Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the liberal champion whose work ranks him with the greatest lawmakers in American history, died Tuesday night at his home on Cape Cod after a long, public struggle with cancer.

Ap photo

Sen. Edward Kennedy

The Massachusetts Democrat, brother of the late President John F. Kennedy and father of Rhode Island Rep. Patrick Kennedy, was 77.

When the youngest son of the fabled political family was diagnosed with a malignant form of brain tumor in May 2008, he characteristically made the diagnosis a spur to action. He insisted on aggressive treatment to prolong his life.

In August 2008, he left his sickbed to attend Barack Obama’s presidential nominating convention in Denver, where he delivered a ringing speech. That fall, he worked the phones to salvage a landmark mental health law with his son Patrick, the Rhode Island congressman.

In the early months of Mr. Obama’s presidency, he labored backstage on his last campaign, the remaking of the U.S. medical system.

But the white-maned Massachusetts Democrat -- one of the best-known figures of his age -- was rarely seen in recent months. In February, Kennedy appeared at Mr. Obama’s White House kickoff of the health-care initiative and at a triumphant – though bittersweet – birthday gala at the Washington performance center built in honor of his brother, President John F. Kennedy. Earlier this month, however, he missed the funeral of his sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, and the White House ceremony honoring him and 17 other leaders from various fields with Presidential Medals of Freedom.

KENNEDY WAS A NEARLY Shakespearean figure on the national stage for half a century, his life’s passage driven by extraordinary privilege and ambition, colored by outsized achievements, appetites and character flaws and shadowed by a leitmotif of personal loss.

It was the work, in the end, that defined the man. From his apprenticeship to civil rights in the time that President Kennedy dubbed the New Frontier, to his role in a black man’s rise to the White House in the new century, Ted Kennedy harnessed himself to the idea that much is expected of those to whom much is given. The youngest of Joseph P. and Rose F. Kennedy’s nine children came to see his vocation of service as linked especially to the betterment of the lives of society’s least fortunate: the poor, the sick, the handicapped, the unjustly treated.

Kennedy defied some customs along the way: he broke with President Lyndon B. Johnson over the Vietnam War and ran for president against another Democratic incumbent, Jimmy Carter.

He took up burdens he had not sought: the role of surrogate father to the children of his slain brothers; the rear-guard defense of Democratic social welfare programs during the Republican resurgence under President Ronald Reagan.

Near the end of his career, Kennedy brought new meaning to the old saying about politics and strange bedfellows, collaborating with a longtime adversary, President George W. Bush, on Washington’s boldest reach since the 1960s into education and medicine. And under Mr. Obama, he was a continual backstage presence in what he called “the cause of my life” -- the drive to remake the health-care system. Indeed, one of the most persistent lines of Washington speculation in recent months was whether things might have gone better for the health-care overhaul with Kennedy visible in the thick of bipartisan negotiations.

From his original place in his family’s pecking order, he did not look the part of a world-famous leader. A jibe from Jack, shortly after Ted’s first election to the Senate in 1962, summed it up:

“I want to express my appreciation to my brother Teddy for offering me his coat-tail,” President Kennedy told a crowd of local politicians at the old Boston Armory. “My last campaign, I suppose, may be coming up very shortly – but Teddy is around and, therefore, these dinners can go on indefinitely.”

THAT LAST CAMPAIGN, of course, never came to pass. President Kennedy was shot dead the next November; and his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, was killed in June 1968, at the height of his run for president.

Edward Moore Kennedy would never approach the near-mythic status of his brothers, who in the words of the Yeats poem that he loved were killed before they ever “could comb gray hair.” But the political dinners did go on almost indefinitely, along with the election campaigns and legislative battles of a 47-year march through the grit and mire of public life.

AP photo / Sen. Patrick Leahy

Sen. Edward Kennedy, right, poses for a picture with his son, Rep. Patrick Kennedy, at the inauguration of President Barack Obama in this Jan. 20, 2009 at the Capitol in Washington.

In the end, Kennedy compiled a greater record of hard achievement than either of his brothers.

He prospered in large part because he used the gifts he had – great connections, a winsome way with people, a bulldog-like persistence through adversity – and he worked at the skills that did not come easily. Thus, the indifferent scholar who got thrown out of Harvard for cheating made himself into a crack student of the Senate’s arcane folkways and a master of the lawmaker’s craft.

