Edward Kennedy: The last of the titans

The Kennedys, it is said, don't matter any more – that you have to be in advanced middle age to have any serious memory of that vanished golden age when John Kennedy was king, and America was young and beautiful and full of boundless promise. To which there is only one answer. Ted Kennedy matters.

If not, then the first disturbing news at the weekend that the Senate's Democratic titan had been rushed to hospital with a suspected stroke would not have caused the cable networks to drop all other programming. And if Ted Kennedy and the Kennedys didn't matter, why would The Wall Street Journal, of all papers, have led its front page yesterday not with the latest primary results or the convulsions in the oil market, but with the announcement that the brother of the murdered president was stricken with a grave, and possibly fatal form of brain cancer.

One can but hope that in Ted Kennedy's case, the grim prognoses are not borne out – of an illness that, once discovered, kills half its victims within a year. But subconsciously you sense that America is already preparing for a fourth and final act of the tragic drama that began in Dallas on 22 November 1963. Five years later, Robert Kennedy was gunned down as he sought to follow his elder brother into the White House. Then in 1999, John Kennedy Jr, JFK's impossibly handsome son, died when his small plane crashed into the sea. And now Ted. The difference perhaps is that this time the country has been given time to prepare.

What is it about the Kennedys, and the extraordinary grip of their adventures and misadventures on the collective national psyche? Once, indeed, they were America's nearest thing to a ruling dynasty. But in terms of real politics and real power, the family has long since been supplanted by the Bushes and Clintons. That, however, is mere reality. But the imagination is something else, at least equally potent, where celebrity and politics have intersected in a half-century-long melodrama of the Beautiful and the Damned.

There are younger Kennedys dotted around American politics and public life, but none appear to have either the taste or the talent for high office. They, too, are sometimes brushed by "The Curse of the Kennedys" – a horrible skiing accident, marital or mental breakdown, trouble with women or drugs, even murder. But Ted is the last of the brothers, the last of the lineage, the last one who really matters.

And matter he does. The outpouring of shock and grief is not merely a Pavlovian response to a name. Yes, Ted Kennedy (with the possible exception of Hillary Clinton) is the most recognisable Democratic senator. But he is also the most influential and effective Democratic senator, and has been so for two decades.

Ted Kennedy's endorsement of Barack Obama in January did not, it is true, enable the likely Democratic nominee to carry the Kennedy family fiefdom of Massachusetts in that state's primary on Super Tuesday. But it served notice that the party establishment might forsake Hillary Clinton.

Most important, it sprinkled the stardust of the Kennedy legend over the young man from Illinois. Barack Obama, Ted declared in so many words was the John F Kennedy of 2008. And if Obama does win the supreme prize, and Ted Kennedy is still at work, the new president will have no more important ally on Capitol Hill.

Few – not even old Joe Kennedy, the patriarch-cum-philanderer, who was determined that one, and preferably all his sons, become president – could have imagined Ted's career would take the course it did.

When he first appeared on the scene, he was very much in the shadow of his elder brothers, Jack the president and Bobby the attorney-general. When he won the White House, Jack had to give up his senate seat in Massachusetts, but the family machine kept it warm for Ted. In 1962 he was duly elected senator at the tender age of 30. The callow young man, it was assumed, would be a make-weight whose ambitions, like those of his brother before him, were set on higher things.

True, there were signs of the future master-legislator as early as 1965, when Kennedy helped to push through the bill that ended special preferences for immigrants from white Europe. But for the country, he was still a youngster, albeit one tempered by the tragic death of his brother, who had passed the torch of fraternal seniority to Bobby. But then Bobby died, assassinated in Los Angeles in the early hours of 5 June 1968 at the very moment he was savouring a victory in the California primary that might well have brought him the Democratic nomination.

By the highest measure of all, the one set by his father and attained by his brothers, Ted Kennedy's career could be termed a disappointment. It is often forgotten in the light of everything that has come after, but for more than a year – the interval between RFK's death and the Chappaquiddick incident of July 1969 – he seemed the monarch in waiting, for whom the presidency sooner or later would be his for the asking.

Very briefly, cloistered with a few of his closest advisers in a Chicago hotel suite as the chaotic Democratic convention of 1968 unfolded in the city's International Amphitheater and on its streets, Ted toyed with the idea of a run that year. But he quickly concluded that not only was he too young (at 36, a single year older than the minimum of 35 required to become president), but that a presidential campaign would have been unfair both to his own family and to the entire extended Kennedy family, of which he, as Joe's last surviving son, was the de facto leader. It would have thrown down a macabre gauntlet to fate, in a country all too familiar with political assassination.

Then came the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne in July 1969, at Chappaquiddick, an island linked to Martha's Vineyard. The young woman was a passenger when Ted Kennedy drove his car off a bridge after the two had attended a party for former campaign worker of RFK. He escaped, she did not. For reasons never properly explained, Kennedy failed to report the accident. He denied behaving improperly with Kopechne, or driving while drunk. Ultimately, he pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident after causing injury, and received a two-month jail sentence that was suspended.

In retrospect, Ted Kennedy's White House dreams died along with Mary Jo Kopechne that night in the tide-torn waters of Nantucket Sound. He sat out the 1972 and 1976 elections, when the scandal would undoubtedly have dominated a White House campaign. But by 1980 memories were less raw. Many Democrats, believing that the unpopular incumbent, Jimmy Carter, was simply unelectable, urged Kennedy to run. This time he did, but his campaign got off to a disastrous start with a TV interview in which he seemed unable to say exactly why he wanted to be president. Though he won many primaries, he never really recovered.

By the time the primaries were over, Carter had mathematically locked up the nomination. But Kennedy – with far less reason, incidentally, than Hillary Clinton would have now – took the struggle all the way to the convention. To no avail. With his defeat, all hopes of a Kennedy restoration were over.

