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Despite the sacred place his family holds in the Democratic Party, Kennedy never had much chance of denying the sitting president his party's nomination.

"I'll whip his ass," the moralistic Carter told a group of Democratic congressmen in June 1979.

Later that year, Kennedy botched a television interview with CBS' Roger Mudd, struggling to explain his behavior at Chappaquiddick and, more important, failing to compose a coherent answer to the question of why he was running.

Carter swept through the early primary states, benefiting, ironically, from the situation in Iran, where the U.S. Embassy had been overrun by militants in November 1979 and 66 Americans taken hostage. The hostage crisis would help usher the Republican candidate, Ronald Reagan, to victory in the November general election, but primary voters offered their support to the sitting president.

As the crisis wore on -- and as the nation's economic outlook did not improve -- Kennedy won a handful of big states, including New York and Pennsylvania, but he entered the convention with fewer than 40 percent of the delegates. Unlike the modern party rules, which give nearly 800 unpledged party leaders and elected officials voting rights at the convention, nearly all the delegates were pledged to one candidate or the other in 1980.

Kennedy tried in vain to get delegates to vote to change party rules, to create an "open" convention, so he could be nominated. A resolution binding delegates to vote for the candidate they were sent to support carried overwhelmingly on the first day of the convention, and it was clear that Kennedy still had no path to the nomination.

The next day he delivered the concession speech that would set the tone for the remainder of his career as the lion of the left.

His call to arms for liberal causes would be remembered far better than his indecorous and petty refusal to clasp hands with Carter on stage when the nomination became official two days later.

In "Edward M. Kennedy: A Biography," published in 2000, New York Times reporter Adam Clymer described the picture as "a tableau of Democratic division."

Carter was crushed at the polls in November, and Kennedy would never seek the presidency again.