EDWARD KENNEDY, one of America’s most prominent liberal politicians, was rushed to hospital in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, last night after a seizure.

The senator, 76, the best-known living member of the Kennedy dynasty, was later air-lifted to Massachusetts general hospital in Boston where his condition was “not life-threatening, but serious”. He did not appear to have had a stroke as was first suspected.

A hospital spokeswoman said he was “resting comfortably and it is unlikely we will know anything for the next 48 hours”. Later he was said to be joking with family members by his bedside.

He is the youngest of nine children; his older brothers John F Kennedy, the US president, and Robert “Bobby” Kennedy, a senator, were both assassinated.

Kennedy passed on the torch of his slain brothers to Barack Obama, the likely Democratic presidential nominee. His endorsement of Obama in Washington in January was a hugely symbolic moment at a time when Hillary Clinton was still the Democratic frontrunner.

Kennedy proclaimed that a new era in Democratic politics had dawned, while harking back to a dynasty that predated the Clintons and outshone them in glamour. He has since campaigned tirelessly for Obama.

In 46 years in the Senate he has had great influence as a lawmaker, but his career was tarnished by the Chappaquiddick incident in 1969, when he drove a car off a bridge, killing his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, a campaign worker. He received a suspended two-month jail sentence for leaving the scene of an accident.

As a Democratic leader in the US Senate, he has compiled an unrivalled record of legislative achievement and has proved to be one of the last great liberals in an increasingly conservative age, a powerful voice on behalf of America’s miserable and misbegotten.

Even after Chappaquiddick he was reelected senator for Massachusetts seven times. He earned the respect of his political enemies, and was once described by Senator Orrin Hatch, a senior Republican from Utah, as “one of the all-time great senators”.

For any other man, these achievements might be considered Olympian. For the third of the Kennedy brothers, for the man who was forced to pick up a dynasty’s mantle after two unthinkable assassinations, they have never been quite enough. In 1980, after years of considering a presidential run, he decided to challenge Jimmy Carter for the ultimate prize of the White House. He won 10 Democratic primaries before bowing out, but the abiding memory of that campaign was his critics’ use of a popular song to damn his effort: Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water.

While his brothers advanced steadily up the political ladder, Ted attended Harvard University, where he was caught cheating at exams and was expelled. It was the first hint of a flawed, sometimes volatile and frequently contradictory character.

For all his political skills, he is frighteningly prone to moments of appalling judgment, often involving copious quantities of alcohol and - according to some of his biographers - illicit encounters with women.

Kennedy was first elected senator aged 30 in 1962. His brother John had vacated the post when he became president, and a family friend had kept the seat warm until Ted was ready to run.

With hindsight, it may be easy to conclude that he was caught at a weak moment when he attended the fateful party on Chappaquiddick Island off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, home to the Kennedy family estate at Hyannisport. For all the conspiracy theories and wild allegations that the case has generated, Kennedy has been able to secure the loyalty of Massachusetts voters, who never turned against the state’s most famous family.

Yet that was not the last of the scandals that have soiled his political record. It was to a Palm Beach bar in 1991 that Kennedy invited his son Patrick and his nephew William Kennedy Smith to join him for a few drinks. The events of that day would ultimately lead to rape charges being brought against Smith in a trial that seriously embarrassed the veteran senator.

What became known as the Palm Beach affair undermined Kennedy’s subsequent efforts to block the US Supreme Court appointment of Clarence Thomas, a conservative black judge who had been accused of sexual harassment.

Although Smith was acquitted and Kennedy was never accused of breaking any law, he later felt obliged to offer a kind of apology for his failings. “I recognise my own shortcomings - the faults in my private life,” he said in late 1991. “I realise that I alone am responsible for them and I am the one who must confront them.”

The following year he married his second wife, Victoria, who is said to be a calming influence.

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