On a cold Boston morning, remembering Teddy Kennedy

Victoria Reggie Kennedy speaks at the dedication ceremony for the Edward M. Kennedy Institute as (left to right) Edward Kennedy Jr., first lady Michelle Obama, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, President Barack Obama, Sen. Edward Markey, Vice President Joe Biden, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, Jean Kennedy Smith and Patrick Kennedy listen. (Photo: Darren McCollester/Getty)

BOSTON — Broadway star Brian Stokes Mitchell stood and belted out “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” in his beautiful voice, from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!”

Members of the political elite huddled in their chairs in front of him could muster little in the way of a response. They remained hunched over, many of them without winter coats, trying to survive their third hour exposed to the bitter cold, with temperatures in the low 30s.

Such was the scene at the dedication Monday of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute on Columbia Point, right next to the presidential library of Teddy’s older brother President John F. Kennedy. A host of political luminaries attended. President Barack Obama dropped in and gave remarks. Vice President Joe Biden was the highest-ranking public official to stay for the entire two-and-a-half-hour ceremony opening the institute and honoring Teddy Kennedy nearly four years after his death.

Members of the Kennedy family, including Maria Shriver (second from left) and her brother Mark Shriver (front), at the dedication ceremony. (Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

The institute named after Teddy, now run by his widow, Victoria Reggie Kennedy, spent $78 million to erect an educational center that contains a remarkable, full-scale replica of the U.S. Senate chamber. The center will host students and show them what it’s like to debate a bill and how to create legislation.

Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, like many others, said he hopes the center will be a place that inspires new generations of young people to conceive of political or government service as a real possibility for them, and to spark in them the desire to do so.

“We’ve all seen the polls. We know how difficult it is to serve. We know people’s confidence has declined in government and civic action. But we hope through this center, we can change that by bringing the Senate alive,” the former Democratic senator from South Dakota said.

Obama’s speech was blunt in lamenting the disengagement of most Americans from politics and government.

“We live in a time of such great cynicism about all our institutions. And we are cynical about government and about Washington, most of all. It’s hard for our children to see, in the noisy and too often trivial pursuits of today’s politics, the possibilities of our democracy — our capacity, together, to do big things,” Obama said. “And this place can help change that.”

President Obama speaks at the dedication ceremony. (Photo: Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe via Getty)

After a host of politicians were done speechifying, the few hundred attendees at the center — many of them Kennedy family members or former staffers of the Massachusetts senator — were able to enter the building and watch the vice president preside over a mock session of the Senate inside the chamber.

Before that, however, the speeches venerating Kennedy hit common themes, praising his love of a good joke, a good song (Mitchell, the Broadway baritone, was a personal friend) and a good fight. Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, criticized the nameless elected officials whom he said are unable to get anything done — an apparent swipe at the current GOP-controlled Congress — and praised Kennedy for his enduring ability to build personal relationships and trust to solve problems.

The youngest of Kennedy’s three children, Patrick, also recognized his mother, Joan Bennett Kennedy, who divorced his father in 1982. Joan Kennedy, who has been in bad health after years of battling alcoholism, sat in the front row in a wheelchair but spoke lucidly afterward to guests. When her son thanked her from the stage, the crowd gave her a standing ovation. Patrick Kennedy said afterward that it was the highlight of his day.

Neither former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton nor her husband, former President Bill Clinton, attended. Hillary Clinton was never a natural ally of Edward Kennedy. She worked for former President Jimmy Carter’s re-election effort at the time of Kennedy’s only run for president in 1980, and in 2008, the senator from Massachusetts endorsed Barack Obama rather than Clinton for the Democratic nomination, striking a blow to her hopes.

Joan Kennedy stands up to receive applause at the dedication of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute. (Photo: Susan Walsh/AP)

Clinton sent a video greeting instead that was played at a banquet on Sunday night. Some of those in the audience argued that had Clinton attended the ceremony on Monday, press coverage would have focused on her expected announcement that she will run for president in 2016, and diverted attention from Kennedy and the institute.

