THERE ARE people who can forgive Ted Kennedy anything. There are people who can forgive him nothing.

Many of the rest, perhaps, regard the senior senator from Massachusetts as a marvelously flawed human being who's somehow survived scandal and tragedy and more than three-quarters of a century in the public eye to arrive at a point where colleagues from both sides of the aisle appear to regard him with affection and respect.

With Kennedy currently engaged in battles for both health-care reform and his own life, the timing of tonight's HBO documentary, "Teddy: In His Own Words," is as likely to gall his opponents as to soothe his supporters.

But in at least one way it struck me as perfect.

For weeks now, we've heard calls for the resignations of politicians who've engaged in extramarital affairs, situations that as far as I can see have involved hurt and embarrassment to their families, not to mention some hypocrisy, but no loss of life.

Contrast those with Kennedy's infamous behavior at Chappaquiddick in 1969, when he drove a car off a small bridge after a party.

Mary Jo Kopechne, the 28-year-old passenger in the car, died, and Kennedy himself pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident - an accident he didn't report for eight hours - only to be re-elected to the Senate the following year.

Perhaps it's time we acknowledged that the often confusing contracts between politicians and their constituents don't necessarily include character or morality clauses?

And that given enough time, human beings are capable of making contributions large enough so that the worst thing they may ever have done moves down to the third paragraph in their Wikipedia entries?

Still, I wouldn't mind knowing a bit more about how that's accomplished.

Given that less than 3 1/2 minutes of the approximately 90-minute "Teddy: In His Own Words" is devoted to Chappaquiddick, you shouldn't expect too much in the way of insight, much less detail.

(The 1964 plane crash in which Kennedy's back was broken gets a little more, though some of that's due to the re-election campaign he conducted while forced to lie flat.)

Produced by Peter Kunhardt - whose credits include HBO's "JFK: In His Own Words" and "Bobby Kennedy: In His Own Words" - and the cable network's documentary chief, Sheila Nevins," "Teddy" is best watched as a survey course of 20th-century politics as seen by someone who was born to it.

There's footage here I'm pretty sure I'd never seen, including some from the period when the senator's father, Joseph Kennedy, was ambassador to Britain and young Teddy got to cut the ribbon to open the London zoo, as well as a lot I'd probably seen but forgotten.

The commentary, drawn from past interviews and other archival sources, is largely by Kennedy himself, and thus comes at times from what can charitably be called an unreliable narrator, one who reveres his parents and his late siblings without reserve and is far too much of a politician for public introspection.

If there's a thread that runs through "Teddy," though, and one that suggests the filmmaker is pointing us - or dragging us - in the direction of the senator's hoped-for legacy, it's Kennedy's long interest in health-care legislation, here evidenced by a clip from a Democratic National Committee function in the late 1970s.

Introduced by a young Bill Clinton - then the young governor of Arkansas - Kennedy begins, "Sometimes a party must sail against the wind. It is time for the Democratic party to take up the cause of health. There probably has not been a family in this country that has been touched by sickness, illness and disease like my own family . . . We were able to get the very best in terms of health care, because we were able to afford it. It would have bankrupted any average family in this nation."

Those with good health care, he said, represented the "tip of the iceberg," not the majority.

"As long as I've a vote, and as long as I've a voice in the United States Senate, it's going to be for that Democratic platform plank that provides a decent quality of health care, north and south, east and west, for all Americans as a matter of right, and not of privilege."

Some 30 years later, the man at least remains on message. *

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