WASHINGTON -- If history is any guide, there will be a coordinator for Senator Edward M. Kennedy's reelection campaign - opponent or no opponent, joke or no joke - operating in every city and town in Massachusetts this year, and in every ward and precinct in the population centers as well.
This small chunk of what is a large army will be Democratic to its shoes, but nonetheless distinct, a bit apart from the state's official Democratic Party, and above all Kennedy in its fixation. When people say ''the Kennedys,'' they're not talking merely about a family; they're talking about an institution.
It has been that way for 50 years. You could maybe start with John F. Kennedy's first run for Congress in 1946 and see many of the roots, but all the elements came together for the first time when he caught Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. napping six years later and took his Senate seat away, setting him on the course that ended in the White House eight years after that.
''It quickly developed into an entire political party,'' Tip O'Neill noted in his autobiography, ''with its own people, its own approach, and its own strategies.''
Years later the cement that was poured into that foundation is composed of his younger brother's 37-year record of accomplishment for the working familes who then and now are the core of this political dynasty.
O'Neill's observation is quoted approvingly in a doctoral dissertation at Boston College's history department on that pivotal 1952 race by Thomas J. Whalen that Northeastern's press will bring out in book form this fall.
Whalen, who teaches at Boston University, has mined a topic often glossed over in JFK biographies. It's a far better tale than that. It has intrigue, sharp elbows, and bare knuckles, family and class struggle, and national meaning for the stage it set. Kennedy's victory margin, 70,737 out of more than 2.3 million votes cast, was small enough that every maneuver made a difference.
From the Kennedy side, Whalen makes clear that this was in part a grudge match. Lodge's grandfather, the legendary isolationist and vehement conservative who virtually raised him, had beaten JFK's grandfather, John ''Honey Fitz'' Fitzgerald, in 1916 to win the state's first popular election of a US senator. Lodge himself would reappear as Richard Nixon's running mate in 1960. And Edward Kennedy beat Lodge's son, George, in the '62 Senate race.
But it is also a complicated story of two men who transcended dominating ancestors - by 1952 Lodge, as his own man, had become an important moderate Republican internationalist; Kennedy, 15 years younger, was in the process of becoming his own man, though Whalen's meticulous research shows Joseph P. Kennedy as a central but not predominant character in the drama.
As narrative, his dissertation is riveting. Lodge was not merely the most important influence on Dwight D. Eisenhower's decision to run for president that year; he ran his campaign through the GOP convention, neglecting his own. Worse, his maneuvers in the defeat of Mr. Conservative, Senator Robert Taft, earned him the enmity of ''Tafties'' in Massachusetts, most significantly Taft's state chairman, Basil Brewer, whose right-wing New Bedford Standard Times endorsed Kennedy.
And JFK was uniquely poised to capitalize on this party split as the much more conservative candidate on foreign policy. People forget that in those days, Kennedy's anticommunism often veered into virulence, encompassing both ''who Lost China'' baloney and domestic witch hunts. Joe McCarthy was both a family friend and a personal pal from World War II days, and Whalen's tale of his dissing of Lodge in the campaign's final days and the endorsement of Kennedy by the red-baiting Boston Post is delicious.
But the '52 election is also crucial as a harbinger of many things to come. Without benefit of modern crutches like exit polls, Whalen's analysis of selected precinct voting patterns shows a victory based on blue-collar voters (we call them working families today), Catholics, and a swollen turnout in key areas that was almost certainly largely female. And his research shows how Kennedy's masterful mix of money, organization, and media molded this coaliton.
It was personal and political then. It is so much more than that now because of Edward Kennedy's record. But what hasn't changed is the attention to political detail that enlivens this account of 1952.
The real story in Massachusetts right now should not be the tabloid-style humiliation of a would-be candidate. It should be the state Republican Party's abdication of its public responsibility. One reason Senator Kennedy has no viable opponent is that he never forgets his.
Thomas Oliphant is a Globe columnist.
