SALEM — He looks youthful, you can hear his father's distinctive accent when he speaks, and Ted Kennedy Jr. told a press conference at Salem State last night that he just might be interested in running for office.
He just didn't say when.
Kennedy spoke as part of The Salem State College Series at the O'Keefe Center, drawing a respectably large crowd that included his mother, Joan Bennett Kennedy. He skipped from topic to topic, including a lot of Kennedy family history, but his own life was the basis for his core concern, the disabled.
"When I was 12 years old," he said, "my dad came into my room and told me that the doctors were going to have to remove part of my leg." At first, Ted Jr. thought it was the swollen part of his leg that would have to go, but his father had to explain that it was worse than that: The entire leg below the knee would have to be removed to stop the cancer that afflicted him.
"What would my life be like?" the boy wondered. Would he be better off dead? "I thought no girl in the world could ever be attracted to me."
He made a recovery by learning to ski, realizing that the future still held promise.
"It was a really transformative part of my life," he said.
As a young man, he studied the law and went into practice working on the problems of the disabled. He downplayed the notion that there was something heroic about people overcoming disabilities.
"Most," he said with a smile, "are just trying to go to the movies or get into a restaurant."
Speaking with assurance, Kennedy gave several clues regarding his reluctance to get involved in politics. "Politics," he said in the pre-speech press conference, "it's not an easy life. ... It's incredibly demanding. It's not a family-friendly occupation."
He told the audience, "People who talk about 'quality time' with their families are kidding themselves."
For that matter, he touched on the unique difficulties that his family might face, remembering when his young daughter came to him and asked, "Daddy, who are the Kennedys?"
"I realized I was in for a very long conversation," he said, explaining that he told her the family members are "no better and no worse than anybody else." Yet, he warned that some people would love her and some people would hate her "before they ever meet you."
Kennedy touched on his efforts to help his father battle through the brain cancer that killed him less than a year ago. For one thing, he urged him to drop efforts to finish his autobiography "True Compass."
"I wanted zero stress. ... But he said no. No, I want to do it." The initial title of the book, he noted, was "Persistence."
In fact, the senator had kept contemporaneous notes, Kennedy said, for more than 50 years. It was something that seemed to surprise even his son. "Isn't that the nerdiest thing to do?" he asked the audience with a laugh.
He next offered an anecdote from the book, a story involving his grandmother, Rose Kennedy, and her penchant for giving away books autographed by world leaders. As it happened, her letter requesting such a book arrived on Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's desk at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Picturing the KGB bosses conferring with Khrushchev, Kennedy speculated, "They're sitting there asking, 'What is the CIA trying to say to us with this?'"
His grandmother was a major part of Kennedy's speech. Kennedy recalled a girl raised in the early 20th century, daughter of the mayor of Boston, fighting to win acceptance in a world that still held strong prejudices against the Irish. Barred from the stylish clubs of the Yankee establishment, "She started her own club."
Arriving at the press conference prior to his talk, Kennedy was directed to a comfortable chair at the head of the room. He laughed — "I'm not going to sit on that" — and sat among the reporters, photographers and Salem State officials, showing more than a little of the Kennedy charm as he eagerly handled the questions.
Politics, he said, is "something I'd consider a few years from now. ... I do think I'd be good at politics. I love people. I'm a high-energy person. My wife likes politics."
He offered a measure of praise for his father's successor, Sen. Scott Brown, a Wrentham Republican. "He seems like a good guy. A sincere guy."
His own ambitions might include a run for state attorney general (he lives in Connecticut), where he says there are new opportunities to have an impact.
"I don't want to be a carbon copy of my father," he said
Mother Joan interrupted at one point to note that she was descended from one of the victims of the Salem witch hysteria of 1692, Mary Eastey, who she said was hanged.
For his part, Kennedy referenced his link to Salem in his speech, joking, "Thank you very much for being so nice to me this time around."
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