Through the weeks of melodic mourning and rose-colored reminiscence that followed the death of Nelson Mandela, I occasionally found myself exchanging bursts of frustration with other journalists who were there when Mandela and his party took South Africa from the white minority.

None of us who covered Mandela doubted his courage, his vision or his character, his greatness of spirit or his political genius, and yet some of the eulogizing felt sanitized. “He Taught a Continent to Forgive,” proclaimed one headline, which would be news to a bloody roster of African countries that never got the lesson. Another writer cooed over the supposedly enduring bond between Mandela and his second wife, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, who was made a monster by apartheid and long ago forfeited any claim on Mandela’s heart. “Sweet Jesus,” lamented one of my cohort in an email. “I’ve had to stop looking at the TV.” So much of the coverage celebrated the saint but missed the man.

My personal refuge from the canonization was the memory of one day in 1994 when Mandela, to my amazement, granted my request to follow him through a shift of his presidency. From wheels-up at 6 a.m., when his presidential jet left Pretoria for the Parliament in Cape Town, until he shuffled off to dinner with a delegation from Lesotho, regretfully passing up a planned evening with his grandchildren, a South African reporter and I eavesdropped on his day.

Mandela supplied occasional commentary as he worked. We were shooed from the room for a few sensitive meetings, and I was aware throughout that we were being treated to a seduction by a master of political theater. Watching him wield his charm on visiting diplomats and potential investors, I understood that we were collateral marks. But Mandela could not help being Mandela. And he had edges.

It is because he was human that we can aspire to his example.

For a man of 76, Mandela showed impressive stamina, but there was no mistaking that he was already old, with swollen feet and hearing aids and lung troubles acquired during 27 years in captivity. Recently a surgeon, while repairing cataracts, had unplugged Mandela’s tear ducts, glued shut from years of breaking rock in a dusty prison quarry. From time to time he had to mop his eyes with a handkerchief.

Mandela is properly revered for stepping down after a single term, a democracy lesson for his people and the world. Looking back, though, I can’t help thinking this was not just nobility, but the age and physical decline that made him one of us. It is because he was human that we can aspire to his example.

At that point in his presidency — Day 122 — Mandela was laboring to tamp down the expectations of his own liberation-struggle allies and reassure white businesses that their mines and farms and factories were not in danger of confiscation.

I sat in his office while he took a call from Raymond Ackerman, the head of a grocery chain that was weathering a raucous strike by store clerks — Mandela’s base, you would think. But Mandela shared the grocery magnate’s frustration. Just the day before he implored the Congress of South African Trade Unions, part of his electoral coalition, to stifle its demands, warning that populism would scare off needed investment.

When the phone call was over, Mandela explained that before the election, he approached 20 titans of corporate South Africa and asked each for at least a million rand — about $275,000 — to build up his party and finance the campaign. Nearly all of them agreed, and Ackerman and others gave double Mandela’s requested amount.

“The right to strike is in the Constitution,” he said. “But for [workers] to target people who have been assisting us creates difficulties. Without funds, we could not have built the organization, we could not have won the election.” And without investment there would be no hope of broader prosperity.

Many South Africans will tell you now that Mandela should have done more redistributing of apartheid-era wealth, to lift up the still-desperate underclass. The examples of neighboring Zimbabwe and other liberated nations that redistributed themselves into economic collapse argue for Mandela’s choice. This is a debate South Africa is still having with itself.

None of us who covered Mandela doubted his courage, his vision or his character … and yet some of the eulogizing felt sanitized.

But what struck me that day was that the executive class had become Mandela’s affinity group. I do not mean that he was bought, but that he found in the business moguls men a bit like himself: coolheaded, ambitious, practical leaders. Mandela’s manners were endearingly egalitarian. Every visitor to the president’s chamber, including cabinet members and diplomats and two intruding journalists, was encouraged to shake hands with the woman who brought out their tea. But his sympathies were with success.

Another thing that stays with me from that day is that Mandela could be mean. He is celebrated, rightly so, for the strategic forgiveness that enabled him to bargain with his erstwhile tormentors and even include them, for an interim period, in his cabinet.

But to include them did not mean to love them. On my day of watching, there were flashes of entirely human rancor, especially in his acerbic asides about his predecessor and partner in history, F. W. de Klerk, who had become a deputy in the unity government. Mandela took several opportunities to portray de Klerk as a small-minded conniver. He poked fun at de Klerk for his slowness in leaving the presidential mansion in Pretoria (“He is still there,” Mandela said, rolling his eyes), and he blamed de Klerk for standing in the way of efforts to make the government more frugal and efficient. With unmistakable relish, Mandela disclosed that he had just stripped de Klerk of his authority overseeing administration of the intelligence service.

Of course, you or I might well have done the same and done it with the same twist of the knife. Which is my point.