True Compass: A Memoir

by Edward M. Kennedy

  Joe Jr., who'd served as an informal secretary to Dad in London after graduating Harvard in 1938, enrolled in Harvard Law School. Jack graduated cum laude from Harvard in June, the season in which Why England Slept was published. He enrolled in the fall at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and in the spring he traveled through South America, meeting up with Mother and Eunice in Rio de Janeiro.

  Mother enrolled Bobby at Portsmouth Priory, a school run by Benedictine monks in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. I initially stayed with Mother, but when she moved from Palm Beach to Bronxville with the seasons, I did too. In the second grade alone, I attended three different schools, with three different curriculums, with three different peer groups and sets of friends to make.

  By the spring of my third-grade year, Mother thought that a shortterm stint in boarding school was the best option for me, and she tried to ease the pain of separation by having me go to the same school as Bobby. If we both were at Portsmouth Priory, she reasoned, he could look after me, and I wouldn't be so lonely. And anyway, we would all be together on Cape Cod in the summer.

  The Benedictines were happy to accommodate Mother's wishes, but there was a bit of a complication: Portsmouth Priory started in the seventh grade; it had no elementary school. No problem, said Mother. Bobby, a fourteen-year-old eighth grader, would be there to look after me, and after all, she was planning to keep me at Priory just until the end of the school year. Unfortunately, "just until the end of the school year," even if it's just two or three months, can be a very long time.

  I entered the seventh grade at Portsmouth Priory in the spring of 1941 when I was barely nine years old, boarding and competing with boys who were four years older than me. It was a recipe for disaster.

  My time at Portsmouth Priory was not an education; it was a battle. I took French, which I'd studied a little at Gibbs. On my first exam, I got a 13. I went to math class but the work was incomprehensible to me, and so was Latin.

  My classmates did not befriend me. Once in a while, if I was really lucky, someone would take me out for a sail on a boat. But I was rarely chosen to go. I was rarely picked to be on any of the teams during that period, because I was so young. Bobby was there, of course, but, being a regular teenage boy, he already had his own group of friends and was generally involved with them. A few of my classmates proved as cruel as only children can be.

  I'd brought my pet turtle to school with me, and in those hours of loneliness I played with him. But after a few weeks, my turtle died. I took him outside and dug a hole in the frozen ground outside my dormitory where I buried him and said a few prayers, giving him my own nine-year-old version of a funeral. Then I went back inside, found my cubicle--our dormitory rooms were cubicles with open ceilings--and crawled into bed and cried myself to sleep. At some point during the night, I was awakened by a strange sound from the hallway. Thump. Thump. Thump. And then laughter. I didn't know what it was until the next morning, when I awoke to find my dead pet turtle in my bed. Some of the students must have spotted me burying him. That night, they dug him up and tossed the shell with his lifeless body back and forth down the hall. Thump. Thump. Thump. And then they put him between my sheets. I buried him again that morning.

  Bobby didn't think that family solidarity required him to be my protector. One day I got into a fight with a boy named Plowden. He was a head taller than me, and soon had the better of me, twisting my arm up between my shoulder blades. Bobby came walking past, and I shouted to him, "We're fighting because he says the Plowdens are better than the Kennedys!"

  Bobby walked on. As he left me behind, he called back, "You have to learn to fight your own battles in life."

  I didn't learn much else at Portsmouth Priory. I certainly didn't improve my spelling. "Dear Daddy, We are down in cap-card," I wrote to my father around this time, "mother has gone to jacks graduain. joe is here. The weather is very dad. Would you get the kings autograph for me I will send you an other lettor soon."

  In the summer of 1941, Cape Cod was for me an oasis of stability and family love. Joe and Jack helped me with my sailing when they were there. My sisters and Mother doted on me. Bobby paid more attention to me than he had at Priory. And I basically was able to be a carefree nine-yearold boy, riding my bike, swimming, and perfecting my sailing.

