True Compass: A Memoir

by Edward M. Kennedy

  Of course, even a man of Honey Fitz Fitzgerald's energy needed a little downtime now and then. And so on weekends he would march into the lobby of his favorite hotel, find himself a comfortable easy chair, and wait for the people to come to him. Someone would walk through the main door, and he'd jump up and bound over to them with his hand outstretched. He would do this all day long. When I was about sixteen, I remember driving Grampa to the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach. Grampa's idea of fun was to sit in the lobby and wait to meet new people. He would tip the hotel desk clerk to ring the bell when guests checked in--once if they were from Massachusetts; twice if they were from Boston. When the bell rang twice, up would go Grampa, introducing himself to the strangers. "I'm John F. Fitzgerald. You're from Boston, aren't you?" By the end of the day, he would have gotten himself invited to lunch and dinner and would have had the time of his life. I'd pick him up at 10 p.m., and he was overflowing with stories about his great day. Grampa loved to laugh. He would get tickled by his own stories. One of his favorites was a tad off-color. But nobody ever realized that it was off-color, because Grampa could never get to the punch line without falling into a laughing fit so severe he could barely breathe, let alone finish the joke. The joke involved the name of a lovely little seacoast town about twenty miles southeast of Boston, named Scituate. Well, I can't reconstruct Grampa's joke completely, but the punch line involves a slight scatological mispronunciation of the town's name, so that it comes out--well, you know. Grampa would always try his best to make it through. But as he got close, he'd begin to chuckle, and then fight for breath, and his eyes would squeeze shut and fill with tears, and his face would turn red, and he'd fish his handkerchief out of his breast pocket. And everybody else in the room would be laughing and choking along with him, not knowing really why they were doing it. They were all just captured by Grampa's sense of fun. It was so infectious.

  In 1943, Honey Fitz was just seven years from his passing in 1950, but his mind was still sharp and his political sense acute. On those autumnal Sundays of 1943, I had this marvelous legend all to myself. He took a special interest in me, for Lord only knows what reasons. In my later grade school years, he and I grew very close. While my older siblings would be off at different places and doing different things, Grampa Fitzgerald and I would be together, traveling around Boston.

  Entering his suite at the Bellevue, the first thing I'd see would be what looked like a moving newspaper, with short legs. Grampa liked to keep informed, and he'd have torn-up editions of all the Boston papers scattered around the floor. In those days the newspapers published several editions, with updated news all day long, and Grampa read all of them from cover to cover. The items that interested him he would pin to his lapels and other parts of his clothing. (When he visited at the Cape, he'd have us kids constantly on the run to the village for the latest editions.) I believe Mother's habit of adorning the bulletin board near our dining table with topical items came directly from this.

  He'd unpin himself--mostly--and take me downstairs to lunch in the hotel restaurant. I'd have to hustle to keep up with this plump, dapper old man with the twinkling blue eyes. We'd enter through the kitchen. This gave Grampa the chance to introduce me (once again, in most cases) to all the cooks and waitresses. At the table, I could hardly wait to order my mashed potatoes and meat, but as soon as we sat down, a crush of Bostonians would descend upon us, and Grampa would greet each one and make introductions again. Often my ice cream would be melted before I had a chance to spoon it. Then we'd hurry out of the hotel--Grampa scooping up the newer editions of the papers in the lobby--and he would lead me on one of his enchanted walking tours of Boston.

  He'd take me to Milk Street and tell me, "It's called Milk Street because that was where the cows used to walk down and wait at the Commons." And Water Street: "Because of the well that was there." And then down to where the ships came in. And then we'd walk over past Paul Revere's house, and he'd talk about Paul Revere.

  Along the way, he would tell me about the Irish experience in Boston. He'd talk about the discrimination against the Irish that he'd seen, and would show me the signs he'd collected: "No Irish Need Apply." I still have some of those signs in my house. Then he would take me down Beacon Street and Tremont Street and show me the glass windows that dated to American Revolution time. He'd talk about the difference in the Boston social classes illustrated by Boston Common, and the Public Garden. The Common, he'd explain, was were where the British soldiers trained. And where the cattle used to graze. The Garden was funded by, and largely enjoyed by, the wealthy people, though it was open to the public.

