True Compass: A Memoir

by Edward M. Kennedy

  Lafay was saying, "I hope this party gets over pretty quick because it's really dull and we're not having much fun at all. It's really drab, so will you come and get me?" I stood there sort of paralyzed and embarrassed that the boy felt my party was dull.

  Then I heard footsteps behind me. My father had just walked out of the master bedroom and spotted me listening to the telephone conversation. He quietly told me to come back with him into his bedroom. I thought maybe he was going to console me, but he had another topic entirely on his mind. He said, "Teddy, let me give you some advice. Follow it, and you'll be much happier for the rest of your life.

  "Never listen to a phone call that isn't meant for you. Never read a letter that isn't meant for you. Never pay attention to a comment that isn't meant for you. Never violate people's privacy. You will save yourself a great deal of anguish. You might not understand this now, but you will later on."

  Well, he was absolutely prophetic in what he said. It is advice that I followed again and again, and its use has extended well beyond phone conversations and letters. I've learned to turn my attention away from all sorts of things that can cause anguish: for instance, the books, the magazine pieces, the newspaper stories that carry malicious gossip or opinions about me or my family. I just stopped hearing it after a while. And I have been happier for it. I would recommend Dad's advice to anybody.

  No observation by Joseph Kennedy Sr. had as much lasting influence as a similar dictum: "There'll be no crying in this house."

  The "house" he had in mind, I am certain, was the House of Kennedy. He repeated this admonition to all of us, and he pronounced it with the force of moral law, and all of us absorbed its import and molded our behavior to honor it. "There will be no crying in this house." To understand the profound authority of this charge to us is to understand much about my family.

  We have wept only rarely in public. We have accepted the scrutiny and the criticism as the legitimate consequences of prominence in a highly self-aware society. With exceedingly few exceptions, we have refused to complain against the speculation, gossip, and slander.

  Some have viewed our refusal as excessive reticence, even as tacit admission of the innuendo at hand. In my view, it is neither. At least for me, it's the continuing assent to Joseph Kennedy's dictum: "There will be no crying in this house."

  I associate Bronxville with late autumn and winter. And largeness. Everything within our gates seemed so large back then--including my siblings, from my littlest-kid perspective. The three-story white house and its surrounding trees appeared to reach into the clouds. My sisters have told me they had the same sensation. A driveway bordered by shrubbery arced downward along the terraced lawn until it reached the street. Jack taught me to ride a bicycle through the swirls of autumn leaves on that driveway, and it was fun, except for the sudden stops. Jack and Bobby would helpfully push me along as the bike gained momentum and barreled down the drive, until it was brought to a halt--say, by a tree--and I went tumbling over the bars into a heap. "That's very natural!" Jack would assure me as the two of them raced down the hill to pick me up. I was never quite convinced.

  Neighborhood children liked to romp into our yard for games of football and tag, and sledding in the winter. Sometimes an emissary from the larger world--Hollywood, the Catholic Church--showed up at our house. President Roosevelt arranged for Dad to escort Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli to several sites around the country when Pacelli visited the United States in 1936, not long before he headed back to Rome and his eventual coronation as Pope Pius XII. One of his last stops was at our house. I remember crawling up onto his lap. I was fascinated by his long robe and scarlet skullcap, and his long aristocratic nose. We still have the couch where he sat, and the plaque that Mother put on it.

  The dinner table conversations at Bronxville were as lively as at the Cape. But it was here that Jack found a way to invest mealtimes with even more challenge and intrigue. He invented a new game. The pawn was the platter of roast beef. Jack's goal was to get served from it before the rest of us children. He knew that the platter always went to Dad first, and then to Mother. But which way would it travel after that?--to the left, or to the right? The question was important because whoever got served first was treated to a thick, juicy slab of beef, and the last person served had to settle for end scraps. Jack's guess on any given night determined which side of the table he'd choose to seat himself. He liked to say in later years that the reason he was so thin was that he always chose wrong.

