True Compass: A Memoir

by Edward M. Kennedy

  "Some of the anger of recent days reflects the pain of a new idea still being born--the idea of a society where sex discrimination is ended and sexual harassment is unacceptable--the idea of an America where the majority who are women are truly and finally equal citizens."

  Then, shifting my focus to another source of recent public anger, I turned to the heart of what I'd come to say.

  "I am painfully aware," I told my audience, "that the criticism directed at me in recent months involves far more than honest disagreements with my positions, or the usual criticism from the far right. It also involves the disappointment of friends and many others who rely on me to fight the good fight."

  I looked around the auditorium and continued, in matter-of-fact tones:

  "To them I say: I recognize my own shortcomings--the faults in the conduct of my private life. I realize that I alone am responsible for them, and I am the one who must confront them. I believe that each of us as individuals must not only struggle to make a better world, but to make ourselves better, too, and in this life those endeavors are never finished."

  After the speech, I was relieved, but I knew it was only the beginning. I had work to do.

  That evening, after a quiet dinner, I asked Vicki to take a walk with me. I wanted to show her some of the things that make Boston such a special place for me. We walked through the Public Garden and through the Common, jewels in Boston's Emerald Necklace, the magnificent park system created by Frederick Law Olmstead. We walked up Chestnut Street, where I showed her the buildings designed by Charles Bulfinch, the same architect who had designed the U.S. Capitol and the church, though I didn't know it at the time, at which my beloved mother eventually would be buried. I showed Vicki Louisburg Square, where citizens of Irish descent had gathered to challenge my grandfather when he appointed an Italian American to a post, shouting, "Remember your own, Honey Fitz. Remember your own!"

  I always saw any campaign as an education, for me and for the voters. But I hadn't gone through especially competitive elections for a while, and the voters didn't know what I'd been doing in the Senate. They knew about all of the tabloid fodder, but not about the serious hard work of legislating and the many successes we had.

  I faced some other troubling fires of discontent that burned in Massachusetts and the nation. There was increasing unhappiness with the status quo and a strong aversion to incumbency. "Term limits" was the cure-all of the moment. The Republicans' "Gingrich Revolution," which in 1994 would claim a net fifty-four House seats and eight in the Senate, was forming. Right-wing talk radio was on the rise, lending fury to the general discontent.

  There were reasons enough for discontent. People were hurting in my state and all across the country. The rhetoric by political leaders was to demonize the poor as people getting something for nothing. Gingrich was calling America a welfare state. But the policies he was proposing were heartless.

  And my likely Republican opponent was right out of central casting--young, tall, handsome, slender, with a beautiful wife and five attractive sons. Mitt Romney had a Harvard MBA and a fortune that he was prepared to spend.

  The son of George W. Romney, the former Michigan governor and 1968 Republican presidential candidate, Mitt was forty-seven in 1994, and a legend in Boston financial circles. His private equity investment firm, Bain Capital, boasted a 113 percent average annual rate of return on investments. He'd never before won or even sought a political seat of any kind, but in 1994 this was held to be a good thing. In fact, one political analyst described him, for this very reason among others, as the ideal candidate: "a newcomer to politics, 45 to 50 years old, without any skeletons in his closet, a record of entrepreneurial success in the private sector, socially liberal, fiscally conservative." The analyst went on: "A critical mass of the voters are either like that themselves or aspire to that role. Mitt Romney at this point appears to fit that profile."

  His TV ads cast me, by contrast, as old and tired. Time to retire old Ted. Say thank you, give him a gold watch, and let him spend his dotage on Cape Cod. At least that's how Romney started out. He also made a point of repeating that I had never held a real job. I had certainly heard that old saw before, but never from a candidate quite as eager and confident and charged up as Mitt.

  Mitt ran as the man with a Mr. Clean image, whose hard work had blessed him with a fortune, and who was now going to "give something back" by bringing good honest business principles to the messy game of politics. I remember one newspaper profile of him that described him as singing only hymns and as having even his dog kneel down for nightly prayers.

