As a refresher, here's Steven Pearlstein's oft-cited claim, offered in a column urging progressives to abandon the public option:
Asked about his greatest regret as a legislator, Ted Kennedy would usually cite his refusal to cut a deal with Richard Nixon on health care.
The only actual quote I could find of Kennedy saying anything remotely like this comes from a 2004 interview with Susan Milligan of the Boston Globe in which Kennedy discusses an oral history project with the University of Virginia's Miller Center:
Kennedy said he would discuss "missed opportunities" as well as accomplishments. For example, Kennedy said, he has wondered whether Democrats should have taken a rare opportunity during the Nixon administration to accept Nixon's national healthcare proposal. While many Democrats believed the plan was flawed, it may have been better to sign onto it, given that decades later, the nation still has more than 40 million uninsured people, Kennedy said.
"I'll have to go back and look at whether we should have jumped on that. Did we make a mistake waiting?" Kennedy said.
In The Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy, author Peter Canellos made a similar claim to that of Pearlstein, but he sourced his claim back to the Milligan article.
If Milligan and the reference by Canellos to Milligan are the only pieces of evidence for Pearlstein's claim, then he's on pretty shaky ground, factually speaking. Kennedy musing about whether or not he made the right decision back in 1974 is a far cry from him saying it was his "greatest regret."
If Pearlstein's claim is accurate, then he must have evidence for it above and beyond the Milligan article. He should offer it.