  Every space around the big house was a potential source for adventure. Our roof looked to Joe and Jack as if it might be ideal for launching a parachutist. So they made up a parachute from sheets and ropes. For the test run, they were generous enough to invite the son of the chauffeur to share the adventure. They helped him on with the straps, and then they helped him off the roof. Luckily, he only suffered an ankle sprain, but it was a pretty bad one.

  Yet quiet moments there were--and even these were rich in stimulation. I can still see Bobby frowning into a magnifying glass as he bent his small frame over his stamp collection, which included contributions from President Roosevelt. Sometimes we brothers would sprawl on the floor absorbed in practice maneuvers with the cast-iron soldiers that our father collected for us as Christmas presents from countries all over the world, their brilliant hand-painted uniforms rendered in precise detail. As we lined them up in battle formation, our mother would often bustle in, bearing maps and information about their countries of origin.

  Mother would make learning opportunities, too, from the dolls Dad bought in the countries he visited. These were spectacular dolls, always dressed in ceremonial costumes, accurate in detail. They were heavy, and sometimes a foot or so high. Mother would sit with the girls and the dolls and get them to think about the cultures they came from: How are the Polish dolls dressed, and why? What about the Lithuanians? What can their dress tell you about the people?

  Mother delighted in her acquaintences with Catholic bishops and cardinals and, later, popes, but she enjoyed social circles less ecclesiastical as well: during the 1930s she was named the best-dressed woman in public life by a poll of fashion designers. And she became a familiar figure in international ports of call: after seventeen years of birthing and nurturing her nine children, Rose Kennedy in her forties resumed her girlhood penchant for travel, making several trips to Europe and to her beloved Paris in particular. Dad would arrange to be at home with us when Mother was rekindling her love of European art, languages, and cities.

  Our parents escorted us on frequent excursions beyond the house and grounds. A Sunday ritual, after church, was our two-car caravan into Manhattan for a family luncheon at a Longchamps, that bygone chain of art deco restaurants with their stained glass and murals and heaping plates of delicious food. Then we'd all head over to Radio City for a movie. Jack must have loved those outings; he often brought Jackie to Longchamps for dinner in the early days of their marriage.

  A reminder that the outside world was a lot less secure than our own occurred when I was five, shortly after I was enrolled at a kindergarten off Pondfield Road in the Bronx. The school was only a five-minute car ride from our house, and one fine autumn afternoon I decided to impress my parents with my independence by walking home through the crunchy fallen leaves. My mother wasn't expecting this, and when she drove to the school and didn't find me, she grew terrified. The famous Lindbergh baby kidnapping and killing had occurred shortly after my birth, and parents across the nation were still haunted by it. My parents knew the Lindberghs and had observed their pain firsthand. And so instead of congratulating me on my adventure when I strutted through the door, my mother reasoned with me via a coat hanger, and then banished me to the closet.

  But the outside world also held wonder, especially when my father was along. He took me to a ball game at Yankee Stadium once when I was about seven. We had box seats, but Dad apparently found these a little too remote from the action, and boosted me over the wall onto the playing field dur
ing batting practice. The ushers smiled at us and touched their caps. We strolled around and I drank in all the huge famous men in pinstripes firing baseballs at one another, and was just turning my attention back to the hot-dog vendor roaming the seats when I heard Dad say, "Teddy, come over here." He was standing beside a big grinning moonfaced man in a business suit. "Teddy, this is Babe Ruth," Dad said, "the greatest baseball player of our time." Ruth had been retired for a couple years, but I knew who he was. Honey Fitz had told me about cheering the Babe when he played for the Red Sox before 1920, and my grandfather was an organizing member of the Royal Rooters. Now I'd have something to tell Grampa.

  Ruth reached down a huge paw and grabbed my hand. I can't remember what I said to him, but to this day, meeting Babe Ruth remains the strongest memory I have of being awestruck by someone. I was tonguetied.

  A household as teeming with children as ours required some reinforcements for the parents. I recall a couple of governesses in particular, one of them a legend within the extended Kennedy family, the other not quite so beloved.

