Cancer felled Hamilton Jordan and was found in Ted Kennedy the same day. Everybody knows Kennedy. But how many know Jordan – and his connection with Kennedy?

Before Karl Rove, James Carville and Lee Atwater, Jordan – pronounced Jer-dan – was the original modern Southern-fried political operative. He was the strategic genius behind Jimmy Carter’s election in 1976. It was his – and Carter’s – insight that Nixon and Watergate had sown the seeds for a clean, competent outsider to win the Presidency.

But Jordan’s genius failed him in the White House. The Georgia outsider never fit in with the Washington insiders. The Democratic establishment – led by Kennedy – struck back. It was a bitter battle. I remember Governor Jim Hunt leading the Carter forces against the Kennedy forces in a fight over a balanced-budget resolution in the 1978 national party mini-convention in Memphis. Hunt and Carter won; Bill Clinton (and Erskine Bowles) later made the balanced budget a Democratic issue.

In his book Crisis about the final year of the Carter administration – including the Iraq hostages and Kennedy’s primary challenge – Jordan wrote bitterly about the political price Kennedy made Carter pay in 1980. Jordan thought Kennedy cost Carter the election.

For most of the rest of his life, Jordan fought cancer – three forms of it. He became an advocate for cancer research. He and his wife started a camp for young cancer victims. He wrote a great book about his health battles, No Such Thing as a Bad Day. And he occasionally detoured again into outsider politics, like with Ross Perot in 1992.

The battle between Kennedy’s liberalism and Jordan’s centrism goes on in the Democratic Party today. But their battles with cancer remind us that, beyond the politics, there are real people bound together in life’s real trials.

Click Here to discuss and comment on this and other articles