True Compass: A Memoir

by Edward M. Kennedy

  The Castro fear was not entirely unjustified. I witnessed a powerful example of Cuba's influence as I visited small villages in Colombia and Venezuela. People in the region had devised an amazing bit of primitive technology: a can filled with kerosene, with a wick on top. When lit, the fuel burned at a rate just fast enough to power a small fan. The fans, in turn, generated enough electricity to power radios the size of a human fist. The radios pulled in one station: Havana. In the poorest of villages, listening to news from Cuba was a communal event. This moved me tremendously. To my mind, it was not an indication of communist passions. It was a cry for community. I was able to convey this sense of things to my brother. I believe it reinforced his determination to see the Alliance for Progress through.

  I returned home in time to be present in Boston at the birth, on September 26, 1961, of our first son, Edward Moore Kennedy Jr. The joy and miracle of the birth of this child moved me beyond words. The love I felt for him that day has continued to multiply with each passing day since.

  A little less than three months afterward, my world changed forever. On December 19, while Dad was playing golf in Florida, he suddenly grew weak. Cousin Ann Gargan, who was with him, drove him back to our home in Palm Beach, and from there he was taken by ambulance to a hospital. The diagnosis was severe: an intracranial thrombosis--a stroke--that paralyzed the right side of his seventy-three-year-old body.

  All the family converged at his bedside. My mother went to the hospital immediately. Jack and Bobby flew down from Washington on Air Force One. Pat, Eunice, and Jean arrived.

  I located a vascular specialist in Boston and persuaded him to fly to Florida with me, where I found my father conscious but near death. Pneumonia had set in, and last rites had been administered. All of us gathered for a vigil in Dad's room. I stayed there by his bedside for three days.

  We learned that Dad would survive, but that he would probably never walk again. Worse, the brain hemorrhage had damaged the part of his brain that controlled his speech. He would be able to make sounds; but the familiar sharp, confident, Boston-inflected cadences that informed, inspired, cajoled, and instructed me--the voice that had read me the Sunday funnies in my early childhood and spoken for Roosevelt on the radio in 1940--was to be heard no more.

  My father's illness hit me very hard. He had been so strong, so vital, so important in all our lives. And finally, for the first time in my life, the two of us had been together as men, sharing a common purpose. Now that aspect of our relationship was lost to me. It was almost more than I could bear.

  There were some people around me who thought my political plans would end with Dad's illness. But that would have been at odds with everything Joe Kennedy believed in or that I had worked for. I would continue with my plans, but I had to be sure that even without Dad able to strategize with me, I would do it the right way. My close friend and brother-in-law Steve Smith made regular visits to Boston to help out. He made an enormous difference. And he gave reports to Jack and Bobby, who were following my progress very closely.

  On Sunday, March 11, 1962, as rumors of my running escalated, I was scheduled to go on NBC's Meet the Press. I'd flown into Washington the previous Friday for a meeting with Jack in the White House. When I arrived, the president instructed his secretary Evelyn Lincoln, "Don't bother me for a while." Then he sat me down behind his desk and pretended to be Lawrence Spivak, the host of Meet the Press. He was very tough as he asked me questions about foreign and domestic policy, and he was not satisfied with my answers. "Well, we're going to have to sharpen these up a bit," he said as he called in Ted Sorensen and another aide, Meyer "Mike" Feldman. They peppered me for an hour and a half with the toughest questions I could possibly imagine. I was stunned. But they wouldn't let up. We went over and over possible questions and answers until we all started to feel pretty good. I learned something that day, and have followed that method of preparation for Sunday morning interview shows for all of my public life. It has generally served me fairly well.

  On the morning of my Meet the Press appearance, Jack was down in Florida and watched the program from the Palm Beach house. Dave Powers tells the story of how my brother was so nervous that he kept walking in and out of the room, and at the end had to ask Dave how I did. Dave said I did fine. This wasn't enough for Jack. He phoned up Lawrence Spivak. I can only imagine what Spivak must have thought when he received a call from the president asking him how his kid brother did on the show. Spivak said, "He did just fine. I just never could get an answer out of him on this aid-to-education issue. I couldn't pin him down on whether he was for aid to Catholic schools or against it." Jack laughed and replied, "That's just fine, Larry. That's just where he ought to be."

