The last Kennedy brother is dead

The inevitable day has arrived when Edward M. Kennedy, the last of the Kennedy brothers, has died. Since his diagnosis in May 2008 of a brain tumor, the nation and his Senate colleagues have known this day was coming.

The Washington Post is running a long and thorough obituary, one that, no doubt, has been in the works since last year, or before. Ted was the youngest of the Kennedy brothers, and by most accounts, the least responsible, mature or gifted. But on his shoulders fell the burden of a father's great ambitions for his sons. Joe would die a war hero in an aerial mission gone wrong. Jack would achieve the pinnacle of success he inherited from Joe, only to be assassinated long before his potential was fully realized. Bobby would also die from an assassin's bullet just as he was about to make his own mark on the country. The burden of tragic fate and family honor, not to mention the welfare of his brothers' children, sat heavily on Ted's shoulders at a young age.

Ted, despite his youthful indiscretions (such as getting kicked out of Harvard for cheating and his failed marriage), might have turned the Kennedy magic and the memories of his martyred brothers into political gold had he been less reckless in his personal life. Following a July 1969 beach party, he drove off a narrow bridge at Chappaquiddick, Mass., and killed a young woman. Some evidence indicates Mary Jo Kopechne survived the wreck but drowned in the car Kennedy abandoned in an effort to save his own life and reputation. That incident cost Kennedy any chance at the 1972 and 1976 Democratic presidential nomination, but it was his 1980 challenge of sitting Democrat Jimmy Carter that ended his presidential ambitions. Kennedy's attitude of privilege and inevitability doomed his prospects and also contributed to Carter's loss to Ronald Reagan.

That loss also had a profound and beneficial effect on Kennedy's career: He settled down to being a good senator without the dagger of presidential ambition hanging over his head. He concentrated on being a legislator, one who would accomplish change by sponsoring and shaping legislation. His fingerprints are on most of the significant legislation of the past three decades, and both Democrats and Republicans laud him as an effective advocate who was willing to compromise to achieve his goals. In this respect, he accomplished more than either of his brothers in their tragically shortened careers.

Ted Kennedy has also been, for most of the past 30 or 40 years, the straw man of conservative commentators. "Kennedy Liberal" is a redundancy. Kennedy, who was born into fabulous wealth, advocated for the least fortunate and inevitably saw a government program of some sort as the solution to the world's ills. Even as the national mood turned more conservative, he wore the "liberal" label proudly. He never achieved the universal health care program he had sought for decades, but he inched the nation toward that goal with Medicare, Medicaid, the Family and Medical Leave Act, COBRA, SCHIP and other incremental legislation. He worked for all of the civil rights legislation since the 1960s, including the Americans with Disabilities Act, and it was his endorsement last year that helped ensure the election of America's first African-American president.

Kennedy was both the liberal demigod of the left and the embodiment of insulated, impractical and unrealistic nanny government to critics on the right. History will likely remember him for the imprint he left on the nation's laws, an enduring and profound legacy.