True Compass: A Memoir

by Edward M. Kennedy

  We competed in every conceivable way: at touch football, at sailing, at skipping rocks, and seeing whose seashell could float the farthest out to sea. We competed at games of wit and information and debate. We competed for attention at the dinner table, which meant a good deal of boning up: entry stakes for those conversations amounted to a substantial mastery of the topic under discussion. It is no accident that copious research and preparation have defined my methods as a senator: I will not champion a bill or a cause, no matter how complex, until I have understood it well enough to satisfy the standards my father set for table talk.

  Competition, of course, is the route to achievement in America. As I think back to my three brothers, and about what they had accomplished before I was even out of my childhood, it sometimes has occurred to me that my entire life has been a constant state of catching up.

  By "catching up," I mean with my own life and with the members of my family. I don't mean that I felt envious of any of them; I loved and respected every single one. I mean that they set an extraordinarily high standard for living a life in general, and in particular in public service. So from the very beginning I started really behind the eight-ball. My brothers and sisters were already on a very fast track. I was the ninth of nine.

  There was no question of catching up to Joe Jr. in that summer of 1941. At twenty-six, he had already started to prepare himself for a career in politics. He had attended Harvard and the London School of Economics, and had served as a delegate to the 1940 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. There, he showed his independent streak by backing James A. Farley for the nomination against an unprecedented third run by Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom Joe Sr. continued to support despite their complicated relationship.

  Dad respected his son's decision. He respected all our decisions that were not frivolous. His scrupulous neutrality regarding our life choices stands counter to one of the more persistent myths about the Kennedy family: that our father had somehow "designated" all his sons for office at the highest levels of government, starting with the presidency for Joe. This is simply not the case. My eldest brother's political ambitions were entirely his own, as was another ambition that ran even more sharply against our father's grain.

  In agreement with Dad, Joe had made anti-interventionist arguments in his two years at Harvard Law School. But now, convinced of America's inevitable involvement in the war, Joe had dropped out of law school and put his political plans on hold to join the navy as an aviator.

  Less than a year earlier, in October 1940, in a national radio address endorsing Franklin Roosevelt for reelection and at the same time pleading for American neutrality in the war, Joseph Kennedy Sr. had reminded his listeners, "My wife and I have given nine hostages to fortune. Our children and your children are more important than anything else in the world." Yet he uttered not a murmur of protest at his eldest son's decision, nor at Jack's that same summer.

  Joe would commence training in the fall and earn his wings the following year. Then he would be sent off to England, and from there to the British coastal skies, headed for Europe, and then on to eternity.

  In an essay for a privately printed book of reminiscences about Joe, which he edited, Jack wrote, "Joe did many things well, but I have always felt that he achieved his greatest success as the oldest brother. Very early in life he acquired a sense of responsibility towards his brothers and sisters, and I do not think that he ever forgot it." Joe, too, saw the family as his world, and Jack understood this.

  Jack also saw our eldest brother as something of a puzzle. "I suppose I knew Joe as well as anyone," he wrote in that essay, "and yet, I sometimes wonder whether I ever knew him. He had always a slight detachment from things around him--a wall of reserve which few people ever succeeded in penetrating."

  Jack, twenty-four that summer, might well have been describing himself. I cannot deny that he had qualities that made him enigmatic to some. He read more books than any of us, and perhaps the ideas in them drew his attention inward. I served in Washington--all too briefly--with Jack in the early 1960s, when he was president and I was a senator. In this sense we were adults together, and colleagues at the pinnacle of public service. Yet I always looked up to Jack. He was more than a revered older brother to me. He was almost a second father. In fact, he was my godfather, a role he had requested in a letter to our mother, written from Choate in 1932, shortly before I was born. "Can I be Godfather to the baby?" he asked. Rose Kennedy gladly consented. She held to the theory that godparents should play active roles in guiding younger children. Nearly fifteen years in age separated us, which meant that my childhood self saw him as a grown-up, and that perception never really changed, bolstered by his god-fatherly enthusiasm.

