Aug. 27 Daily News editorial

No matter how you felt about Sen. Edward Kennedy — and most Americans had strong feelings about the man one way or another — his death Tuesday was a significant moment in American history.

More so than the passing of a political figure, his death represented the final note for a remarkable, iconic and tragedy-laden group of siblings. Though their many offspring and other relatives will carry on the Kennedy legacy in some form, it was the four sons of Joseph and Rose Kennedy who changed and shaped our political and social landscape.

Edward “Teddy” Kennedy was the youngest of the four brothers. His early life was spent in the considerable shadow cast by the other three.

Joseph Jr., the eldest, was often seen as the brightest political light in the family. He, it was said, was the man being groomed by his hard-driving father to be president.

Instead he became the forerunner of tragic endings when he died in a plane crash in World War II.

But the next brother in line, John F. Kennedy, fulfilled his father’s lofty ambitions n 1960 when he was elected president. President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas in 1963 is a time forever etched in the minds of Americans who lived through that tumultuous time.

Then in 1968, Robert F. Kennedy was gunned down in Los Angeles as he campaigned for the Democratic presidential nomination.

The heavy responsibility of carrying on the Kennedy legacy fell to Teddy but his future was forever tainted and his political ambitions stunted by an accident at Chappaquiddick in 1969, when a car he was driving plunged off a bridge, killing a young woman.

Many perceived the aftermath of that incident as an example a double standard for the privileged few. Indeed, local authorities seemed cowed by the power and prestige of the Kennedy family during their investigation.

But to his credit, Edward Kennedy continued on with his political agenda, seemingly never wavering in what he saw as his fight for social justice. He eventually spent almost half a century in the Senate as one of the most influential political figures of our time. He was unabashedly and consistently liberal, championing the causes of the less-advantaged of society.

Massachusetts voters dutifully returned him to the Senate every six years where he served through many shifts in national ideological favor, never, it seemed, putting his finger to the wind. He made a run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1980 but was defeated by President Carter.

As beloved as he was by many, he also was subjected to no small amount of ridicule for his personal life. Perhaps most famously, 1991 at the rape trial of his nephew, William Kennedy Smith, it was revealed he was drunkenly wandering around the family’s Palm Beach, Fla., estate with no pants. Smith was acquitted but more damage was done to Edward Kennedy’s reputation.

Still, he carried on with his causes in the Senate, championing health care reform, civil rights and much more.

His continuing influence was clear during the Democratic presidential primary last year when he threw his support behind Barack Obama.

Kennedy was diagnosed with a cancerous brain tumor in May 2008 and underwent surgery and a grueling regimen of radiation and chemotherapy. He lived longer than most expected he would after that diagnosis. And through that difficult time he continued to fight for his causes. And in that, he escaped from the shadow of his famous brothers to make his own mark on history.