After the president of Harvard hailed him as a “national leader but a local servant,” after the pastor read the “Let us now praise famous men” passage from the Bible and after the cellist Yo-Yo Ma honored him by performing a Gershwin prelude, Senator Edward M. Kennedy lumbered across the antique stage.
“I have lived a blessed time,” Mr. Kennedy told the audience at a special honorary degree convocation at Harvard in December. His voice started shaky, but gained strength. “Now, with you, I look forward to a new time of high aspiration for our nation and the world.”
As the crowd rose, Mr. Kennedy waved buoyantly, as if trying to acknowledge everyone he saw: a special fist pump for his former staff member, Justice Stephen G. Breyer of the Supreme Court; a salute in the direction of Vice President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.; a thumbs-up for his niece Caroline Kennedy.
Mr. Kennedy’s wife, Vicki, tried to lead him off, but he broke away, grinning. For a few extra moments, he kept the stage.
Since the diagnosis of his brain cancer last May, Mr. Kennedy has been given all manner of tributes and testimonials, lifetime achievement awards, medals of honor and standing ovations. But even as those accolades have provided sweet solace — and even some dark humor — as he endures grueling treatments, Mr. Kennedy, who turns 77 on Sunday, has been intent on racing time rather than looking back on it.
He considers unnecessary what his son Representative Patrick J. Kennedy of Rhode Island calls “the premature eulogizing,” or what Mr. Biden terms “a bordering on an obituary,” that has accompanied his life in recent months.
“Obviously I’ve been touched and grateful,” Mr. Kennedy said in a phone interview Friday from the rented home in Miami where he has spent most of the winter. “Beyond that, I don’t really plan to go away soon.”
Friends who have seen Mr. Kennedy describe him as driven and focused on work. He sometimes gets angry watching C-Span, pores over memorandums and speed-dials staff members and colleagues (sometimes from his sailboat, the Mya). He speaks frequently — and often on his trademark issue, overhauling the nation’s health care system — to President Obama; Mr. Biden; the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel; and checks up on the Senate “chatter” with lawmakers.
Between chemotherapy treatments, physical therapy sessions and naps, Mr. Kennedy has been lobbying the White House on possible nominees for secretary of health and human services. (He has heard good things about the leading candidate, Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, though he does not know her well and has been pressing for other candidates.)
While his office said he planned to return to Washington in a few weeks, Mr. Kennedy has been orchestrating efforts from afar, setting the foundation for legislation on what he calls “the cause of my life.”
“What has been essential to his recovery and motivation has been setting goals,” said Dr. Lawrence C. Horowitz, a former Kennedy staff member who has been overseeing his care. The first goal the senator set after cancer surgery in June was to speak at the Democratic National Convention (he did, despite kidney stones); then he resolved to attend Mr. Obama’s inauguration (he did, though he had a seizure afterward).
“Now, his goal is to play a central role in health care reform,” Dr. Horowitz said. “That’s what keeps him going.”
Wired for Optimism
Still, as perception can be reality in politics, Mr. Kennedy and his allies have been battling an inescapable sense that his time is too short or he is too ailing to be effective — a notion reinforced last month when people close to Caroline Kennedy seemed to blame her uncle’s health problems for her sudden loss of interest in being appointed to a Senate seat from New York.
Mr. Kennedy says he is wired to be optimistic. “That’s the way I was born and brought up,” he said. “That’s the way we’re dealing with the challenges we’re facing now.”
Until the brief phone interview with The New York Times, Mr. Kennedy had given no interviews since the cancer diagnosis, aside from a few brief hallway remarks to reporters on his sporadic Senate forays and public events. He declined multiple requests over several weeks for a longer, in-person interview.
Even so, people who have spent time with him say Mr. Kennedy is talking more about his past and that of his family than he typically has, in part because he is writing a memoir and it stirs memories. (“Remind me, Vicki, to put that in the book,” has become a familiar refrain.) He can be sentimental at times — wiping his eyes at the Harvard service during a slideshow of his career. And his illness has provoked something of a bipartisan crush of affection by people who have had personal and professional dealings with him.
