Office was incubator for policy elite

Kennedy saw his personal and committee staffs as the best and the brightest of Capitol Hill, and many of those protégés spun off to serve in influential jobs in government, politics, and business - spreading the senator’s distinctive mark of 20th-century liberalism in the process.

“He attracted really hard-working, hard-driven people to work for him on issues he cared deeply about, and he gave staff the latitude to work on the issues alongside him,’’ said Antonia Hernández, who advised Kennedy on immigration policy in the 1980s. “He was the nucleus that kept us altogether.’’

Kennedy acolytes have their hand in most important policy decisions in President Obama’s administration. Kennedy’s one-time chief counsel, Melody Barnes, is the president’s top domestic policy adviser. White House counsel Gregory Craig and Deputy Secretary of State James B. Steinberg are both former Kennedy foreign policy aides. The doctor overseeing Obama’s push for digital medical records, David Blumenthal, worked for Kennedy on a health subcommittee. Kenneth Feinberg, the lawyer named last month as the Treasury Department’s compensation czar, is a former chief of staff.

While Kennedy alumni regularly reconvened for the senator’s annual Christmas party, often any high-profile Washington gathering could viewed as a de-facto reunion. The Democratic National Committee’s transfer of power in 1989 consisted of an old Kennedy adviser, Paul G. Kirk Jr., relinquishing the party chairmanship to another, future Commerce Secretary Ron Brown.

When the Supreme Court heard arguments in Bush v. Gore in 2000, one former Judiciary Committee staffer - litigator David Boies - took up Gore’s case before another, Justice Stephen Breyer.

Over 46 years in office, Kennedy configured a legislative machine that seemed to propel itself even in his absence. This week, as Kennedy convalesced away from the Capitol, his staff continued to play a key role in the delicate maneuvers over health care. When Kennedy became too ill to participate personally in a daily strategy call, aides went on without him. On many issues, Kennedy’s aides earned unusual respect from other lawmakers.

“His staff could be very candid in their views about what they thought was the right thing to do,’’ said Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona. “Too often you get into these meetings and only the principals talk and you don’t gain anything from it. Ted always enjoyed vigorous discussion and debate - not only from his fellow senators, but also any staffers, because he knew they had a lot of wisdom.’’

McCain laughed when asked whether other senators showed their aides such deference.

Those who worked with Kennedy say his posture was evidence of a particular humility - that despite his often-encyclopedic familiarity with policy issues, he still sought out the expertise of others.

“He didn’t feel intellectually competitive with the people who worked for him,’’ said Robert Hunter, an aide to Kennedy for three years in the 1970s before becoming US ambassador to NATO.

“The Kennedy family was competitive, among themselves and with the outside world. But certainly not with staff.’’

As chairman of the judiciary and then the health committee, Kennedy usually had more than 100 staffers at his command. He learned quickly how to build an empire of loyalists. As a junior member of judiciary - then led by a chairman, Mississippi’s James Eastland, famous for keeping the Senate’s largest committee staff - Kennedy managed to keep his own foreign affairs adviser on the payroll of a subcommittee on refugee issues.

“As he became more and more of a leader in all of the fields he was interested in, the best people were more and more interested in working for him,’’ said James F. Flug, who became Kennedy’s legislative assistant and chief counsel in 1967. “It was a self-reinforcing, self-enhancing process.’’

After President Lyndon Johnson left office in 1969, leaving Kennedy as the Democrats’ presidential hopeful by default, the party’s ambitious policymakers came to see his Senate office as a White House-in-waiting.

“I won’t deny that the possibility of his being president one day was an element of the attractiveness,’’ said Hunter.

Kennedy’s personnel practices took little account of political careerism. Unlike many of his peers, Kennedy was wary of hiring other Capitol Hill staffers or recent graduates who had little more than a desire to rise in Washington.

Instead, Kennedy looked for specialists with substantive expertise, even if it meant they had little familiarity with politics.

When criminal justice issues dominated his Judiciary Committee agenda, Kennedy hired Feinberg, then a prosecutor working for a US Attorney in New York. When airline deregulation caught Kennedy’s eye, he sought out Breyer, a Harvard Law professor and former Justice Department antitrust official. As chairman of a health subcommittee, Kennedy brought on Blumenthal, an internist who had recently completed a residency at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Kennedy’s first legislative aide in 1963 was a former Harvard football teammate, John Culver, who went on to serve alongside Kennedy in the Senate. But Kennedy also became known on Capitol Hill for naming women and minorities to influential posts.

“It was one of the most diverse staffs in the Senate,’’ said Hernández, now president of the California Community Foundation, a Los Angeles nonprofit.