True Compass: A Memoir

by Edward M. Kennedy

  Being able to speak at the Democratic convention in August, as I had done at so many conventions past, became my mission and stayed in the forefront of my mind during my radiation and chemotherapy treatments that summer, as Vicki and I made the round trip by car from Hyannis Port to Boston five days a week for six weeks. The timetable was in our favor: radiation would end in July, and we'd been told that I could expect to regain much of my energy after that. The convention was to be at the end of August. It made for an ideal goal. I have always been a person who schedules his time, and I always try to be on time. Having open-ended free time makes me restless. I suppose you could say that preparing for the convention was also part of my recuperation that summer.

  And so I embarked on a summer of rehabilitation, sailing, and planning to rejoin my fellow Democrats at the moment of their great celebration. I sailed nearly every day. Teddy Jr. delighted me by setting up his office in Jack's old house, nearly next door to us, and moving in along with Kiki and their children, Kiley and Teddy III. Kara and her two children, Grace and Max, also spent most of the summer on the Cape. Patrick was there a lot, as much as the congressional schedule allowed. Curran Raclin, Vicki's son and my stepson whom I had helped raise since he was nine, was working in Boston and often just drove down for dinner. Caroline Raclin, the newly minted Wesleyan graduate, was a frequent visitor. My sister Jean even rented a house in Hyannis Port for a while. And of course Eunice and Ethel and lots of nieces and nephews were already there. I decided that I was finally going to indulge my passion for Four Seas, the legendary ice cream that is freshly made on Cape Cod only in the summer. I may be the only patient in the history of Massachusetts General who went through both chemotherapy and radiation and gained weight!

  I soon began work on my convention speech, asking my longtime friend and old speechwriter Bob Shrum to come talk to Vicki and me. I knew essentially what I wanted to say at the outset, and Bob and Vicki and I have a synergistic way of working together.

  As the summer lengthened, I felt my strength returning, just as the doctors had predicted. Still, there was no medical guarantee that I'd be able to follow through on my hope. We decided to keep this project a secret, but of course speculation eventually mounted that I might attend the convention.

  We flew to Denver on Sunday, August 24, the day before the convention opened, in a chartered jet. With us were my internist Larry Ronan and some close friends and family members. Inside the private apartment in Denver that we had rented, my aides and I began a run-through of my speech on a teleprompter. After a minute or two I held up my hand. "You know, I really don't feel well," I said. I felt a sharp pain in my side and we didn't know what it was. I was taken to a hospital, where I was surrounded by three doctors, all of them, coincidentally, named Larry, which would have been funny if I hadn't been in so much pain.

  Unbelievably, after making it through brain surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy and meeting my goal of being ready and able to address the delegates in Denver, I had been struck, out of the blue and for the first time in my life, with a kidney stone. As the doctors prepared to administer a very powerful pain medication, my wife, who is usually unflappable in a crisis, burst into tears. "If you give him pain medicine, then you will have made the decision for him about speaking tonight. You can't take away his ability to make this decision for himself. He's worked too hard for this night." After doing a back-of-the-envelope calculation on how long the medication would stay in my bloodstream, the doctors assured her that it would be out of my system in time for me to speak, though, as they later told us, they did not think I would be feeling up to speaking in any event.

  Now doctors from all over Denver had begun to descend on my room, Larrys and non-Larrys alike. A neurologist arrived, and a urologist, and several other -ologists. I welcomed them all, of course; but Vicki's preoccupation (and mine) was not diagnosis, it was the danger of overmedication and overpowering sleep well past my schedule for appearing at the Pepsi Center.

  We were not vigilant enough. A nurse gave me more pain medication when no one was looking. The doctor had not yet changed the orders in the chart to reflect our private conversations. Vicki, shall we say, remonstrated with her. Yet there it was, the sleep-inducing drug, coursing anew through my system. How long before it would lift?

  "What do you think?" I asked Vicki drowsily.

  "You can just go out and wave," she replied. "Just go out there with the family and wave."

