There were no brothers left to give the eulogy for Senator Edward Kennedy, who was called to give so many.

The sorrow at his death is tempered by the fact that he got what so many in his family didn't, 77 years. At his nephew's funeral, Kennedy said: "We dared to think, in that other Irish phrase, that this John Kennedy would live to comb gray hair... But like his father, he had every gift but length of years."

Ted Kennedy lived to comb white hair and he needed that length of years to become the great man he was at his death. He was the callow kid brother, nobility in name only. His brother's Massachusetts senate seat was held for him by a family retainer until he could claim it at 30. His opponent correctly claimed that the unimpressive Kennedy, who had been kicked out of Harvard, would never have won had his name been Edward Moore.

As a senator, he didn't come into his own until after his disastrously inept 1980 presidential campaign, in which he was flummoxed by a simple question about why he wanted the office. His finest moment was his exit speech: "For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die."

In truth, his dream of being president had died on a late night in 1969 when he drove off a bridge in Chappaquiddick, swam to safety but left behind a young female campaign aide who drowned, and then waited 10 hours to report the tragedy.

In spite of what that awful episode said about his character, his Massachusetts constituents — including Irish Catholics, the most distraught of his critics — sent him back to Washington in 1970 and again every six years for four decades. He spent the next 40 years, during which he cast 15,000 votes, making up for his horrible failing.

He spent that time in the off-stage tedium of legislating not as a leader — he was denied minority whip in 1971 — but as a workhorse in subcommittee hearings and markup sessions, the general drudgery that's discouraged many an idealistic lawmaker.

With a few exceptions — he was at the Palm Beach, Florida, family estate when his nephew William Kennedy Smith was accused of rape — he gave up hard drinking and partying. His unbecoming after-hours behaviour ended with his serendipitous marriage to an old friend, Victoria Reggie, whom he reconnected with at a family party in 1991.

Over time, he built a sterling record of achievement, taking his presidential agenda and, by dint of parliamentary mastery and maneouvre, getting it through the Senate, strengthening the Voting Rights Act and increasing funding for AIDS research.

Ronald Reagan piggybacked on a Kennedy trip to Moscow in 1986, asking him to act as an intermediary on arms control. As a member of the Armed Services Committee he was instrumental in halting the bloodbath in Central America and defying the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Although he didn't live to see health-care reform prevail, he presided over a vast expansion of health insurance for children, an extension of benefits to the mentally ill and passage of the National Cancer Act and the Family and Medical Leave Act. Kennedy also helped expand prescription-drug benefits for seniors, but felt betrayed when he found out the Bush White House had given up negotiating for lower prices with manufacturers. Although he railed against the failure to properly fund it later, he was instrumental in pushing No Child Left Behind across the finish line.

As major as his accomplishments were, he built an even bigger reservoir of respect. To his archest opponents, his word was gold. Castigated as an unfashionable liberal relic, Kennedy could nonetheless reach across the aisle and forge a compromise. The first thing Senator Orrin Hatch, a frequent Kennedy dining companion, would show a visiting reporter was a painting by Kennedy prominently displayed on his wall.

In 1988, Dan Quayle risibly and repeatedly used his modest association with Kennedy on a job-training bill to claim he was qualified to be vice president.

Just last week on ABC Senator John McCain, who ran for president against the candidate whom he might have defeated had it not been for Kennedy's heartfelt endorsement, said, "It's huge that he's absent. Ted Kennedy comes as close to being indispensable as any individual I've ever known in the Senate."

Many with his wealth would have gone into hiding after Chappaquiddick, in shame and for the relief from the unending condemnation. But he stayed in public life. He overcame near tragic flaws and heartbreaking losses to become a masterful legislator, something he came to after early entitlement gave way to working for what he would have. Through all the suffering and failures, the sadness and squandered opportunity, he grew and endured into the "good and decent" man he called his closest friend and brother Robert at his funeral.

In the fevered child who can see a doctor his mother couldn't afford, in the African-American savouring full participation in our politics, in the most marginal worker earning a living cleaning an office building at midnight, in all these, even his harshest critics might see a worthy legacy and even the strictest of his fellow Catholics his redemption.

He won that first Senate seat because of his family name, but he is remembered at the end of his days for what he did with it.

(Margaret Carlson, author of "Anyone Can Grow Up: How George Bush and I Made It to the White House" and former White House correspondent for Time magazine, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)