  I resigned my position as assistant district attorney and announced for the Senate three days after the broadcast. One of my most cherished possessions is a framed note from my sister-in-law Jackie that hangs on my wall at home:

  For Teddy

  Jack wrote this about you, and you know how proud and happy he was when you won.

  With love, Jackie

  And along with that note is a press release drafted by the White House press office at the time of my announcement, with the president's handwritten changes to the draft.

  Jack's press office thought he should release the following statement:

  The President has been advised of his brother's statement. The President's brother has made an independent decision to seek the Senate seat in Massachusetts. He has not sought the President's endorsement of his candidacy and he is not looking for the President's help in the campaign.

  In other words, this guy is on his own! Here's how Jack edited it to read:

  The President of course knows of his brother's statement. His brother prefers that this matter be decided by the people of Massachusetts and that the President should not become involved. In response to this request, the White House will have no comment.

  I walked in the St. Patrick's Day parade in Boston three days after my announcement. The crowds were jubilant and friendly, and I was starting to think that running for office was pretty grand sport, until I ran into my first opponent: myself.

  I received a telephone call from Jack. "Teddy, I think it's good if we get that Harvard story out." For a moment I couldn't even think what he was talking about. I said, "What do you mean by that?!" Jack answered, "Get it out, the whole story, from beginning to end. Get it out in the early part of this campaign."

  I thought, How nice of him to think about this. But Jack was right once again. Through an intermediary, our family furnished the details of the incident to Bob Healy at the Globe. Jack himself urged Healy to slip the cheating episode into the body of a longer profile on me. Healy refused to negotiate, and on Thursday, March 30, the Globe played the story on its front page.

  I had a speaking engagement in Milford that night. The hall down there held about four hundred people. As I pulled into the parking lot I said to myself, They've all read the Globe. I've got to go in there and face that crowd. This is going to be bad.

  I steeled myself as I walked into the hall, and once again was reminded of the basic decency of people. The crowd rose to its feet and began to cheer me. I cannot describe the feeling of uplift that I felt as I walked up to the podium. It seemed that the people in that room, at least, were willing to look beyond the stupid mistakes of a teenager. Under my breath, before I began my speech, I murmured, almost as if it were a prayer, Maybe I can get through this after all.

  My main opponent in the primary was Eddie McCormack. (The Republican primary was dominated by familiar political names as well: H. Stuart Hughes, the grandson of presidential candidate Charles Evans Hughes, and George Cabot Lodge, son of Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.) I didn't know Eddie well, but I thought him intelligent and a good politician. He knew how to connect with people. For instance, if we made a joint appearance at a synagogue, Eddie would speak some Hebrew. He had run statewide before--he was the Commonwealth's attorney general--and he had a strong recor
d on civil rights.

  Neither the press nor academia--which still had a voice in public matters in those days--had yet accepted me. The New York Times columnist James "Scotty" Reston hammered at my presumption and inexperience, and the editorial page was scarcely more friendly. Vaguely scolding terms such as "dynasty" and "Kennedyism" were cropping up in press coverage, along with such questions as, "One too many?" My alma mater seemed almost to regret having given me a diploma. One law professor denounced me around the state as a "bumptious newcomer" and a "coattail candidate."

  More than my own political future was riding on this campaign. Jack's advisers made no secret to me that if I lost, it would be a loss for all the Kennedys. We had more or less taken the nation by storm as a family, and the rejection of one of us in his home state would harm Jack's career.

