According to a statement from House Speaker Robert DeLeo’s office, former Speaker George Keverian died this morning.

John McDonough, who served in the House under Keverian (photo by Craig MacCormack), wrote an appreciation of the Everett lawmaker in CommonWealth magazine in 2002, called “The Speaker Who Believed in Democracy.” McDonough noted that Keverian won his first election, to Everett’s equivalent to a city council, in a manner that makes you wonder what he could have done with Facebook and Twitter:

Keverian took photos of every house in the ward, then pasted each on a separate flier next to a picture of his own house. The flier read: “This is a picture of your home. This is my home. We are neighbors.” The trick got him noticed not just by voters who placed him first but by the Associated Press, which sent the story across the nation. Years later, Keverian would still be asked by constituents, “Why did you send a picture of my house to everyone in the ward?”

But McDonough writes mostly about Keverian’s legacy in the state House of Representatives:

…I propose that [Keverian] should properly be remembered as one of the Legislature’s most honorable leaders, and one of its most persistent and successful reformers.

My evidence: In the 1970s Keverian twice managed sweeping overhauls of House districts without political bloodshed, legislated early campaign-finance reforms, and established independent ethics oversight of public officials. In the 1980s he overthrew an autocratic House leader in the only upset of a sitting Speaker to date and ushered in rules reforms that empowered rank-and-file legislators at the expense of his own clout. And he stuck to those principles of legislative democracy under the most difficult circumstances imaginable, struggling to pass remedies to the fiscal crisis by means of persuasion, not intimidation. If the votes to do what was necessary were hard to come by, the fault lay not with Keverian, but with the members he led.

My view is a judgment rarely expressed in Massachusetts political circles. Last February, in a review of my book, Experiencing Politics, Brian Mooney of The Boston Globe quoted my assessment of Keverian as “a profile in courage” who “deserved better than he got.” Soon thereafter, I found this message on my answering machine: “John, this is your friend, George Keverian. Thanks for the only nice thing anyone has said about me in 10 years.”