Revolution, and the Republicans had just retaken the Senate - not an easy time to be the torchbearer for liberalism. But Kennedy assumed the role gladly. He became not only a dogged defender of the faith but also an even more adept player of the congressional game. In the '80s, he teamed repeatedly with the unlikeliest of allies, conservative Utah Republican Orrin Hatch. It was Hatch and Kennedy who got the first major AIDS legislation passed in 1988, a $1 billion spending measure for treatment, education and research. Two years later, they pushed through the Ryan White CARE Act to assist people with HIV who lack sufficient health-care coverage. But if Kennedy knew how to play ball with the other side, he also knew how to play hardball. When Reagan tried to put Robert Bork on the Supreme Court, it was Kennedy who led the ferocious and ultimately successful liberal opposition.
>  
> Kennedy wasn't nearly as prominent in the next major battle over a court seat, the 1991 nomination of Clarence Thomas by George H.W. Bush. Even in the best of times, Kennedy's reputation for womanizing would have made it awkward for him to sit in judgment when Thomas was accused by Anita Hill of sexual harassment. But the Senate hearings on Thomas started at a particularly bad moment for Kennedy, just months after one of the messiest episodes in his public life. In March, while visiting the family compound in Palm Beach, Fla., Kennedy had roused his son Patrick and his nephew William Kennedy Smith out of bed so they could join him for drinks at a local bar. Smith returned to the compound that night with a young woman who would later accuse him of raping her. He was eventually acquitted after a nationally televised trial in which Kennedy was called as a witness. But the image of the capering Senator leading two younger men out to play reawakened all the
> old misgivings about Kennedy, women and alcohol. The man who had once been Prince Hal, the reluctant heir to the throne, was in danger of turning into Falstaff, the aging reprobate.
> Kennedy pulled himself back from that brink. In the summer of the same year, a decade after his divorce from Joan, Kennedy re-encountered Victoria Reggie, a 37-year-old lawyer and gun-safety advocate who had briefly been an intern in his Senate office. Now she lived in Washington with her two children from a previous marriage. Soon they were dating, and a year later they were married. The new marriage transformed Kennedy, giving him a feeling of contentment and stability he had not enjoyed for years. It was a newly energized Kennedy who moved on to the legislative accomplishments of the '90s, like the Family and Medical Leave Act. When the Republicans retook Congress in 1994, it was Kennedy who would push Bill Clinton from the left when Clinton's old soul mates from the Democratic Leadership Council were urging him to move right. "The last thing this country needs," he said then, "is two Republican Parties." (See pictures of Bill Clinton's North Korea
> Rescue Mission.)
>  
> Yet when the next President turned out to be a Republican, Kennedy still found a way to work with him on shared goals. Kennedy spearheaded the effort to pass the No Child Left Behind Act, a priority for George W. Bush. But they later parted ways over what Kennedy felt was Bush's failure to adequately fund the program. And on other issues, there could be no common ground. In 2002, Kennedy was one of the 23 Senators who voted against authorizing the Iraq war. Years later, he would call it the "best vote" he ever cast in the Senate.
>  
> But by that time, there had been a lot of good votes - votes that left the country a changed place and a better one. Nobody talks about Camelot anymore. They struck the scenery long ago. Without Ted, the Kennedy legacy would be mostly beautiful afterglow, just mood music and high rhetoric. More than either of his brothers, he took the mythology and shaped it into something real and enduring.
>  
> On the weekend of his Inauguration in 1961, John Kennedy gave Ted, the last born of the Kennedy siblings, an engraved cigarette box. It read, "And the last shall be first." That was almost 50 years ago. Neither of them knew then in just what ways that prophecy might turn out to be true.
> We do.
> View this article on Time.com
> Related articles on Time.com:
>
> Obama on Kennedy: "An Important Chapter In Our History Has Come To An End"
> Teddy: The Youngest Kennedy Brother
> The Man Who Found Himself
> The Death of Ted Kennedy: The Brother Who Mattered Most
> World Reaction
>

------------------------------------

[Disclaimer: ALOCHONA Management is not liable for information contained in this message. The author takes full responsibility.]
To unsubscribe/subscribe, send request to alochona-owner@egroups.comYahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/alochona/

<*> Your email settings:
Individual Email | Traditional

<*> To change settings online go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/alochona/join
(Yahoo! ID required)

<*> To change settings via email:
mailto:alochona-digest@yahoogroups.com
mailto:alochona-fullfeatured@yahoogroups.com

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
alochona-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com

<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/