  Jack claimed a broad mandate. Delighted that my arrival was February 22, the birthday of our first president, he waged an unsuccessful campaign for me to be named George Washington Kennedy. He invented wondrous games for us from the simplest objects on the seashore. Scallop shells became "floaties," or tiny racing yachts. Sometimes Jack and I would play "football" without a football. I would run a pass pattern as if I were the receiver and he the quarterback. But instead of throwing a pigskin, Jack would bat a softball on a line into my outstretched hands with the accuracy of Sammy Baugh of the Washington Redskins. Later he taught me to sail. He was my mentor, protector, wise counsel, and constant friend.

  Jack was bedeviled by health challenges for all of his life, but he refused to let illness slow him down for long. He was resilient enough to play junior varsity football at Harvard, work as a ranch hand in Arizona, and sail competitively in Hyannis Port and elsewhere. He was fearless enough to tear around Europe in his own convertible in 1937; and, amid the tensions of 1939, to explore the Soviet Union, the Balkan countries, parts of the Middle East, Czechoslovakia, and Germany, returning to London on September 1, the day Germany invaded Poland. The book that resulted from these travels--an expansion of his Harvard senior honors thesis and titled Why England Slept--was published in 1940 and became a best-seller.

  Jack would occasionally send us "mementos" of his travels, and some of these were rather exotic. During one of his Arizona visits, my brother decided that his Doberman pinscher was getting to be a nuisance, so he crated the dog up and shipped him back to the family in Hyannis Port, with special instructions for me to look after him. A delivery truck brought the dog to our house from the railroad station. A note fixed to the crate read, "My name is Moe and I don't bite." When I looked at Moe through the slats, I was glad for that news, because Moe was one big, muscular dog.

  I opened the crate. Moe bounded out of the cage, gave me a glancing nip, knocked me over, and bounded full speed down the lawn. He circled a bit and then made for the McKelvey house next door. Johnny McKelvey, a boy a little younger than me, was standing in his yard, his eyes riveted on Moe. Moe bore in on Johnny and sent him flying like a tenpin in a bowling alley. Johnny started to bawl. His nanny came rushing out of the house and screamed, "Get up, Johnny! Get up! Your mother doesn't want you to ruin those nice new pants! You're getting a grass stain on them!" Johnny couldn't stop howling. Moe, meanwhile, was having a hell of a good time. He came charging back up to our house, tongue and tail waving. The delivery truck man, a true profile in courage, crouched, spread his arms, and somehow managed to grab him. Dad had been monitoring all this, and had reached an executive decision. "Put him back in that crate and ship him back!" he ordered me. I was happy to oblige; it gave me a rare chance to tease Jack. I wrote him a note back on the crate: "This dog that doesn't bite just jumped out of his cage and bit me. Teddy."

  My eldest sister, Rosemary, was twenty-three in 1941. Luminously pretty and round-faced, with a widow's peak, dark brows, and a great smile that dimpled her cheeks, Rosemary was the one sibling with whom all the others were unfailingly gentle. Her affliction, diagnosed as mental retardation, left her struggling to comprehend things as quickly and as clearly as other people. She was a sweet and loving human being.

  Ros
emary enriched the humanity of all of us. Our sister Eunice seemed always to be near her, helping her through simple childhood games such as dodgeball, inviting her along and giving her assignments in sailing races. As she grew into adolescence, Rosemary knew she could count on Jack or Joe to escort her to dances at the Yacht Club at the Cape, or to the Stork Club in New York. I looked out for her too, when I could, though I was fourteen years younger--she was my godmother, after all. Dad wrote affectionate letters to her from abroad, and Mother actually altered her own handwriting from the swirling "fine Spencerian hand" on which she'd prided herself, to a simpler style that imitated typographical print, so that Rosemary would have less trouble following it.

