The most dignified moment in the long life of Edward M Kennedy came when he was loneliest. In June 1968, having endured the deaths of two elder brothers - the Second World War hero Joe Jr and Jack, the president - he eulogised on the third, Bobby, at St Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan. The slain presidential challenger, he said, "need not be idealised . . . [but] remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it". Ted Kennedy writes in his memoir of that dark hour: "Life, and politics, went on . . . [But not] for me. I was shaken to my core."

The cliché runs that the youngest brother was a weak underachiever in a family of giants. And yet, by the time he himself died of cancer as this book was about to be published, 40 years after burying Bobby, Ted's own achievements would finally be recognised. Having taken Jack's Massachusetts seat in the Senate in 1962, with his brothers in the White House as president and attorney general, Kennedy would emerge from their shadow to fight for civil liberties, nuclear disarmament and the nation's poor. Kennedy's public atonement was such that today he is remembered for so much more than the dark night at Chappaquiddick in 1969 that - to his critics - defined his life.

Kennedy devotes only six pages to the fateful drive with the former presidential aide Mary Jo Kopechne, but he is not defensive: "I could not wish it away. I had suffered many losses during my life . . . [But] the difference this time was that I myself was responsible . . . I had caused an innocent woman's death."

This is characteristic honesty from a man whose emotionalism - especially when he drank, as he did too often - defied the Kennedy clan's strict Roman Catholic conservatism. Although the book is fiercely loyal towards every member of Ted's close-knit family, there are occasional acknowledgements of their harshness. In one chapter, entitled "No Crying in This House", "Teddy" describes growing up on the Kennedy family "compound" at Hyannis Port, Cape Cod, where he was born in 1932. He remembers his father, Joseph, whom he feared and adored in equal measure, issuing this double-edged warning: "You can have a serious life or a non-serious life, Teddy. I'll still love you whichever choice you make. But if you decide to have a non-serious life, I won't have much time for you . . . There are too many children here who are doing things that are interesting for me to do much with you."

The book is at its weakest when it deals with the early years, dimly remembered and guardedly sugar-coated. In March 1938, three days before Hitler invaded Austria, Ted and Bobby (Jack was at Harvard) were taken to London, where his father would serve as US ambassador. Joe's disgraceful support for the Nazis is not mentioned. But it was not a happy time for Ted, as the "insularity of my early childhood ended". To his relief, he soon returned to America, to boarding school, where he acquired his lifelong love of sailing, and to Harvard. However, just as his greatest achievement at Harvard (before his exam retakes) was scoring the only touchdown in a football match against Yale, Ted's most important decision while at law school in Virginia in 1957-58 was to marry the glamorous debutante Joan Bennett.

Like all the Kennedys (see Seymour Hersh's The Dark Side of Camelot) Teddy was flawed. His marriage, damaged by womanising and the couple's shared alcohol abuse, ended in 1982. Ten years later Kennedy remarried, to Victoria Reggie, and it is to "Vicki" that he dedicates the book. "I would never have engaged in this endeavour had she not helped me to talk more openly about feelings that had long since been shut away," he says. But in death the memory - and enduring legacy - of his public work has at last eclipsed that of his private failings.

This gripping and essentially honest book helps demonstrate that Ted Kennedy was so much more than "the grand old man of politics" or the "Lion of the Senate", as routinely described in the television obituaries. He was, thanks to both fate and hard work, the keeper of what Jack in his inaugural address called "the torch" of progress in America.

His most influential action was to endorse Barack Obama for the Democratic candidacy, boldly rejecting pleas from his friends the Clintons. He writes that, at the Democratic Convention in August 2008, knowing he had cancer, "I fulfilled my personal dream that would never die . . . took a breath and gathered my strength, as Jack's words and mine converged: 'And this November, the torch will be passed again to a new generation of Americans.'"

Like Obama (but unlike Hillary Clinton) Ted Kennedy had opposed the invasion of Iraq from the beginning in 2003, one of only 23 senators to do so. Health-care reform was, in his words, "the cause of my life", and his death came at a poignant time; Obama is still battling the forces of conservatism to see change through. But this moving and surprisingly well-written book is a lasting reminder to the president of the giant burden of hope on his shoulders.

Now, that powerful description of Bobby in Ted's eulogy, which captured the "better angels" of the Kennedy clan, can at last be applied to the man who delivered it.

James Macintyre is the New Statesman's political correspondent.

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