But even with the Clintons absent, there was a clear clash of political worldviews in the speeches of two Democratic leaders present who are unlikely to run against Clinton but have yet to rule such a possibility out: Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat.

Warren, who sat on the stage behind Biden in the second of two rows of VIPs, told in intimate detail the story of her first meeting with Kennedy, on April 17, 1998. She was a college professor working to prevent legislation that would restrict the ability of consumers to file for bankruptcy. One of Kennedy’s aides, Melody Barnes, had invited her to meet with Kennedy at his offices in Boston.

Warren told the frigid audience that after a 90-minute meeting, Kennedy told her he would vote with her when the issue came to the floor of the Senate. She told him she needed more than that. She wanted him to lead the fight on the issue. When he agreed, Warren said, she was so overcome that she had to walk out of the office and weep in the hallway.

The lesson Warren took away from the incident was that politics could be conducted based on moral authority alone.

“Senator Kennedy changed my life that day. I hadn’t liked politics: all the lobbyists and cozy dealings and special favors for those who could buy access. But I stood in the lobby outside Ted Kennedy’s office, and I felt clean,” Warren said. “I’d come into his office with no political connections, no money —improving the bankruptcy system certainly wasn’t going to help in his next reelection campaign. And frankly, everyone knew that eventually we were going to lose this. But Senator Ted Kennedy, the lion of the Senate, agreed to lead this fight because it was the right thing to do for millions of people hanging on by their fingernails, just desperately needing a little help.”

Vice President Joe Biden sits in as president of the Senate in the replica of the U.S. Senate chamber at the dedication. (Photo: Stephan Savoia/AP)

A few speakers later, Biden strode to the lectern and delivered a starkly different kind of story about Kennedy. Biden rattled off a list of the divisive issues that Kennedy debated on the Senate floor over the years: the Voting Rights Act, the Equal Rights Amendment, Watergate, the nominees to the Supreme Court, and the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. And Biden stressed that as fiery as the debate was, Kennedy always prioritized relationships and trust above the particular details of the issue at hand.

“Teddy understood … consensus was about more than just mastering the details, and he did master them,” Biden said. “He understood that consensus is arrived at by the cumulative effect — the cumulative effect — of personal relationships, the little things that you did for the other, built over time. That’s what generated the trust and the mutual respect and the comity that only Teddy was able to do.”

“Forgive me for saying in the city of Tip O’Neill,” Biden said, referring to the longtime Democratic speaker of the House, “but I think he was wrong that all politics is local. All politics is personal. All politics is personal. And no one, no one in my life understood that better than Ted Kennedy.”

Obama added: “As far as I could tell, it was never ideology that compelled him, except insofar as his ideology said you should help people; that you should have a life of purpose; that you should be empathetic and be able to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes, and see through their eyes.”

A framed photograph of Rose Kennedy, mother of Ted Kennedy, rests on a desk that belonged to the late senator in a replica of his Senate office at the institute. (Photo: Steven Senne/AP)

Inside the Kennedy Institute is a replica of the senator’s office on Capitol Hill, which includes framed pictures of drawings given to him by his children and nieces and nephews when they were children. In the institute, on the walls and in the interactive exhibits showing the highlights of Kennedy’s career, no mention is made of the fact that he ran, unsuccessfully, for president in 1980, losing in the Democratic primary to Jimmy Carter. In his closing lines, Obama invoked Kennedy’s famous phrase exhorting his audience to “seek a cause that endures; and sail against the wind in its pursuit.”

The focus of the Kennedy Institute, instead, is squarely on Teddy’s life and career in the Senate, where he served for almost 47 years, and where he eventually became known as one of the most accomplished lawmakers in American history, in large part precisely because of his knack for working with — and compromising with — Republicans.

For a man whose life, as the president noted, included a great deal of suffering, Kennedy’s ascendance in the Senate is the brightest spot by far on which to fix his legacy.