King Kennedy

Last year, when Sen. John F. Kerry was just another presidential wannabe, he would crack wise about the Bay State. Massachusetts, he told audiences, is actually “a Wampanoag Indian name meaning ‘Land of Many Kennedys.’ ”

Now, of course, Kerry is on the verge of claiming the Democratic presidential nomination, a triumph he celebrates here in his hometown of Boston. But Sen. Edward M. Kennedy wears a larger mantle. “He’s the king,” said Marc Landy, a Boston College politics professor.

And all of Massachusetts is his court.

On Sunday night, the state’s senior United States senator hosted a reception for world diplomats at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum in nearby Dorchester. On Monday, he choked up as he helped dedicate the Rose Kennedy Greenway, a string of parks near Boston’s waterfront that was named after the late family matriarch. On Monday night, he presided over a celebrity-filled fundraiser for the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial, a human rights organization.

Tonight there will be a “Tribute to Ted” at the city’s Symphony Hall, featuring the Boston Pops, cellist Yo-Yo Ma and U2 frontman Bono. Beforehand, Kennedy will deliver a prime-time address at the Democratic National Convention, reprising the featured role he has played at every party gathering since 1960, when his brother John was set on the path to the White House.

And why not? If not for Kennedy, there might have been no Democratic convention in Boston. And no Kerry nomination, for that matter.

“There is no way to overstate” Kennedy’s importance to the campaign, said manager Mary Beth Cahill, who serves as one case in point. She was dispatched last November from Kennedy’s Capitol Hill office, where she was chief of staff, to assume control of Kerry’s flailing effort. She brought order and discipline to an operation that badly needed both; Kennedy, who stumped across star-struck Iowa, brought passion and big crowds. “That’s attention John Kerry would not have gotten on his own,” Cahill said.

Obviously, Kerry no longer needs the help. All the same, if he is the least bit perturbed at this week’s cavalcade of Kennedy -- having labored his whole political lifetime as the other senator from Massachusetts -- it has never shown.

The two men talk regularly, forging a relationship far closer than the one they shared during nearly 20 years on Capitol Hill. The uneasy jostling that is typical of same-state senators -- and the sniping between their staffs -- has given way to a warm and fruitful collaboration, extending even as far as the free-fire zone of Boston politics. Just recently, Kennedy stepped in to help smooth things between Kerry and the city’s tetchy mayor, fellow Democrat Tom Menino, when a dust-up over police labor relations threatened to embarrass them both.

After serving 42 years in the Senate, longer than all but four men in history, Kennedy has become the party’s paterfamilias; he is both a fixer and a fixed point for the Democratic faithful. Rarer still, he is that most transcendent of political beings -- an icon -- loved by Democrats and lampooned by Republicans, not just here in the land of Kennedys, but across the country.

Indeed, GOP strategists may be the only group of people happier than die-hard Democrats to see him front-and-center this week.

The inevitable question, raised by all those ghosts and shadows, is whether Kennedy wishes he were the one lifting his arms in victory Thursday night, accepting the party’s presidential nomination.

“When you look at the scene, you can’t help but think it’s far from what was supposed to happen,” said Paul Watanabe, a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. “There’s no question that John Kerry has always been perceived as the junior senator, not just in seniority but in stature.”

Kennedy had his chance. He ran for president in 1980 and lost the Democratic nomination to incumbent President Carter. He thought about running again in 1984 but ruled it out after a family council. At the time, Kennedy was going through a divorce and told reporters his “overriding obligation” to his children meant that he could not be diverted by yet another campaign. “I just felt that the cumulative effects of those kinds of pressures on the family were unacceptable at this particular time,” Kennedy said in December 1982.

In truth, his White House hopes probably ended years earlier, in 1969, when Kennedy drove his Oldsmobile off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island and his passenger, a young woman, drowned.

Over the years, Kennedy has been asked countless times whether he regrets that the White House, which once seemed his destiny, ultimately proved out of reach.

“I ran in 1980, and I’m glad that I did,” he recently told Associated Press in a variation on his stock answer. “But as I said shortly after that, my ambition is public service, not the constant pursuit of the presidency.”

Instead, Kennedy has poured his soul into the Senate, becoming, in the estimation of recent biographer Adam Clymer, one of the greatest legislators in history.

He has written laws creating the Meals on Wheels program, expanding the availability of health insurance, boosting the minimum wage, extending civil rights protections. Every major piece of education legislation passed over the last 40 years bears Kennedy’s imprint, and he also played a major role in post-Watergate campaign reform efforts.

“Odds are he affected the life of the nation more in 40-plus years as a senator than he would have in four or eight years in the White House,” said Clymer, a former New York Times political reporter.

For all his accomplishments -- or maybe because of them -- Kennedy is a figure ripe for parody. Time has not been kind to the 72-year-old last brother. He shows none of the youth of John or urgency of Robert, frozen as they are in time. He struggles with his weight. His full head of hair has gone white, and his jowly face is streaked with purple veins. He wobbles when he walks, a hobbyhorse gait caused by a chronically bad back.

Still, Kennedy possesses a manic energy, evident when he dervishes through a crowd: hugging, squeezing, gripping and throwing his head back as he roars with laughter. “He’s tireless,” said Cahill, who spent 2 1/2 years on Kennedy’s staff, trying to keep up.

Kennedy has already said he plans to run for reelection in 2006. “What else would he do in life?” asked Clymer, suggesting the senator’s diversions of sailing and painting watercolors are little more than that.

So even if the convention is not the last hurrah that romance would suggest, only a churl could begrudge Kennedy this moment. It was the Kennedy clan, over the last half-century, that reshaped Massachusetts politics in its image, turning the state from a redoubt of Yankee Republicanism to the nation’s fountainhead of liberalism.

The Democratic nomination may be Kerry’s. But Massachusetts is still Kennedy’s world. The rest of us are just visiting.