True Compass: A Memoir

by Edward M. Kennedy

  I recommended "play or pay" to President Clinton shortly after his inauguration. I'd hoped that the Democrats could combine it with the moderate Republican John Chafee's bill, which aimed at universal coverage via mandating uninsured individuals to buy insurance from private carriers. Tax deductions and subsidies would make it possible for them to do so. Bob Dole and several other prominent Republicans supported Chafee's bill. But Clinton did not immediately endorse a specific plan.

  In January 1993, I began to understand the reason. Word spread through the Senate that the president intended to name Hillary as head of a task force charged with creating a sweeping health care reform bill in one hundred days, from within the purview of the White House. The idea at first seemed thrilling, perhaps even revolutionary. For the first time since the Truman administration, a president was going to battle against a cruelly broken system that perpetuated American suffering and poverty on a needlessly vast scale.

  It would not be easy, of course, because all the familiar political enemies of reform were running up all the tattered flags of dissent: health reform would lead to socialized medicine; it would stunt medical research; it would add bureaucracy and limit patient choice. They were aligned with extremely powerful and dedicated groups--the pharmaceutical companies, the insurance companies, the American Medical Association--determined to protect their interests.

  I offered the resources of my staff and myself to the First Lady and her people. Dan Rostenkowski, the House Ways and Means chairman from Illinois, was far more cautious, and more prescient, as he later recounted in a lengthy interview.

  President Clinton telephoned the Democratic congressman to ask, "Danny, what do you think of me making Hillary the head of this group?" Rostenkowski reports that he shot back, "Bill, I didn't know you disliked her that much." Clinton asked what he meant. "You know, you're not in Arkansas anymore," the congressman reminded him. "You're going against probably the most talented group of lobbyists and trade association people in the country. This is their job. You're not going to be able to tell them, 'Well, here's a job for your cousin and I want you to support me.' These people are here, and this is a lifestyle for them."

  Rostenkowski (who favored health care reform) then raised another tough line of objection: "The people you're talking about putting together on this issue, Bill--did any of them ever run for sheriff? Did they ever get any dirt underneath their fingernails? Did they ever do anything in their communities for health care, or in the Washington area? You're getting academicians who like to sit back and smoke their pipes and say, Oh, this is the way it should be. That's not the way it is in real life. And you should know this, for God's sake. You're a politician!"

  And Clinton, in Rostenkowski's accounting, came back with, "Well, you know, I would love to name Hillary."

  He did, which I felt was a bold statement of commitment by the president. He would not have appointed his wife to head a task force if he weren't serious about the issue. In terms of vision, Hillary Clinton performed admirably. But the process clearly got bogged down--and became very complicated.

  In March 1993 I tried to move things along by proposing that we include health care as part of the budget reconciliation process. There, it would need only fifty votes to pass, and would not be subject to a filibuster and thus a sixty-vote threshold for passage. With President Clinton's approval, I approached Bob Byrd, to see whether he would agree to waive the "Byrd rule" and allow the measure to go forward. The Byrd rule prohibits the Senate from considering extraneous matter as part of a reconciliation bill debate.

  Byrd turned me down.

  Public opinion was shifting against the administration's great undertaking. By the time the plan was formally presented in the fall, the task force had dissolved. President Clinton himself had read the signs of disaster and backed away from it, choosing to emphasize his economic program and, later, the North American Free Trade Agreement instead.

  I was not ready to abandon the fight. I wanted to get a health reform bill, even a compromise bill, to Congress for a vote in September 1994. A few other Democrats, notably Tom Daschle, didn't want to give up either.

  The road got rougher in early 1994. Republicans managed to exploit Whitewater, the overblown and eventually discredited real estate "scandal" laid at Hillary Clinton's doorstep, for its value in undercutting the public's trust in Hillary and her plan. The task force lost a powerful ally when Dan Rostenkowski was indicted on charges of conspiracy to defraud the federal government and was obliged to resign his position. Hard-line conservatives increased their pressure on moderate Republicans, such as Bob Dole, who had indicated an interest in a compromise bill. These moderates were branded by the far right in news interviews as not being "true believers." Dole himself was warned that his own presidential ambitions in 1994 rested on his willingness to abandon a compromise bill.

  In June, I steered my Labor and Human Resources Committee to approval of a reform draft similar to the Clinton plan. It faced opposition not only from Republicans, but from members of my own party such as Daniel Moynihan, who'd succumbed to the belief that only strong Republican support would save the day. Moynihan introduced his own bill, whose centrist provisions he hoped he could merge with Dole's.

  The air filled now with contending voices. Bill and Hillary exhorted top White House staffers to keep pressing congressmen for positive action; Hillary summoned leaders from groups that until recently had been allies and demanded that they reenergize themselves, stop their internal bickering, and unite behind the goal of universal coverage. Such groups were running short of money.

  Well-intentioned alternative efforts began to fade. John Dingell gave up his efforts to get a bill out of his Energy and Commerce Committee. Dole, hearing the warnings from the right, outflanked his would-be Democratic partner Moynihan by introducing a bill made meaningless by its incrementalism: its silence, for instance, on such essentials as price controls, employer or individual mandates, and premium caps. Business lobbies and the Republican National Committee, naturally, loved it. Moynihan watched his own tepid effort get dismantled in committee.

