Death has a way of linking legacies, sometimes ironically, sometimes cruelly. So we struggle, and fail, to find meaning in a month that brought the death of James Brown, the godfather of soul, and Saddam Hussein, a soulless and murderous dictator.

The job of meaning-making is made infinitely easier when the departed are two men, Gerald Ford and Teddy Kollek, who, different in so many ways, nevertheless had this in common: They represented the better and braver impulses of another era.

Ford, who died Dec. 26 at 93, may have been an accidental president, but he was not an accidental leader. He served honorably in the House of Representatives where his unfulfilled dream was to be the Speaker. The Jewish community will remember the way he marshaled those leadership skills as president on behalf of Soviet Jewry, when in 1975 he signed the Helsinki Declaration. The act held the Soviets, in the eyes of Europe and North America, accountable for its deplorable human rights record. Earlier he signed the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, another pillar of the movement to allow Soviet Jews to emigrate. And he will be remembered for the way he stood up to the Arab boycott of Israel, refusing to capitulate to that nasty piece of international blackmail.

For most Americans, however, such milestones are incidental to the main point of the 38th president’s biography: his pardon of Richard Nixon. Perhaps that is as it should be, not because Ford’s controversial action was necessarily the right thing to do, but because it grew out of an unassailably correct impulse. Ford saw the pardon as a way to move America, still mired in Vietnam and socked by economic woes, past the “national nightmare” of Watergate. Ford recognized that a future of congressional and criminal investigations would distract his colleagues from the business of governing even as it inflamed partisan passions — a principle, by the way, that he applied when the prosecutorial impulse swung toward a Democratic president two decades later.

Passionate partisanship was something he could not abide. The better and braver impulse of cooperation and compromise between the major parties sounds quaint these days, and that’s tragic. As Ford once said, “Truth is the glue that holds government together. Compromise is the oil that makes government go.” It was a lesson lost on his party colleagues in recent years; it will be up to the next Congress to prove that there can be a better way.

Teddy Kollek also embodied truth-telling and compromise, applying them in a region with a paucity of both. Kollek’s early life could have turned a lesser man into a cynic or a radical. Named Teddy after Theodor Herzl, the Austrian-born Kollek modeled Zionism-in-action, organizing youth movements in Europe before immigrating to Palestine in his 20s. Yet he was painfully aware of the Jews he left behind and repeatedly returned to Europe to arrange visas for those caught up in the Nazi nightmare.

In wartime — whether World War II or Israel’s own War of Independence — Kollek was adept and tireless in smuggling arms and Jews. And when the wars were won, he applied those same skills — a combination of salesmanship and brinkmanship — in building financial support for his fledgling country. As Ben-Gurion’s right-hand man, he turned Diaspora Jews into full partners in the Israeli enterprise, opening the philanthropic floodgates and even building Israel’s tourism industry.

And that was all before the accomplishments for which he will best be remembered, during his five terms as mayor of Jerusalem. Kollek had a vision of a beautiful Jerusalem, ringing the city with parks and museums, gardens and theaters, but also restoring a sense of the inner beauty that had been missing during its many years of division. His relationship with Jerusalem’s Arab residents was complicated, but it was a relationship. He considered them his constituents and set about creating a city that would serve all its residents.

There were limits, of course, and the truth that went along with the compromise was this: Jerusalem is the united capital of a Jewish state, and for this there can be no apology. At the same time, Kollek proved that the Jews could be model protectors of holy sites precious to three great religions.

He also reached out to the city’s growing population of fervently Orthodox — sometimes with less success than he met among Arabs, but in a spirit that demonstrated that his love of klal Yisrael trumped his own fervent secularism.

If Nixon’s pardon was Ford’s signature act, Kollek’s was this: dismantling the wall that separated Arab and Jewish Jerusalem, imagining that separation hurt the cause of peace. In this regard, of course, time has overtaken Kollek’s vision.

Nevertheless, Israel and the Diaspora could use a little of that vision. At heart he was a pragmatist, believing a city, like a country, was the living, breathing sum of its inhabitants and not a theoretical or ideological construction. He had faith in dialogue and was willing to reach out a hand even to those who would sometimes bite it. He could be disappointed in those who didn’t share his vision, but that didn’t mean he didn’t stop trying.

Truth, and compromise. The hardness of a pioneer and the softness of a connoisseur of urban beauty. These times tend to mock those who embody such complexity. But history will mock those who never try.