  Finally we'd get to the Old North Church, where Grampa would spot the rector. The two of them would cross Salem Street and cock their chairs back opposite the church, so they could look at the steeple. They'd begin to talk, oblivious to the people walking by. They would talk about the architecture, and about the church, and about what was happening in the North End. Grampa would give me some money to go buy cannolis. At last the time would come when he would say goodbye to the rector, and continue our little tour, and finally bring me back to Park Street. I'd get on the train to get back to Fessenden.

  Grampa had a good pal, a fellow named Clem Norton, who seemed to spend his whole life reading books at the Athenaeum on Beacon Street. Sometimes Grampa would go and fetch Norton. "Nawton! " he'd say, in that Boston accent of his. "Let's go and watch the boys row over at Hawva'd!" Norton would say, "Fine!" and put down his book. They'd go over to the Charles River and watch the college boys row. Grampa would call out, "Who's that Number Two, Nawton?" "Number Two, that's Hallowell's boy! State Street Bank! Hallowell! State Street Bank!" "Who's that Number One up there?" "That's a Lowell!" "Is that Ralph Lowell's son?" "Yes, he's up at the First Bank of Boston!" And on it would go. And then my grandfather, ever the politician, would head over to State Street Bank, for example, and wait outside until closing time, when Mr. Hallowell left the building. He'd rush up to the banker and say, "Mr. Hallowell, Mr. Hallowell, I'm John F. Fitzgerald, the former mayor of Boston." I doubt that Hallowell was pleased to see him. But then Honey Fitz would say, "I saw your boy row over at Hawva'd today. Number Two. Beautiful stroke. Beautiful stroke." And in a beautiful stroke of political genius, Grampa would have won over the Brahmin banker. And of course, that was exactly what he had in mind the whole time.

  My memories of this good, grand old man have restored hope in me when things have been darkest in my life. He was a constant in my life during the difficult, nomadic years of boarding school. His simple bequest to me has been more precious than any fortune. Love life, and believe in it.

  In September 1943, the newly commissioned naval pilot Joseph Kennedy Jr. made a dashing farewell visit to the family at Hyannis Port. I came over from school for the occasion. With permission, he flew his PB4Y Liberator up from Florida to the Cape, where he landed and shook hands all round and said goodbye. He took off again, and this was the last glimpse we were to have of Joe. Soon he was in England, where he would complete twenty-five combat missions, and then, in August 1944, volunteer for one more.

  Bobby and I became quite close that autumn. He was attending Milton Academy just south of Boston, playing football and studying as he kept his attention focused on the war and international politics. In October, still six weeks shy of eighteen, he enlisted in the naval reserve as an apprentice seaman, restricted from active duty until the following year.

  We spent several weekends together at the Cape house that fall, usually just the two of us, though sometimes Lem Billings would come along. We'd drive to Hyannis Port after dusk and comb the deserted streets for a lonely open grocery store where we could buy some staples. Dad closed the house down when the weather turned cold, so we would sleep in the little apartment above the garage, bundled up against the frosty nights. Before turning in, we'd walk along the shore. Our talk would be typical of any two brothers--plans for the future, our schools, girls. I relished his company. He was still quiet, inner-directed, deepl
y devout. But the selfdeprecating humor that would mark him as a grown man was beginning to emerge. And he was always interested in what was going on in my life. Those chilly weekends at the Cape cast a quiet spell on both of us, I think, that is hard to describe.

  I do recall one preoccupation of Bobby's around that time. I'm convinced that his anguish over it led directly to one of the most famous Catholic doctrinal disputes of the late 1940s and early '50s, a dispute that still has resonance today. I believe, though I cannot be certain, that Bobby's concern resulted, over time, in the excommunication of a popular Boston priest, and to a major shift in Catholic teaching regarding the possibility of salvation for non-Catholics.

  Bobby was among many students attracted to the Thursday evening lectures given by Father Leonard Feeney, a priest, Jesuitical scholar, and a colorful, mesmerizing advocate of traditional doctrine. In the mid-1940s Father Feeney had become convinced that Catholicism as practiced in America was defective. In particular, the Church had gone lax on a tenet that Feeney believed to be a pillar of the faith: that salvation for people outside the Catholic Church was impossible.

