On March 26, 2003, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York died at the age of 76.  Moynihan, many argued, was the last great intellectual of the Senate.  He’d been reared in government; served as ambassador to the United Nations; and served on the staff of the Avrill Harriman, the governor of New York.  He began his political life in the Kennedy administration serving as Assistant Secretary of Labor where he began to lay a foundation which would, under President Johnson, become the War on Poverty.

He supported Robert Kennedy for President in 1964, left the Johnson administration in 1965, and attempt to create a political career of his own in New York City.  He ran for the President of the City Council and lost.  And while his political career was at a stand-still, his intellectual career flourished.  He became the Director for the Joint Center of Urban Studies at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He joined the Nixon administration in 1968; served as Ambassador to India from ‘73 - ‘75 and as UN Ambassador.  In 1976, Moynihan ran for the Senate and, in a crowded primary, won.  He served four terms before retiring in 2000.  Before his death, Moynihan had authored 19 books, and the Almanac of American Politics described him as “the nation’s best thinker among politicians since Lincoln and its best politician among thinkers since Jefferson.”

I met Sen. Moynihan a few times when I was a young boy standing on the floor of the Senate as a Page.  He wore bow ties, as I did, and he spoke slowly and carefully, recognizing that in the Senate, every word mattered.  He was polite and always spoke to us and asked us if we’d ever heard of him.  He was deprecating in a good way; he wasn’t in search of anything.

This was in the summer of 1995.  I was sixteen.  In this same time, I was introduced to the ferocious liberalism of two great American Senators: Paul Wellstone and Ted Kennedy.  Sen. Wellstone died in a plane crash in 2002.  Before coming to the Senate, Wellstone was a political science professor at Carleton College where he lectured students and wrote books.  In many ways, Wellstone was similar to John Irving’s famous character T.S. Garp from his fourth novel, “The World According to Garp.”  Wellstone was a small man, but he was an accomplished wrestler.  He went to the University of North Carolina on a wrestling scholarship.  There, he won an ACC championship and won election to Phi Beta Kappa.

I spoke to him only once that summer on the same day I met Ted Kennedy.  My sponsor, Sen. David Pryor, invited me to meet him at his desk.  Wellstone had a professorial like about him, although one that unlike Moynihan, spent his days at protests and underground meetings and union halls.  He was one of them.

Wellstone is long credited for leading the progressive movement in American politics.  His statement, “I represent the democratic wing of the Democratic Party,” was later adopted by Howard Dean during his 2004 presidential campaign.

Today, we learned that Sen. Ted Kennedy has a brain tumor, a malignant glioma, which is diagnosed in about 9,000 Americans each year.  Depending on the severity of the tumor, survival can last anywhere from less than a year to five years.

As a Senate page you’re required (or, at least you were in 1995) to wear solid blue slacks, a white shirt, a solid blue tie and black shoes.  Everyone wore the same thing.  We looked silly.  But we had unfettered access to the entire Capitol including both cloakrooms, the avenue behind the well of the Senate, and the hidden areas of the Capitol denied to tourists.  It was our playground.

Early in the summer of 1995, President Bill Clinton put forth Dr. Henry W. Foster as his new Surgeon General.  The Republicans, fresh off convincing wins in the 1994 mid-term elections were trying to derail any Clinton initiative they could.  The growing anti-abortion, far right wing of the party went after Foster with fury (he was an obstetrician - gynecologist).  Sen. Bob Dole was the Majority Leader, and he would soon leave the Senate and run against Clinton in 1996 only to lose handily.

The bitterness that erupted between Republicans and Democrats was no more evident than the day I walked in and watched a young Senator named Rick Santorum, a product of the tidal wave of Republican victories in 1994, demonstrating how an abortion was performed.  He used a small doll and a series of charts and tools.

After he concluded, Sen. Kennedy took to the floor and roared back, in defense of Dr. Foster, his President and the issue of fairness.  I was sitting no more than ten feet away watching Kennedy’s face turn bright red as his New England inflection grew more apparent the louder he yelled.  His speech may not make a compilation of his best, but it’s the only one I’ve ever heard him give in person, and it was incredible.

It was always inevitable that he would leave the Senate, and the sad news today makes that reality much more immediate.

When he does, his time in the Senate, like Moynihan and Wellstone, will have ended too soon.  And his departure will mark the end of a great era of public servants; of lions and intellectuals.