  But I had not come all the way to Denver just to wave.

  We worked on a compromise: Shrum cut my prepared remarks down to about four lines, in case my deep drowsiness persisted. Then, assuming the best--which by now was not as good as I'd hoped--he cut the original in half. That would be the version I would give if I was strong and awake enough to speak at any length at all.

  The convention's opening gavel was scheduled for 6 p.m. At around 4:30, I awoke and told Vicki, "I probably ought to get up now and see if I can walk and not fall flat on my face." I made it from my bed to the end of the room. "I think I'll go back to sleep now," I said.

  I didn't sleep long. We would have to leave for the center no later than 6:30 if we had any hope of being on time. I had not had the chance to rehearse my remarks on the teleprompter and had not seen the text in two days. Nor would I again until I spoke it. We showered and dressed at the hospital. Someone was combing my hair as the aides stared at their wristwatches; someone else was wrapping my hand in an Ace bandage, to conceal the intravenous line still implanted there.

  Larry Horowitz was on the phone with the Pepsi Center. They needed to know which version of the speech if any to put in the teleprompter. I said the original one that I had rehearsed at the Cape, but Vicki and Larry persuaded me that Shrum's abbreviated version was probably a better idea.

  "Let's go," I said. The three Larrys--Ronan, Horowitz, and Larry Allen, a wonderful young doctor we had met when I had surgery at Duke who had coincidentally moved to Denver--escorted us to a waiting van. Vicki and I sat in the middle seats, between the driver and the doctors. We sped off toward a convention hall I'd never been in, and a stage whose contours I did not know, to give a version of a speech that I had never seen. Even the full speech had become the stuff of distant memory.

  I can handle this, I kept telling myself. I can handle this.

  My niece Caroline Kennedy gave a beautiful and heartwarming introduction. After a spectacular film produced by Mark Herzog and Ken Burns, we heard the announcer's voice: "Ladies and gentlemen, Senator Edward Kennedy." This was it. Showtime.

  My wife walked with me out onstage and to the podium, held my face, and kissed me. And then she went to sit with the rest of our family. I could feel myself start to settle down.

  And so on Monday evening, August 25, 2008, I fulfilled my personal dream that would never die. "It is so wonderful to be here," I declared to the cheering delegates. "Nothing, nothing was going to keep me away from this special gathering tonight."

  I acknowledged the friends and family members in the hall: the people who had stood with me through the successes and setbacks, the victories and defeats, over the decades. I then made a vow that I would be on the floor of the United States Senate in January 2009 to continue the cause of my life--affordable health care as a fundamental right.

  "There is a new wave of change all around us, and if we set our compass true, we will reach our destination--not merely victory for our party, but renewal for our nation."

  As I approached my conclusion, the final phrases of my speech demanded a high note--a bugle call. They were a conjoining of John F. Kennedy's words and my own. I took a breath and gathered my strength, as Jack's words and mine converged:

  "And this November, the torch will be passed again to a new generation of Americans.

  "And so with Barack Obama--for you and for me, for our country and for our cause--the work begins anew, the hope rises again, and the dream lives on."

  It is that passing of the torch and that living dream that have i
nspired me to write this memoir. For several years, long before the prospects for my longevity had abruptly come into question, I had been building an archive of my memories, both personal and political, through an oral history project at the University of Virginia. I also had more than fifty years of personal notes and diaries that I kept. I'd supposed that they would be useful in an account of my life.

  As I grappled with the dire implications of my illness, I realized that my own life has always been inseparable from that of my family. When I sit at the front porch of our Cape house, in the sunshine and sea-freshened air, I think of them often: my parents and my brothers and sisters, all departed now save for Jean and myself. And each alive and vibrant in my memory. I remember how each of us, distinct and autonomous from one another though we were, melded wholeheartedly into a family, a self-contained universe of love and deepest truths that could not be comprehended by the outside world.

  My story is their story, and theirs is mine. And so it shall be in these pages.