“The fact that he has cancer leads people suddenly to try to put into perspective what he has done over time,” Justice Breyer said in an interview in his chambers. “That makes them tend to appreciate him more, whatever their politics.”
It is oddly typical of Mr. Kennedy’s life that, for instance, the president of Chile would travel to his house on Cape Cod to present the Order to the Merit of Chile (a spokesman said the award had been announced before he became ill). The Kennedy Center in Washington is holding a belated birthday gala for him on March 8. His friends have pointed out this accumulation of accolades, and not without some wryness.
“It’s the goal of every Irishman to be able to be a witness to your own eulogy,” said Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut. “This is sheer heaven for him.” Hearing Mr. Dodd’s words repeated on Friday, Mr. Kennedy let loose with a rollicking laugh.
Praise and Vilification
Over 46 years in the Senate, Ted Kennedy has been an all-too-human repository for larger-than-life emotions. Colleagues praise his lengthy legislative résumé and personal kindnesses, often in superlative terms: “the most remarkable senator I’ve ever worked with” (Mr. Biden), “the single most effective member of the Senate” (Senator John McCain of Arizona).
Critics have vilified him as a run-amok liberal and an out-of-touch elitist, a longtime playboy involved in a car crash that killed a young woman. In certain political quadrants, his name is akin to profanity even now. Ann Coulter calls him a “drunken slob” in her new book, while various bloggers, radio hosts and other conservative commentators have said far worse.
Mr. Kennedy said he planned to spend Sunday — his birthday — having a quiet celebration with members of his family. His answers were brief on matters pertaining to his illness and life generally, and he repeatedly steered the conversation back to health care and what he called “this unique and special time” to pass major legislation.
Colleagues say no one has a better grasp of the variables involved in developing such legislation than Mr. Kennedy, who is chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
“He said to me one day, ‘Look, there are about 15 ways for this to happen,’ ” said Senator John Kerry, his fellow Massachusetts Democrat. “ ‘But you’ve got to find the one to make it happen.’ He just has a sense of these things.”
Mr. Kennedy describes the Senate as a “chemical place,” meaning that reading the chemistry between members is critical to understanding how an issue or a vote will play out. Removed from it, he has been frustrated, fellow Democrats say.
Mr. Kennedy’s office has twice pushed back his return date to Washington, raising questions about how well his recovery is proceeding. His staff and family have released limited information about his condition. He said he felt strong, and friends say he has recovered from the June surgery to remove part of the tumor.
Dr. Horowitz said, “He is doing very well, considering that he has a serious disease.” He adds that the “unanimous consensus” of Mr. Kennedy’s team of doctors is that “his disease is totally under control.”
Still, the prognosis for patients with malignant glioma, the type of brain tumor Mr. Kennedy has, is generally poor. (Survival is variable, experts said, but is generally measured in months from the time of diagnosis.) The senator has also had at least two seizure episodes that required hospitalization. He tires easily and needs frequent rest.
“Obviously some days are better than others,” Mr. Kennedy said.
Some colleagues privately acknowledge worrying that Mr. Kennedy may lack the physical stamina to meet the demands of forging a health care overhaul bill this year.
To ease Mr. Kennedy’s comings and goings, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, has given him a plum corner office, about 30 feet from the Senate floor, next to an elevator. When Mr. Kennedy came to Washington to vote on the economic stimulus bill this month, he flew on a government jet, arranged by the White House. “I’ll have to pace myself,” Mr. Kennedy acknowledged of meeting the demands of a fuller workload. “But I come from New England stock here.”
“What is necessary, I’ll do,” he added.
Mr. Kennedy, who campaigned hard for Mr. Obama before he became ill, is clearly eager to play a role in the first year of the new administration. By all accounts, he was exuberant at Mr. Obama’s inauguration. “It’s a great day, it’s a great day,” he told a stream of well-wishers, conspicuous in a black fedora and blue scarf and sitting in an oversize chair on the Capitol dais about 10 feet from where Mr. Obama was sworn in.