  I watched his media performance at a distance through the summer of 1994, getting ready as usual to transition into my own post-Labor Day campaigning after an unusually busy Senate year that ran through August. In May, after discussion with many Republicans, I'd proposed a compromise version of President Clinton's health care bill, a markup of existing legislation that would help assure coverage to workers who had lost or changed jobs. The effort had foundered in June after late partisan bickering undercut what had seemed a good chance for the bill's success. I had worked to draft the Goals 2000 legislation, which stimulated and supported local school reform efforts, including setting high standards for what students should learn. My efforts won broad bipartisan support. Working with the president, I'd led successful Senate efforts to pass the Family and Medical Leave Act and the School-to-Work Opportunities Act. I'd also spearheaded the Crime Act, which put ten thousand new policemen on America's streets and imposed tough new penalties for crimes involving gangs and firearms.

  I ran ads in June and July, the earliest I had ever done so. It was a substantial buy. But I went dark in August. That was a mistake.

  Mitt Romney's TV spots that summer were nominally geared to winning the September 20 primary against his fellow businessman John Lakian (whom he in fact defeated easily), but there was no mistaking the real target: me. Aggressive, slickly packaged, and frequent, they must have taken a good chunk out of his $7 million campaign budget, more spending than was usual for any campaign in Massachusetts. But were they getting him any traction? I doubted it. The ads boasted of Mitt's supposed success as a job-creating business executive, a success he promised to replicate as a senator. He was positioning himself as a moderate, almost an apolitical candidate. He was pro-choice, he declared. But efficiency was what he really had to sell: sleeves-rolled-up, businesslike efficiency, to replace the senior senator's outdated ways.

  He called for an end to rewarding "children who have children" by terminating support for welfare mothers who give birth out of wedlock while on benefits.

  This stand of his posed a sticky challenge to me, at least as some of my aides saw it. Romney was not alone in denouncing welfare. It was a convenient issue in 1994. People were hurting in my state and all across the country. Newt Gingrich was at the peak of his power, touting the Republicans' "Contract with America" and steering his party to a rout of Democrats in the midterm elections.

  Thus the rhetoric of demonizing the poor as people getting something for nothing was especially effective this year, and some on my staff worried that my support of it could jeopardize my chances.

  Just before Labor Day, my campaign manager and nephew Michael Kennedy called Vicki to say that the Boston Herald was going to publish a poll showing Mitt Romney and me virtually tied. Together they called our campaign pollster Tom Kiley to see what he thought of the poll, and he agreed that it was accurate. They then called me with the news: "You and Mitt are dead even."

  That got my attention.

  My Senate campaigns in the past had followed the timetable that Jack had formulated back in the 1950s. "Look," he used to tell me. "Everybody goes away in August. They're not paying much attention. They start caring after Labor Day, when vacation is over and the kids are back in school. And if the Red Sox are doing well, they're not going to focus on the election until after the pennant races. That's when they start making up their minds."

  In 1994,
the Senate business certainly did not go away in August. I divided my time between the critical legislative battles I've described above and getting the Kennedy campaign organization revved up for another go. We reactivated our trusty old troops and brought in promising newcomers. An effective political campaign force is a bit like an army: large, well trained, disciplined, with varying and complex missions, and overseen by a tight chain of command. As with my Senate staff, I have been lucky with the quality of my campaign personnel through the years.

  This time around, they would be tested more intensely than usual. On Labor Day, polls showed that the race was even Steven.

  I called a meeting at our Back Bay apartment on September 18 to discuss our strategy with Bob Shrum, John Sasso, Paul Kirk, Tom Kiley, Michael Kennedy, and other top campaign aides. Vicki and her father, Edmund Reggie (who had been so helpful in my brothers' campaigns), were also there. I listened as they made their presentations and recommendations.