  PART ONE

  Family

  John F. Kennedy Library

  CHAPTER ONE

  Safe Harbor

  1941

  The bridle paths on Cape Cod are mostly old cranberry roads. Deep underground, clear waters help feed a vast aquifer system. The wet, peaty terrain is among the best in the nation for cranberry-growing, and as I look at it from the air, flying home after a week in Washington, this fertile swath of land can resemble a pink-and-green patchwork quilt in harvest season.

  I rode on horseback along those peaceful bridle paths with my father when I was a small boy, on summer mornings in 1941, just months before America entered World War II. My father wore flannel shirts and scuffed horseman's boots on those rides, and looked about like any other fellow on Cape Cod who liked to ride horses.

  A year and a half earlier, in another place, I had seen my father in different attire, different circumstances: wearing a tall black hat and black cutaway coat, and getting in and out of limousines with important-looking men, many of them with bushy white mustaches, who wore similar black clothes and serious expressions. The Kennedy family was in London, where my father was ambassador to the Court of St. James's. I was seven then, and understood dimly that a big war was happening, and that it might come to London soon, and that my dad was working very hard to prevent this. He could not prevent it, and we all came back home. Now America was on the brink of war. I understood that my two eldest brothers were thinking about enlisting.

  I understood these things, and yet they were abstractions, fleeting elements in the half-real, half-dreamed universe of a small boy's mind. None of us, perhaps excepting my father, could anticipate what the war would mean to us: the terrible sacrifices it would exact within our family. Not even my father could imagine the centrality of the Kennedys in the postwar world: the struggles of Jack, and then Bobby, and then to some degree myself, to build upon our country's military victory with victories for social justice and democracy.

  The plaid-shirted figure on horseback in front of me on those morning rides was not--and never would be to me--primarily an American diplomat, or financial titan, or motion picture producer, or source of exotic legend. He was my father.

  Such was the perspective of the boy on the trailing horse.

  From my vantage point as the youngest of the nine Kennedy children, my family did not so much live in the world as comprise the world. Though I have long since outgrown that simplistic view, I have never questioned its emotional truth. We depended upon one another. We savored food and music and laughter with one another. We learned from and taught one another. We worshipped with one another. We loved one another. We were mutually loyal, even as we were mutually competitive, with an intensity that owed more to joy than to an urge for dominance. These values flowed into us on the energies of Joseph and Rose Kennedy. They helped us form bonds among one another, and to develop personalities based on those bonds, to an extent that remains to this day underappreciated by the chroniclers of my family. They sustain me still. They lie at the heart of the story I wish to tell.

  I was nine years old in that summer of 1941, the final summer of the familiar world into which I was born. I was not clear why we had all come back home from England, but I was happy that we had. I was too young to fully understand that my father had resigned his ambassadorship. I was certainly too young to comprehend that he'd resigned because he had offended some people in England by saying that the British might not be capable of fighting a war against Germany. It would have been news to me that Dad had displeased President Roosevelt with these same remarks. Or that when he was away from the Cape house that summer, in New York and Washington, he was trying to persuade other people to join his effort at keeping America out of the war. Or that, despite their differences, Joseph Kennedy continued to support Franklin Roosevelt as president.

  I just knew that on weekends, he and I would ride horseback together on the Cape, and that was all I really cared to know.

  It's hardly surprising that these facets of my father's life were unknowable to me as a child. If my father were alive today, there are things I would like to ask him--about his relationship with FDR and his government service--but I've rarely investigated the myths surrounding him. Perhaps other sons and daughters of towering personalities might find it familiar: his presence within the family eclipsed nearly everything else about him. In some persistent region of my mind, Joseph P. Kennedy remains to me, eternally and solely, my dad. Just as I remain the ninth and youngest child of all the Kennedys.

  Dad was always an early riser. At around six o'clock, I'd blink awake to a rap on my bedroom door on the second floor of our house at Hyannis Port, followed by, "You can come riding if you are downstairs in five minutes!" He meant exactly that. If I were late, he would be gone. I was seldom late.

