Liam Cosgrave spent much of his time challenging Jack Lynch, in government and opposition, but when Lynch retired, Cosgrave called him the most popular Irish leader since Daniel O'Connell.
Cosgrave is not given to exaggeration: Lynch was not only the most popular but the least divisive politician of our time.
His appeal was neither effusive nor patronising: he took people as he found them and, since they were usually friendly, so was he. But he never confused a homely welcome for the tribute of a grateful populace.
He remembered people in crowds, not as supporters or clients, but as if they were neighbours. And, travelling in his company, it was easy to believe that he had neighbours in every town and village in the land.
They were people of every class and creed and almost every political persuasion (he deeply mistrusted anyone who was in two minds about violence). They had names and families and lives outside partisan politics.
On a fair day in Dromore West, Co Sligo, I saw a man reach through the steam rising from a cluster of damp overcoats to shake his hand. Lynch recognised him straight away, remembered a death in the family and wondered if the man's sons had got home from England for the funeral.
He didn't indulge in begrudgery and rarely provoked it. Pat Magnier of Labour, in a half-hearted attempt to do him down, once handed a photograph of Lynch in a dress suit to an elderly neighbour in Blackpool.
"There's Jack for you, now," said Magnier, "hob-nobbing with the crowd from the oil companies." He looked around at a basin filling with water from a leaky roof. The old woman peered at the photograph and slowly smiled: "Ah, Jesus, will you look at him. Didn't he come on grand."
None of this should be taken to mean that, in politics, Lynch was a soft touch. In the early 1970s he was successful not just on one front but on three.
It was difficult enough to survive the arms crisis and the fierce internecine struggles it provoked; all but impossible to persuade Edward Heath of Dublin's right to a say in Northern affairs.
He managed both and then, with Paddy Hillery, negotiated Ireland's membership of the Common Market. Ironically, in the general election of 1973, Fianna Fail lost office but increased its share of first preference votes. Cosgrave led the Fine Gael-Labour coalition and Lynch, in opposition, became known as the real Taoiseach.
Years later, outside a meeting of European heads of government in Bremen, Germany, a shrewd Danish journalist, Karl Tofte Jensen, of Politiken, said: "A fellow might think that because he speaks quietly, your Mr Lynch is an easy mark. That would be the fellow's first mistake. And, maybe, his last."
That was at the close of the 1970s when Lynch was back in office and negotiating, first with the formidable pair of Helmut Schmidt and Valery Giscard D'Estaing, on the establishment of a European Monetary System; then with Margaret Thatcher on the thorny question of Britain's EC contributions.
Representing his views on two films for Granada Television, I had an opportunity to watch at close quarters (for a journalist) as he worked on highly technical financial and diplomatic projects.
Ireland held the EC presidency for the first time, so both Community and national interests had to be borne in mind. His commitment to the EC was strong, his grasp of detail impressive and his openness to change surprising.
Like most political leaders he was reluctant to admit - indeed, preferred not to discuss - decisions which friends as well as critics considered to have been mistakes.
Take Charles Haughey's restoration to the Fianna Fail front bench in 1975. Lynch thought it an act of Christian justice: the minister, whom he'd sacked in 1970 had done his time.
Others felt it was bound to be a disaster for the party, for the country and for politics.
HE blamed circumstances rather than some flawed theory about spending our way out of recession for the failure of the 1977 election manifesto. And he wouldn't hear of the argument that the practice - implementing the promises - turned out to be worse than the theory.
But the judgment which springs to mind today is that of Justin Keating, one of the most perceptive members of the Fine Gael-Labour coalition of the 1970s, who said, when it looked as if Fianna Fail was bound for defeat: "History will be kind to Jack Lynch."
Twice in the past 10 years Lynch and I happened to be in neighbouring rooms in St Vincent's hospital and we visited each other from time to time. Our conversations were not about politics but about hurling and his youth in Blackpool.
The first time I saw him he was taut as a coiled spring in a red jersey as he shot a point for Cork which set the crowd in Limerick's Gaelic Grounds reeling with admiration. The best of it was that, as he crouched by the sideline 40 yards out, he knew he could depend on wrist and eye; he wasn't going to miss.
"There you are," said my father, "and he's a TD and a barrister to boot."
"Or not to boot," said the cool Corkman beside us. "Didn't he throw the boots away at half-time."
You could tell the story about many another player-turned-politician - if they were good enough - but only in Lynch's case is it close to being the whole truth. His wife Mair in, his native Cork, politics and hurling were his life.
And a good life it was.