Two days before suffering a fatal stroke, Ted Sorensen, 82, the great presidential historian and adviser, was in a buoyant mood as he set out for lunch with friends from Nebraska who now lived in New York City.

I walked him from his apartment to Gabriel’s restaurant, located a few short blocks away. He had suffered a serious stroke nine years earlier, and it had left him with poor eyesight.

He was frail, but clearly energized. Ted never let the physical setback slow his full and active life.

He always made me proud, realizing the greatness that my home state of Nebraska had given the world of public service. His words will live for generations, perhaps as no other presidential scholar.

That Wednesday afternoon, Oct. 20, was to be “Nebraska Day in New York,” he declared with boyish anticipation. Friends Dick Cavett and Bob Kerrey greeted us, anxious to launch the conversation and stories from Lincoln where Ted went to public schools and graduated from the University of Nebraska and its law school.

“Lincoln was in his blood,” Gillian Sorensen, his wife, who once served as an assistant secretary general of the United Nations, said.

His visits back home were frequent and meaningful to him; he admittedly returned refreshed and full of memories of family, friends, and life-changing events.

Kerrey and Cavett opened the lunch by quoting from Willa Cather, a literary giant from Nebraska. No one bested Sorensen when it came to quoting famous Nebraskans, and he jumped in to one-up his luncheon companions.

We talked and laughed for nearly three hours, and all of us had stories from home, especially refreshed for the occasion. Everyone at the table remembered Johnny Carson with fondness. Others at the restaurant politely suffered the good cheer, and even the owner asked us to come back.

We all agreed to meet monthly, a suggestion made by Ted.

Before leaving, Ted said Americans should pay much more attention to the plight of their public schools and colleges and universities. “They have been starved and that is not in the long-term best interests of the country,” he noted.

He was amazed that the political campaigns had not elicited more substantive discussion about the state of education and of the global conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He pointed with pride to public universities like University of Nebraska-Lincoln where he remembered numerous graduates who went on to strengthen the fundamental structure and values of the United States.

I walked him back home.

Theodore C. Sorensen was proud to be remembered by so many as the alter ego to President John F. Kennedy, as one who helped to produce crisp, poetic turns of a phrase that shaped and clarified history.

“One cannot overstate the importance of words,” he once told me. “They can point the way for all of us.”

The once shy youngster from Lincoln was the subject of much debate among historians on what he wrote and what came from JFK. He refused to comment, but he was, in the president’s own words, “my intellectual blood bank.”

Sorensen once wrote that he and Kennedy came from far different places, but came together with the closeness of their minds. Each had a wry sense of humor, a dislike of hypocrisy, a love of books, and a high-mined regard for public life.

“Ted lived an extraordinary life that made our country — and our world — more equal, more just, and more secure,” President Obama submitted.

Ted will be sorely missed.