Sen. Edward Kennedy poses on Capitol Hill in Washington in 2003.

NYT / LANE TURNER

It was early March 1988.

I’d been in Sen. Ted Kennedy’s presence before, but this was the first sustained look I’d gotten of his Irish flair.

He’d spoken this night at a Dukakis-for-President rally at Warwick’s Rocky Point Park. His son, Patrick, a 20-year-old Providence College sophomore, was running in the Rhode Island presidential primary to be a delegate to the Democratic National Convention.

The Massachusetts senator, 56, was a hit at the rally, but now he really bowled people over at the Sandy Lane Knights of Columbus Hall, where St. Michael’s Parish of South Providence was celebrating St. Patrick’s Day early.

Warwick Mayor Frank Flaherty and Providence Mayor Joe Paolino brought Kennedy over. The senator waded in to a sea of green decorations as a band played “Heart of My Heart.”

He snapped his fingers to the music, danced with a woman and sang the lyrics. Then he strode on stage and sang “Those Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Gang of Mine.” He said he was there to tout Mike Dukakis but was truly excited about St. Patrick’s Day.

He boomed, “I love St. Patrick so much that I named my youngest son Patrick!” This was blarney, of course, but who cared?

Amid shouts and applause, he summoned Patrick and, side by side, they sang “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.”

This is the image of Ted Kennedy — basking in the limelight, in the prime of life but getting old enough to start living also through a son — that first leaps to mind as I, along with Americans everywhere, watch today the anguish of a 76-year-old political legend struck by brain cancer.

Interestingly, the very first time I’d seen him, in March 1962, also was at a St. Patrick’s affair, a dinner at White’s restaurant in Westport. My father took me to see this man who had just turned 30, aspired to the Senate, and whose only real qualification was that he was the president’s brother.

But even then you could see he had the touch. When they called on him to speak, he said he first wanted to hear a few more songs from the Irish tenor on hand. And after Kennedy spoke and they presented him with a briefcase, he held it aloft and said he’d take it to Washington with him.

In 1994, when Patrick, then a Rhode Island state rep, was about to announce for Congress, I had a chance to talk with Senator Kennedy about his 1962 Senate primary with Massachusetts Attorney General Ed McCormack, nephew of U.S. House Speaker John McCormack. Kennedy had done a stint as a $1-a-year assistant district attorney.

During a celebrated TV debate, McCormack sneered that if Kennedy’s name were merely Edward Moore, instead of Edward Moore Kennedy, his candidacy would be a joke.

Kennedy told me he was rocked — “for about an hour and a half.” He said it was apparent from early radio reaction that people weren’t buying McCormack’s line, and the next day brought one of those campaign-trail incidents that are the stuff of legend. Kennedy recalled, “A fellow said, ‘I heard what they said about you last night: You never worked a day in your life. Let me tell you something: You haven’t missed a thing!’ ”

My dealings with Kennedy have been upbeat, and I was present at two of his most triumphant moments — his electrifying call at a 1978 national Democratic gathering in Memphis for national health insurance and the 1979 launch in Boston of his 1980 presidential candidacy.

But before that, as a young reporter, I was drawn into the saturation coverage of the 1969 drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne, who had been a passenger in a car the senator was driving on Chappaquiddick Island, off of Martha’s Vineyard. This was six years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and one year after the assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.

The Providence Journal flew me and other reporters to the Vineyard, where we joined an international press corps. I tried to capture the scene:

“They came from all over, dispatched by newspapers in London and Los Angeles and all the Detroits and Chicagos and Clevelands in between, by an Italian magazine, by the great TV networks in New York.

“They came to this town, which looks like all towns would look if picture postcard manufacturers ruled the world, to document on paper, on celluloid, and on tape yet another story of a family whose tragedies doubtlessly have been documented more exhaustively than those of any other family anywhere…”

Kennedy weighed resigning from the Senate, but the people of Massachusetts wouldn’t hear of it, and he became one of his party’s most formidable figures.

In the 1970s, Democrats held midterm conventions, and on Dec. 9, 1978, Kennedy stole the limelight from Jimmy Carter by unleashing a direct challenge to the president’s program.

I watched from a balcony as Kennedy delivered a fiery speech that had 1,500 people at a health-care “workshop” roaring with approval as he called for national health insurance.

