True Compass: A Memoir

by Edward M. Kennedy

  "I don't want a saddle," I told him. "I'll try a surcingle."

  I didn't know exactly what a surcingle was, but I soon found out. It is a leather strap that you fasten around a horse's middle when you ride bareback. It comes with handholds attached. That sounded reassuring.

  I also came up with a cowboy hat, a black Stetson.

  In the trailer, a bowlegged cowpoke introduced himself as Shorty, and asked me, "You ever done this before?"

  I said I hadn't. "What can you tell me?"

  Shorty said, "Well, I'm number one. They're going to let you go, I guess, after me."

  I looked more closely at Shorty. His cowboy hat was beaten and tattered. His riding gloves were soaked with sweat, practically a part of his skin. For some reason they had little bells sewn on the sides. His shirt was dirty and torn in places. He looked like he'd just come from the losing end of a bar fight.

  And Shorty was the bronco-riding expert.

  "I'll show you how to do this thing," he said. "Watch me." I watched as Shorty climbed atop a slatted frame and balanced himself on the wood above a horse that was about a foot and a half below him. The horse seemed to be trying to kick the pen to splinters. When his turn came, Shorty dropped onto the mount and wrapped his fingers around the surcingle, his forearm rippling with muscles. The gate opened and the horse came crashing out, kicking his hind legs side to side. Shorty stayed on top, tipping his hat. He stayed on for about ten seconds--pretty good--and then tried to switch from the bucking steed to the tamed horse that had cantered up alongside. He missed the remount and fell to the dust. The horse he'd been riding did something that I later learned few horses do: he began to "corkscrew"--jump and twist and pivot, directly above Shorty. Shorty rolled, his shirt buttons popped, and he finally got to his feet and came limping, caked with dust and blood, back to the corral.

  I blurted out, "Shorty! Are you okay?"

  Shorty said, "You're next."

  I'm next? I'm next?! "Is there anything else I ought to know?" I shouted to Shorty's retreating back. He didn't hear me. He was disappearing into the trailer, looking for ice.

  My horse was named Skyrocket. I think he got his name by sending everyone who tried to ride him straight up into the air. He was already crashing against the pen. Boom! Boom! Boom!

  I grabbed the surcingle. The gate opened, and out I lurched, the world looking like a piece of film running through a broken sprocket. I could hear the crowd--either cheering or laughing, I couldn't tell which.

  Somehow, I lasted seven seconds before Skyrocket launched me where he'd launched all the others. When my head cleared I realized I was stretched out on my back, breathing dust. No bones were broken. I pushed myself upright, swatted my pants, and walked back to the corral. But it all paid off. When I walked out onstage to address those cowboy conventioneers that afternoon, they were still cheering. I didn't need my campaign literature. I didn't even have to give a talk. I just said, "You know, there's a horse called Skyrocket"--here they all cheered again--"and he wants you to vote for John Kennedy!"

  We picked up about half the delegates.

  My reputation must have preceded me to Rock Springs, just under forty miles to the north. There, they wanted to shoot a cigarette out of my mouth. I was a good sport on that one until I heard the sound of the pistol being cocked, and then decided I'd take a pass on that adventure.

  After Montana, I went on to Idaho, where, through the efforts of some energetic supporters, we managed to gain a split of that delegation as well. And from there to Utah, where I had my first run-in with a real-life gunslinger. He got the drop on me when he caught me trying to rustle his car.

  I'd been flying over desert land toward a political luncheon in Price, a small town at the foot of a steep mountain. My escort was a young Kennedy supporter named Oscar McConkie, the son of a prominent judge in the area. As we descended, our pilot noticed that the desert was covered by a ground fog as far as the eye could see, except for some highlands on our side of the town. We were faced with the choice of either trying to land somewhere on those highlands or fly to Salt Lake City and miss the luncheon.

  Flying low, the pilot spotted a rugged dirt road and said he thought he could land there. Oscar and I jumped out of the plane after it came to a rest, and when we looked around, the pilot was taking off again.