  George Mitchell, the Senate majority leader, made a "rescue" bid of his own in July for salvaging health care, and even turned down President Clinton's offer of a Supreme Court appointment to continue his fight. House majority leader Dick Gephardt at the same time started work on his own bill.

  In late July the Republican right abandoned all pretense and acknowledged bluntly the real motive for its relentless crusade against a health care bill. Newt Gingrich, his power and ambitions on the rise, frankly told the New York Times that the House Republicans were going to use opposition to the bill as a springboard to win Republican control of the House in the November elections. Less than a month later, abetted by Phil Gramm of Texas, Gingrich made similar use of the president's crime bill, attacking it. His nakedly obvious purpose was to further tie up Congress in paralyzing debate and controversy before adjournment, and thus delay a vote on health care and the accountability such a vote would demand of each congressman before the fall elections.

  I could see that we were running out of time. I remained stubbornly committed to persevering on to the end. I wanted that vote. I wanted to put every member of the Senate and the House on record as being for or against health reform, before we adjourned. Now committee jurisdictional battles raged, and further impeded the momentum necessary to salvage this most urgent of social reform causes.

  By mid-August, defections from the ranks and gestures of defeat by Democrats were beginning to do the work of the Republicans for them. Many in my party conceded publicly that health care would be delayed indefinitely. Among those holding fast with me was Mitchell, who on August 15 threatened to keep the Senate in round-the-clock session until the Republicans agreed to vote. I was white-hot now for continuing the pushback against the obstructionists, and I let it show at a leadership luncheon on August 18, when I got into a shouting match with Bob Kerrey of Nebraska over whether the debate over health
care should be continued. (There was never a problem between Bob and me. Emotions were just running high.)

  But it was slipping away. I could feel it. The schedule was running against us. We lost on the schedule. We gave up, in fact. I recall my exasperation when Democrats were told on a Thursday afternoon that we wouldn't work through the weekend.

  Well, you have to keep your people around if you want to win. The Senate is a chemical place. Something happens when senators are all in the room, debating an issue, especially when everyone understands that we are going to stay in and not adjourn until we get things done. I had talked to a number of my colleagues who agreed to stay. We had the headcount. We could have held the vote and at least put everybody on the public record as to whether or not they supported health care reform. But we didn't do that. If we'd stayed there, we'd have caught the attention and perhaps the conscience of other senators. If we'd stayed there, we'd have had all the newspapers in the country writing about it. If we'd stayed, we'd have had people all over the country asking why, why, why are they doing this? And then maybe we'd have had them thinking again about the whole issue, the whole value, of health care reform. Thinking about what it was that we senators believed in enough to be staying all night for.

  In a private meeting, I told the Senate leadership that this was a complete abdication (along with some other less elevated words). I'm told that I was in what Vicki would call my "red-faced and full-throated" mode.

  I left the meeting and closed the door. But I didn't slam it. I didn't close it all the way. Because I knew I would be back.

  The 1994 midterm elections were as disastrous as any Democrat expected, if not worse. Many party stalwarts were turned out of office: Tom Foley, Jim Sasser, Jack Brooks, and New York governor Mario Cuomo. A conviction took hold that the electorate had embraced the conservative cause. This became a settled truth for many pundits, other opinion-makers, and, sadly, for many Democratic leaders as well.

  I never accepted this. The Democratic Party may have lurched to the right in response to the elections. The Democratic Leadership Council and, I feared, President Clinton were moving in that direction. But I believed they were chasing a phantom. As I'd put it in remarks to the National Press Club on January 11, "If the Democrats run for cover, if we become pale carbon copies of the opposition, we will lose--and deserve to lose." Republicans had made gains by depressing voter turnout. They hadn't won a mandate. They'd gained control of Congress by the narrowest of margins.

  I had a couple of telephone conversations with President Clinton after the midterm elections. He said he was "bone tired" from being on the campaign trail in the immediate aftermath of a demanding trip to the Middle East. He believed the National Rifle Association had murdered him in the South by making guns a cultural rather than a law enforcement issue. I mentioned that I thought we had more Democrats voting in the election nationwide, but President Clinton corrected me and said, "No--one percent more Republicans."

  I made the case that he would be effective as an underdog and that we could still get some major legislation passed--on health care and student aid for education and job retraining and cuts in corporate subsidies. Then we made a bet on the upcoming basketball game between the University of Massachusetts and the University of Arkansas--a bushel of bay scallops to a bushel of barbecued chicken.

  Meanwhile, I continued my advocacy for an increase in the minimum wage. To some extent, the president agreed, supporting the increase in his State of the Union address. But other persuasive voices also had access to the president's ear; people such as his adviser Dick Morris. It was thanks in large part to Morris and his concept of "triangulation," or gaining the large, safe middle ground by co-opting ideas from both the left and the right, that Clinton began his move toward the center.

  While I did not agree with all of President Clinton's concessions, I found much to admire in his presidency. I am especially proud of the effort we shared in bringing peace to Northern Ireland.