“Sometimes a party must sail against the wind,” Kennedy said.

With health care emerging in recent times as more of a front-burner issue, what Kennedy said that day has almost an air of quaintness. But back then, it was a thunderclap.

He boomed:

“We’ve got national health insurance for members of the Senate and House of Representatives. They give their speeches and cast their votes in Congress. And then they go out to Walter Reed Army Hospital or Bethesda Naval Hospital for the free medical and dental care that Uncle Sam provides.

“That isn’t fair. If national health insurance is good enough for the wealthy and good enough for Congress, then it is good enough for every American citizen in every city, town and village and on every farm throughout this land.”

Less than a year later, Kennedy, with a big poll lead over Carter, launched a bid for the 1980 presidential nomination.

It was Nov. 7, 1979, at Faneuil Hall in Boston, shortly after Americans had been taken hostage in Iran.

In the enthusiasm of the kickoff, it had not yet sunk in how disastrous was Kennedy’s CBS interview a few nights before when he could not explain to correspondent Roger Mudd, a friend, why he wanted to be president.

I noticed Mudd, who was one of America’s best known faces, in the Fanueil Hall audience. But this was hardly a crowd lacking in star power.

I wrote: “Jacqueline Onassis, John Kennedy’s widow, and Ethel Kennedy, Robert Kennedy’s widow, watched as Edward Kennedy stood before a mammoth mural of Daniel Webster, faced a five-tiered press platform, and declared that he was seeking the presidency ‘with no illusions.’

“He asserted, ‘The most important task of presidential leadership is to release the native energy of the people. The only thing that paralyzes us today is the myth that we cannot move.”

Rose Kennedy, the senator’s mother, was there, as were John F. Kennedy Jr., a Brown University freshman, and his sister, Caroline.

And so were the candidate’s wife, Joan, and their children Patrick, Kara, and Ted Jr.

Senator Kennedy wound up losing to Carter, and eventually he and Joan divorced.

By the 1992 Democratic National Convention in New York, he had married Victoria Reggie, and she was a huge hit. After seeing them star at a reception in Gracie Mansion, the fancy official home of the mayor, I twitted the senator.

I said that while I used to think of him as Patrick’s father, I was now starting to think of him as Victoria’s husband. He laughed and said I was right. “No one’s paying any attention to me.”

Of course, his stature as a senator continued to grow, with major achievements in health, education and civil rights.

Sometimes I’d talk with him about these things, but often the topic was Patrick or other family matters.

One time the senator gave me a tour of the generations of artifacts in his Washington office. Here, for example, was a 1932 note on Choate School stationery asking, “Can I be godfather to the baby?” The senator said, “That was my brother, Jack, writing to my mother about me.”

As I watch Senator Kennedy face off against cancer but first insisting on sailing, including taking the helm in a race off the Cape, I can’t help think about comments he made back in March 1988 at the Dukakis rally when Patrick was running to be a convention delegate. He joked about how strange it was to be campaigning for his son — the family tradition had been that the younger members worked for the older.

Discussing this the next morning, he segued into a sailing metaphor. He told me, “You know, I used to go out and do all the crewing for my brothers. That’s the way I remember it. And now this generation wants to know when they’re going to get hold of the tiller, and so I end up crewing. I started off crewing as a young person and I’m ending up crewing as an older person!”

He said he was just delighted.

Later that year, he was in Providence to campaign for Patrick as he won a seat in the Rhode Island House.

Outside Greene Middle School, Senator Kennedy recalled passing out leaflets in Cambridge, at age 14, for his brother John’s first bid for Congress in 1946.

When Ted Kennedy entered the Senate, young and with only slight accomplishments, he had to apply himself. “It’s hard work,” he told me as he looked back on becoming accepted. “You have to outwork all of those you’re going to be dealing with, know more about the issues and learn and stick to your guns.”

He said it would be incumbent on Patrick, given this chance to serve in the legislature here, now to produce. The senator said of opportunity, “What counts is what you do with it.”

And what better way is there to sum up a politician’s career? Ted Kennedy’s admirers, gushing over his priorities, his skills, and his accomplishments, would rush to tell you that no senator has ever made more of his opportunity.

M. Charles Bakst is The Journal’s political columnist.

mbakst@projo.com