By James Rowley
Aug. 26 (Bloomberg) -- Edward Kennedy had a skill that served him well in his four-decade career in the Senate: He knew how to make a friend.
It enabled him to bridge partisan differences while maintaining his standing as a fierce advocate of Democratic Party ideals. “I never saw anybody he couldn’t work with,” said Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming.
The patriarch of a legendary political dynasty at the time of his death, Kennedy built a Senate career spanning almost 47 years. Unlike two brothers who also served in the Senate, President John F. Kennedy and U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, Ted, as he was known, built his reputation as a lawmaker.
“He has got to be one of the major figures in the Senate’s history,” said Donald Ritchie, associate historian of the Senate.
With Republican Orrin Hatch of Utah, a close friend of many years in the Senate, Kennedy won passage of legislation to finance AIDS treatment and to provide health insurance to children in poor families.
Kennedy and Arizona Republican John McCain worked together on immigration overhaul in 2007 and Kennedy teamed up earlier with former Indiana Republican Senator Dan Quayle to expand a federal job-training program. With Kansas Republican Nancy Kassebaum, he co-sponsored a 1996 law that allowed some workers to take insurance coverage from one employer to the next.
‘Likes People’
“He genuinely likes people,” Connecticut Democrat Christopher Dodd, one of Kennedy’s closest Senate friends, said in a July 24 interview. “He likes his colleagues, even ones he has little in common with substantively.” Kennedy “listens to them” and “doesn’t think anybody’s got ideas that are not worth listening to,” Dodd said. “That goes a long way in this legislative business.”
Kennedy’s accomplishments also included enactment of the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act that barred discrimination against people with physical disabilities, legislation mandating appropriate public education for children with disabilities and laws barring discrimination against women and protection of children against abuse.
“Early in his career probably there were a lot of Republicans who would vote against any bill he would sponsor,” Ritchie said. Kennedy “figured out how to build alliances” and became “brilliant at choosing someone from the other side of an issue” to craft legislation, he said.
Backing Bush
To the consternation of many fellow Democrats, Kennedy supported former Republican President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind legislation that set nationwide standards for education in public schools. Later, he accused Republicans of gutting the effort by failing to provide enough money to finance programs to help schools in poor neighborhoods meet the standards.
While he was unsuccessful in 2007 in pushing comprehensive immigration reform, Kennedy won the admiration of Democrats and Republicans who worked to try to reach consensus on that politically divisive issue.
At a bipartisan press conference in May, 2007, South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham turned to Kennedy and joked that the Massachusetts lawmaker had gotten the better of him in negotiations.
“I promise never to work with you again for the people of South Carolina,” Graham said. “You have a reputation of being a serious legislator” who “knows how to get things done. That has been absolutely true.”
Kennedy joined the Senate in 1962 at age 30 after winning a special election to fill his brother John’s seat. Colleagues described Kennedy as deferential to the more senior senators.
Democratic Whip
He was elected to the No. 2 leadership post of Democratic whip in 1969 and later the same year was embroiled in scandal when a woman passenger in his car named Mary Jo Kopechne drowned after the vehicle went off a bridge at Chappaquiddick in Massachusetts. Two years later he lost the post to West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd.
Byrd went on to become Senate Democratic leader. Kennedy eventually headed two committees. It was as chairman of the Judiciary Committee and the Labor and Health Committee -- later reorganized as the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee -- that Kennedy made his mark as a master legislator.
Capitol Hill Staff
Kennedy’s staff was widely regarded as the best on Capitol Hill. At one point, his Judiciary Committee legal staff included Stephen Breyer, now a U.S. Supreme justice; Kenneth Feinberg, who is now overseeing executive compensation issues for firms that receive federal money in the Obama administration; and David Boies, who went on to be the lead courtroom lawyer in the U.S. government’s successful antitrust case against Microsoft Corp., argue Democrat Al Gore’s case in the court fight that determined the outcome of the 2000 presidential election, and defend former AIG International Chairman Hank Greenberg.
Kennedy’s “ability to attract and keep the best staff people on the Hill (including the likes of Stephen Breyer) and his incredible appetite for work” created a “model” for legislating, Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, said in an e- mail.
Kennedy helped lead the Democratic attack in 1987 that blocked the confirmation of Robert Bork, one of Republican President Ronald Reagan’s Supreme Court nominees.
Legislation he sponsored to put pressure on South Africa’s white-dominated government to end the racial separation policy of apartheid prompted Reagan to impose economic sanctions.
Health Care Champion
A longtime champion of universal health-care coverage, Kennedy sponsored legislation that allowed laid-off workers to continue to buy, for a period of time, health insurance offered by their employers. He also was instrumental in pushing community health centers that serve low-income Americans and the Women, Infants and Children Nutrition program to improve the health of poor women and their children.
By the time the Senate began drafting legislation to carry out President Barack Obama’s plan to overhaul U.S. health care, Kennedy was too sick to participate in the day-to-day discussions. He kept in touch by telephone with lawmakers and turned the task of shepherding the bill through the HELP Committee to Dodd.
Democratic leaders repeatedly invoked Kennedy’s name as the driving force behind their legislative effort to pass health insurance.
Over his Senate career, Kennedy wrote more than 2,500 bills, of which more than 500 became law, according a compilation of his legislative achievements furnished by his office.
His legislative record is “going to be very hard” to replicate, said political historian and analyst Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution in Washington.
Simpson, whose father was elected to the Senate in 1962 along with Kennedy, said the Massachusetts senator’s strategy was to “try to accommodate the 80 percent and fight over that 20. That is a pretty good example of a legislator. I don’t know anyone who would have those accomplishments.”
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