  Dad always bought his horses in Ireland, big Irish hunters that were strong and calm. Most times it was just the two of us, and I savored these chances to have him all to myself. Bobby was never interested in riding. Jack liked it, but he sometimes suffered asthma attacks afterward, and concluded that he was allergic to horses. Joe Jr. loved to ride, but he tended to gallop off on his own.

  My father's horse was named Swifty. I rode Blue Boy, an old and gentle animal that all my brothers had ridden in years past. If it was harvest season, the cranberry-hauling pickup trucks would ramble along the roads and keep the vines at bay, and Dad and I could ride side by side. After the trucks left, the vines would quickly overtake the road again, and we'd ride single file. Sometimes in high summer they grew so fast that my father assigned me the task of clearing them away again, and this gave me the chance to plunge into one of those clear, chilly ponds for a quick swim. Other times, at low tide, I'd drop behind to gather up some of the clams that had ridden in on the waves: succulent Northern quahogs and sweet surf clams.

  My father was a complicated man, and during our rides I came to know different sides of him. His temperament was never hard to discern. If he was in a cheerful mood, he would talk freely in his high, Bostonpitched staccato, and our conversations could be rich and animated: how well (or not) I was performing at school or at sports, a book he wanted me to read. If he was preoccupied, he'd be introspective and mute, his reddish hair aglow and his rimless glasses glinting in the morning light, with only the clop-clop of our horses to break the silence. Most typically, Dad liked to wax philosophical, thinking out loud about the family.

  "The summer of 1941 was the last one that our family would ever have together," my mother has written. * Is that literally true? Were all eleven of the famously in-motion Kennedys ever together under the Cape house roof that year? I can't recall, but Mother usually had her facts straight. In any case, I can look back and see all of them as they might well have been on a given weekend morning, each one distinct yet a part of the whole; absorbed in the moment, wondrously alive.

  Their familiar bedlam would be pouring through the windows as Dad and I returned from our ride, me still tingl
ing from the chill morning air and my father's coveted companionship, avid for breakfast, imitating his stride. We would hear their raucous, contending voices and laughter, their high-spirited insults and their tramping on the stairs, as telephones rang, dogs barked, radios blared, and some passing virtuoso banged out a few notes on the living room piano en route to somewhere else. A visitor once recalled being startled by "so many young people... who looked alike when they grinned and managed to keep the atmosphere in the house at a fever pitch." Well, that was our family.

  Joe Jr., rugged and magnetic, might have been locked in an early-morning duel of wits with Jack--these two were archcompetitors in a family of competitors. If Jack managed to outdo him at chess or in one of the word games he loved, "Categories" maybe, Joe tended to retaliate with a little friendly muscle. But as competitive as they were with each other, they were unbeatable when united: in 1938, the two of them crewed together to win the intercollegiate sailing championships on the waters off Annapolis.

  I looked up to my older brothers. "Hero worship" wouldn't be too far off the mark. As long as I can remember, I wanted a boat so I could sail the way they did. They were my earliest sailing instructors, and they encouraged me more than they even knew. I did my first solo sailing under their watchful eyes. "You can go as far as that boat anchored over there, Teddy, then sail back to us... Stay inside the breakwater... Let me see you tack... Now gybe..."

  I remember one July at the Cape when the cook had baked a big beautiful birthday cake for Joe, slathered with chocolate frosting. Joe loved chocolate frosting, so he sneaked into the kitchen while the cake was cooling, scraped all the frosting off the surface and sides, and sculpted it into a little pile on the side of the platter so that he could eat it all when the cake was cut. Jack was watching this. As soon as Joe left the kitchen, Jack charged in, scooped up the pile with one hand, and raced outdoors. Joe heard the commotion and lit out in pursuit. He chased Jack all the way to the end of the breakwater, where Jack dodged and ducked around a small navigation beacon, trying to balance the pile of warm chocolate in his hand, while Joe tried to trap him. Jack was rescued by Eddie Moore, Dad's secretary, before Joe could close in.