Kerry Remembers Ted Kennedy As 'Great Teacher' 5 Years After His Death
BOSTON (CBS) – It has been five years since Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy died. His loss to the political landscape reverberates for many even today.
In a statement to WBZ NewsRadio 1030, Secretary of State John Kerry, who worked with Kennedy for nearly 25 years, says he thinks about his former colleague all the time.
Full statement from John Kerry:
"It's hard to fully grasp that it's been five years without Ted - probably because in so many ways he's still around us and in our lives. I think about him all the time, especially when I'm home in Massachusetts, and probably most fondly when I'm out on the ocean in the kind of weather Ted loved so much.
But, it's more than just personal. I hear his voice in all of our debates. He was such an advocate, but he also knew how to listen. He had such a sense of fundamental fairness. He was bigger than life.
It might surprise some people, but it's true that, to this day, when I have foreign ministers visiting me here at the State Department, particularly from Africa and Latin America and former Soviet countries, so many of them point to the pictures on my desk of me and Ted, and they still remember a visit he took to their country through those five plus decades in the Senate.
His fight mattered to Massachusetts, and it mattered to domestic policy enormously, but it also mattered to foreign policy and to the world. He was a great teacher when I came to the Senate and one of my closest, most treasured friends when he left me almost 25 years later."
Kennedy spent nearly five decades in the senate, taking office in November of 1962 until his death on August 25th, 2009.
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