If Ted started out as an uneven understudy to brothers who were naturals at the rostrum and on the television screen, he outstripped them to became perhaps the best stump-speaker of his time – a throwback to the florid style in vogue when his mother’s father, Patrick J. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, was the mayor of Boston.

The Kennedys saw to it that a friend of Jack’s warmed his old Senate seat until Teddy came of constitutional age and won it in his own right – despite a rival’s dead-on claim in their debate that “if your name was Edward Moore instead of Edward M. Kennedy, your campaign would be a farce.”

It seemed a charmed life. The last of Joe and Rose Kennedy’s nine children was now the youngest senator, ensconced with his new wife, Joan, at the center of a great nation’s power. His brother Robert was leading the president’s political team as attorney general. First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy dominated a heady new social scene.

History intervened to disrupt that life –– and the nation’s –– profoundly. The president was assassinated just over a year later. Ted barely escaped death in the summer of 1964, surviving a small plane crash with a back injury that would plague him for the rest of his years. In 1968, as a rift opened in the Democratic Party over civil rights policy and the Vietnam War, Robert launched a presidential campaign that ended a few weeks after Martin Luther King’s assassination, when he was shot dead in Los Angeles.

TED KENNEDY WALKED through the adversity to become a serious legislator with a formidable staff. In 1969, he became the youngest whip in Senate history, took up the banner of the growing anti-war movement and prepared to seek the Democratic nomination to challenge President Richard M. Nixon in 1972.

All that changed around midnight on July 18, 1969, when Kennedy drove a 28-year-old woman to her death in a tidal channel off Martha’s Vineyard. The crash that killed Mary Jo Kopechne followed a small party for the young women who had worked in the “boiler room” of Bobby Kennedy’s campaign. Kennedy denied driving under the influence of alcohol but pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and received a suspended jail sentence. Massachusetts voters re-elected him handily in 1970.

Outside the courtroom, however, “Chappaquiddick” had far graver repercussions, staining Kennedy’s reputation forever, hobbling his presidential ambitions and inciting talk about his drinking and his sexual behavior that would never completely die down.

Kennedy found ways to right himself. When fellow Democrats blocked his upward path by defeating him for re-election to the leader’s post in 1971, he made a fateful change of course into the deliberative, deal-making realm of the Senate’s legislative committees. He threw himself into civil rights issues as a member – and eventual chairman – of the Judiciary Committee. On the panel known today as the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, he found the signature cause that he pursued until his death: reinvention of the U.S. medical system to guarantee care for all.

Kennedy traveled the globe, taking on the causes of arms control, immigration and human rights. He played a role in resolving the troubles of Northern Ireland after 25-years of discord. The peace accprd struck on Good Friday of 1998 relied in no small part to Kennedy's relationship with John Hume, a Catholic activist from Derry who, embracing the examples of non-violent principles of Mahatma Gandhi and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., would share the Nobel Peace Prize with a leader from the Protestant side of the bloody divide. From the fall of Saigon and the Central American “contra wars,” to the Persian Gulf War and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, he was a leading skeptic on the use of American military force.

Kennedy’s only campaign for president produced one of his most notorious pratfalls, as well as a hail-and-farewell to the 1980 Democratic National Convention that stands with the finest political addresses of his time. His challenge to the beleaguered President Jimmy Carter began in embarrassment when Kennedy groped for a reply to CBS-TV newsman Roger Mudd’s simple question: Why do you want to be president?

It was at the moment of defeat the next summer that Kennedy raised the roof of New York’s Madison Square Garden, inspiring Democrats to tears and loud ovations when he declared, “The work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

Carter, too, was defeated that year, in the landslide that swept Ronald Reagan into the White House and a GOP Senate majority into the Capitol. Kennedy was thrust into the role of resistance against a Republican tide.

Looking back at the 1980 convention more than a quarter century later, the senator’s son, Rhode Island Representative Patrick Kennedy, said the nationally televised portrait of the family –– gallant candidate, stalwart wife, and their three children on the convention stage –– belied a painful reality. Teddy Junior was recovering from the loss of a leg to cancer, Joan was in and out of treatment for alcoholism, the marriage was on the rocks. Patrick was to fall prey to what he called “the family disease” of addiction in the years to come; his sister, Kara Kennedy Allen, would contract cancer; and many of their cousins encountered their own tribulations and even, as with John F. Kennedy Jr., early death.