  Up until that point, for thirty-two years of public life, I had never mentioned my opponent in a campaign ad. But times had changed and my Republican opponents had been running ads against me while I remained silent. Those ads had obviously taken their toll. Shrum, pointing out that we could not attack my opponent's voting record because there was no record to attack, argued strongly that Romney's business practices were fair game. His business was to take over and invest in other companies, and it was in that arena where we should go searching for clues to the kind of judgments he would bring to bear in representing the people as their United States senator. Vicki strongly agreed with this, and I gave my go-ahead.

  In addition, I was advised to take a position in favor of so-called welfare reform. Romney had made a point of being opposed to additional benefits being given to single mothers who had more children. None of us wanted to reward irresponsibility, but who were we punishing? It seemed to me that we would be hurting innocent babies who needed assistance. I told my staff that I was not going to try to win this election on the backs of poor women and children. Case closed.

  After the meeting, I got on the phone and asked Ranny Cooper, my extremely capable former chief of staff, to take a leave of absence from her private-sector job to join the campaign. Ranny had run my office for many years. She knew me, knew how to get things done, and if she were there I knew I wouldn't have to worry about anything.

  And then there was Dave Burke. Dave had also been my trusted chief of staff at an earlier time. When he wrote to offer to help in any way he could, I don't think he ever expected me to follow up in quite the way I did. Dave had been the president of CBS News and had had a very successful private-sector career. I doubt that he thought he was volunteering to leave his beautiful wife, Trixie, for six weeks to live out of a suitcase to be my "body man." But that's exactly what I asked him to do. I needed a peer to ride in the car with me, someone who knew me and had good judgment. There were press stakeouts at every campaign stop. There were constantly changing issues of the day. I needed a trusted aide to bounce ideas off of. Dave was the man. Vicki was usually campaigning on her own during the day, but she joined us for the evening events. And I have to say that with Dave and Vicki, my mood was lighter every day. I always enjoy campaigning, but we were really having fun.

  Vicki, meanwhile, had been busy developing another new campaign avenue for me. We had decided actively and energetically to pursue the women's vote. Women had been brought into the political process by the Clinton campaign like never before, and Vicki wanted to harness that energy and enthusiasm for our campaign. And she did.

  With trusted aide Lisa McBirney, Vicki began meeting with professional women in Massachusetts as early as 1993. She was a natural. As women in that group have since told me, she was one of them, swapping stories of working motherhood and even talking about how we met. While I have never been at ease discussing such things, Vicki apparently chatted about our courtship and the children and she listened to the stories of women who have since become her very good friends. My formerly "granite" exterior was falling away, as voters began to connect with me through Vicki's eyes.

  For all of her natural ability and love of politics, Vicki had never been on the campaign trail before. But with the help of Angela Menino, the much-loved and politically savvy wife of Boston mayor Tom Menino, Vicki plunged in.

  In the evenings, the two of us would laugh over the "war" stories we accumulated along the way. About being in a parade and seeing people give me the finger. Or even worse, young people with no expression at all--they had no idea who I was.

  Vicki told me that many times Angela would introduce her to a woman and ask, "Would you like to meet Mrs. Kennedy?" and the woman would say, "No, thank you!" Vicki asked, "Angela, what do I say?" And Angela said, "You just ask them for their vote. Say you hope they'll be able to support your husband, and if they say no, say, 'Well, I hope you'll give it consideration.'"

  But then there were wonderful little moments that gave both of us such joy. We were at a Lebanese festival in the northeast part of the state when an elderly Lebanese woman came up to Vicki, pulled her aside, and asked, "So, honey, is he good to you?" Vicki said yes, he is good to me. The woman asked, "Do you love him?" Vicki said she loved me. And then the most important question of all. "Does he eat Lebanese food?" Vicki said yes, I did, I loved Lebanese food. Then, in what Vicki described as the comforting tones of Arabic-accented English that reminded my wife of her beloved grandmother, and while making the sign of the cross, the old woman said, "Okay, honey, I'm gonna vote for him for the first time in my life." How we both loved that story.