  But in the fall of that year, our father, concerned that Rosemary's condition would pose insurmountable dangers to her as an adult woman in the world, listened to doctors who assured him that a new form of neurosurgery would greatly benefit her and improve her quality of life. The doctors were wrong, the surgery further injured Rosie, and my parents were devastated. I, of course, knew and understood nothing of what had happened. Rosemary spent her remaining sixty-three years mostly in comfortable supervision at her home in a Catholic community in Wisconsin. Over the years, through her regular visits to Eunice's home or her summer days on Cape Cod or wintertime in Florida or Thanksgiving at Jean's, Rosemary remained a loving and inspirational presence in our family, not just for her siblings, but for the next generations too.

  If Kathleen happened to be at the Cape with us, there'd be a touch of stardust in the house. Kathleen, twenty-one in 1941, had already made a glittering debut into London society before the king and queen in 1938, the year Dad arrived there as ambassador--a debut that she shared with Rosemary. Admirers of all ages and nationalities trailed in "Kick's" wake. She'd returned to America and completed two years at Finch College in Manhattan. She spent a good deal of time on the Cape that summer, before signing on as a reporter and reviewer at the Washington Times-Herald.

  The war soon spoke to Kick's sense of duty, as it had to that of Joe Jr. and Jack. In 1943 she would put aside her reporter's notebook and mink coat and recross the Atlantic to London to join the grim, vital mission of the American Red Cross.

  Eunice, lanky, athletic, and intense at twenty, might have been trooping up to the house from the tennis court after an early-morning match with a friend, a barrette clinging to her tousled hair. "Keep up your tennis and your golf," Dad instructed her from London in 1940. "I am still going to make a champion out of you." A champion she became: tennis player, swim team captain, and superb competitive sailor, winning many races at the Cape in those years. Eunice's famous drive, which she applied to good works in her adult life, may have been prompted in part by a wish to emulate Joe Jr. and Jack. She remarked in later years, "To us they were marvelous creatures, practically god-like, and we yearned to please them and be acceptable."

  Pat might have been curled on a sofa in her robe and bobby sox, flipping through a copy of Variety or Photoplay as Dad and I headed into the house. She was seventeen in 1941, and dreamed quietly of the Hollywood glamour world that she would one day be a part of. She agreed with Kick and Eunice that in Joe Jr. and Jack the family had its own bright stars. "To us they were heroes, young gods," she once reminisced, echoing her sister.

  Our father's career as a movie studio investor and producer in the 1920s and '30s inspired her. After directing and acting in several plays at Rosemont, Pat became a world traveler and travel writer, a producer for the beloved singer Kate Smith, and, in time, part of the Hollywood scene herself. She married the British screen actor Peter Lawford in 1954.

  Pat always had a good eye for detail. In a 1946 diary entry, she gently lampooned Winston Churchill, who stayed at our Palm Beach house while in America to receive an honorary degree from the University of Miami: "We hadn't been in the house long before Winston appeared downstairs with an enormous cigar, bare-footed in his dressing gown, complaining as to whether quarter to ten meant quarter to or past. Mrs. C. calmed him [and] he went upstairs."

  Multilayered, deeply religious, Bobby was loving and warm beneath his famously aggressive exterior. He was a collector of stamps in those early days, small and shy, a stubborn struggler in the classroom and on the playing fields. A resolute youthful reader of "serious" books: The Crisis, The Hurricane, and Men Against the Sea in one stretch of 1939. A year before that, he'd composed an essay about himself, probably for a school assignment:

  I am thirteen years old, and about five feet two inches tall. I have got a lot of freckles. I have hazel eyes, and blond hair which is plenty hard to keep down because I have many licks, and so much of it. I am not very fat, but fat enough....

  I have a pretty good character on the whole, but my temper is not too good. I am not jelous of any one, I have a very loud voice, and talk alot, but sometimes my talk is not very interesting.

