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Friday, November 22, 1963

Just after 1:30 P.M., in the near-empty chamber of the United States Senate, a handsome, dark-haired freshman was taking his back-bencher's turn at a thankless task: presiding over a desultory debate on the need for federal library services. Edward M. Kennedy, thirty-one years old, had been the junior senator from Massachusetts for barely a year and had yet to make a speech from the floor. Suddenly, Richard Riedel, a Senate press liaison who had first come to the Capitol a half century earlier as a nine-year-old page, came running onto the Senate floor, in a breach of all decorum. He rushed for the rostrum and told the presiding officer, "The most horrible thing has happened! It's terrible, terrible!" 

- From An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by Todd S. Purdum