  The less-than-adored caretaker was an Irishwoman we called Kico, who sometimes let our rambunctiousness get the better of her. I can still hear the nighttime thump... thump... thump of poor Bobby's forehead as Kico banged it against a wall in an effort to discipline him. Bobby's famous hardheadedness served him well in these moments. Kico did not last long at the Kennedy house.

  The legendary governess was Luella Hennessey (later Donovan), who was in our lives for forty years, assisted at the births of twenty-three Kennedy children, lavished tender care upon my father after he suffered his stroke in 1961, helped nurse me back to health after my airplane crash in 1964, and was a particular favorite of Jack's. In 1963, President Kennedy coaxed the hardworking Luella to expand her horizons by enrolling at Boston College to get her college degree. He died before she received her bachelor of science diploma, but she endearingly remarked, "The president said he would come to my graduation if I got my degree. I guess he'll know I'm getting it."

  Our expanding household, as I noted earlier, was an important reason that Dad found it necessary for us to leave Boston. But there were other reasons--reasons I did not suspect as a child; reasons that had to do with the outside world from which he tried to shield us until we were ready for it. Much of what he knew about the world did not please Joe Kennedy, and some of it quite rightly infuriated him.

  The Boston of my dad's young manhood remained in certain ways as it had been since the mid-nineteenth century: two cities, in effect, mutually hostile and resentful. One was the silk-stocking Boston of old, landed Yankee power and influence; Beacon Hill; Harvard; the bankers and captains of industry. The other city consisted of the teeming storefronts and docksides. This was the Boston of immigrants' working-class descendants. These were mostly Irish, but included Italians and Portuguese.

  The Irish Catholics had established a small middle class, which overlapped with a strong and tightly knit political class. Mayor and Congressman "Honey Fitz" was an exemplar of the latter. My dad's own father, Patrick Joseph, lived in both. He was the soft-spoken owner of three saloons and a liquor-importing business, a bank founder and president, a real estate promoter, and a leader of East Boston's Democratic Party, serving four terms as a state representative. He was a regular presence at community events, known for his gentlemanly manner and political influence. P.J. and his perceptive wife, Mary, hoped their son would move upward in the world through the classic Irish route of politics.

  Dad had his own ideas. He thrived academically, at Boston Latin School and then Harvard. In 1914, he blocked the hostile takeover of his father's neighborhood bank and became, at age twenty-five, the state's youngest bank president, ultimately becoming one of the financial masterminds of his generation. Dad immersed himself in the intricacies of buying and selling stock. In 1934, when the U.S. Congress created the Securities and Exchange Commission to protect investors from insider trading, President Roosevelt appointed him chairman of the new regulatory agency. He was the right man for the job precisely because he knew how the system worked.

  Yet even as he marched through one invisible barricade after another, Dad always understood that he was never completely accepted as an equal by the old Yankee stock. He would always be an "Irish Catholic" first, and an individual second. "I was born here. My parents were born here. What the hell do I have to do to be called an American?" he blurted after yet one more paper referred to him as an "Irishman." In 1922 he was turned down for membership in a country club on Boston's South Shore, and years later complained that the Protestant elite would not have accepted his daughters as debutantes. He bought the home in Hyannis Port only after realizing he could not gain entry into a more exclusive neighborhood, and even many families in Hyannis Port greeted him coldly. His conviction that "Boston was no place to bring up Irish Catholic children," as he declared to a reporter, was the impetus for the family's self-exile from the city.

  Dad could convey strength and inspiration precisely at those moments when he might seem, at a glance, to be stern and unbending. One example among many has lodged in my memory, perhaps because it involves an early encounter with the sea. We must jump ahead in time for a few moments, from Bronxville of the 1930s to Hyannis Port in the summer of 1943, when I was eleven. The war across the sea cast its long shadow--a half-terrifying, half-enthralling shadow for a boy--even into our little coastal village. Car owners were instructed to paint their headlights half black. All of the drapes in the Cape house were black, to keep any light from shore from reflecting off our tankers and troopships that were moving up and down the coastline.