  My tablemate at breakfast--at a small separate table a short distance from the big family one--would likely be my sister Jean, the closest of the children to me in age. This arrangement did not necessarily thrill Jean. She was thirteen then, and yearned to be included among the older siblings privileged enough to sit with Mom and Dad. So did I, if truth be told, but the rules were the rules. Occasionally another sister would take pity on Jean and say, "I'll switch with you." No one ever said that to me.

  My family's future ambassador to Ireland was a tender and shy little girl. She looked to Joe Jr., her godfather, for special attention among the elders, and Joe provided it. After the loss of him, it was Jean, in a wide-brimmed white hat and floral dress, who in 1945 would christen the destroyer USS Joseph Kennedy Jr. It was Jean who would introduce her Manhattanville College roommate Ethel Skakel, lively and prankish at seventeen, to the twenty-year-old Bobby, and then subtly steer the two toward one another until Bobby "got it" and married Ethel in 1950.

  Also at the Big House, as we called it, and nearly as much "family" as we nine children, would be the Gargan kids--Joey, Mary Jo, and Ann. These were the children of Joseph F. and Agnes Fitzgerald Gargan, my mother's sister. After Agnes's death in 1936, my parents took the small trio into the Kennedy household for summers and school vacations. Joey was eleven in 1941, two years older than me, but he was my constant chum. Dad and Mother took good care of them and saw that they were interwoven into the family's fabric.

  The small figure who held us all together might have been arriving at the house just as Dad and I were. She'd have stepped out of the blue two-door coupe that she drove to and from morning mass at St. Francis Xavier Church despite barely being able to see over the top of the steering wheel. Unlike the rest of us, my mother would have been dressed in a way befitting respectable society, in a tilted broad-brimmed straw hat and floral dress, her earrings and pearls in place, a small purse held tightly in her two gloved hands.

  Both of my parents were deeply religious, and the family prayed together daily and attended mass together at least weekly. Yet it is Rose Kennedy, mainly, to whom I owe the gift of faith as the foundation of my life. It is a core factor in my understanding of who I am.

  My own center of belief, as I matured and grew curious about these things, moved toward the great Gospel of Matthew, chapter 25 especially, in which he calls us to care for the least of these among us, and feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, visit the imprisoned. It's enormously significant to me that the only description in the Bible about salvation is tied to one's willingness to act on behalf of one's fellow human beings. The ones who will be deprived of salvation--the sinners--are those who've turned away from their fellow man. People responsive to the great human condition, and who've tried to alleviate its misery--these will be the ones who join Christ in Paradise.

  To me, this perspective on my faith has almost literally been a lifesaver. It has given me strength and purpose during the greatest challenges I have faced, the roughest roads I've traveled.

  Mother was also our Pied Piper into the world of knowledg
e and ideas. She led us on educational outings to museums and concerts, to Concord and Bunker Hill and the Old North Church, rattling out improvised math challenges to us along the way. ("What is two plus two, subtract three, then add two?!") She was our unflagging grammarian and standard-bearer of decorous speech. Woe unto those of us who neglected to use "whom" after a preposition! Once Mother wrote to me, "I noticed you are quoted as using the word 'ass' in several expressions. I do not think you should use that word. I am sure you realize it really does not look very well in print." I was forty years old and a senator when she sent that one. It still hangs on my Senate office wall. Still later, she nailed me again: "I just saw a story in which you said: 'If I was president.' You should have said, 'If I were president'... which is correct because it is a condition contrary to fact."

  She was moderator of our topical dinner table conversations, the topics--geography one night, the front-page headlines the next--announced in advance on cards that she wrote out and pinned to a billboard near the dining room. She was the disciplinarian of all our headstrong impulses, and was sometimes strict: spankings and whacks with a coat hanger were in her arsenal, as were banishments to the closet. On one such expedition, I stood in the darkness feeling sorry for myself, until I realized I was not alone: Jean was standing beside me, serving out her own time for some infraction of the rules.