US: If the opening day belonged to the Clintons, yesterday belonged to Ted Kennedy, who last night topped the programme at the Democratic National Convention, writes Conor O'Clery in Boston
Tickets for a sell-out tribute concert earlier in the evening in Symphony Hall, starring Bono, Yo-Yo Ma and the Boston Pops, were the hottest property in town.
Three busloads of Kennedy clan members attended the opening by Senator Kennedy of a parkland strip dedicated to his mother, Rose, that is replacing a demolished elevated highway. The senator eulogised the city which gave him strength and which he said symbolised liberty.
"This is where the roots of my family are. This is where my grandparents entered the United States in 1848," he said. The convention in Boston marks the last great hurrah for the silver-haired Massachusetts senator.
Many of the Kennedy family are minor celebrities, but none will likely ever match the political stature of the 72-year-old keeper of the flame. Ted Kennedy is also being honoured in Boston as the convention's king-maker. It was his intervention in Iowa that rescued John Kerry's faltering primary campaign, bringing to Kerry events an antiwar passion to match the popular rhetoric of Senator Howard Dean. It is Kennedy's political team who have taken over the Kerry campaign and made it a professional operation.
Kennedy is fired up with a desire to unseat George Bush. He feels he was conned by the President into standing beside him to launch the No Child Left Behind Act, only to see it fail through lack of funds.
Kennedy is still to many Americans a polarising figure. He was once reviled by the candidate's wife with whom he shared the platform last night. Then married to a Republican senator, Teresa Heinz Kerry said back in 1975, in a little-known interview, that she didn't trust Ted Kennedy and that the Democratic machine was "putrid". This was gleefully splashed as a lead yesterday by the pro-Republican Boston Herald.
Mrs Heinz Kerry's advice to a journalist to "shove it" also reverberated in the media, but the former senator, Mr George Mitchell, dismissed it as "very modest language", and others suggested a debate between Mr Kerry's wife and Dick Cheney, who recently told Senator Patrick Leahy to commit an impossible act with himself.
As a Kennedy author, Richard Reeves, pointed out in the Boston Globe, it is 60 years since the first Kennedy political campaign in Massachusetts, when JFK ran on his record as a navy veteran. Now as the Kennedys fade, it is John Kerry, a product of Austrian and English immigrants, who is campaigning for president on a record of military combat.
Veterans of the Vietnam War have come to Boston in large numbers, some in wheelchairs, many missing limbs, to support him. The Rev David Alston from South Carolina fought with him. "I know him from a small boat in Vietnam where we shed blood together," he said, and he found Kerry "a man of courage and conviction."
The veterans help portray the candidate as a man who can lead the nation in time of war, always perceived as a Democratic weakness. There were lots of references in floor speeches to his captaincy of a swiftboat in Vietnam to show he could take over from the present captain on the bridge to steer the United States to safer waters.
Bill Clinton joined in, telling delegates they should choose "a captain . . . who knows how to steer our vessel through troubled waters."
Kerry went out of his way yesterday in his journey to Boston to speak in front of a US warship in Norfolk, Virginia. Just as John Kennedy stole national security issues from Nixon to win the 1960 election, the Democrats are determined to wrestle the mantle of patriotism from the Republicans.
At a rally for the veterans, held beneath a huge American flag, the former general, Wesley Clark, had them roaring approval when he said: "This flag is our flag. We've seen men die for that flag. And no John Ashcroft or Tom Delay or Dick Cheney is going to take that flag away from us."
John Kerry took symbolism a bit far on Monday by going to the space shuttle launch pad in Florida to mark the official launch of his White House bid.
There he donned a skin-tight suit to squeeze sperm-like through a metal tunnel.
There were no media photographers present, but NASA released a picture, which had some Kerry people crying conspiracy and others recalling how another Democratic candidate, Michael Dukakis, saw his campaign crumble in ridicule after he tried to appear militaristic by climbing into a tank.
Ridiculing the President has been banned at the convention, on Kerry's orders, to project a positive image, but on the streets he is fair game. A car was spotted cruising around Boston yesterday towing an effigy of George Bush with flames shooting out of his trousers. The slogan read "Pants on Fire".