  This implied consignment of millions of worthy souls to Purgatory troubled Bobby, and he talked to me about it as we walked along the beach. He discussed it with our father one weekend at the Cape house. I well remember the conversation.

  Dad could not believe that Bobby had heard Father Feeney correctly. "But," he said, "if you feel strongly that you did, I'm going to go into the other room and call Richard. Maybe he'll want you to go up to Boston and see him."

  "Richard" was Richard Cardinal Cushing. Dad and the cardinal enjoyed a long and profound friendship. I remember the cardinal coming to visit at the Cape. He and Dad liked to go out on the Marlin, dad's motorboat, with a pitcher of chowder and another pitcher of daiquiris, and talk theology and world issues while they cruised.

  Bobby said he felt strongly indeed. Bang! Dad called up "Richard" and arranged for Bobby to visit him. The cardinal, as nonplussed as Dad, sent some of his people over to hear Father Feeney's Thursday evening lecture. When he found that my brother was right, Cushing banned Feeney from speaking there; Feeney refused to obey the order, and in September 1949 the archdiocese formally condemned the priest's teaching and suspended him from his duties. In February 1952, Father Feeney was excommunicated.

  Bobby wasn't the only critic of Father Feeney, of course, but he was among the first to achieve results. Nor did his principled gesture end with the banishment of Feeney. Reinforced by Cardinal Cushing's discussions with the papal hierarchy in Rome, it became an animating impulse of the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, which opened under Pope John XXIII in 1962.

  It was in August 1944 that I had my first encounter with tragedy. Our family, Mother especially, was already digesting some unsettling news: in May, Kick, at twenty-four, informed us from London that she'd married her beau of six years, a British lord named William Cavendish. Cavendish was an Anglican--a Protestant--and as deeply as Mother loved Kick, she could not at first reconcile her daughter's decision with her own strict Catholic tenets about marrying and agreeing to raise your children within the faith.

  This situation was still fresh in our minds as several of us idled away the pleasant Sunday afternoon of August 13, in the sunroom of the Cape house. Our little family group included Mother, Jack, Joey Gargan and me, and Jean and Eunice, and also a young European friend of Eunice's, Peggy Edgerton Byrd, who was about eighteen. We were listening to a recording of Bing Crosby singing the number one tune of that year, "I'll Be Seeing You," when a strange dark car pulled into the front driving circle and stopped. Two naval chaplains got out, walked up the steps to the porch, and knocked on the screen door. Mother looked up from the Sunday paper she'd been reading in a tiny rocking chair that only she could fit into. As she received the clerics, we could hear a few words: "missing--lost." All of us froze.

  The chaplains asked to speak to Mr. Kennedy. Mother turned and rushed upstairs, where Dad lay napping. Moments later the two of them came back down. They took the clergymen into another room and talked briefly. When they emerged, Dad's face was twisted. He got the words out that confirmed what we already suspected. Joe Jr. was dead.

  After completing his required twenty-five combat missions and earning the right to return home, Joe had volunteered for a mission so dangerous that some members of his ground crew pleaded with him not to go. Along with a copilot, he was to take off in an experimental drone loaded with high explosives and pilot it on a trajectory toward a target in Germany. Over the English Channel, the two young Americans were to eject themselves, parachute into the sea, and let a radio beam guide the craft, by then a loaded weapon, to its target. Something had gone wrong. Perhaps the radio beam itself had ignited a tiny spark. Whatever the cause, the drone had exploded into a fireball just minutes before the two pilots were due to bail out.

  I recall that suddenly the sunroom was awash in tears. Mother, my sisters, our guest, myself--everybody was crying; some wailed. Dad turned himself around and stumbled back up the stairs; he did not want us to witness his own dissolution into sobs.

  This went on for about fifteen minutes. And then Jack spoke up.

  "Joe wouldn't want us sitting here crying," my brother said. "He would want us to go sailing. Let's go sailing. Teddy, Joey, get the sails. We're going sailing."

  And that was what we did. We went sailing.

