Through two years of wearying campaigning, defeats and victories, the cool, disciplined Sen. Barack Obama rarely was overcome by emotion. Once was on the eve of the election, when his grandmother died.
The other time, a close aide recalled, was when Sen. Ted Kennedy endorsed him.
Kennedy's endorsement may have won Obama the nomination. His legacy, health care legislation, has already shaped Obama's presidency, and Obama will deliver a eulogy at Kennedy's funeral Saturday. But it wasn't until the last minute, in late January 2008, that Kennedy decided to take sides at all - throwing himself into a hard-fought primary between two of his friends, Obama and then-Sen. Hillary Clinton.
When he did, it was without reservation. He addressed critics, declaring Obama ready to lead. And he invoked his family's legacy:
"The torch will be passed again to a new generation of Americans. The hope rises again. And the dream lives on," he said, as the future president sat on a tall stool on stage behind him at American University in Washington on Jan. 28, 2008.
"He was a monumental figure in the history of the campaign," David Axelrod, Obama's senior adviser, told POLITICO, saying that the weekend of Kennedy's endorsement "transformed the campaign."
"It was like being shot from a cannon," Axelrod said.
The day of the endorsement was, Obama told a Kennedy adviser at the time, the greatest day of his life, according to Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson's account of the campaign.
Kennedy, whose age never diminished his outsized political standing or his eye for up-and-coming talent, saw Obama dominate the 2004 Democratic National Convention in his hometown, Boston, and he may have seen a little of himself in the young celebrity senator.
"When [Obama] came to the Senate as a new young senator, he was in a certain way a little like Teddy was when he first came to the Senate. That is, that everybody already knew about him or thought they knew about him," longtime Kennedy adviser Bob Shrum told POLITICO. "So I don't think Kennedy was surprised at his eloquence, his intelligence, his grasp of issues. But it was kind of a habit with Teddy [to mentor promising young senators]. He spent time with him and got to know him well."
He also helped recruit Obama to his committee, the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions panel, Shrum said.
Their relationship was not, however, entirely smooth. Even before Obama was elected to the Senate, he chafed at the humility required of a newcomer, and sometimes it showed.
"We've got to call up not just Republicans, but we've got to call up Ted Kennedy and say, 'Ted, you're getting a little old now, and you've been a fighter for us before. I don't know what's happening now,'" Obama told a union audience in 2003 - in a video that appeared on Huffington Post in December 2007 as Kennedy was considering an endorsement. "Ted, get some spine and stand up to the Republicans."
Kennedy, who had encouraged Obama's campaign but hadn't endorsed him, shrugged off the slight after the young senator called to address the comments. Kennedy spoke occasionally to Obama during the campaign to offer advice - who to talk to, what to look for - but no endorsement.
And he watched the campaign for the next month, torn between his old friends, the Clintons, and the promise of Obama.
It was, Kennedy aides said at the time, the Clintons' own allies who gave him the final push. The days surrounding the South Carolina primary Jan. 26 saw the contest become, for the first time, racially charged. Kennedy blamed Clinton's side, and blamed President Bill Clinton himself. The two men spoke and did little to repair the breach.
Another Democratic consultant close to Kennedy's circle suggested that Kennedy's political judgment may have affected his timing as much as the harsh words in South Carolina. Kennedy had intervened at crucial moments in 2000 and 2004 to back his preferred candidates for the Democratic nomination, and he knew the impact he could have in 2008. He timed his announcement for the lead-up to a national primary - Super Tuesday - where Obama was struggling to convince millions of voters who had barely heard of him that he was ready to be president.
"Sen. Kennedy had an acute understanding of the way politics works and a particularly good understanding of the nominating process," said the consultant, Tad Devine. "When Kennedy stepped in the way he did, he essentially credentialed Obama."
Clinton's camp watched the endorsement with dismay.
"It was tremendously important and played a pivotal role in the campaign -- as he has in politics and the Senate for decades," said Clinton's chief strategist, Mark Penn, who had once also polled for Kennedy.