  We had no transportation. Price was fifteen miles away. We started walking. Oscar's shoes hadn't been made for walking on rocky land. Nor had mine, but since this was my show, I told my friend to wait while I walked on ahead and looked for a car to flag down. The car I found didn't need flagging; it sat by the side of the road unoccupied, a green 1956 Ford station wagon. I looked around for the owner, but the terrain was empty.

  I thought, "Well, if I don't get to Price in the next twenty minutes, I'll miss the luncheon, so I might as well take the car. I'll get one of our supporters to drive it back here as soon as Oscar and I arrive."

  I reached through a side window and unlocked a door. I started rummaging in the glove compartment and under the seat for a key, but came up empty. I figured I would start the car by crossing the wires. I'd never done that before in my life, but I'd seen it in the movies.

  Then I heard a sound and looked out the car's window into a pistol pointed right at my belt buckle, held by about as tough-looking a customer as I'd ever seen. He'd been out in the desert trapping, I later found out. Now he'd found some quarry.

  I thought fast. Before the stranger could say anything, I began jabbering about how glad I was to see him and how I'd sure appreciate some help because I'd really be in trouble if I didn't get to Price in a hurry. The pistol stayed aimed at my midsection, but the cowboy's steely gaze softened just a bit.

  At this point the cavalry, in the form of McConkie, arrived. He recognized the trapper as a fellow his father the judge had once given a break to in a court case. The trapper drove us into town, where I finally talked the county Democratic convention into giving Jack's campaign what I'd come there seeking: half a delegate.

  Oscar McConkie did all right for himself over the years, by the way. In 2007 the Utah State Bar named him Lawyer of the Year.

  Arizona was next. As in Montana and Idaho, the old-line Democrats were supporting Lyndon Johnson; the key was to get various district committee people elected who were sympathetic to Jack, and the districts were widely separated by rugged terrain.

  Flying myself in a Tri-Pacer, a single-engine plane that I'd chartered, I hopscotched from Tucson to Phoenix and several smaller towns from south to north: Globe, Show Low, Flagstaff, Prescott, and Yuma among them. I'd stocked the plane with an armload of maps, checked the weather, and then launched myself into the sky. Two things were quickly impressed on my mind as an amateur pilot flying over Arizona. One was that the terrain lacked the visual navigation aids that are common in the East: air stations, towers, lakes, rivers, railroads, and highways. The second was that airports were even scarcer than landmarks. Luckily, one could glide for many miles in any direction to find a refueling stop.

  I spotted Globe easily enough from the air, after an hour's flight, and touched down for a luncheon with county Democrats and a radio interview. Afterward, Barry DeRose, the county chairman, hitched a ride with me over to Show Low, a town high up on the Mogollon Rim of eastcentral Arizona. (It is called Show Low, according to legend, because a couple of cowpokes who couldn't stand each other played a card game to decide who'd have to move out. The low-card holder got to stay. One of the men drew the deuce of clubs, for which the main street is named.) We tried to talk a third fellow, whose name I recall as Sadovich, into coming with us, but Sadovich doubted my piloting skills and changed his mind at least six times on the way to the plane. DeRose finally talked him on board. I got the engines going and had started to taxi when I noticed that Sadovich was twitching like a rabbit. I decided to calm him by giving him something to do. "Take this chart," I told him, "and hold on to it. And keep your eye on the main highway, because if we lose sight of it we're lost.
" Unaccountably, this did not ease Sadovich's mind. "Screw you fellows," he blurted, fumbling at his seat belt. "I'm not about to go with you two."

  Actually, he was about to go with us, because we were nearly airborne. But Sadovich opened the door and jumped for it. DeRose and I could hardly stop our laughter, but I managed to get the plane in the air.

