Senator Edward M. Kennedy is dead.

Edward Kennedy will be remembered as a man who overcame an impoverished, hardscrabble upbringing to matriculate at Harvard, where he soon established a reputation for extraordinarily original thinking. Before his election in 1962 he had complied such a record of accomplishment that the voters of Massachusetts were impatient at the Constitutional age limit of 30 for senators.

When faced with a great personal crisis, Kennedy acted with such straightforward candor and courage as to embody that old adage, “Let justice be done, though the heavens may fall.”

In his only run for the presidency, he laid out such a coherent vision of his reasons for seeking that office that it was only through the machinations of his opponent that he was deprived of it.

In his 45 years as a Senator, Kennedy’s green-eyeshade approach to spending and careful appreciation of the Constititional restraint on the reach of the Federal government earned him the affectionate title of “The Taxpayer’s Friend.”

A faithful husband as well as the father of another upstanding legislator, Edward Kennedy was the embodiment of his Catholic faith. We will not see his kind again.