  And yet for a Hyannis Port boy, these were almost make-believe precautions, hardly more urgent than storybook drama. The true object of my epic dreams was the timeless, shimmering water that lay before my eyes each summer day.

  For some months, I'd been allowed to explore Nantucket Sound in that sixteen-foot sloop, the One More. But I had another adventure in mind, and I was finally successful in getting Dad's permission.

  I wanted to take the boat around Point Gammon, at the tip of Great Island, some two miles out on Nantucket Sound, and then to the mouth of the Bass River, five miles east: a short distance for an experienced sailor, an uncertain voyage for an eleven-year-old boy. Adding to the adventure was the understanding that I would be out on the boat overnight.

  My "crew" on that voyage, as on so many voyages of my boyhood, was Joey Gargan, then an old salt of thirteen. It was a rainy day, but we boarded the little open boat anyway, clutching paper bags with our sandwiches inside. It rained and rained, but we pressed ahead through the choppy water. The "Big House" disappeared into the fog behind us. Squinting against the wind and the salt spray, we made it around the point and on to the river mouth, and anchored the boat near shore. Still it rained and it rained, and it was cold, and the day crept along, and it rained, and it was cold.

  We found ourselves trapped. Our overnight adventure no longer looked so enticing, but we had neither the strength nor expertise to get the boat back home. We spent a frigid night huddled inside that boat, hardly sleeping. A gray morning dawned. Wet and hungry, we left the boat at anchor and swam to the shore. Then we trudged until we found a gas station, from where we called up the house. Dave, our chauffeur, answered the phone. I groaned, "You've got to come down and get us. It's been bad. It rained all night. My sandwiches are wet, and I'm cold. Oh, I'm so cold."

  Dave came down and picked us up and drove us back to the house. Just as we arrived, we met my father getting ready to go out for his morning horseback ride. He said, "Teddy? I thought you were going for your little cruise."

  I said, "I did, Dad. But it was cold! It rained. It was bad, it was cold!"

  "Where's the boat?" he asked. I said, "It's anchored at Bass River. We'll go back and get it later. But now I'm going upstairs to get warm, and get breakfast, and rest, and get some sleep. I'm so cold and wet." But my father said, "Dave, take Teddy and Joey back to the boat. Teddy,
if you leave with the boat, you come back with the boat."

  So the car turned around and off we went, me boo-hooing all the way. If there was anybody in the world who felt sorry for themselves that morning, it was me. But we arrived back at Bass River, and suddenly the sun came up, and a breeze came on up, and the sails on the boat came up, and the warmth came on out, and Joey and I had just a terrific sail that day.

  In the long hours and days and years, my father has been there to turn me around and send me back to do what is necessary. To come back with the boat. I can envision him now, striding toward me, looking me straight in the eye, his handshake firm, his laugh wholehearted. I grew up eager not to disappoint him, determined never to meet any challenge in a halfhearted way, ultimately confident that if he knew I had done my best, he would--even if things turned out badly--give me what amounted to his benediction:

  "After you have done your best, then the hell with it."

  My father knew whereof he spoke. By the dawn of the 1940s he had already done his best, on the world stage, and failed--failed to forestall the most devastating war in history.

  In February 1938, within days of my sixth birthday, Joseph Kennedy sailed for London to take up his duties as President Roosevelt's newly appointed ambassador to the Court of St. James's. History shows that Roosevelt, whose campaign Dad had vigorously supported, had conferred the appointment despite my father's lack of diplomatic experience in hopes that Dad could negotiate an important British-American trade agreement, and that his famous bluntness would give the administration an unvarnished pipeline into Britain's responses toward Nazi Germany.

  On March 12 of that year, Adolf Hitler lit the fuse that would in time dash everyone's hopes for peace and detonate the second global war of the century, by sending his storm troopers across the German border to occupy Austria, in direct violation of the Versailles Treaty.