I recalled the prejudice directed against my own Irish forebears. I cited the support for the bill among hundreds of religious leaders, most particularly Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston--who, I avowed, had made unparalleled contributions to my own racial and religious understanding.
Noting that wide areas of the South remained without integration years after the principle had been established, I warned that if Congress did not move quickly to expedite the integration decree, "it will be acquiescing in what has amounted in many places to a virtual reversal of the Supreme Court's decisions."
As for discrimination in federal programs--health, education, job training, for instance--I made what I believed to be a ringingly obvious point: "We cannot justify using Negro taxpayers' money to perpetuate discrimination against them."
After voicing a series of buttressing arguments to support these major points, I wound up my maiden speech as follows: "I remember the words of President Johnson last November 27: 'No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy's memory than the earliest possible passage of the Civil Rights Bill for which he fought so long.'
"My brother was the first president of the United States to state publicly that segregation was morally wrong. His heart and his soul are in this bill. If his life and death had a meaning, it was that we should not hate but love one another, and that we should use our powers not to create conditions of oppression that lead to violence, but conditions of freedom that lead to peace. It is in that spirit that I hope the Senate will pass this bill."
On June 19, 1964, a year to the day after my brother sent his civil rights bill to Congress, it passed into law on a vote of seventy-three to twenty-seven.
We knew that the Democratic Party would pay a price for this achievement. Lyndon Johnson himself put it most succinctly when he remarked, "We may win this legislation, but we're going to lose the South for a generation." And he was right; this marked the onset of the transformation of that region from Democratic to Republican.
Other Democratic leaders foresaw this as well, yet they acted to pass the bill nonetheless. I'm convinced that they acted, as had my brother in his speech, beyond political calculus: this was simply the right thing to do. Lyndon Johnson underscored his own progressive aims on May 22 when, at a commencement address at the University of Michigan, he described his vision of a "Great Society." His ideas, transformed into action by a Democratic Congress, produced a constellation of programs, laws, and agencies for social reform, some conceived by Jack and Bobby, but all championed and fought for by LBJ. They included the War on Poverty and the Economic Opportunity Act, the Job Corps, Project Head Start, Medicare, Medicaid, the National Endowments for the Arts and for Humanities, VISTA, and others.
All were landmarks in American history.
On Friday, June 19, 1964, the same evening that we passed the Civil Rights Act, the Massachusetts Democratic Party was opening its annual convention in Springfield. I had planned to fly there after the vote and accept the party's nomination to my first full term in the United States Senate. My friend Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana had agreed to deliver the keynote. The usual flurry of floor speeches in the Senate had pushed the Civil Rights vote further and further into the evening hours, delaying our departure for the state convention, and at one point I telephoned the delegates in Springfield, my voice amplified in their hall by a public address system, to assure them I would arrive later in the evening.
The Senate roll call began at 7:40 p.m. After proudly voting "aye," I hurried and headed to Washington National Airport. There, I boarded a chartered plane along with Senator Bayh, his wife, Marvella, and my longtime aide and friend Edward Moss. The pilot, Edwin J. Zimny, was a last-minute substitute for Daniel Hogan, the plane's owner, who had decided to attend a reunion of Yale alumni. The plane was an Aero Commander, a small twin-engine painted white with blue trim. Our destination was Barnes Municipal Airport in Westfield, Massachusetts, near Springfield.
The night was heavy and humid in Washington. We headed northeast on the 360-mile trip, with the pilot navigating on instruments. An Aero Commander is configured with seats for the pilot and copilot, plus room for five passengers. Directly behind the pilot and copilot are two rear-facing cabin seats that in turn face a bench accommodating three people. The Bayhs sat together on the bench, and Ed Moss and I both initially sat in the rear-facing seats. As we were coming in over Springfield, Ed Moss got up and said, "You people need more space, because you're working on your speeches." With that, he unbuckled himself and moved up into the empty copilot's seat. Birch worked on his speech and I went over mine, and as we were coming into Barnes airfield I turned in my seat to watch our approach for landing. I looked out in front of the plane and saw that the ground was blanketed in fog. As I knew from my own experience as a pilot, we should have been able to see the airport runway lights at about this time, giving the pilot a target for landing. But instead of runway lights as we came out of the mist, I saw a hill, scattered with large rocks, and we were about to crash into it.
The pilot glimpsed this terrifying sight at the same moment I did and pulled back on the stick to lift the plane up. Every muscle in my body tensed as I mentally went through the motions with the pilot. Up. Up. Up, dammit! I could see tall pine trees just beyond the rocky part of the hill. If only the pilot can clear them... He couldn't. We were flying at an altitude of only 177 feet. The whole plane was jolted as we struck the first treetop, and then we rode along the tops of those trees in what felt like a slow-motion nightmare. As we sped along and clipped those treetops, the plane teetered from side to side, until the left wing of the plane struck one of the trees with such force that the plane was thrown to the left. We crashed to the ground in an apple orchard and skidded into the earth between two rows of trees, plowing a trench two feet deep. That trench helped to slow the plane down, but we still slammed into a tree. The low branches acted as a knife, slicing open the front of the plane. The impact hurled my corkscrewed body forward into the cockpit, directly between the pilot and my friend Ed Moss.
