Boston Globe: Ted Kennedy was not a great man. The extraordinary events of his life clashed with his human frailties, and the frailties sometimes won. He had real talent as a legislative politician, but for his first few decades seemed destined mainly to be someone's kid brother.

Boston Herald: What do you do, what do you say, when a legend dies?

How do you grieve when a figure who has been larger than life is gone?

For nearly half a century Edward M. Kennedy has been the center of our political world here in Massachusetts. In good times and in tough times he was there - for his family, his party, his state and his nation.

Washington Post: Ted Kennedy once said that his own legislative record was one he'd love to run against. A number of people tried, of course, and lost. But then, they weren't Ted Kennedy. Mr. Kennedy spent 46 years in the Senate hewing pretty steadily to his course while others trimmed their sails or just plain bailed out.

New York Times: Three decades ago, Senator Edward Moore Kennedy ruined his last hope to be elected to the White House when a television interviewer asked him why he wanted to be president. He could not articulate an answer, offering instead a rambling, empty response that persuaded his party that he may not really have wanted or been suited for the job that his brother John had held and to which his brother Robert had aspired.

USA Today: Amid the outpouring of tributes to Sen. Ted Kennedy, it's easy to forget the low expectations that greeted his arrival in Washington nearly 47 years ago. The arc of Kennedy's Senate career provides a cautionary reminder of how first impressions can turn out to be woefully wrong.

Wall Street Journal: A common myth about politics is that centrists rule the day. The truth is that moderates typically cut their deals on ground taken by conviction politicians of the left or right who have already changed the terms of public debate. Edward "Ted" Kennedy, who died Tuesday of brain cancer at age 77, was a conviction politician who achieved more than most modern Democratic Presidents.

New York Post: One need not identify with, or approve of, Kennedy's politics to agree that, for half a century, he was the preeminent symbol of liberal orthodoxy in America.

Particularly for the generation that came of age under the influence of his murdered elder brothers, Jack and Bobby, Ted Kennedy personified uncompromising idealism.

New York Daily News: He lived a hell of a life, had a ringside seat on history terrible and glorious, scored hearty triumphs, suffered monstrous pain, was guilty of wretched failure, and endured to come through to the other side, hailed by Presidents of both parties and colleagues liberal and conservative.

There was the man and there is the record, each outsized.

San Francisco Chronicle: Paradox seemed to follow the Massachusetts Democrat at every turn. He was scorned by some as a son of privilege, yet he focused his considerable political influence on helping society's neediest. His unwavering liberalism made him frequent fodder for ridicule from the right, yet his effectiveness in the Senate was defined by his ability to forge personal relationships - and to find common ground - with conservative colleagues. He was the uncle who was a rock of stability for his many nieces and nephews, yet his own personal life was beset by years of indulgences and misjudgments.
Los Angeles Times: Kennedy made several missteps in his long career. His primary challenge to the centrist President Jimmy Carter probably contributed to Ronald Reagan's landslide general-election victory. His hyperbolic warning that confirming Robert H. Bork for the Supreme Court would usher in the return of segregated lunch counters and back-alley abortions sowed the seeds of today's petty partisanship over judicial selection.

Taken all in all, however, Kennedy contributed enormously to the realization of the sort of society he championed, despite -- or perhaps because of -- his failure to win the White House.

Philadelphia Inquirer: He never quite matched the public's adoration for his older brothers, President John F. Kennedy and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, whose lives were cut short by assassins' bullets. But Ted Kennedy's legislative achievements far surpassed the impact of his brothers in the lives of ordinary citizens.

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