  Our campaign days were long. And I was still keeping a busy Senate schedule back in Washington. So Vicki and Michael Kennedy were surrogates for me at events around the state. And I had extraordinary assistance and support from my fellow Democrats in the congressional delegation and from local elected officials. The governor was a Republican, but the Senate president Bill Bulger and Speaker of the House Charlie Flaherty were in my corner, and they rallied their troops in a meaningful and effective way. Tom Menino was also tremendously helpful. I remember gathering in his basement one night in the spring of 1994, as he brought his organization together for pasta and a pep talk. When he finished, I was ready to go out and campaign for myself in the cold. The friendship and support of these dedicated elected officials is something I'll never forget. Tip O'Neill was right that all politics is local. And these political leaders had their fingers on the local pulse. Along with them and the state representatives and state senators and mayors all around the Commonwealth that welcomed us and encouraged their supporters to join our effort, we were able to rebuild a successful organization.

  The Senate was in session for most of August that year, so I didn't have the month to hit the ground as usual. I was chairman of the committee that was churning out much of the important legislation, and I didn't want to be absent. I believed that my constituents would be pleased that I was doing the people's business, but the truth was that they were being bombarded with advertisements from the Republican Senate primary essentially aimed at me, and, other than weekends, I wasn't there to counteract the impact. So the local officials and the revitalized organization and surrogates were more important than ever that summer.

  Vicki would come back from the campaign trail and regale me with tales of her adventures. She loved campaigning, and, as she said to me, she loved most of all sharing the stories with me at the end of the day. At a popular restaurant in Boston, where you had to shout to be heard above the din of the crowd, a campaign worker asked a woman diner, "HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO MEET MRS. TED KENNEDY?" The woman looked up and said, without missing a beat, "NOT AS PRETTY AS THE FIRST ONE!" Vicki smiled and said, "THANK YOU SO MUCH! I HOPE YOU'LL SUPPORT MY HUSBAND!" Vicki loved that story and used it to tease me to no end about the sacrifices she made for me. And then she would dissolve into laughter. Yes, I love this woman. She told me about a man at another table who replied to her greeting with, "KENNEDY! I WOULDN'T VOTE FOR
HIM IF YOU PAID ME TO!" Then he remembered his manners. "BUT IT'S NICE TO MEET YOU, MA'AM!"

  In Worcester a few days later, a fellow deflected her "I hope you'll support my husband" greeting with the off-center retort, "I only support people who are French." "Ah," Vicki said. "Then you'll want to support my husband, Ted Ken-a-day!" They both started laughing. She believes she won him over with that one.

  When I was able to be there, I had my own interesting encounters that were a bit different from previous campaigns. The tenor of some of the questions fired at me at events left no doubt that the electorate was angry. People were hurting.

  But there were still the fun times: singing Irish songs in senior centers; eating food at the ethnic festivals; walking in the parades. Those are the things that bring you close to the people and make politics fun. They're a long way from the more modern campaign staples of television advertising and the Internet, but they're every bit as important, at least for me. I wouldn't trade the people part of politics for anything in the world.

  The Senate finally recessed on October 8, and I was able to be in Massachusetts full-time. Vicki's mother, Doris, basically relocated to our home in Virginia to help look after the children. Curran was eleven and Caroline was eight, and the separation was especially hard on them and on Vicki. But having Doris there helped ease the burden. We began to feel momentum as I was able to get around the state. As one state rep put it, "People just want to see your shoe leather hit the pavement." And hit the pavement we did.

  I gained some impressive backup. My nephew John Kennedy, accompanied by his large German shepherd, Sam, joined the campaign and brought crowds to their feet with his infectious charm and witty but impassioned message. Another nephew, Chris Lawford, then playing a heartthrob in a popular daytime soap opera, created quite a stir wherever he went. Other nieces and nephews, and of course our own children, hit the trail. The actor Alec Baldwin went to college campuses to register new voters. President Clinton and Hillary came to the state to stump for me. Both were enormously popular and great assets.