May Edward Kennedy's legacy inspire the young

It was about three years ago and I was driving somewhere in the Midwest, passing the time by listening to some despicable talk-radio host musing despicably about Ted Kennedy. Why was he even permitted to serve in the Senate? the host wanted to know. How could his colleagues tolerate shaking his hand or even being in this drunken killer's presence?

I exaggerate not. That, nearly 40 years after Chappaquiddick, was the kind of prattle that obsessively convulsed the far right. The talk-radio host's listeners soon chimed in; all had a merry and quite satisfying time.

I briefly wondered if their merriment wasn't some sort of psychological compensation for having one of their own in the White House at the time, a former drunk who by then had heedlessly managed the senseless slaughter of about 4,000 Americans in some vast overseas desert, but I doubted their capacity for ever connecting so much as two dots.

Their man in the Oval Office never looked back, never apologized, never reflected, never examined and never evoked his own humanity, never reached down with all he possessed to lift others up: hallmarks, it seems, of the right-wing mind. A life, essentially, flat.

The life of Edward M. Kennedy, however, always struck me as one of redemption and growth, just as it was with his brothers. They came from almost unimaginable wealth and privilege, yet devoted the better part of their lives to that ancient and now-discarded concept of noblesse oblige.

True, that's what their father had taught them, what he impressed on them in often harsh and unambiguous terms, but there seemed to exist within all the Kennedy brothers a kind of interior willingness -- even enthusiasm -- to go along with Joe Sr.'s demands. There was something, maybe, of the old poor Irish that atavistically retained -- something that whispered, "But for the Grace of God ..."

By the end of his life, John had begun to recognize the global tyranny of the thermonuclear threat as the ultimate oppressor; his transcendent vision, reconfigured from those Cold Warrior days, was to expunge the wretched thing. Robert, on the other hand, came to look more inward as a budding philosopher king, and in the process better comprehended those domestic injustices, of ruthless poverty and brutal discrimination, that had always surrounded but eluded his family privilege.

Their friend and biographer Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. best encapsulated these brothers' public careers and private essence when he wrote, ''John Kennedy was a realist brilliantly disguised as a romantic, Robert Kennedy, a romantic stubbornly disguised as a realist.''

How would Schlesinger, and how will history, remember Ted Kennedy? My guess: as the realized fulfillment of his brothers' truncated hopes -- to engage at length, with good cheer and rugged optimism, in the human struggle; as a man of unbounded romanticism steeped in realism; as a Sisyphean realist undaunted by romanticism's many defeats -- as a flawed man nevertheless permitted by God or the gods or fate or whatever to assist a few noble dreams.

More than a few, indeed, which affected, in the Rooseveltian tradition of comforting the afflicted, so many: from greater cultivating the socioeconomic fruits of organized labor, to guaranteeing every citizen's civil and voting and human rights, to better educating our young, to, someday, insuring that everyone's basic health care is no longer a Darwinian function of material success.

But, more broadly, I think Edward M. Kennedy will be remembered by the same words he delivered at his brother Robert's memorial service: "as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it."

And, as he further observed, in the words of George Bernard Shaw: "Some men see things as they are and say, Why? I dream things that never were and say, Why not?"

Senator, may your noble legacy inspire many, many others, and thereby enfeeble the blind worldview that keeps us mired in the human injustices you so clearly saw and tried to overcome. You were quite a guy.