  Jack helped me, not publicly of course, but from behind the scenes. He organized a strategy session at the White House on April 27, with politicians and aides from all over Massachusetts flying in to brief him on how the candidates were viewed in the state. After that, full control shifted to Steve Smith, who proved nearly as masterful as Bobby at running a campaign. As Steve's staffers--many of them attorneys working without pay--fanned out across Massachusetts to organize support, I plunged back into the marathon round of travel and speechmaking that I'd experienced two years earlier. Only this time, I was speaking not for my brother, but for myself.

  And I was having fun doing it. Back in my home state now, I could campaign the old-fashioned way, the Honey Fitz way, with marching bands, flags, drum majorettes, buttonholing people on the street. Once, as I strode the aisles of a textile machinery plant in Worcester, I spied a grimy, sweaty fellow and closed in on him with my hand outstretched. He pulled back, signaling to me that his own hand was too greasy. "Gimme that, buddy!" I yelled. I wore his worker's grime on my hand as a badge of honor the rest of the day.

  Joan also visited countless women's club meetings and teas around the Commonwealth, charming audiences with her enthusiasm, her persuasiveness on my behalf, and with the home movies of our family that she liked to show.

  As strange as it seems, this was really the first time in nearly four years of marriage that Joan and I were actually working together toward a goal that would affect our lives. Even so, our campaigning was frequently separate.

  As I look back on this period of my life and at my marriage, I realize that Joan and I were young and naive about what it took to have a successful relationship. We certainly had not spent a lot of time together during our courtship, and we didn't spend the necessary time together in the early years. Almost immediately after the wedding celebrations were over, I plunged back into law school and the moot court competition, my travels, and campaign work for Jack. And so we never benefited from that critical but fleeting interval in which a young husband and wife get to know themselves and each other as a married couple.

  Joan was bright and beautiful and talented. We shared the same religious faith. She was a graduate of the same Catholic college that my sisters and Mother had attended. We both had high expectations for a successful marriage. Sadly, that was not to be. Joan was private, contemplative, and artistic, while I was public, political, and on the go. We probably would have realized that we had fundamentally different temperaments if we had taken more time to get to know each other before we married, but we didn't want to wait. We thought we were in love. And I will grant that at the time I met her, I was keen to join my brothers as a married man, a family man. I certainly wished to be a family man. How could I not, given that "family" virtually defined my entire consciousness? Perhaps I'd assured myself that the core requirement in a marriage, compatibility, would develop naturally once the vows were exchanged.

  My parents and siblings were well disposed toward Joan. Yet as time went on, the awareness deepened among all of us that something fundamental was not working right.

  Our relationship atrophied. We remained together for many years longer than we were happy, but I don't think either of us seriously considered a divorce for most of those years. So many other things were going on in our lives, so many difficulties, so many tragedies, that breaking up our marriage just wasn't on the agenda. The reasons were many: our children, our faith, my career, and perhaps fear of change.

  To compound our mutual unhappiness, as Joan herself has discussed publicly many times, she suffered with alcoholism. I myself drank too much at times and feel exceedingly lucky to have been spared addiction.

  I do not blame Joan for the demise of our marriage. Nor do I agree with some of the accounts that she has given as to the reasons for its demise. I regret my failings and accept responsibility for them and will leave it at that.

  In 1961, the worst of these troubles were still in the future. Joan, not yet twenty-five, did her best to be a mother and wife to an aspiring senator.

  When I was able to get off the hustings, I'd immerse myself in long rounds of political "homework" assignments and quizzing. These were run by some of Jack's senior aides, and held mostly at the Cape house. The old house was buzzing.

  By June, the time of the Democratic state convention, Steve Smith's groundwork had paid off. The party's endorsement was at stake, and our side had projected 1,196 of the 1,719 delegates. The roll call had given us 691 voted to McCormack's 360 when Eddie conceded the endorsement but demanded a primary contest in the fall, which he had a right to do. The primary contest led naturally to debates. Eddie and I had two of them, but the first was probably decisive. It was held on August 27 at South Boston High School, and carried on radio and television.