Through it all, Ted was the bulwark of the famous clan, playing stand-in father, mentor, and, in the case of son Patrick and his nephew, former Massachusetts Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II, legislative partner. Kennedy’s personal demons seemed finally to quiet after his marriage in 1992 to Victoria Reggie, a Washington lawyer and daughter of a Louisiana political family with close ties to the Kennedys.

AS STRONGLY AS Kennedy is identified with full-throated liberalism and the Democratic campaigns to expand government aid to the poor, the underprivileged, and the working class, Kennedy adapted his craft to the pendulum swings of popular will and political clout. A Republican held the White House for more than two thirds of his time in office and Democrats were out of power in the Senate for long stretches of his life there. Kennedy, therefore, won some of his signal victories by blunting GOP initiatives, such as Reagan’s efforts to slow the growth of domestic spending programs, or leading the charge against the nomination of Robert Bork, a conservative federal judge, to the Supreme Court in 1987.

More noteworthy yet has been Kennedy’s deft touch in the art of the possible – finding common ground with Republicans to strike improbable deals. Kennedy thus raised eyebrows early in the Reagan years when he reached across the aisle to prevent the extinction of a Democratic employment program by forging a public-private job-training system acceptable to the GOP. His partner: Dan Quayle, the freshman senator from Indiana and future vice-president who had ousted Kennedy’s old friend Birch Bayh in 1980.

After the defeat of President Bill Clinton’s ambitious health-care overhaul and the Republican resurgence on Capitol Hill in the 1990s, it was Kennedy who helped chart his party’s course, with a series of incremental advances on health insurance, education and other social programs.

Kennedy was crucial to President George W. Bush’s only significant successes as a builder of domestic programs – the public school testing system known as “No Child Left Behind” and the landmark expansion of the Medicare program to cover prescription drugs. In both cases, Kennedy failed to secure the levels of financing that he wanted, but he broke with some liberals in calculating that the half-a-loaf to be had in a deal with the other side was well worth taking.

Late in Mr. Bush’s term, Kennedy helped his son Patrick to win enactment of a milestone mental health care bill, using a technique that he would later take to the far bigger and more complex task of overhauling the entire medical system. For several months, Kennedy led closed-door negotiations with Senate Republicans and key leaders of the mental-health lobby, the insurance industry and business interests to lay out the contours of a grand bargain that all could accept.

“Senator Kennedy is crazy like a fox,” one expert on health-care legislation said after Bush signed Medicare drug benefit into law. Kennedy “played it brilliantly” -- doing some of the spadework that made the big new benefit possible, but paving the way for Democrats to make it even bigger in the future, said an admiring Robert Moffitt of the right-leaning Heritage Foundation.

Indeed, as Kennedy foresaw, Democrats have returned to power on both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue and are in a position to build upon those Bush-era programs for the public schools and for aging Americans.

And of course, the senator had something to do with the restoration of the White House into Democratic hands – following the cue of the daughter of President Kennedy. Days after Caroline Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama for president at a key moment in the Democratic primary season of 2008, Ted Kennedy and his son Patrick joined her at a tumultuous rally in Washington with the Illinois senator. It was an important conferral of Democratic institutional support, signaling that Obama was an upstart no more.

KENNEDY WAS STRICKEN and diagnosed with cancer in May 2008, just as candidate Obama was wrapping up the Democratic nomination for president.

From that moment until the end of his life, he rallied for vintage Kennedy performances –– his speech last August at the Democratic National Convention, his behind-the-scenes maneuvering to get the mental-health bill attached to last September’s Wall Street bailout bill, a cameo appearance at Mr. Obama’s inauguration, and a rousing speech at the kick-off of the president’s health-care campaign in March.

Rhode Islanders have become acquainted with this dimension of their famous neighbor from the Bay State since his youngest child took up the family trade. When the senator introduced his apprentice son to political Washington at a congressional campaign fundraiser in his house overlooking the Potomac, he subjected him to the same brand of needling his older brothers had once inflicted on him.

Sen. Jack Reed, then a junior congressman, suggested to the assembled politicos that young Patrick would win his 1994 campaign for the U.S. House in his own right –– not because of his celebrated last name.

The father broke in with a loud riposte that brought down the house: “I didn’t make it because I was a Kennedy,” he boomed. “I made it because I was Ted.”

But his son said last summer that along with the banter, there was also a matter of deepest conviction passed down the generations of their family.

“My dad would always say when I was growing up, ‘From those to whom much is given, much is expected,’ ” said Patrick Kennedy.

jmulligan@belo-dc.com