Shrum, though, suggested that Kennedy's revulsion with the Clintons was the lesser part of his choice.
"He watched the campaign unfold, and I know that stuff has been written that it was an anti-Clinton move - it wasn't. He saw Obama as holding up the sense of hope and change, the possibility of a different America, touching the same kind of responsive chords that his brother did," Shrum said.
Obama learned of the coming endorsement on the Thursday before Saturday's South Carolina primary while crossing that state in his campaign's RV, Axelrod said.
Obama took the call alone in one of the vehicle's two sections, then came into the other where his staff gathered to hear the news.
"He said, 'We got Ted Kennedy,'" recalled Axelrod. Obama explained that the endorsement must be kept quiet and done exactly as Kennedy wanted it. But he understood its power.
"This is big," the candidate said.
"The president is not given to being overly buoyant," Axelrod recalled. "But he was plainly happy, not just because of the strategic value but because of who Kennedy was and what it meant."
The Kennedy weekend continued with an op-ed by John F. Kennedy's daughter, Caroline, in the Sunday New York Times. The headline: "A President Like My Father."
The family had decided to go all out, to make explicit a passing of its legacy to an outsider, after decades of searching for an heir inside the clan. On stage at American University that Monday with Caroline and his son, Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D-R.I.), the senator, too, referred to passing the torch and echoed his famous 1980 Democratic National Convention promise that "the dream shall never die."
Obama told Axelrod after the event: "That was a very humbling experience."
But he wasn't just a symbolic figure. Kennedy engaged actively in the campaign, using his speech to rebut Clinton's central attack on Obama, that he wasn't ready.
"I know that he's ready to be president on Day One," Kennedy said, imploring his audience - in another veiled reference to Clinton's campaign - to "reject the counsels of doubt and calculation."
Then Kennedy traveled for Obama, heading to East L.A. to make his case to a Hispanic crowd, and cutting into Clinton's edge in big states where routs might have ended Obama's campaign.
Kennedy vanished from the trail in May when he was diagnosed with brain cancer, but, understanding his own symbolism and the size of the moment, dragged himself to the convention stage in Denver.
He had spent the previous night, sleepless, in the hospital, in agonizing pain from kidney stones.
"To go give the speech he had to tell them to lower the pain medication," Shrum said. "He was just absolutely determined to do it. I had a 30-second version of the speech prepared. He scoffed at that."
"'I'm not going to come to the Democratic convention to give a 30-second speech,'" Shrum recalled Kennedy saying.
Kennedy delivered the longer version, again invoking his own legacy.
"And this November, the torch will be passed again to a new generation of Americans, so with Barack Obama and for you and for me, our country will be committed to his cause. The work begins anew. The hope rises again. And the dream lives on," he said in Denver.
When Obama was inaugurated on a cold day in January, Kennedy insisted on being there and taking in the ceremony outside the Capitol.
"He was absolutely ebullient, talking about what a great day this was," recalled Axelrod, who talked to Kennedy shortly before the senator suffered a seizure at the luncheon that day. "He was like a proud father."
The burly, passionate youngest brother of a powerful family, and the cool, slim young candidate from nowhere made an odd couple, but Kennedy seemed to impart to Obama the emotion he was sometimes unable to project. When Kennedy fell ill, their relationship was often more symbolic, and emotional, than practical: Obama filled in for Kennedy at a commencement speech soon after his cancer diagnosis, and Kennedy, an aide, said, later asked for an autographed copy of the speech. Earlier this summer when he was at the Vatican, Obama carried a letter to the pope from Kennedy, a Roman Catholic.
Now, Kennedy's death will frame the central struggle of Obama's young presidency, the charge to drive health care legislation through the Senate. The loss of his vote and his deal-making prowess are a profound blow to the bill's prospects, but his allies hope his memory will carry it through.
"It may be that now that his absence casts such a long shadow to make it more possible to get a health bill," said Shrum.
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