Edward M. Kennedy, Rest in Peace

Senator Edward M. Kennedy's long battle with brain cancer ended last night. Teddy passed away at the age of 77. With the passing of the youngest Kennedy brother we come to the end of an extraordinary era in American society and politics. The famous Kennedy legacy of idealism came to be personified by perhaps its least likely protagonist these past forty-one years.

Ted was the youngest, fattest, and seemingly softest of the four sons of Joe and Rose Kennedy. He had a penchant for hedonism in some ways even beyond those of his older brothers. Yet with their untimely deaths he eventually pulled himself together, assumed the mantle of their service and came to surpass them in many important ways.

It is hard to believe that Teddy spent nearly as much time in the United States Senate as brothers Jack and Bobby lived. They joined eldest brother Joe, Jr., who died even younger flying for the Army Air Corps on a mission to take out a German V-1 rocket launching site in World War II.

They were meteors who flashed brilliantly across the public sky but were snuffed out decades too soon. He alone lived to the grayness of old age, and came to embrace the role of the incremental fight of advancing his cause by inches over the years. It was a role his early temperament did not seem suited for, but one he embraced and filled well. Today the accolades run the gamut from Al Sharpton and Howard Dean to John McCain and Nancy Reagan.

All seem to agree he was one of the last of a dying breed, the politician of conviction who could fight the good fight yet remain friends with his colleagues across the aisle. His ability to craft compromises on education, civil rights and health have been remarked upon by many of his colleagues and will be sorely missed. For though he was often vilified in earlier years by conservatives as the prototypical liberal bogeyman, he was paradoxically one who was better at the old-fashioned skill of finding enough common ground to advance his cause, incrementally, if necessary, over a long period of time.

He did not have to do any of this, of course. He could easily have retired to the easy life of Hyannis Port, sailing and dabbling in high society. Instead, this scion of wealth and prep school privilege was a tireless advocate for issues affecting women, minorities and the working class. Though they affected him little personally, he fought to increase the minimum wage to a living wage, and hardest of all for universal health coverage. His vote and his political skill in this last and currently hottest battle will be sorely missed.

Last January, after the Barack Obama win in Iowa, the Hillary Clinton victory in New Hampshire and subsequent Obama's success in South Carolina, Ted and his niece Caroline passed the Kennedy mantle to Obama, all but designating him the fifth brother. It was an unmistakable signal to the nation that Sen. Clinton's assumed advantage with the Democratic establishment may not have been as solid as it seemed. When she shortly proved unable to shake the young Illinoisan's lead on Super Tuesday, Obama was on his march to the presidency.

Most of all, Ted Kennedy's life and death bookend fifty years when one family inspired millions in the world's leading country probably more than any other. Though his style may be inimitable and his legislative accomplishments many, the youngest brother's true contribution
may have been to the nation's conscience, such as when he said at his bother Bobby's funeral, "those of us who loved him pray that what he dreamed shall come to pass."

Or as he memorably concluded at the convention after losing his party's nomination for President in 1980, the assurance that win or lose, in good times and in bad, in a world of regular people contending against powers and interests seemingly intent on keeping them down and leaving them out of many of the benefits of the society they helped build, that they were not forgotten by all the power brokers. As Teddy assured them, "The dream will never die."