Twenty-five years ago, I had the opportunity to work with Senator Robert Byrd, who died yesterday. As minority leader, Senator Byrd chaired the Senate Democratic Policy Committee. I worked on the staff of the committee as counsel for tax and trade legislation.

It was a small staff, six or seven people as I remember. We convened every Friday afternoon in Senator Byrd’s ornate office, steps away from the Senate floor. Each week, our agenda was the same: outline the Democratic floor strategy for the legislative calendar. We needed these meetings to understand what Senator Byrd, a precise mind, expected of us on the Senate floor in the following week.

In these meetings, we got to see the complex personality of Senator Byrd at work. He could be demanding, distant and self-important. But he was also eloquent, knowledgeable and deeply committed to the common people of his state.

On rare occasions, he would pull out his fiddle, not really to play, but to admire it with a story, as if we were attending a “show and tell” day in elementary school. At these times, he could be playful and funny. He once told a story of how he took a telephone call from President Reagan while his pet bird was sitting on his shoulder and listening in, he was convinced. (Yes, Senator Byrd had a pet bird.)

His relentless focus on improving West Virginia could obstruct his vision of broader national policy issues. In one of our Friday meetings, I was briefing him on the importance of having the Democrats push legislation to cap the third year of the Reagan tax cut. In the middle of the briefing, he got up to take call from a member of the House. For 15 minutes we suspended our meeting while Senator Byrd deftly twisted the congressman’s arm into a pretzel to support an appropriation for a bridge in West Virginia. Then, quite satisfied he had done his best to secure another vote for his appropriation, we resumed.

Senator Byrd possessed a sharp mind with an encyclopedic knowledge of the complex rules governing the Senate. These rules -–  originally crafted by Thomas Jefferson when he was Vice President to John Adams -– are subtle, sophisticated and at times bewildering. They embody the history of the institution in a way that the House rules (which read more like Roberts Rules of Order) do not. The Senate rules capture the ghosts of the past –- Calhoun, Webster, Clay — and like a good playwright, Sen. Byrd could make these words come alive in your mind.

During one of those Friday meetings, he pulled out a Senate history in order to calculate how long he would have to live to achieve his goal of being the longest-serving U.S. Senator. Yesterday, he set the bar, and it’s difficult to see how anyone will surpass him.