Ted Kennedy failed to dig deep enough in ‘True Compass ’
As he worked on his memoir in the final years of his life, Ted Kennedy reportedly told people, “I’ve got to get this right for history.” I wish he had written it more out of passion than obligation.
Yes, it is all here, 532 pages of recollections on virtually every event of personal and political note in an extraordinary life. That is both the blessing and the curse of this book by the longest-surviving son of Joe and Rose Kennedy’s iconic American family.
Historians who want Teddy’s take on Ronald Reagan, check Chapter 19. Interested in the longtime liberal scion’s opinion of Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam? See Chapter 12. Ready for a revealingly unempathetic look at Jimmy Carter, refer to pages 361 through 382.
The longtime Senate bastion of liberalism seems so intent on getting a vast quantity of views on the record, he fails—in many regards—to probe beneath an epidermal layer.
We find out, with maddening comprehensiveness, what Teddy Kennedy thought of just about everyone and everything. We seldom discover how he felt about much of it. Only when the going gets deeply personal— his special bond with his father; the killings of brothers Jack and Bobby; the bone cancer of Teddy Jr.; the unexpectedly deep, sunset romance with second wife Victoria Reggie—only then do we get what reads like outbursts from the man’s heart, not musings from his head.
Perhaps the adult party animal— despite (or because of) a succession of tragedies that would have made a cynic of Job—resolutely avoided a deeper contemplation of events. Perhaps the process of creation—Kennedy dictated these recollections, along with mining some 50 years of contemporaneous notes—favored comprehensiveness over a soul-deep archaeological dig. Or maybe a man who admittedly had trouble “talk[ing] about my feelings” simply performed here to the best of his capabilities.
Kennedy, by birthright and political position, was granted the double-edged, lifelong gift of deference. To his mind, it may simply be enough that The Great Man shared his views on a wide variety of events. Historians no doubt appreciate having his thoughts on the record. This reader would have preferred a larger helping of emotion to go with the memories. Perhaps, ultimately, this is a function of a man more self-absorbed than observant.
Kennedy is a pedestrian writer, frequently burdening readers with cliches. Every white-haired Irishman has twinkling eyes. Every party is enlivened by “stiff drink.” He has enjoyed, he confides, “the company of women.” Snore.
In fairness, the memoir suffers the curse of great expectations. Teddy was granted the gift his brothers were denied—longevity. He is the brother who lived to tell the tale, to provide an inside look at a legendary American family. We come to the table with appetites whetted. Instead of a feast, we are served for long stretches with the equivalent of a tapas dinner—a taste of an overwhelming variety of items, without much opportunity for settling down and digging in.
For all of its historical comprehensiveness, the book works better as a personal than a political memoir. In the most memorable pages of “True Compass,” Kennedy takes us behind the closed doors of America’s blessed and cursed family, allows us to peer into the eye of its blinding light and into the heart of its dark, irrevocable tragedy.
Teddy confesses that, as a boy, he revered “like gods” his older brothers: Joe, who did not survive World War II, and Jack, who would later hold an entire nation in thrall. Jack was 15 years older than Teddy, as much a father figure to him as an older brother. Teddy’s adolescent recollections are basted with raw admiration and love.
There is an unforgettable story of an adolescent Teddy, scorched by his father’s criticism, briefly running away from home. The reluctant runaway is eased back, with pride intact, by older brother Jack’s face-saving invitation to join him at the movies. Jack later intercedes with the family patriarch, suggesting—to good effect— that Joe Sr. might go easier on the little guy. The moving evocation of protective brotherly love remained branded, a half-century later, in the younger brother’s memory.
No wonder, then, that twentysomething Teddy—in service to brother Jack’s presidential campaign— agreed to such insane antics as riding a rodeo bronco and taking his maiden ski jump. It is on these early pages that the book most comes alive.
As life went on, joy and tragedy kept trading hands. Bobby is so devastated by Jack’s 1963 assassination that Teddy fears for his brother’s emotional existence:
Ethel [Kennedy] and my mother feared for his own survival; his psychic survival at least ... He spent hours without speaking a word ... Hope seemed to have died within him. He went through the motions of everyday life, but he carried the burden of grief with him always.
In a startling revelation, Teddy credits Johnson—habitually demeaned by Bobby—for an “act of compassion” that renewed his brother’s faith. Sensing Bobby’s despair, Johnson sent him on a Far Eastern trip, rightly sensing that the tumultuous welcome of throngs would renew his spirit. Writes Teddy:
I believe that the reception restored his faith that life was worth living.
Weeks before he was gunned down, after a long day of campaigning in Indiana, Bobby turned to Ted as they ascended a hotel stairway. The anecdote is heartbreaking in its implications.
Bobby told me that he was worried about his then 12-year-old son David, who had been caught throwing rocks at cars. My brother stopped and looked straight at me.
“Teddy,” he said, “I want you to know that if I don’t make it this time, I am not interested in running [for president] again. This all takes too much. I have to be there for David and the other children.”
Teddy never fulfilled presidential expectations, the millstone of Chappaquiddick never unfastened from his neck. He morphed instead into the consummate horse-trading senator, holding the liberal beachhead against the assaults of Reaganomics, Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America and the George W. Bush/Dick Cheney invasion of Iraq. Yet readers salivating at the prospect of a guided tour of the Senate’s inner recesses are left unsated. Seldom are we taken behind the closed doors for a blow-by-blow account of arms twisted and concessions made in the course of pounding a bill into law.
Readers fare equally poorly with his obligatory, but reluctant, tackling of infamous scandals. Not until page 292 does he even reference “my reputation” as a womanizer. He takes responsibility for the 1969 drowning death at Chappaquiddick of Mary Jo Kopechne, an aide to his late brother Bobby, without filling in the blanks of his delay in reporting the accident and other failings.
He breezes in two pages over the 1991 date rape charge against nephew Willy Smith after a night when 59-year-old Teddy had been drinking in Palm Beach with 30-year-old Smith and 23-year-old son Patrick Kennedy. The great liberal defender utters nary a sympathetic word for the female accuser, merely noting his nephew’s acquittal and offering the lame regret: “If I’d simply taken a walk on the beach by myself that night.”
Kennedy had a fine final act, politically and personally. The golden-years romance with Victoria Reggie, herself from a political family, brought him a love he had never known. His consistent opposition to the Iraq War looks, in retrospect, even more enlightened. He put his political weight behind his principles with his support—in the face of the Clinton machine—for then-underdog Barack Obama. His decades-long quest for universal health care marches on. He faced impending death with admirable courage and fortitude. All told, this memoir is a welcome historical document.
Kennedy lived an extraordinary life. In recollecting it, one only wishes that he had revealed what he felt in equal measure to what he saw.
Donn Esmonde is a Buffalo News columnist.
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