It is not incidental that the three acts of Kennedy’s life correspond to the three stages of anthropologist Joseph Campbell’s stages of the life cycle of a hero. The hero arrives; he undergoes an awful test, usually in some netherworld; and then, having survived, he returns to share with us what he has learned from his trial.

The lesson Kennedy shared with us through the Reagan and then the Bush years, after having survived his own dip into the netherworld, was just how critical it was for us to be more compassionate, more generous, more tolerant, more courageous. In short, to be greater.