“Hold it,” called a voice from the hotel lobby.
I pushed the “Open” elevator button — and in walked Sen. Ted Kennedy.
It was the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, and I was headed to cover an event where he’d be speaking.
Noticing the media credentials around my neck, he asked for my reporter’s notebook, clicked a pen from his pocket and jotted something down.
“Health care. Health care. Health care,” he wrote.
“Tell your editors that’s the story,” he said as the doors opened. He handed back my notebook and rushed to his speech.
Sure, it was memorable to share an elevator with a Kennedy. But far more striking was the urgency of his cause.
His hurried scribbles bring to mind Richard Blakely, 76, of Aurora, whose recent day-and-a-half hospital visit for chest pains cost $26,000.
And Kara Hartley, who stands on Colfax with a sign soliciting cash for diabetic care.
And Chaz Luna-Ramirez, who phoned Wednesday to ask if I’d write about his mom.
“She has cancer, see. And the medical bills are breaking us,” he explained. “Maybe your (readers) would pay attention now that Ted Kennedy’s gone.”
Health care. Health care. Health care.
As political issues go, calls for reform were far from popular in 1964 when, suffering severe injuries from a plane crash, Kennedy contemplated how he would have paid for treatment if his family didn’t have money.
It was hardly a public mandate when, starting in 1971, he argued for a national health insurance system.
Kennedy had an issue and rode it. He stood witness for the sick and poor for four decades — even during an elevator ride in which lesser senators may have spent their 45 seconds straightening their ties.
He may be remembered as one of the last great liberals. But that misses what stood out, especially among his Senate colleagues: his spine.
Eulogizing Robert Kennedy in 1968, he famously said that his brother “need not be idealized or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life.”
Ted Kennedy’s own flaws — most notably his political downfall over Chappaquiddick, in which he fled and delayed reporting a car crash that killed his female passenger — will keep even his loyalists from overinflating his record.
But that doesn’t diminish the virtue of his fight for “decent, quality health care as a fundamental right and not a privilege.” As he said of his slain brother, he “saw suffering and tried to heal it.” It was, he said, “the cause of my life.”
Kennedy used his time well.
A year ago this week, while recuperating from brain surgery, he defied his doctor’s wishes and came to the Democratic National Convention.
It was little known that, in the hours before his speech, he was treated in a Denver hospital, released, then treated again for an agonizing kidney stone attack.
His appearance left even the most hardened lobbyists sobbing in their box seats and otherwise stoic journalists fighting tears over their laptops.
“Together we have known success and seen setbacks, victory and defeat,” he said. “For me this is a season of hope.”
As he promised that night, an ailing Kennedy lived to see the inauguration of a presidential candidate he backed largely for his promise of universal health care.
But he didn’t survive long enough to witness the right side of a history that’s still struggling to catch up with his legacy.
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