  My countless hours upon the sea have mostly been happy ones. This was the first of the many times when taking the tiller has steered me away from nearly unendurable grief across the healing waters on the long, hard course toward renewal and hope.

  Joe was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and the Air Medal. In 1946, the navy commissioned a destroyer in his name. None of that mattered to my father. I don't think Dad ever fully recovered from the death of his eldest son.

  Three weeks after those men visited the house with the tragic news about Joe came the news of a second crushing loss. Billy Cavendish had been shot dead by a German bullet in Belgium. Kathleen, who had returned to be with our family after Joe's death, was shopping with Eunice in New York when a messenger found her and told her she must go back to the Waldorf-Astoria, where Dad had a suite.

  Kathleen and Billy had been married four months, and had spent only a month together before Cavendish was called to the front.

  * * *

  My prep school education moved along in its checkerboard fashion, and then stabilized. In 1945, the year of the Allied victory in World War II, I was enrolled at Cranwell, in western Massachusetts. There, I kept getting into fights with my roommate, a fellow named Francis Aloysius O'Hara. The punishment for misbehavior at Cranwell was memorizing and reciting long prayers. O'Hara had a photographic memory and could learn the prayers in no time. I had to struggle for hours with them.

  Then the following year I finally was matched up with a school where I felt at home, and stayed a while: Milton Academy, where I spent my four high school years.

  Mentally and physically, I began my transformation from boy to young man at Milton. My grades improved, spurred by my blooming interests in civic affairs, debate, and public speaking. For the first time, I thought of a career in public service. And I started to convert the chubbiness that I'd carried since childhood into muscle. I began to go out with girls at Milton. Nancy Burley was perhaps my first sweetheart--she attended the nearby Milton Academy Girls School. We went to dances together for about three years.

  I had not quite outgrown my love of pranks while at Milton. I had an outside tutor for chemistry, an extraordinary teacher in the local community named Dr. Nervais, a Belgian. He turned out students who won all sorts of national awards. None of them, I must report, came from my crowd.

  We were more absorbed in playing practical jokes on Dr. Nervais. Among his teachings was that a liquid substance, when vaporized, would weigh exactly the same if it were passed through a sealed pipe, then exposed to cold water on the pip
e's other end until it cooled to room temperature. "You vill see," he'd say in his studious Belgian cadences, "that ven it comes through, it vill veigh the same as ven we started--exactly two and a half grams." Except it never did. "Well, it isn't the same," one of us would muse. "It's heavier over here." And Dr. Nervais would patiently repeat the experiment: "Vell, ve vill do the situation again."

  I can't remember how he found out about the magnets in the drawer on the cooling side of the table. I should not have even been a part of that prank. But it seemed very funny at the time. Dr. Nervais was actually quite a good sport about the whole thing. He was an excellent teacher and obviously knew a lot about how to handle silly adolescent boys. But I still can't figure out valences.

  I joined several of Milton's teams: wrestling, then track, and ultimately football. Milton had a famous wrestling coach named Louie Andrews. Louie's squads didn't lose a meet in twelve years. They used to beat even Andover and Exeter, two hot teams. Louie's approach was simple and inspirational. He wanted you to be the best, and you didn't want to disappoint him.

  I must thank Bobby, as in so many things, for connecting me with Louie. Before he graduated, my brother went to the coach and said, "Teddy is coming. Shape him up." Which he did. I learned balance, I learned how to use my legs and feet, and I learned muscle-building and aggressiveness. All these were to come in handy sooner than I could have predicted.

  The Milton years were like a bright dawn to me after the cheerlessness of my early boarding school years. My knowledge increased more rapidly in Milton's classrooms than at any other place of learning, perhaps including Harvard. Even the summers away from school, at the Cape, were especially glorious.

  Joey Gargan and I were sailing on August 15, 1945, when we heard a deafening volley of explosions erupting from Hyannis Port. Fireworks. We headed for shore, and learned that World War II was over--Japan had announced its surrender, following that of Germany the previous May. A parade was organized, and Joey and I found ourselves in a convertible filled with happy relatives and friends, driven past the dancing, cheering crowds lining Hyannis's streets by Lieutenant Jack Kennedy.