WASHINGTON — 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.
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