  In September 1941, Mother sent me to Riverdale Country School for Boys in the Bronx. All three of my older brothers had gone to Riverdale. They had been day students, but since the family was no longer headquartered in the house in Bronxville, I was a boarder. And the happiness of my Cape Cod summer did not take long to evaporate.

  If Portsmouth Priory taught me about the cruelty of children, then Riverdale taught me about the cruelty of adults. And it was not the kind of cruelty that could easily be erased by the happy days of summer. Our dorm master was an abuser. He lived in the residence hall with us, in loco parentis if you will, and violated every trust that our parents had placed in him. He specialized in terror and humiliation. In evenings, at "lights out" time, R., as I will refer to him, would summon a rotating group of boys to his room, have them stand in a circle, and lead them in a matching-word game. He might say "shoe," and someone would respond with "leather." He'd say "heel," and someone would say "sole." Then he might say "shoelace," and if you couldn't think of a matching word, you'd have to take off an article of clothing. Since the boys were in pajamas, they didn't have too many articles of clothing to take off. Soon they were naked and subjected to R.'s "inspection." No boy was spared the humiliation.

  R. had enlisted two senior boys, Argentines, as accomplices who would sometimes help him lead the word game. They added a cruel twist by shouting out words in Spanish. But the young boarders at Riverdale didn't know any Spanish. The humiliation arrived even sooner.

  I could not believe this was happening. There were whispers that R. also took a private interest in some boys and would send the Argentines to round them up. I spent many terror-filled nights under my bunk, hiding lest I too become one of those victims. I kept telling myself that this would pass. That I would get through this nightmare. That my brothers had survived boarding school and I would too. It's going to be okay, I told myself. I had to believe that.

  I have a particular memory of that horrible time that I can see in my mind as vividly as if it happened five minutes ago. There was a path on the grounds at Riverdale that led along a ridge, where the ground fell away quite steeply. Quite a way down, another path ran along the top of a bluff above the Hudson River. One fall afternoon, I was walking the upper path. I looked down and saw a little boy, maybe even younger than I was, walking fast and half running along the lower path. He carried a suitcase and his teddy bear. R. was hurrying after him. The boy was trying to run away, but the older man caught him. "Where do you think you're going, young man?" he shouted. The poor little boy was weeping and clutching his teddy bear and his suitcase. R. ripped the teddy bear from the boy's arms and threw it on the ground. Then he yanked away the suitcase and with one of the most evil expressions I have ever seen, he opened the suitcase and emptied all of the boy's belongings down the hill. Then he dragged the sobbing child back to the dormitory. I couldn't stop staring at the clothes strewn everywhere and the teddy bear still lying on the ground.

  The dorm master was eventually caught and fired. But his activities were all hushed up; nothing was ever said to the parents.

  As for the Argentine accomplices, I saw one of them ten years later. I was in the army, doing basic training at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Two buddies and I were in a New York bar on a weekend pass, having a drink. I looked at the man standing next to me at the bar. It was one of the Argentines. I said to him, "I know you from Riverdale. This bar isn't big enough for both of us." He took a look at me and my friends and walked out.

  Just a few years ago, as I write this, I was at a social event in Palm Beach, chatting with a lot of people. I saw a man approach and said to myself, "Who is he? I know him from somewhere." Then it hit me: he was the other Argentine. W
hen he came up to me and put out his hand, I turned my back on him.

  I was saved from the worst of R.'s terror by two things. First, Mother wanted my sister Jean and me to be near her during the winter months, so she took both of us out of boarding school and had us attend day school while we lived with her in Palm Beach. While this plan of switching schools for just the winter term was not exactly conducive to keeping and making friends or to doing well in school, it saved me from R.'s abusive games during that winter. I was too ashamed to tell my mother what had happened, but I was thankful to be safe at home with her.

  The second thing that saved me was whooping cough. When the winter came to an end, I went back to Riverdale, where the terror began all over again. Perhaps it was the stress, but I got sick, very sick, with pneumonia and whooping cough. And again, I was able to return to the safe and loving arms of my mother.

