The most revealing moment in Edward “Ted” Kennedy’s political life came Nov. 4, 1979, just three days before he would officially launch his challenge to a sitting president of his own party, Jimmy Carter. In a televised interview, CBS News correspondent Roger Mudd asked the already stout Massachusetts senator a “giveaway” question, a question about as tough as a quiz show host trying to help break the ice with a nervous contestant by asking, “What color is grass?”

Roger Mudd asked: “Why do you want to be president?”

Ted Kennedy, 47, was about to challenge an incumbent president of his own party, with whom his ideological differences were minimal. Why not wait just four years more? Dividing one’s own party in such a way must always weaken the party, creating an opening for the other party’s challenger in the general election (Ronald Reagan, in this case) no matter who wins the primary.

Any mature politician considering such a move — any thoughtful man who had seen two elder brothers assassinated for their trouble in seeking that office — would have asked himself, not once or twice, but a hundred times, “Do I really want to do this? Is seeking the White House — heck, even winning the White House — the best thing for my family, my country, my party, for me? What can I accomplish that Jimmy Carter cannot, and how important is it?”

Instead, Ted Kennedy was caught flat-footed when Mudd asked him why he wanted to be president. This was not merely a “bad moment.” His rambling, directionless answer — vague bromides about the European nations doing better on energy policy and on fighting inflation — made it clear he was merely being swept along by those who wanted to benefit from installing him in the seat of power. He was running because it was “his turn” … or something.

The little boy who had always been overshadowed by his big brothers; the spoiled brat who was kicked out of Harvard for paying someone else to take his Spanish exam for him; the confused, panicked drunk who returned to the party and left Mary Jo Kopechne to drown in his car as it sank into the waters off Chappaquiddick Island (unless we choose to give the event a more ominous interpretation — Gene Frieh, the undertaker, told reporters death “was due to suffocation rather than drowning”; John Farrar, the diver who removed Kopechne from the car, claimed she was “too buoyant to be full of water”; there was never an autopsy) was finally on his own, asked a question that any thoughtful man would have been rehearsing in his own mind for months.

And the second-term senator was revealed to have the quality of intellect we’d expect from some babbling beauty contestant, a creature whose life and purpose and ambition were, to be as kind as possible, unexamined.

Oh, some will moan, you’re just concentrating on the bad parts. The man’s body is barely cold, for heaven’s sake. Can’t you talk about his achievements, all the good he did?

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