  I'd flattered myself that I was a pretty good debater based on my training at Harvard and in moot court at the University of Virginia. But I was hardly ready for the ferocity of McCormack's attack. "You never worked for a living," McCormack began railing at me as he pointed a finger in my direction. "You never held elective office. You are not running on qualifications. You are running on a slogan, 'He can do more for Massachusetts.' That is the most insulting slogan I have ever seen. It says, 'Vote for this man because he has influence, connections, relatives.'"

  And this, mind you, was only in Eddie's opening statement.

  As the debate went along, he dropped such insinuations as, "We need a senator with experience, not arrogance," and, "The office of United States senator should be merited and not inherited." He mocked my trips to Europe. He mentioned that I had once been arrested in Pamplona for throwing a cushion into the bullring, and was held for six or seven hours. (This happened to be true. In my defense, I will say that it was a terrible bullfight and everyone was throwing cushions.) It struck me later that the likely way Eddie could have obtained this information was through the CIA or Henry Cabot Lodge.

  The papers later said my voice shook as I spoke. But I refrained from firing back at Eddie on the same level of hostility and personal attack. Instead, I emphasized the sincerity of my claim that I could help the people of Massachusetts, and the similarity of my political philosophies to those of Jack.

  At the end, Eddie McCormack could not stop himself from one last ad hominem jab. "If his name was [simply] Edward Moore," he said, pointing at me again, "his candidacy would be a joke. Nobody is laughing. Your name"--turning to me--"is Edward Moore Kennedy."

  I was seething, not least because of the insult to a good and decent man, Eddie Moore. Joan and I returned home--by this time we were living at 3 Charles River Square--shaken, and not knowing whether my candidacy was finished. I called his widow, Mary Moore, to apologize that Eddie's name was dragged through the mud because of me. The living room was quiet for about forty-five minutes. And then, close to midnight, the telephone began to ring, and it kept on ringing, call after call. People were telling us that although the TV newscasts had Eddie "blasting" me, the late-night talk shows struck a different sentiment from the callers. People felt that Eddie had overdone it, and they admired my restraint.

  One of the calls was from the president. Jack had been so nervous he co
uld not sit still and watch the debate. He'd asked others about it, and they'd said I held my own.

  And I suppose I had. Viewers and listeners seemed to see my restraint as a virtue, a sign of dignity. And they felt Eddie had gone too far. The next morning, I was out meeting and greeting voters when a laborer came up to me and said, "Hey, Kennedy. They say you haven't worked a day in your life." Then he stuck out his right hand and clapped me on the back with his left, saying, "Lemme tell you. You haven't missed a thing!"

  Eddie and I had one other debate, and it was pretty mild. Perhaps his advisers had suggested that he try a little restraint and dignity himself. It was too late, though. On primary night, the numbers were Edward Kennedy 73 percent of the vote, and Edward McCormack 27 percent.

  I will always remember that evening as being enormously exciting, but also incredibly sad. The exciting part was the victory. A malfunctioning ballot box up in Salem gave us an early tip-off about the outcome: when workers opened it so they could repair it, they could see that I was winning by 60-40, and transmitted the news down to the Cape. That put everyone in festive spirits. But later that evening, my father suffered his second stroke. I canceled all the television appearances and spent time with him in the hospital. That November, I made my father proud in the best way I knew: I defeated the Republican George Cabot Lodge, by 53 percent to 44. The next day, I was sworn in as a senator.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Drinks with the Senator

  1962

  I arrived in Washington to begin my Senate career on November 7, 1962, the day after being elected. Given that I was technically filling out the last two years of Jack's unexpired term, the appointed Benjamin Smith having stepped aside, we did not wait until the new Congress began on January 3, 1963--although I was sworn in on that date too, along with the other incoming senators, including Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, with whom I still serve. The press was enormously interested in this event. I was nearly blocked by them from coming over to the Capitol from my hotel on Massachusetts Avenue. Lyndon Johnson performed the ceremony in the Senate gallery as Joan and my sisters and parents looked on from the seats.