Kennedy's Recent CQR Appearances

As an active legislator, and one of the Senate's most long-tenured members, the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (who died early this morning at the age of 77) was mentioned and cited frequently in CQ Researcher.
Nearly four years ago, I talked to him briefly about one of his favorite subjects, the federal minimum wage. He was a longtime champion of raising it. At the time we spoke, late 2005, Congress hadn't ordered a raise since 1997. But Kennedy assured me that change was on the way. “We'll get this, I'm convinced, during the next year,” he said with a confident smile after I intercepted him - on an aide's advice - following the screening of an anti-WalMart documentary in a Senate office building.
He was only one year off, which is pretty good, as legislative tea-leaf reading goes.
More recently, Kennedy contributed an "At Issue" essay to a report by my colleague Marcia Clemmitt on financial aid to students. In his 400-word piece, Kennedy argued for congressional action to benefit financially strapped students, as opposed to private lenders.
Kennedy embraced more causes than the minimum wage and student aid, of course. But he didn't take those two casually. His own good luck as heir to a great fortune seemed to goad him to open up opportunities for those who weren't born with his advantages.
No federal program, though, could endow anyone with the personal magnetism that was another of Kennedy's advantages. "Great to see you!," he told me when our brief talk ended - a stock phrase, of course, but delivered with the grin and twinkling eyes of someone who's born to charm.