Edward M. Kennedy: The Dream Never Did Die

Edward Moore Kennedy, forever known to the world as Teddy, the unsteady heir of two martyred brothers who matured into a liberal titan of the Senate, a politician who embarrassingly failed in his quest for the presidency but left behind a 46-year legislative record that presidents might envy, died early Wednesday morning of brain cancer at age 77. The last of his kind – not a cliché but an accurate description of the Massachusetts senator's legacy – Kennedy was the personification of an old-school Senate tradition in which fierce ideological adversaries could work across party lines to craft lasting legislative compromises.

Kennedy's life and career were marked by misadventure and tragedy. Ridiculed as unready and revealed to have withdrawn from Harvard in a cheating scandal when he was vaulted into his older brother's Senate seat in the 1962 elections, Edward Kennedy was sworn in to office as Massachusetts's junior senator just 11 months before John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Flying back to Boston in the fog to address a party dinner after casting a vote for final passage of the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, Teddy Kennedy almost died in a private plane crash that kept him bedridden with back injuries for months. A year after his brother Robert was shot and killed just after winning the 1968 California primary, Kennedy drove his car off a bridge when leaving a beach party on Martha's Vineyard killing Mary Jo Kopechne, a political staffer, who was in the back seat. That tragedy – and, in the minds of many, the ensuing cover-up -- were forever known by the place name Chappaquiddick. In early 1971, because of Chappaquiddick, Kennedy seemingly permanently lost his footing on the legislative ladder when Robert Byrd defeated him for reelection as Senate Majority Whip.

Occasionally his liberal compatriots complained that Kennedy went too far in his quest to find unlikely allies – a prime example was his working with President George W. Bush to pass the 2001 No Child Left Behind education bill without securing what many Democrats considered adequate funding. But Kennedy's political life was encapsulated in words (written by Robert Shrum) that he delivered at the end of a grudging convention concession speech after failing to defeat incumbent President Jimmy Carter for the 1980 Democratic nomination: "For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."

Kennedy died just as the legislative dream that animated his career – the Holy Grail quest for universal health-care coverage – is in the midst of a rebirth under Barack Obama. As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi promised in a Wednesday morning statement, "Ted Kennedy's dream of quality health care for all Americans will be made real this year." Yet the loss of the senior Massachusetts senator complicates Obama's task, not so much because it temporarily deprives the Democrats of a vital Senate vote that may be needed to choke off a Republican filibuster, but because Kennedy's shrewd legislative instincts will be missed – by Republicans as much as by Democrats.

But if Kennedy will not be around to help the president with health care, Obama may owe his presidency itself to Kennedy and his family. Kennedy endorsed Obama immediately after his breakthrough victory in the 2008 South Carolina primary. In doing so, not only did Kennedy spurn the Clintons – with whom he went sailing off Martha's Vineyard in 1997 in a symbolic passing the helm to a new family gesture – but he also likened the youthful enthusiasm surrounding Obama to the 1960s idealism that characterized his brothers' campaigns.

The Kennedy magic had its limits; just eight days after the Obama endorsement Hillary Clinton won the Massachusetts primary by more than 200,000 votes. But the Kennedy legislative legacy had almost no confines:

One of Kennedy's earliest legislative triumphs helped create a polyglot America where it was possible for a man with a Kenyan father and a name like Barack Obama to be elected president. As a fledgling senator just out of the hospital in 1965 – a year when Obama was just three years old – Kennedy played a major role shaping the sweeping overhaul of America's immigration policies passed that year by Congress and signed into law by President Johnson. Under the new statute, family reunification became America's guiding principle, rather than per-country quotas. Kennedy assured nervous critics that under the new legislation "immigration levels would remain "substantially the same" and that "the ethnic mix of the country will not be upset."

After the next four decades, of course, this prediction and a similar one by Lyndon Johnson as he signed the legislation were proved wildly – and to pro-immigration advocates, wonderfully – off the mark. The law reversed what used to be, in effect, a European-born-whites-only immigration policy and transformed the American electorate. Not only did Obama carry the fast-growing Hispanic vote by better than a two-to-one margin against John McCain, based on exit polls, but he also racked up even more lopsided margins among foreign-born Latino voters, according to surveys by Democratic pollster Sergio Bendixon.

Kennedy's own dreams of the White House began with trumpet fanfares and ended with the playing of "Taps." After the 1968 presidential election that saw the assassination of Robert Kennedy and the election of Richard Nixon, the surviving Kennedy brother was the winter-book favorite for the 1972 nomination until Chappaquiddick. Resisting blandishments to run in 1976 (his 12-year-old son Edward had developed bone cancer in 1973 and he was on the 1976 ballot for a third full Senate term in Massachusetts), Kennedy was exasperated by the success of a little-known former Georgia governor named Jimmy Carter. His own marriage was in tatters, and he separated from his first wife, Joan, in 1978.

Kennedy nonetheless impetuously challenged his own party's incumbent president Democrats' nomination without ever developing a rationale for his candidacy beyond royalist entitlement. The last Kennedy presidential crusade came unglued before the official announcement of candidacy in October 1979 during an interview with CBS newsman Roger Mudd who asked the simple question: "Senator, why do you want to be president?"

Kennedy's 336-word answer, which was too rambling to be parsed and too incoherent to be reproduced, proved to be the death knell of his candidacy. Although Kennedy fought Carter to the Madison Square Garden Convention, even resisting shaking the victor's hand on stage, the last attempt at a Kennedy restoration was over almost before it began.

Left with perhaps the safest Senate seat in the union (although then-centrist Republican Mitt Romney did get 41 percent of the vote in 1994), Kennedy decided to make the most of it. And he succeeded in a way that dwarfed the legislative accomplishments of the three men (all of whom he served with) whose names now adorn the Senate office buildings: conservative Southern Democrat Richard Russell, Republican leader Everett Dirksen, and liberal icon Phil Hart.