OXFORD – Curtis Wilkie remembers the last of the Kennedy brothers as a skilled politician whose “charming, affable” personality and thorough knowledge of the issues he championed won respect and friendship at both ends of the political spectrum.

“Ted Kennedy will be remembered as a very effective senator who cared about the issues and represented his constituents very well,” said Wilkie, a Mississippi native who spent 26 years as a reporter for the Boston Globe and now serves as Cook chair and associate professor of journalism at the University of Mississippi.

“When he went into the Senate, he was regarded as a young upstart who had only won the position because his brother was president,” Wilkie said. “People recognized over the years that this guy was strong, tough and smart. He was a very good, thoughtful senator. Even Republicans and conservative Democrats who might not agree with him grew not only to respect him, but to like him.”

Often called the “Liberal Lion,” Kennedy was nevertheless friends with Mississippi’s conservative Sen. Jim Eastland.

Wilkie was one of the journalists who accompanied Ted Kennedy when he spoke at Ole Miss’ commencement in 1978.

“Eastland asked him to come, and he was glad to accept because of the Kennedy connection to Ole Miss going back to 1962,” Wilkie said. Ted Kennedy’s brothers – John as president and Robert as attorney general – had both been intimately involved in enforcing the integration of Ole Miss and ending the riots that surrounded the event.

“By the time Ted Kennedy came here in 1978, there was really no controversy,” Wilkie noted. “He was warmly welcomed.”

Wilkie also covered Kennedy on a trip to the Middle East and during his 1980 campaign to challenge incumbent Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination for the presidency.

Kennedy derailed his own effort with, among other failures, a faltering answer to broadcast journalist Roger Mudd’s question, “Why do you want to be president?”

“He’d be the first to say it was a badly conceived campaign,” Wilkie said.

While Kennedy was lauded for his work on causes such as health care and civil rights, displayed what Wilkie called a “charming, affable personality, and showed strength in the face of repeated family tragedies, he had his own demons.

He was long-rumored to be a hard-drinking philanderer and, 40 years ago, was the driver of a car that went off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, resulting in the drowning of Kennedy campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne.

“Oddly enough, in the latter part of his life, his wife Vickie … had a major influence in kind of his cleaning up his personal life,” Wilkie said. “He misbehaved a good bit during a big portion of his life, whether it was Chappaquiddick or drinking too much, but she was a major influence over him in the last several years.”