How Do We Remember Ted Kennedy?

As one whose views of the Kennedy family were most shaped by the deaths of Jack and Robert during my teen years, I admit that I have always wanted to see their family in a positive light. While much of what has been done by others in the family, including Eunice Shriver's work building the Special Olympics, has happened outside politics, Ted's personal struggles always gave me pause and caused me to feel as if he had squandered both opportunity and legacy.

What I did not know until recently is how he rose to the occasion of caring for his brothers' kids... how he genuinely cared for his colleagues and others he met. And it seems that in the last 17 years or so of his life he grew into being the person he perhaps could have been along.

I offer this quote from President Obama's eulogy at today's funeral.

We can still hear his voice bellowing through the Senate chamber, face reddened, fist pounding the podium, a veritable force of nature, in support of health care or workers’ rights or civil rights. And yet, while his causes became deeply personal, his disagreements never did. While he was seen by his fiercest critics as a partisan lightning rod, that is not the prism through which Ted Kennedy saw the world, nor was it the prism through which his colleagues saw him. He was a product of an age when the joy and nobility of politics prevented differences of party and philosophy from becoming barriers to cooperation and mutual respect – a time when adversaries still saw each other as patriots.
And that’s how Ted Kennedy became the greatest legislator of our time. He did it by hewing to principle, but also by seeking compromise and common cause – not through deal-making and horse-trading alone, but through friendship, and kindness, and humor.

My hope is that perhaps his death will remind all our legislators that they can work together as patriots, as those who love this nation, in that same spirit of cooperation and mutual respect. I for one have had enough of the hateful posturing and vitriolic speech.