How We Really Help Ted

It's too bad that Hamilton Jordan isn't still alive to remind the media that Ted Kennedy isn't already dead. Jordan, who died last week after surviving four different cancers for 22 years, would have loathed those funereal and, in the case of the New York Post (TED IS DYING), offensive headlines about Kennedy. So does Kennedy, no doubt. The senator will bring to this struggle his fighting spirit, the greatest of our time. Only three days after learning that he was suffering from a malignant and inoperable brain tumor, Kennedy was already on his boat near the family compound at Hyannis Port, determined once again to sail against the wind.

There was a time when mentioning Kennedy and Jimmy Carter (or Carter's right hand) in the same breath would have meant a story about a Democratic family feud even more bitter than this year's between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. But today these men offer priceless lessons in how to overcome endless adversity and deep unpopularity and go on to lead redemptive and joyful lives that touch millions. Their example might also get us into a new war we desperately need—a war to save the more than 500,000 Americans who die every year of cancer.

Both Kennedy and Jordan became famous at age 31 with people rooting for them to stumble. Kennedy arrived in the Senate in 1962 for no other reason than that his brother was president. Jordan, a Machiavellian Georgian, had written a brilliant memo outlining how his obscure peanut-farmer boss could get to the White House, then made it happen. But he refused to make the necessary concessions to Beltway traditions and paid for it with failure.

By that time, Kennedy had lost four older siblings, nearly died in a 1964 plane crash and endured the shame of Chappaquiddick. His story was one of pathos, fecklessness and failed promise. In 1980, Kennedy launched an ill-conceived challenge to Carter for the Democratic nomination. Despite trailing by 700 delegates, he took the struggle all the way to the convention, where he snubbed Carter on the podium and helped doom Carter's campaign against Ronald Reagan that fall.

In different ways, the two men then slowly remade their lives. Kennedy remarried and, happy at last, devoted himself to the Senate, working across the aisle to amass an astonishing legislative record, particularly on health and education issues. And that's not even counting all the awful bills he blocked. Jordan remarried, too, and he and his wife started a Georgia camp for kids with cancer. Only months later, Jordan, then 41, was diagnosed with lymphoma, the first of a variety of cancers that invaded his body over the next two decades.

I got to know Jordan in recent years, and I agree with Carter, who says he was one of the most extraordinary people he has ever met. Even when ailing, he brought creative energy to countless causes. At first Jordan couldn't find a publisher for his book, "No Such Thing as a Bad Day," which eventually helped me and thousands of others cope with cancer. "The greatest challenge is the mental and emotional one of living with all this," he wrote me in 2004 after my own lymphoma diagnosis. "But the mind is a powerful, powerful resource which I believe can be decisive in this battle, sometimes leading to cures against overwhelming odds and often extending life significantly."