At 67, Ted Kennedy is overweight and shambling. He sometimes wears boating shoes with his suits, even in the US senate where he is practically a democratic institution. He is widely admired, even by his political opponents, as one of the senate's most distinguished and hard-working members.

Since 1968 Kennedy, the youngest son of America's most famous political family, has had the mantle of patriarch thrust upon him.

For John F Kennedy jr, whose ashes were buried at sea off the Massachusetts coast on Thursday, and all the children of his two older brothers made fatherless by assassins' bullets, the avuncular `Teddy' has been a rock in the ensuing 30 years.

"After all thetragedies with which the family has had to deal, Ted has become a real father figure to the entire next generation of Kennedys," democratic Sen Barbara Boxer of California, said on the senate floor this week. "I know how Senator Kennedy teaches those of us who have not been here as long as he, how he monitors us and guides us.

"I can just imagine the close bond he had with John Kennedy Jr. And what this has done to his heart."

A glimpse of Kennedy's closeness to his nephew was revealed publicly when John introduced his uncle at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta in 1988.

"I owe a special debt to the man his nephews and nieces call Teddy, not just because of what he means to me, but because of the causes he has carried on," John said.

Friends of the tight-knit, private family say Kennedy was there whenever he could be for the children's' birthday parties, graduations, weddings -- the happy times. He was also there through the string of scandals that have dogged the family. And he was alwaysthere for the funerals. Since Kennedy's eldest brother, Joe, died in an air crash during world war II, there has been no shortage of either.

In 1969 after his own presidential ambitions crashed with his car off a bridge at Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts, killing a young aide, Mary Jo Kopechne, it was Ted who first uttered the suspicion that some malevolence may be responsible for the misfortune that dogged the family. "Does some evil curse hang over us?" he asked.