COLUMNISTS His own man

— Nearly a half-century ago, as a young Associated Press reporter in New Orleans, I attended a Democratic Party dinner to observe the featured speaker, a young man whose brother had just been elected president.

My recollection of Ted Kennedy's speech, recounting his experiences in running his brother's campaign in predominantly Republican Western states, was that he was distinctly unimpressive, unexciting and far from fluent.

Indeed, little that evening beyond his name suggested the soaring orator and political icon whom Americans mourn today. During 47 years in the Senate, he became one of his generation's most significant political leaders, climaxing his career by helping Barack Obama win the White House as the political heir to the Kennedy family's tradition of service.

Long after John F. Kennedy inspired a generation of Americans toward public service, his youngest brother pursued a lifelong quest to use government on behalf of Americans who needed help.

That he would achieve such standing and win acclaim from colleagues in both parties as one of the Senate's all-time greats was hardly preordained.

Elected early in his Senate career as his party's No. 2 leader, he squandered that opportunity-and, most likely, his chance for the presidency-with a reckless personal life that included his role in the tragic death of a staff member after a drunken party on Chappaquiddick Island.

Beseeched for years to seek the presidency, he undercut his one full-scale bid-an ill-timed 1980 challenge to an incumbent of his own party-by his inability to explain precisely why he was running.

After that, he devoted himself to the Senate. Helped by such staff members as Carey Parker and Jim Flug and wordsmiths like Bob Shrum, Kennedy became not only his party's true Senate leader but one of the most eloquent voices for the less fortunate.

Most notably, he fought to expand government's role in guaranteeing health care, vowing to win that fight as he fought his own personal battle against the disease that ultimately killed him.

He was a key figure in many Supreme Court nomination fights, playing a leading role in defeating Richard Nixon nominees Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell and Ronald Reagan's nominationof Robert Bork. One sitting justice, Stephen Breyer, is a former Kennedy staffer.

Despite those partisan battles, Kennedy developed a deserved reputation for working across party lines, an especially important trait in the Senate, where the rules make bipartisan action more effective.

He cleaned up his personal life, too, after some unfortunate escapades, a troubled first marriage and divorce, marrying lawyer Vickie Reggie, whose father ironically had managed John Kennedy's Louisiana campaign when I worked in New Orleans.

Though he will be forever linked in history with his two famous brothers, Ted Kennedy was very differentas a politician and a person. John was cool, understated and ironic; Robert seemed shy and sometimes brooding.

Ted Kennedy was the exuberant Irishman of his forebears who went through life with a big, hearty laugh and a penchant for hyperbole that might have made John or Robert flinch.

Some of his sallies seemed overheated as when he said that "Robert Bork'sAmerica is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, children could not be taught about evolution."

But that passion made him an effective stump speaker, able to rouse partisan crowds to wild enthusiasm. That was on view for perhaps the last time 19 months ago when he bestowed on Barack Obama the endorsement that provided crucial momentum.

"It is time for a new generation of leadership," he said, remembering what his brother, facing similar party-elder opposition, told him in 1960. "So it is with Barack Obama."

Seven months later, already diagnosed with the brain cancer that took his life, Kennedy made a dramatic appearance at the Democratic National Convention and echoed the words that so often roused Democrats before:

"This November, the torch will be passed again to a new generation of Americans, so with Barack Obama, and for you and for me, our country will be committed to his cause. The work begins anew. The hope rises again.

"And the dream lives on." -

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Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News.

Editorial, Pages 12 on 08/27/2009

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