True Compass: A Memoir

by Edward M. Kennedy

  I had spent Saturday night in Dad's New York apartment with Jack. Giving a talk at a women's college was the last thing on my mind. The Washington Redskins were in town to play the 3-1 Giants, and Dad and I had planned to go see the game on Sunday. It was Jack, not me, who'd originally agreed to give the talk. But when my brother showed up at the apartment and saw me there he said, "Oh! Dad, since Teddy's here, why don't we let him do it? I want to go to the football game."

  I didn't think that was a terribly good idea. I'd looked forward to seeing that game. Jack held his ground: it was going to be a great game, and he wanted to see it. Our father said, "Fine. Why don't you two work it out?" We worked it out, and Jack went to the football game.

  I went to the college with my sister Jean. I gave the speech. It was successful enough, I suppose. After my remarks that Sunday afternoon, Margo Murray, a friend of Jean's, took me by the hand and introduced me to an exquisitely beautiful young student named Joan Bennett, who had just turned twenty-one. Jean was with Margo for the introduction, but she had not met Joan before either. I learned later that Joan had done some modeling and was a gifted piano player, which earned her a lot of points with Mother.

  I definitely wanted to see more of Joan. I thought fast, and talked Margo and Joan into driving me to the airport for my flight back to Virginia. Joan and I hit it off in the car. I took her out every time I came up to New York, and almost before we knew it we were on a fast track toward marriage. The family was thrilled. She was beautiful, she was fun, and she played piano duets with Mother. It was time for me to think about settling down and getting married, and Joan seemed like a perfect match.

  As for that football game--Jack had the great pleasure of watching the Giants get buried by the Redskins, 31-14.

  PART TWO

  Brotherhood

  Cecil Stoughton, White House/John F. Kennedy Library

  CHAPTER SIX

  Kennedy for President

  1958-1960

  Jack's reelection to the Senate in 1958 was never in serious question. He was skyrocketing now as a public figure. The camera emphasized his youth, his elegance, his good looks, his quick wit. But while his reelection to the Senate was not in doubt, the margin of victory was very important. Jack's presidential ambitions in 1960 were now a given, at least within the family and closest advisers. That required that every public step along the way be marked with as much evidence of achievement as possible.

  A great deal of Jack's charm, of course, was substantive, a factor of his unconcealed principles. His political candor was as fresh and bold as his style, and like his style, it won over audiences who might have resented it in any other candidate. He'd drawn a standing ovation in Jackson, Mississippi, after a talk in which he endorsed school desegregation; he won the support of the governor of Kansas even though he had earlier voted against high farm price supports. He accepted speaking dates before southern Protestant ministers and the American Jewish Congress in New York.

  Bobby had managed Jack's first Senate campaign, but now he was absorbed as chief counsel for the Senate Labor Rackets Committee under Chairman John L. McClellan. His lacerating exchanges with the powerful Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa were earning him national attention. So Jack asked me to run his campaign. I relished the opportunity. I was still a year from law school graduation and was courting Joan, but the chance to help my brother, while at the same time getting a baptism in electoral politics, was irresistible.

  So after my final examinations in June, I hurried home to Massachusetts and joined the senator's reelection team. Jack named me campaign manager, though I was glad to have such able hands as Larry O'Brien, Kenny O'Donnell, and Jean's husband, Steve Smith, to show me the ropes. Here were three immensely talented and loyal political professionals at the core of a group whose names would forever be associated with that of President John F. Kennedy. "A mixture of amateurs, professionals, eggheads and hardheads," the New York Times admiringly called them.

  Larry O'Brien was an army veteran, a former union president at age twenty-two, and a Democratic operative when he came aboard my brother's 1950 Senate campaign. Like Bobby, Larry was passionate about organization. The slightly younger Kenny O'Donnell was also an army vet who was Bobby's roommate at Harvard after the war. A principled and politically sensitive man, he, along with Larry, remained at Jack's side through the presidential years as a special assistant and member.

