"The evil men do lives after them while the good is oft interred with their bones."

I was reminded of this famous line at Senator Edward Kennedy's passing.

Predictably, the 77-year-old Senator's death drew sharply polarised reactions.

To his "liberal" supporters in America he was their country's lost leader: A champion of civil rights, a fierce critic of apartheid (at a time when the Reagan administration supported a policy of "engagement" with South Africa) an opponent of America's role in Vietnam and of the 2003 Iraq War – a socially conscious fighter for the downtrodden whose opposition to injustice and poverty were the enduring hallmarks of his life.  

His American opponents, on the other hand, saw him as a "tax and spend liberal" who had opened the floodgates to illegal immigrants, someone with a leftist agenda that looked increasingly oudated when set against the Reagan counter-revolution of the 1980s.

Many Conservatives in the UK held something far worse against him. They saw him as a Sinn Fein sympathiser. Kennedy had called for the withdrawal of all British troops from Northern Ireland and once urged British living in the province to "go home".  

But, above all, Kennedy's critics assailed him on grounds of character. He was a boozy philanderer, the exam cheat expelled from Harvard, the "coward" whose presidential ambitions were irrevocably scuppered when he fled the scene after driving his car into the water at Chappaquidick, the infamous 1969 "accident" that killed his companion in the car, Mary Jo Kopechne.

And Kennedy had only been dead a day when his critics surfaced, all guns blazing, and, perhaps predictably, it was that incident 40 years ago in Massachusetts that gave them the most ammunition.

Here's Charlie Laurence in the Daily Mail: "Senator Edward 'Ted' Kennedy stood for sleaze. Bloated and drunken, he used his standing in the Kennedy clan to chase vulnerable women – which brought his dream of reaching the White House to a shameful end."

Perhaps the fiercest criticsm came from American writer James Buchanan: "Kennedy’s personal life was just as disgraceful as his political life. Mary Jo Kopechne drowned in the back seat of his car abandoned by this drunk womaniser, who cared more about his reputation than saving her life. Kennedy eventually bloated himself out to 300lbs, showing as little self-control in his eating as he did in his spending."

Ed West, writing in the Daily Telegraph, chose to assail Kennedy over Northern Ireland. "For years, Kennedy was the bang-drummer-in-chief for brainless Irish-American IRA sympathisers, dimwits who shouted 'troops out of Dublin!' and sang maudlin songs from the comfort of Boston and New York, giving money for strangers 3000 miles away to murder their neighbours."

Let's take Kennedy's "support" for the IRA. Many Irish-Americans have always had strong pro-republican leanings. But Kennedy never supported violence. And, with hindsight, he was right to urge that Gerry Adams be granted a visa into the United States and that Sinn Fein should be brought into the process. Everyone knew that a negotiated settlement was inevitable. We had to talk; ritual condemnations of IRA violence achieved little.

As for Kennedy's alleged drunkenness, there have been many famous people who battled with drink problems throughout their lives, but this doesn't diminish their status. His drinking brought him into compromising situations but then again, perhaps if we revealed all the skeletons in our locked cupboards we'd all be compromised.

Back to Chappaquidick. By July 1969 Kennedy had suffered the loss of two brothers to assassins' bullets. Perhaps those two tragedies alone would have been enough to drive anyone to drink. His actions may have been indefensible that night. But what should we conclude? That one moment of madness outweighs a lifetime of good intentions? To be honest after the loss of two siblings I shouldn't think one's mind is one's own anymore.

I suspect Kennedy knew he had behaved badly at times in his private life. To his credit he agonised over his mistakes and sought to atone.

One story, in particular, offers a fine example of this, the case of little Jessica Katz, the young Russian Jewish refusenik, who suffered from an illness that prevented her from digesting food and milk properly. She needed baby formula, but it wasn't available in the Soviet Union back in 1978.

According to CNN: "The Soviet doctors couldn't save her. Jessica's parents, Boris and Natalya, were desperate.

Jessica's grandmother had immigrated to Boston, Massachusetts, with two of her sons and was campaigning to get her baby granddaughter out of the Soviet Union.

At first she helped urge American tourists to take baby formula to Moscow for the Katz family, and for a little while, it worked. But the Katz family knew they needed access to doctors in the West."

Eventually, the grandmother's campaign reached Kennedy's office. In September 1978, Kennedy flew to Moscow for a meeting with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Kennedy urged him to let the Katz family leave the country immediately.

Jessica's father is convinced that Kennedy played a pivotal role. "If not for his intervention, I would have been arrested very soon [afterward] and it would have been too late for him to intervene," said Boris Katz, recalling the fate of many of his Jewish friends. "So he saved Jessica, he saved me, he saved the rest of our family."

From what we've read there were two Ted Kennedys. One was the sometimes irresponsible private citizen burdeoned with unknown demons and the weight of the nation's expectations. The other was the conscientious public figure who went out of his way to help others. I prefer to remember the latter.  

He who saves one life, saves the world entire.