  Whooping cough was serious business back then, before the pertussis vaccine was widely available. Children often died after days or weeks of sustained coughing and gasping for breath. It nearly killed me when, accompanied by a case of pneumonia, it struck me in 1942.

  When I first fell ill, I was rushed from school to a New York City hospital for emergency treatment, after which Mother brought me up to Cape Cod to recuperate. This was the first time since infancy that I really had my mother to myself, and the first time I enjoyed such close attention from her, and I basked in it. We took long walks on the nearly deserted beach together--it was spring, and the crowds hadn't yet descended on the town--and in the evenings she would read to me: books on science, history, geography, and the occasional adventure from Jack London or Sir Walter Scott. I still remember those terrible dogfights in London's White Fang. I couldn't sleep after I heard them read. And the elaborate prose of Ivanhoe, those chivalric images and cadences.

  But more than any specific activity, it was my mother's constant tenderness and attention that I cherished. When the original bout of whooping cough was nearly over, I went out in the rain and suffered a recurrence of the pneumonia, and Mother patiently nursed me back to health again. As sick as I was, those days were a tonic for me. And they cemented a special bond between my mother and me that survived until her death at the age of 104.

  Dave Powers, one of President Kennedy's closest friends and aides, long remembered and wrote about an incident that happened when I was about sixteen. Dave was having breakfast at the Cape house with us and listening to me excitedly tell Dad about my plans to compete in the Edgartown regatta that weekend. Mother walked into the room in time to hear some of this. She reminded me that she expected me to make my annual visit to a religious retreat north of Boston, which was happening that same weekend. Without so much as furrowing my eyebrows, I immediately replied--as Dave recalled--"Yes, Mother, I'll be ready to go."

  My father was watching this exchange as well. He supported my mother, disciplinarian that he was. But after observing the exchange, he volunteered that I could drive his car to the retreat. Since no one ever was allowed to drive Dad's car, the message was unmistakable. I know this is hard for you, Teddy. I know you want to compete in the regatta. But you're doing the right thing by honoring and obeying your mother. I've never forgotten that day. And as much as I'm sure I would have loved the regatta, I doubt I would have remembered it any more than the one the year before or the year after.

  Friends have asked me, over the years, whether I felt anger toward my parents for this exacting discipline, and for launching me off to these nomadic boarding schools at such an early age. My answer is that no, I did not, and do not. For one thing, I was taught not to complain. That was one of the rules that Dad lived by, and thus one that we all lived by. "Kennedys never complain!" For another, sending children away to school was simply what many parents did in those days. I knew lots of other children in circumstances similar to mine. Some suffered, but suffering is a given in life. Most, I think, grew up to be good parents themselves and to enjoy prosperous lives.

  Besides that, I never once doubted my parents' love. Dad could be stern, but he not only loved us; he showed us all a deep respect. He always kissed us when we came home. Not many fathers kissed their children back then. And even as grown men, we kissed our father on the cheek when greeting him or saying goodbye. I continue that tradition with my own sons.

  Now, I don't mean to imply that Dad was a pushover. I was reminded of the limits of his indulgence--and of his insistence on self-discipline--at age eleven, when I was about to leave home for yet another boarding school: Fessenden, I believe. Dad sat me down for his traditional pep talk. At the end of it, he said, "Well, now, Ted, you may go down to the cupboard in the pantry and help yourself to a piece of my butter crunch."

  Everyone in the family knew that Katie Lynch's Butter Crunch was my favorite treat. It was a taste I shared with my sister Rosemary--and with Dad. I raced into the pantry and helped myself to much more than one piece. My pockets were bulging with as much butter crunch as I could jam into them. My newly bulky profile proved suspicious to my eagleeyed father. He insisted on looking in my pockets, where he found them chock-full of what amounted to two complete boxes of the candy. He exploded. And I was sent off to school without so much as a taste of Katie Lynch's Butter Crunch.