  This historic healing required the courage and cooperation of many men and women, of course--Irish, British, and American. Among those who distinguished themselves was my sister Jean Kennedy Smith, who in 1993 stepped gracefully from a life of quiet good works into the world of diplomacy.

  My sister Jean and I have always had a special relationship. We are closest in age of all of my siblings. When we were growing up, she was my partner at the small table in the dining room for more years than she would have liked, and she was my companion during those winter school terms in Palm Beach. In later years, we spent much time together. I was extraordinarily close to her husband, Steve, as well, and we all took ski vacations together and enjoyed each other's company enormously.

  In 1974, Jean had founded Very Special Arts, now VSA Arts, a nonprofit organization that allowed people with disabilities to participate in and enjoy the arts. She has expanded the organization to include affiliates in more than sixty countries, including Ireland.

  At my suggestion, President Clinton appointed Jean ambassador to Ireland not long after taking office. Jean's appointment was very well received by the Irish people. In addition to becoming steeped in issues relating to the Republic of Ireland, she had been a well-informed observer of the turmoil in Northern Ireland since the early 1970s, and had gained the respect both of the Irish people and political leaders, including my friend John Hume. She performed admirably in her confirmation hearings and took up her duties in Dublin. One of Jean's first and most significant accomplishments was to persuade me to support the issuance of a U.S. visa for Gerry Adams, the head of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the IRA.

  Jean was convinced that Adams no longer believed that continuing the armed struggle was the way to achieve the IRA's objective of a united Ireland. He was in fact working to convince the IRA's more aggressive members to end the violence and pursue the political path. Most convincingly, Adams had held a series of conversations with John Hume that led Hume to believe a cease-fire and negotiations could soon be achieved.

  The State Department refused Adams a visa in March 1993, but in mid-December that year the British prime minister John Major and the new taoiseach (head of state), Albert Reynolds, raised hopes significantly when they issued their joint declaration affirming Northern Ireland's right of self-determination.

  Two weeks after the joint declaration, Vicki and I visited Jean in Dublin over the Christmas holidays. It took only a couple hours' conversation with Jean after we landed to discover what was really the most important thing on her mind: the opportunity for a breakthrough in the Northern Ireland stalemate, which she believed depended on a visa for Gerry Adams to visit the United States so that he could bring along those Irish Americans who had, for years, been sending guns and money to the IRA. When I met later on that trip with Albert Reynolds, he was passionate, thoughtful, and brilliantly informed, and quickly reinforced Jean's instinct that this was the right moment to act. He told me he was convinced to a moral certainty that Adams was now an advocate for a peaceful resolution. I returned to the United States primed to do all in my power to help move their hopes to diplomatic reality.

  The occasion for commencing my efforts was a sad one: the funeral of Tip O'Neill. Tip had died on January 5 at age eighty-one. The retired Speaker of the House was unquestionably one of the towering American figures of his time, a generous and wise man, and a friend and a political ally.

  Tip was an important force in the long struggle to spur the United States to involvement in Northern Ireland. His funeral was held at St. John the Evangelist's Church in what had been a working-class Irish neighborhood of North Cambridge in which Tip grew up. Among the seventeen hundred people present on the freezing day of January 10 were a few players in the peace process who'd flown over from Ireland to pay their last respects. It was almost as if Tip were calling down to us: "C'mon, fellas! I've done everything I could. Now finish the job!"

  I had dinner that night with one of the best of them, John Hume. (I took John to a place that would a
ppeal to his Irishman's sense of fine irony, Locke-Ober's, the elegant redoubt of the Protestant Brahmins for more than a century.) New York businessman Bill Flynn, chairman of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, had already done his part to force the Gerry Adams issue by offering the Sinn Fein leader an invitation to speak in New York at the end of the month. Now Hume told me at dinner that the IRA had split over whether to accept the joint declaration, and that a visa for Adams would help him win that internal debate.

  I drafted a letter to President Clinton that laid out a list of reasons in favor of granting the visa. Adams could be a critical player in the process, I told the president. The momentum of hope was increasing via the Hume-Adams dialogue and the joint declaration and the British government's activity in talking directly to IRA members. Even should Adams fail to deliver, the visa was a one-time proposition, and the prospect of peace made it well worth the risk. Clinton himself had just established a precedent of sorts: he had met with President Assad of Syria, who in 1982 had 20,000 of his own countrymen killed. Finally, if we refused granting the visa and the fragile peace effort should fall through, America would be blamed for not doing its share.

  Even if Clinton went along with my request, I knew that resistance would be strong from both the State Department, which was locked into a view of Adams as a terrorist, and the British embassy, which resented U.S. involvement in what it considered its home affairs. To counter this opposition and bolster Clinton's resolve, my staff and I rounded up as many signatures from senators and congressmen as we could. Eventually more than fifty signed up with us, including such influential figures as Daniel Moynihan, Chris Dodd, George Mitchell, Claiborne Pell, and Bill Bradley. I personally contacted Vice President Gore, Secretary of State Warren Christopher, and National Security Adviser Anthony Lake. Other allies telephoned still other White House figures.