  Steve Smith was more than a brother-in-law; he was like a brother in our family. A soft-spoken and elegant man, Steve had been an air force lieutenant before joining his father's vast New York tugboat and barge empire, Cleary Brothers, Inc. An eventual heir to the fortune, he developed a genius for financial management--eventually overseeing the Kennedy family's investment operations--as well as for personnel supervision. Steve would go on to manage Bobby's Senate campaign, and my own.

  A fourth member of the team was Ted Sorensen, who was virtually inseparable from Jack. (The two of them toured fifty states together between 1956 and 1959.) Ted had signed on to be the new Senator Kennedy's legislative aide in 1953, as an earnest, horn-rimmed twenty-five-year-old just a couple of years out of Nebraska. And there was Pierre Salinger. Jack had recently hired the dapper thirty-three-year-old journalist and veteran press officer on Bobby's recommendation. Pierre had impressed Bobby as an investigator for the Senate Labor Rackets Committee. He would serve as press secretary to Jack.

  I took Joan to the house at Hyannis Port for a week in June to get her acquainted with my mother and father. And then we all set to work getting Jack reelected.

  We held our first strategy meeting at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston. All the volunteers assembled in a meeting room upstairs, and Jack looked at me and said, "All right, Teddy--now you go on up and give them a speech. Talk about the organization and what you're going to do in the campaign, and then I'll say a few words." I'd never given a campaign strategy talk before. I said, "What exactly do you think I ought to say?" Jack ticked off several details about how he thought the organization should go, and then sent me up. I guess I did okay. Then Jack spoke, and, as usual, charmed and inspired everyone.

  Our biggest challenge was overcoming the apathy of people who thought Jack was a shoo-in for reelection. (He probably was, but as I say, the margin was what counted.) And so we focused on generating turnout. We set up telephone banks and sent volunteers out for door-to-door efforts. I shuttled weekly between Massachusetts and my law classes at the University of Virginia.

  We stumbled upon some unexpected controversies. One of them reflected the ancient tensions between the Irish and the Italians in Massachusetts, still intense in the late 1950s.

  We'd come up with a campaign slogan for Jack, simple yet geared to our goal of a large turnout. It was: "Make your vote count. Vote Kennedy." We discovered that it wasn't so simple--certainly not in the Italian community. A group of Italian-American leaders from around the state converged on Boston and demanded a meeting with me at my brother's headquarters at the Bellevue. They sat down at a conference table opposite me and said, "This is an insult to Italians!"

  I told them I didn't understand. "What we're trying to do is say, 'Make your vote count. Your vote counts for Senator Kennedy in 1958 and it's also a vote, really, for 1960. Your vote is important. Make your vote count.'"

  They said, "No, no. The way we interpret it is that the vote counts if it's for an Irishman, but it doesn't count if it's for an Italian. [The Italian they had in mind was Vincent J. Celeste.] So therefore it's directed at us, and we resent it."

  Pretty soon, the head of every Italian-American organization in the state was denouncing the slogan. We had to tear up all the literature and change it. I mentioned the crisis to Jack, who was as baffled as I. "I don't know. We'll work it out."

  We worked it out by calling Dad up from the Cape.

  We all sat down with one of his friends, an advertising man named John Dowd. Dowd worked at it all day long, trying out slogan after slogan. He was wearing a pinstriped su
it, as I recall, with white checks on it, and he had suspenders and a mustache that moved when he talked, and dark, very groomed hair. He had five different pencils and pads of paper. He'd write out a slogan and hand it to Dad, and Dad would look at it and say, "No, that doesn't work, Dowd. That's not good. You can do better than that. That's not good." And then Dad went across the street to Bailey's restaurant and had his lunch, a chocolate soda. That's all he'd eat. He loved ice cream, but he didn't want to gain weight, so he had just this one chocolate soda.

  He came back in half an hour. "How are you doing now, Dowd?" Dowd wasn't doing so well. By this time he was perspiring, and the dye in his hair was starting to run. After several more hours of frantic scrawling, he handed Dad yet another slip of paper with yet another slogan: "He has served Massachusetts with distinction." I thought that one, frankly, to be a little like a Schenley's whiskey ad, but my father liked it. So that became the slogan. "Kennedy. He has served Massachusetts with distinction."