  Confrontations (as opposed to competition) were actually quite rare in our household, and they almost never occurred between any of the brothers and sisters. This was no accident. Dad raised us to cooperate, not to quarrel. This may sound like a tall order for any parent, but our father made it work. First, he respected us, and in that way he showed us how to respect him and one another. He used a tactical ploy as well: he would draw any sign of tension away from us and toward himself. Mother did not always understand this, and would worry when one of us argued with Dad. He would explain to her, "As long as they're not fighting with each other, as long as their disagreements are with others and not among themselves, I can deal with it. I can't deal with the fact that they're differing or fighting with each other."

  Another important factor in our harmony was that, as strange as it might seem, Dad and Mother never fought. My niece Caroline Kennedy tells of asking Mother once, "Did you and Grampa ever fight?"

  Mother said, "Oh, no, dear. No, Grampa and I never fought."

  Caroline said, "Well, how did you handle your differences?"

  Mother replied, "I would always just say, 'Yes, dear,' and then I'd go to Paris."

  It was about three years until Dad and I clashed again, but it was a beaut. This time I was the aggrieved party, or I thought I was, and the upshot was that I decided to run away from home. The provocation was something silly. My parents had promised that I could go on the boat, and then they withdrew their promise. That was my perception, anyway. The more I reminded them of the promise, the more unreasonable they grew--in my view. I was an adolescent now, and so I was mortally wounded. "I'm going to run away," I announced. I stormed out of the house and got into one of the cars and started driving. I drove west, toward the Cape Cod Canal, as I remember. Just before I crossed the Cape Cod Canal bridge, the landmark that would officially take me "off-Cape," I stopped and found a telephone and called home. My intent, or so I told myself, was to reiterate to my parents that I was running away.

  Jack, who was visiting the Cape house, and not Dad, answered--to my great fortune. "I'm running away from home!" I repeated to him. "I'm tired of it all. This is it. I'm finished. I'm out of here."

  Jack subtly took charge of the situation. He didn't try to persuade me that our parents may have had a point. Instead, he said, "Well, Teddy, before you run away, why don't you meet me at the Midtown Theater?" This was a movie house in Hyannis.

  Pride made me hold out in grim silence.

  "There's a war picture on," Jack said. "Come and watch a war picture with me."

  He really knew how to get me. Watching a war picture with a hero of World War II. Who was my brother. It was all over, and we both knew it, but I needed to salvage a little dignity. I pretended to think a
bout it.

  "Well," I said. "All right."

  I turned around and headed for Hyannis, where I met my brother at the movies. At the end of the war picture, as we were walking out, Jack turned to me and said, "It's getting late, Teddy. Why don't you come home with me and get a good night's sleep and run away in the morning."

  "I'm not sure about that," I said.

  "That's the right thing to do, Teddy. Otherwise you're going to have to find some other place to sleep tonight," he said.

  That convinced me, even though the truth is that I didn't need too much convincing by then.

  When we got home and I went to sleep, Jack found our father and said, "I think you ought to let up on Teddy."

  Early the next morning, Dad knocked on my bedroom door and said, "Teddy, do you want to go riding?" I said, "Sure, Dad." And all was forgotten.

  Jack's easy mastery of a crisis, and his way of making an adolescent boy feel like a worthy person whose feelings mattered--these formed another aspect of my wish to "catch up." It wasn't entirely about matching my brothers' accomplishments. It was about conducting myself like them as well.

  When Dad was still in England, he was never far from my thoughts. Looking over old and poorly spelled letters, I find myself making many assurances that I was living up to his wishes: "We had a Halloween party lost week. Afterwards I got dressed up like a ghost and went all the way down the road I didn't scare because you said not to scare anyone because they may have a weak heart."

  Dad never wanted us to flaunt our wealth. Thus I was not allowed to even have a bicycle until the majority of boys among my friends had received theirs. Later on, I was not allowed to have a car until most of my friends owned one. My brothers and sisters had to obey the same rule. At the time, we felt a little sorry for ourselves. We never complained, of course. And years later, we all looked back and understood how important this rule was to our development. The underlying principle was that we were always to distinguish ourselves through achievement, not mere flamboyance.