Michelle Obama went over with her daughters, Sasha and Malia, for a visit. Mr. Kennedy, who like roughly 99 percent of the world’s population knows that the Obama girls have been promised a puppy, took the occasion to lobby for Portuguese water dogs (Mr. Kennedy has two, Sunny and Splash).
At the airport the night before, Patrick Kennedy encountered Roger Wilkins, the civil rights leader, who hailed his father as a hero. Patrick passed this on to his father, who said, “You really need to start writing this stuff down.”
The Personal Touch
After the swearing-in, Mr. Kennedy repaired to a Congressional luncheon, where he mingled with colleagues and ate a meal of pheasant and seafood stew. Before dessert, he was rushed to a hospital after a seizure. The next day, Mr. Kennedy called Mr. Biden to check up on his 15-year-old granddaughter, who had witnessed the incident.
“I’m sorry if I upset your granddaughter,” the vice president recalled him saying. Mr. Kennedy also sent Mr. Biden’s 91-year-old mother flowers (he told her she looked wonderful at the inauguration).
Stories of such gestures from Mr. Kennedy have abounded. Few politicians rival him at the just-checking-in phone call, the scribbled note or the goofy buck-up gift. Mr. Biden recalled how Mr. Kennedy showed up at his home while he was recovering from a brain aneurysm years ago, armed with an inspirational photograph of a giant Irish stag.
These are recent examples:
- When Mr. Kennedy learned that former Senator Tom Daschle’s brother was fighting the same type of brain cancer, the senator put him in touch with his doctors and opened his Boston home to him while he received treatment. He also offered assistance to the conservative columnist Robert D. Novak, a fierce critic of his, when Mr. Novak learned last year that he had a similar cancer.
- He was one of the few to call to congratulate Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico when he was nominated to be commerce secretary and later to console him when he withdrew over questions about his relationship with a donor. “He always starts it off with some personal thing, in my case singing the song ‘Jalisco’ in Spanish,” Mr. Richardson said.
- Mr. Kennedy insisted on accompanying former Senator John Culver, a former Harvard classmate who was about to undergo back surgery, to the Harvard-Yale game in November despite protests that it was a bad idea. Harvard won 10-0. “It was a great day,” Mr. Culver said.
Such efforts have won Mr. Kennedy bipartisan good will, which has been returned since he became ill.
“I got elected to Congress in 1972 running against the Kennedys,” said former Senator Trent Lott, a onetime Republican leader. “Forget liberal, conservative, moderate, whatever,” he said of Mr. Kennedy. “He’s a damn nice guy.”
Last November, shortly after the election, President George W. Bush invited Mr. Kennedy and three other lawmakers to the Oval Office to mark the passage of a bill requiring insurance companies to cover mental and physical health equally, an issue Mr. Kennedy had worked on for years.
Mr. Bush had signed the measure in October, but Mr. Kennedy could not attend, so the president staged a mock signing. They posed for photographs behind Mr. Bush’s desk (once used by Mr. Kennedy’s brother John), along with Patrick Kennedy and the bill’s other co-sponsors.
Mr. Kennedy was perhaps Mr. Bush’s most important Democratic partner in the Senate on education and immigration issues, and maybe his toughest critic on most everything else, especially the Iraq war. Mr. Bush, who had called and written to Mr. Kennedy several times after he became ill, told the senator that he always admired him as an opponent and appreciated that he knew where he stood with him.
“I’ve had more trouble with my friends than with my opponents,” Mr. Bush told Mr. Kennedy in the Oval Office, according to his son. Patrick mentioned the burden of living up to his father’s example, prompting Mr. Bush to reply: “Believe me, I know that feeling all too well.”
After a while, nearly everyone was escorted out, leaving Mr. Bush and Senator Kennedy alone. As aides watched, they walked out the back of the Oval Office, Mr. Kennedy maneuvering a cane.
Weathered by years and battles, the dynastic heirs lingered outside, talking about sports, the election and the future. They shook hands for a final time before Mr. Bush walked Mr. Kennedy to his car and waved goodbye.
This article, , first appeared in The New York Times.