I haven’t read the book yet, but Times-Picayune reporter Jonathan Tilove cherry-picked this story from U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy’s posthumously published memoir, True Compass. It’s so Louisiana, you know it’s got to be true.
Sen. Edward Kennedy recounts a Louisiana story from the 1956 Democratic National Convention and his brother John Kennedy’s decision to seek the Democratic vice presidential nomination. Kennedy’s father opposed the move because he was sure that the ticket, led by Adlai Stevenson, would lose to President Dwight Eisenhower.
But, Kennedy writes, his brother was “persuaded to run, despite my father’s objections, by a Louisiana delegate who pleaded with him to stay in the race after their delegation had stuck their neck out for him. In an amazing twist of history and fate, the Louisiana delegate was my future father-in-law, Edmund Reggie, then a thirty-year-old judge, who had managed to swing the Louisiana delegation behind my brother when Governor Earl K. Long had gone to the horse races.”