  Sadovich missed a great experience. The hop from Globe to Show Low was beautiful. The rugged plateaus and pine forests were covered with a light country snow that sparkled in the sun. DeRose and I were enjoying the view so much, in fact, that damned if we didn't lose track of the highway. I shifted the bearing more and more to the north in hopes that it would reappear, but to no avail. A smog-covered town emerged beneath us, with an airport tower that peeked just above the mist. DeRose asked me the name of the tower. I checked the chart and could find nothing in the vicinity that corresponded to it. "It must be a new one," I told him, "that hasn't been put on the map yet." Something in my voice must have tipped him off that I did not entirely believe this, because he was not convinced. "Let's go back and take another look," he told me. I thought that was a pretty good idea myself.

  As we circled lower, DeRose peered hard and then gasped, "My God! That's Fort Apache! I know it because I'm a counsel for the Apache Indians. I've been here before!"

  This discovery meant that we were off course by some fifty miles to the east, blown by winds we hadn't been aware of. I frantically scanned the chart again and noticed that the highway leaving Fort Apache to the north continued directly to Show Low. So we followed it on to the town.

  That was when we discovered that our troubles were only beginning. Neither of us could locate the Show Low airport. Everything was covered with white--the result of a four-foot snowfall. We couldn't turn back because we didn't have enough gas to get us anywhere else. I started my descent. DeRose, sounding just a little like Sadovich, asked me whether I knew how to land in snow. I assured him that I'd never had any trouble in the past--which was not a complete lie, given that I had never tried to land in snow in the past.

  The landing proved to be perhaps the best I ever made, as the snow acted to slow my plane down. Two men inside the hangar, looking at us dubiously, came out to gas up the plane. DeRose and I met at a nearby roadhouse with a committee of county chairmen--all three of them. I felt as though I were winning the West, one Democrat at a time.

  I took off from Show Low after eight taxis down the runway to pack the snow down, and headed for Flagstaff.

  The next day started out uneventfully; in fact my flight to Prescott took only thirty minutes instead of forty-five, thanks to eighty-mile-anhour tailwinds. I enjoyed a good breakfast meeting with another handful of party leaders, and then reboarded the Tri-Pacer to fly to Yuma. And that is when I discovered that I might be a missile target.

  As I took off in the early-morning glow of the sun, I heard something through the radio static about air-to-air missiles, ground-to-air missiles, and that sort of thing. This failed to activate any warning lights in my mind--after all, I was flying over Arizona, not the Soviet Union--so I spun the radio dial until I picked up Frank Sinatra. I hummed along for a while, and then glanced down at my chart. I noticed that I'd crossed into what appeared to be a restricted zone. I flipped the chart over and read that the missile zone was open to civilian aircraft--except at times when they were conducting missile testing operations, which was in the early morning.

  By this time I was in the middle of the zone, with no possibility of rezoning myself, as it were. For the next twenty minutes, I flew onward hunched over the wheel with visions of every newsreel I'd seen of those hound-dog missiles going after a drone plane and never missing. I made it through, and arrived in Yuma. I landed at the wrong airport. On the other hand, I landed.

  I was surprised--perhaps I should not have been--that the question of Jack's religion troubled some Democrats' minds in the West. Some people were concerned when I raised the issue; others when I did not. Either way, it served to let me know that my brother would have to deal with the matter of his faith in every corner of the country.

  At the University of Wyoming in Laramie in the late fall, I addressed a Young Democrats meeting with my usual talking points. I talked about the upcoming election and the national and international issues facing the candidates, Jack's strengths and relative weaknesses, and so on. I came to the topic of religion and dwelt on it for a few minutes, dismissing it as not a major issue in the election. Then I opened things up to questions from the audience.

  As I stood talking to students afterward, an elderly man approached me and said, "Mr. Kennedy, I am a professor of psychology at the university here, and I would like to make just one comment about your discussion. I cannot for the life of me understand why you discuss religion as either a plus or a minus for your brother. It seems to me that from your very raising of this question, you are showing that the Kennedy people are hypersensitive about this issue, and from your discussion here tonight, I fear you are going to make a good many people conscious of that factor who otherwise might not be."

  I appreciated this line of thought, and thanked the professor for his candor. I said that since I was just a beginner in giving political speeches, I found his comments especially helpful. I left the campus believing that I'd been given valuable advice on the religion issue, and that I should avoid it from then on unless it surfaced as a direct question.