  One person not ready to agree that Jack had served Massachusetts with distinction was Vincent Celeste. Celeste may have understood that he had little hope of winning, but he and his people were not about to go down without a fight. I recall the night that he took the fight, almost literally, to Jack's window.

  Jack had rented an apartment at 122 Bowdoin Street in Boston. This was the subject of much amusement in the family because so many Kennedys were registered to vote with that as their address. It was a small apartment, but Jack and Jackie, Bobby and Ethel, and I were all registered out of this small apartment.

  Jack loved to take his bath at 122 Bowdoin to soak his back and refresh himself before evening campaign events. This was the time he valued the most in his day, in certain ways. He was then at his most relaxed and funniest, and he came away with a sense of purpose and seriousness. I always sat in the bathroom with him as he called out instructions and asked questions.

  Just outside the apartment was a fairly large parking lot. One evening, while Jack was in the tub, I heard noises down there, went to the living room, and looked out the window. I saw eight or ten people lighting a bonfire in the parking lot--a sizable bonfire. Then someone began to speak at the top of his voice. It was Vincent Celeste.

  Jack called to me to ask what in the world was going on. I said, "Vincent Celeste is having a rally." "What's he saying?" "He says you're a phony, your supporters are phonies, and he's going to whip you."

  That caught Jack's interest. As Celeste ranted on, he kept asking from the tub, "What's he saying now?" And I'd repeat what Celeste was saying. I could see it was getting under my brother's skin, even though there were only about forty people in the crowd. But then some of the press started to show up, and so of course it became a big deal, especially to my brother. It was funny and ridiculous, and Jack laughed--but it really did get under his skin.

  In the election, we got the margin we'd hoped for, and then some. Jack defeated Celeste by 874,000 votes, garnering nearly 75 percent of the votes cast, the most lopsided victory in the state's history.

  On November 29, 1958, in St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church in Bronxville, New York, Virginia Joan Bennett and I were married. Cardinal Spellman performed the ceremony. Jack was my best man; Joan was escorted by her father, Harry Wiggin Bennett, and her sister Candace was her maid of honor. My sisters were among the attendants. Among the ushers were Bobby, Joe Gargan, Lem Billings, my law school classmates John Tunney and John Goemans, and my Harvard classmates Claude Hooton and Dick Clasby. My father and mother and Mrs. Bennett were looking on.

  Joan wore a white satin wedding gown and carried a bouquet of white roses. My wedding gift to her was a clover-shaped pin that had belonged to my mother.

  We weren't able to take an extended honeymoon because of my law school schedule. We made up for that later. For the short time we had available, we accepted the invitation of Lord Beaverbrook to spend our honeymoon at his beautiful estate in the Bahamas. Since his time in London, my father had remained friendly with Beaverbrook, the imperious and eccentric publisher of the Daily Express and other British newspapers. The truth is that Joan and I hadn't expected to be quite so friendly with him on our honeymoon. When we arrived at his estate, he didn't seem to know quite what to do with us. He certainly didn't make himself scarce. We ate every meal together. For him--and therefore for us--that meant a baked potato, and only a baked potato, for lunch. Dinner was not much better. We were served exactly one daiquiri apiece before dinner and then something that was definitely not standout cuisine. Our host recommended several times that we visit a nearby little island that was completely deserted. That sounded tantalizing, but somehow his lordship never got around to providing transportation there. And so we spent all our time on his estate. We got to know it... well.

  I graduated from law school the following June, and Joan and I finally took that deferred honeymoon vacation, a five-week trip through Chile and Argentina. We were in some of the most challenging skiing country in the world. Joan was in the early stages of her pregnancy with Kara, and was not a big skier, but she did not hesitate when I offered to help her to learn in the Chilean Andes. She grew adept in an amazingly short time. We trekked on southeastward to Argentina, traveling by riverboat and in the backs of trucks over bumpy roads, and staying at inns that had no heat. Finally we succumbed to a little luxury at a beautiful resort in Bariloche, Patagonia. We visited Buenos Aires, and then returned home, where we were massing to launch Jack's presidential campaign.