Silence.
Silence.
On my left, I could make out the pilot slumped over the wheel. He looked in bad shape. I swiveled my gaze painfully to the right. Ed Moss looked in bad shape too. Behind me in the cabin, I could hear Birch Bayh saying, "Is there anybody alive up there? Is anybody alive?" I couldn't answer. The sleeves of my coat had come off from the impact, the shoelaces had broken on my shoes, and I couldn't move from my waist down.
Birch and Marvella managed to drag themselves out of the airplane. They were some distance away, but I could still hear them. And I still could not speak. I could hear Marvella crying in the darkness, "We've got to get help! We've got to get help! We've got to get help! We've got to get help!"
Then Birch's voice: "I smell gas. That plane might catch fire! I'm going back to see if there's somebody alive in there." It sounds very easy, as I describe it, to say that a plane's going to catch fire, we'd better hurry and get help, and for Birch to turn around, come back, and look in that plane again. But of course there was nothing easy about it. The plane could have exploded into a fireball at any moment, and Birch was risking his own life to try to save those of us still in the plane. He showed courage and compassion that I'll never forget.
When he came back to the plane, I opened my mouth and managed to say, "I'm alive, Birch!" He replied, "I can't bend over because of my back." But the prospect of the plane catching fire gave me some extra juice to try and get out of there. And so I summoned everything I had to turn around, even though I was paralyzed from the waist down. I crawled to the window and put my arm around Birch, and he dragged me out of that plane, far enough away to be safe if there were an explosion. Then I just let go and collapsed onto the ground. Birch left me to go back to the plane to try to rescue the others. But when they didn't move or answer his calls, he feared that Zimny and Moss were dead. The situation was very grim. I was having difficulty breathing as I lay on the ground in
that apple orchard. I couldn't move and was fighting to remain conscious. We had crashed near a back road, and Birch and Marvella walked to the road to try to flag down a passing car for help. For a long time it seemed as though we would spend the night there. Nine cars passed them before one finally stopped. A man named Robert Schauer picked up the Bayhs and drove them to his home, where they called for help. Schauer lent them blankets and pillows and returned them to the crash site. Police and an ambulance finally arrived about an hour and a half after Birch had pulled me from the plane. I said, "You'd better go over to the others. See if they're still alive." They went to the plane and took Moss out, who was still alive. Zimny was dead.
About a half hour later they came back, loaded me in the ambulance, and transported me to a hospital. I was in so much pain that I asked for sodium pentothal. I'd dislocated my shoulder once, and I recalled that pentothal knocked you out. The doctors said, "No, no, we can't give you that." It seems that an anesthetic could have been dangerous if I had internal injuries. But as they cut my clothes away--boom! I passed out. Merciful relief from the pain. I'd suffered a broken back and a collapsed lung that had been punctured by the tip of a rib, one of several that had been cracked apart. I'd been given transfusions, and doctors had suctioned water and air from my chest cavity to keep me from suffocating. My life hung in the balance for a while. Doctors told me that I'd been lucky: had any of my broken vertebrae been cervical or thoracic, I'd have been permanently paralyzed. I was thirty-two years old, six feet two inches tall, and 230 pounds, not that far from my college football weight, and my relative youth and fitness worked in my favor as well.
I remember the first thing I saw when I woke up was Najeeb Halaby from the Federal Aviation Administration, who said, "What happened on the plane?" And I thought, What the hell am I doing talking to this guy? What in the world am I doing talking to Jeeb Halaby about the plane?
Then Joan arrived. She had been waiting for me at the convention, about fifteen miles from the crash site. When she heard the news, she hurried to the hospital, escorted by the governor of Massachusetts, Endicott "Chub" Peabody. "Hi, Joansie," I managed when she rushed into the room. "Don't worry." Then my sister Pat came. Later I got the news that Ed Moss had not pulled through. I was devastated.
A White House aide, under orders from President Johnson, telephoned the home of Dr. Paul Russell, chief surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital. Roused from sleep, Dr. Russell sped the hundred miles from Boston to my bedside, joining two Cooley Dickinson doctors. Several hours later I saw the tousled hair and concerned blue eyes of my brother beside the bed. Bobby had driven all night from Hyannis Port. My brush with death just seven months after Jack's assassination was almost too much for him to bear. I tried to ease his mind with a joke. "Is it true," I asked him, "that you are ruthless?" Bobby stayed at the hospital for two days.
