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In 1957, U.S. Sen. John Kennedy of Massachusetts was appointed to chair a special Senate committee to select and honor the five greatest senators in history. Kennedy was selected for the task because he had written about history himself (he had won a heavily lobbied Pulitzer prize for a book he had, with a good deal of assistance, written about political courage in the Senate).

Kennedy and his committee surveyed historians and boiled the names down. In typical congressional fashion, the matter became a subject of politics.

The committee chose George Norris of Nebraska as one of the five, but Nebraska's two senators blocked the choice. Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan was also a likely choice but ended up being passed over (I forget why).

In the end Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and Daniel Webster, Robert Taft, and Robert LaFollette were selected.

If such a task were undertaken today, it would almost certainly include -- and might well be topped by -- John Kennedy's brother Edward.

Over the past few days press commentary has included frequent references to Ted Kennedy's substantial legacy and his willingness to work with Republicans to accomplish it. But few of the stories have given an indication of HOW substantial that astonishing legacy is.

As best I can tell, there are between two and three thousand pieces of legislation with Kennedy's name on them.

How broadly his work has affected us occurred to me on a trip to Donner Lake with some friends. Several times during the drive people mentioned topics that brought to my mind something Kennedy had done. For instance, our driver mentioned an unfortunate friend who is now dealing with a fourth bout with cancer.

When Kennedy arrived in the Senate in 1963, cancer was a horror whose mention conjured up nothing but dread. It was also a death sentence. In 1970 and 1971, Kennedy began an effort to quadruple federal money for cancer research and create the National Cancer Institute.

President Nixon claimed to support the effort but kept trying to reduce the funding. Kennedy, with the help of GOP colleagues, was successful. Today it is possible to live with and even survive cancer.

Later, Kennedy also increased funding for cancers that are particularly lethal for women (breast, ovarian, cervical and reproductive), and assisted Utah Republican Orrin Hatch in winning compensation for downwind victims of nuclear weapons testing in Nevada.

As I recall, it was around the same time as the cancer initiative (the early 1970s) that Kennedy came to Nevada to gather information at the Pyramid Lake tribal reservation.

There were people (my father was one of them), who objected to Kennedy coming to town for a day, assuming he knew everything there was to know about the subject. That probably had something to do with the way Kennedy's trip was reported. But in fact, the senator probably knew more about Native American issues than most Nevadans, and the result was a major effort to beef up reservation schools and give tribes more control over education on reservations and helped free them from the troubled U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Not all Kennedy legislation was successful, of course. Over the objection of Nevada's U.S. Sen. Howard Cannon, Kennedy accomplished deregulation of the airline industry. It nearly destroyed the industry, which has never completely recovered.

But most such initiatives worked, and today Kennedy legislation affects everything from religious freedom to voting to Lithuania to worker safety to transportation to refugees to prescription drugs.

When we sit down at computer keyboards, we are enjoying the benefits of an industry Kennedy fostered.

Do such good works and contributions to society make up for a man's flaws and mistakes? Kennedy's failings were well-known, and to some people he could do nothing right.

A week before he died, for instance, one of those people posted this at Coyoteblog: "Will someone please off Ted Kennedy? ...that fat vegetable bastard is driving up the cost of our health insurance .... So just die already, scumbag."

For those with a better sense of the fitness of things, the question of whether Kennedy's accomplishments offset his mistakes will be more nuanced than that.