  The following evening I spoke again at an open meeting about the coming election. Again, I covered Jack's prospects, his strengths and liabilities, and steered clear of religion entirely. In the question-and-answer session that followed, another professor of psychology stood up, this one from the University of Colorado. "You've made a great mistake," he admonished me, "in not talking about the role that religion could play in Jack's race. It's a question that everyone is concerned about. By not bringing it up, Mr. Kennedy, you appear hypersensitive about the whole question. It's quite evident from your discussion tonight that you are going to make many people conscious of a factor, which otherwise might not be the case."

  I thanked the professor for his candor. And continued on my sojourn through the West.

  Looking over my faded notes from that priceless adventure of nearly fifty years ago, rereading the brief, earnest stump speech I delivered at breakfast meetings and auditoriums and college dining halls, I find a capsule glimpse of the vast changes in American politics since Jack's era. I find some constants as well, but it is the changes that interest me, because so many of them sprang from Jack's initiatives.

  Twin-engine airplanes of course have long since been replaced by jets, closed-circuit TV, and the Internet. Retail politics still flourishes--putting shoe leather on the ground, pressing flesh, traveling to localities around the country.

  My stump speech as written ran a little less than six double-spaced pages. While I didn't actually read it--I spoke off the cuff--I probably stayed fairly close to the general outline, usually speaking for about ten minutes in addition to the opening thanks to my hosts. I always covered three main topics: federal aid to education, medical care for the aged, and foreign policy.

  Federal aid to education, in 1959, was mostly about how to pay for school construction, teachers' salaries, and school buses. Brown v. Board of Education was just five years old; its enforcement was a matter for the states, and not yet a part of the national dialogue. How the government should address the needs of poor and minority students, students with learning disabilities, the question of evolution versus creationism, school prayer--these were unimaginable topics in a presidential campaign, as were literacy levels, charter schools, the contents of text and library books, and guns in the classroom. Just five years later, the War on Poverty created Head Start, federal aid to low-income students, and other transformative measures. Lyndon Johnson is justly credited with steering this program to reality, but the groundwork was laid by Jack, who had been appalled at the living conditions of the rural poor when he campaigned in West Virginia, a
nd then was galvanized in 1962 by Michael Harrington's landmark study of poverty, The Other America.

  Medical care for the aged was an issue of some concern back then, but the problem and its solutions were only generally defined. Both candidates acknowledged a need for reform. Richard Nixon was campaigning, rather liberally, on a proposal to pay for it with a direct tax levied on every taxpayer--but disbursed only to those who would sign "a pauper's oath," as my speech argued. Jack envisioned a program to be set up under the Social Security program, covering those working men and women who paid a small fraction of their earnings into it.

  This was the root idea of Medicare, which Jack was laying out in his own campaign speeches, and which came to fruition in that same breakout year of 1965, as part of Johnson's Great Society. Then there was the burning issue of World War II and Korea, which were still fresh in the American memory. The fear of communism was all-consuming. Yet the issues I addressed in that stump speech--the Hungarian revolution, the nationalist uprising in Algeria, and those monumentally strategic islands of Quemoy and Matsu--seem almost benign when contrasted to the dangers at large in the world today.

  I still treasure those faded notes and the brittle pages of that earnest stump speech of half a century ago.

  By early February, the West was behind me. Primary voting was set to begin in March, with New Hampshire, the traditional "first" state, leading off on March 8. Now my services were required back east, which was just fine with me for several reasons. The most important was that Joan was about to have our first baby.

  She was with me out west during the earlier days of campaigning, but that became more difficult as her pregnancy advanced. She had been incredibly supportive during my long absences. She was only twenty-three then, not long out of college, and about to become a mother in a family that was busy trying to get one of its own elected president. She went to live with her parents in their Bronxville house, where she was given love and support during the late stages of her pregnancy. She and I were in constant contact by telephone during my western swing, and I'd told her that when the baby was due I would be at her side.