In fact, the end of his presidential ambitions was a liberation. Kennedy threw himself into his work in the Senate, and over the years has put together an unrivalled legislative record. The young man whose birth conferred upon him almost every advantage life could offer – money, looks, connections and the most glamorous family name in American politics – instead took it upon himself to master the nitty gritty of lawmaking, and make it his special mission to help those less fortunate than himself.

But, while never losing sight of his goals, he also understands, more than any of his colleagues, how Republican adversaries can sometimes be useful allies. He remains utterly committed to his party and the liberal cause, never more so than when he led the assault on Robert Bork, the conservative legal scholar picked for the Supreme Court by Ronald Reagan in 1987. Thanks largely to Kennedy's efforts as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Bork's nomination was rejected.

But Kennedy also knows that, in politics, you must have the means to achieve your ends. He understands the importance of favours given and received, of the vital art of compromise. In a place as full of checks and balances as the United States Congress, the best can often be the enemy of the good. Kennedy has long since realised that 70 per cent of what you want is better than nothing at all.

That the poor and disadvantaged have no more effective champion in modern US politics is precisely because Kennedy is ready, on occasion, to take a bipartisan approach. One of his closest senate friends for instance is Orrin Hatch, better known as a fiercely conservative senator from Utah. He has also worked closely, if in vain, with John McCain, presumptive Republican presidential nominee, on the cause of immigration reform, which foundered in Congress last year.

At a moment when most Democrats were still seething at George Bush's perceived theft of the White House, Kennedy reached out to the new President on education reform, rounding up Democratic votes for one of the biggest early successes of Bush's first term. That the two have since diverged – on Bush's failure to come through with funding for No Child Left Behind, aimed at improving school standards and accountability, but above all over the Iraq war – in no way diminishes Kennedy's initial willingness to do business with a political foe.

Kennedy was one of the 23 Democratic senators who in October 2002 voted against giving Bush the authority to attack Iraq. In September 2003, six months after the invasion, he called the war a "fraud cooked up in Texas", and his language about what he calls "Bush's Vietnam" has, if anything, grown even harsher since. Yet that has not prevented him working on other issues with McCain, the war's most ardent advocate and defender. Obviously very moved, McCain described Kennedy as "the single most effective member of the Senate". And this member, let it not be forgotten, belongs to a party that has held the White House for only eight of the last 28 years.

The future is now dark indeed. Most patients of his age who contract a glioma, the cancerous brain tumour with which he has been diagnosed, live no more than 18 months. Treatment permitting, it is safe to assume that a man as tenacious and stubborn as Kennedy will be back at work on Capitol Hill as soon after next week's Memorial Day break as possible.

Whatever happens, however, the Kennedy era is drawing to a close. This eighth full six-year term in the Senate, which theoretically runs until 2012, will be his last. He is one of just three senators in history to have cast more than 15,000 votes. But Ted will not now overtake the record set by Robert Byrd, who is now 90 and has an unprecedented 50 years unbroken service in the Senate behind him. On Tuesday, Byrd wept as he paid tribute on the Senate floor, shortly after the grim news swept through Capitol Hill. "Ted, Ted, my dear friend, I love you and I miss you," Byrd said, in words with which every one of his colleagues, whatever their party, would probably agree.

Barack Obama's debt to Ted Kennedy is obvious. But if, indeed, the great liberal lion is forced to step down within the next few months, no one would have more reason to rue his absence than a President John McCain – obliged to do business with a new Congress that is almost certain to be even more firmly controlled by the Democrats than the present one, but without the Democrat with the most skill and stature to reach across the aisle.

Kennedy's influence on national life is evident in more subtle ways, too. He has an uncanny knack for picking good people, building a Senate staff legendary for its excellence. A spell in his office features on many of the most illustrious resumés in Washington. Justice Stephen Breyer, the liberal standardbearer on the present Supreme Court who once worked for Kennedy on the Judiciary Committee, is just one of them.

Of course, he has his flaws – who doesn't? At 19, he was thrown out of Harvard for cheating. He shares that ferocious competitiveness of his brothers that sometimes turned into ruthlessness. He done his share or more of drinking and womanising, while Chappaquiddick cast enduring doubts about his strength in a crisis. In 1991 and rising 60, he played the embarrassing supporting role in the rape trial of William Kennedy Smith (later acquitted) of the dissolute uncle and supposed chief of the Kennedy clan carousing with his nephew in the bars of Palm Beach. But these sins have been more than mitigated by the way in which he took on extra families after the assassinations, as father figure for the children of JFK and RFK. Over the years, occasional waywardness has become part of the Ted Kennedy legend.

And legend it is, for the Kennedys tug at America's collective heartstrings and the country's sense of might-have-been as no other family. Tragedy has burnished memory, sometimes to the point of distortion. JFK's Camelot was stirring, but less so surely than it is now sometimes depicted. Entire books, meanwhile, have been written about how different American history would have been had Robert Kennedy lived.

In a sense, Ted, granted a far longer life, has disproved the rule. In his case, promise has been magnificently fulfilled, albeit in a fashion that few initially expected. He will be remembered as one of the legislative giants of the past half century, who probably did more to improve the lives of his less fortunate fellow citizens than any politician since President Lyndon Johnson.

It was 28 years ago, that a Kennedy – vanquished, for once – delivered the unforgettable peroration of his keynote speech at the Democratic convention that nominated his rival, Jimmy Carter. "The cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die," Kennedy told an audience that had tears in its eyes. His words were at once an epitaph for his own dream of the White House, an encomium to his fallen brothers, and the articulation of a myth. But they were also a promise for the future. And whatever else, Ted Kennedy has delivered.