When Ted Kennedy redeemed himself

David Frum recalls the moment he stopped despising Ted Kennedy. Why had he started?

I know exactly the hour when my opinion of Sen. Ted Kennedy permanently changed. I had remained very angry at the Massachusetts liberal for many years since his 1986 speech so unjustly vilifying the great conservative justice Robert Bork:

Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, children could not be taught about evolution.

For 15 years thereafter I could hardly bear to hear his name spoken. Nor was my temper much improved by his rough handling of another great conservative legalist, Theodore Olson, at Olson's confirmation hearings as solicitor general. I was always ready to laugh at the harsh jokes conservatives told about the senator's legendarily self-indulgent personal laugh. It seemed a fair judgment on an unfair man.

Then came 9/11.

You've got to read about the amazing grace Kennedy later showed that revolutionized Frum's opinion of the man.

You never really know about people, do you? I'm thinking right now about a conversation I had last year with my friend B. about a well-known political controversialist, whose public pronouncements and activism often drive me crazy. "What's wrong with that guy?" I said to B. Ah, said B., let me tell you something about him that you don't know. B. went on to relate a story in which the unsympathetic public figure behaved in private with such staggering generosity to a stranger in need that I had trouble reconciling what I knew about the man in public with this private behavior. But it was true. They were the same man. I'm glad it's up to God to judge the eternal fate of human souls, because only He can know the whole story.