Ted Kennedy, the Eulogist

Anthony Camerano / AP Photo The eulogies rolling out for Ted Kennedy are unlikely to be as eloquent and beautifully rendered as the ones he delivered throughout his life. Kennedy biographer Adam Clymer shows how the late senator from Massachusetts was a master of the form.

The tributes are pouring in, from presidents, statesmen, senators, and journalists.

In a few days, there will be formal eulogies at his funeral. Those speakers will have a special task—not just of capturing the greatness of Edward M. Kennedy, but of matching or even approaching the standard he set in dozens of eulogies he delivered over four decades honoring family, senators, friends, and staff.

The best-known eulogies are for his family, his mother Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy (“She sustained us in the saddest times—by her faith in God, which was the greatest gift she gave us”), Jacqueline Kennedy and her son, John F. Kennedy, Jr., and, most of all, his brother Robert.

At St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1968, he quoted a speech Robert had given in South Africa about moral courage:

For the fortunate among us, there is the temptation to follow the easy and familiar paths of personal ambition and financial success so grandly spread before those who enjoy the privilege of education. But that is not the road history has marked out for us. Like it or not, we live in times of danger and uncertainty.

And then he concluded in a passage often shown on television:

My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life, to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it. Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world. As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him:

Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.

Of his nephew, John, who died in a plane crash in 1999, Ted said in 1999:

We dared to think, in that other Irish phrase, that this John Kennedy would live to comb gray hair, with his beloved Carolyn by his side. But like his father, he had every gift but length of years. We who have loved him from the day he was born, and watched the remarkable man he became, now bid him farewell.