  That campaign started in earnest after a meeting at Hyannis Port after Labor Day weekend 1959. It was decided that Bobby would return to his role as the overall coordinator of Jack's campaign. Steve Smith would set up the administrative and financial operations. Larry O'Brien would supervise the state primaries. Only sixteen of those existed at that time, and thus a great deal of influence over delegates was still wielded by the political establishment in each state.

  Every state was critical, because Jack's nomination was a long shot. Even had he not been young, Catholic, and relatively unknown, he'd still have had to contend with Democratic party lions such as Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Adlai Stevenson, Stuart Symington of Missouri, and Mayor Robert Wagner of New York. Only Jack and Humphrey actually entered most of the Democratic primaries, and they yielded only 584 out of a total of 1,521 votes that would be cast at the convention. Thus several other hopefuls were focused on courting party leaders around the country for delegates. (Bobby predicted early on that LBJ, not Humphrey, would emerge as Jack's main rival, and he was right.) Nor would the perils decrease should he survive the primaries and emerge as the party's nominee: public opinion polls showed that even though Democrats were in good favor, Jack would face very stiff competition in the general election against the likes of Nelson Rockefeller or Richard Nixon.

  I was assigned to campaign in the eleven western states. I'd volunteered for those states--and in the back of my mind I always kept alive the possibility of moving out there after finishing school. Joan and I had seriously discussed living in California after my sister Pat urged us to come, but we vetoed it in the end because Dad didn't think too much of the idea.

  And so I never became a westerner. Not officially. But the months I spent barnstorming the Rocky Mountain states for Jack turned out to be a series of action-packed escapades that featured bucking broncos, coldeyed strangers with six-shooters drawn, hair-raising close calls in small airplanes, and even the prospect of a guided missile attack.

  The western states posed several especially thorny challenges. Support for Jack on the Great Plains and in California was anemic at the time; no one had invested much work in establishing his credentials out there. Their populations tended to be scattered, so the business of introducing his record and his agenda would entail covering a lot of terrain. I left Massachusetts the Thursday after Labor Day for Montana and the state nominating convention that would produce twenty delegates. Montana was the home of Senator Mike Mansfield, who was destined to become an American s
tatesman: the longest-serving majority leader in Senate history, ambassador to Japan, and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Mansfield was supporting Lyndon Johnson, and at least eight of the delegates were sympathetic to Humphrey. I had work to do.

  I hitched a ride into the site of the convention, the small town of Miles City, in a twin-engine airplane owned by a friend of mine named Joe Reber. I was a licensed pilot myself by this time, having learned to fly while at the University of Virginia, but that day I relied on someone else to handle the controls. Joe and I made our way over to the convention hall where I was to speak at noon. I was wearing a suit and shined shoes, and I carried a briefcase filled with campaign materials, such as circulars. The hall was nearly empty. I asked a man, "Where is everybody?"

  He said, "Ever'body's down to the rodeo."

  So Joe and I went down to the rodeo. We saw pickup trucks, bleachers filled with folks who were yelling and waving cowboy hats, a loudspeaker, a lot of wranglers, and a lot of dust. Something told me there were a lot of Democratic delegates among those hat-waving fans.

  The rodeo people were just getting ready for the last event of the day--the bucking bronco competition. I found someone who looked like he might be in charge, introduced myself as John F. Kennedy's western campaign manager, and asked if I could be introduced. He said nope. The only way to be introduced is if you're riding one of the broncos. I said okay, I'd ride one of the broncos.

  Joe shot me an incredulous look. I knew it was risky, but something told me that unless I gave it a shot, nothing I'd say to those delegates would matter much.

  The wrangler shrugged and jerked his thumb at a trailer truck. "You can go back there and get some ridin' gear and get changed," he said. "We got two ways of mountin' you up. A saddle horse. Or a horse with a surcingle."