I remained at Cooley Dickinson until July 9, encased in a tubing-andstrap device called a Stryker frame that kept me suspended above my bed, occasionally rotating like a hunk of barbecue meat. My father arrived on July 2 from Hyannis Port, an arduous visit for him. He rolled into my room in his wheelchair in the midst of a debate by doctors over how to treat me. There were two options: (1) to perform surgery on my back now, with a long period of convalescence and rehabilitation, to repair the break and fuse my spine, hopefully preserving my ability to walk; or (2) to spend the next six months immobilized, giving my back the chance to heal and fuse on its own. If I could not walk at the end of that six-month period, then we could consider surgery, with an additional lengthy period of convalescence and rehabilitation. Dad made his opinion as clear as if he still had the full power of speech. Whipping his head from side to side, he shouted out, "Naaaa, naaaa, naaa!" I understood that Dad was recalling the back operation on Jack that had left him in permanent pain (and no doubt thinking of Rosemary as well). I made a decision that not only honored his wishes, but mine also: I would take the more conservative option of allowing the broken bones and vertebrae to heal naturally. The chances for complications from the surgery itself were significant, and in 1964 the techniques and equipment were not what they are today. I could very well have been paralyzed because of the surgery. No, I would take my chances with nature.
I made the right choice. I would spend the remainder of my life not being able to stand fully erect and always feeling pain from my injuries. On the bright side, which is how I prefer to look at things, I would spend the remainder of my life able to walk.
When the doctors had ascertained that I'd not suffered injuries to my spinal cord, I was transferred to New England Baptist Hospital in Boston. There I began to savor the simple joys of life as soon as a little strength began to return.
Joan and the children swam back into close orbit with me. Jack's death had devastated her. My accident further distressed her, but it also lent her a new sense of purpose. I was up for election to my first full term that fall. My reelection was not in serious doubt, but we still had a campaign. My opponent was a former state representative named Howard Whitmore Jr. So, as she had in my first Senate campaign, Joan became a surrogate for me. Over the course of the next five months, she barnstormed cities and towns all over Massachusetts, charming crowds and winning votes.
President Johnson visited me at the hospital at 12:40 p.m. on September 29. We'd spoken on the phone September 6--according to my notes, he said he'd had a "hankering" to call--and he'd asked if he could visit in person during a campaign swing through New England. He said he'd been following the reports on my recovery. "I still do not understand how you can shave on your stomach, but I guess you can get used to most anything." Then he asked, "Ted, is there anything I can do to make your life more livable?"
Upon his arrival, he walked into my room and gave me a kiss on the forehead. Then he kissed Joan and told her how well she'd done at the Democratic convention. Our conversation was mostly about his reelection campaign. He mentioned that he thought TV coverage had become more important than the daily newspapers. He talked about how poorly he was polling in Alabama and predicted he would lose Louisiana and Mississippi as well. We talked about prospects for Bobby's Senate campaign, which he said he would do everything to support.
And then President Johnson confided something to me regarding Jack's assassination and the findings of the Warren Commission. He felt the real responsibility had been with the FBI. As Johnson saw it, they were aware that Oswald was dangerous and that he had visited Moscow and Mexico. FBI agents had even interviewed Oswald, but they had neglected to warn the Secret Service of their suspicions, and that's why Johnson thought the agency was culpable.
It was only a thirty-five-minute conversation, but we also had time to discuss a Detroit autoworkers' strike (he was against it); South Vietnam, which he described as a very critical situation; and Rhode Island politics, which he believed had been heavily controlled by corporate interests until Theodore F. Green had been elected governor and then senator. As always, our exchanges were easy and cordial, and when he departed, at 1:15 p.m., I was in good spirits.
During my recuperation, I began to paint again--a hobby I had not pursued since those youthful days of competition with Jack. I'd forgotten the pleasure painting had given me. I have continued to paint since then, with the sea, and sailing boats, and the Cape Cod shoreline as my favorite subjects.
My thoughts turned often to my dad. What had I left unsaid to this great man? So many things.
An inspiration hit me: I would compile a book for him, a book of essays; mine and those of others in the family, which would express to Dad all the loving memories, the respect, the moments of laughter that lived unspoken in all of us. I sent the word out through the family, and the eloquent writings came in.
I chose the title--The Fruitful Bough--from Genesis, chapter 49, verses 22-24:
Joseph is a fruitful bough, even a fruitful bough by a well; whose branches run over the wall: The archers have sorely grieved him, and shot at him, and hated him: But his bow abode in s
trength, and the arms of his hands were made strong by the hands of the mighty God of Jacob.
As I reread The Fruitful Bough today, I see that most of its entries--mine, Mother's, Pat's, Eunice's, Joe Gargan's, and the rest--are gilded with a love that allows no hint of human frailty in their subject. I smile as I pause over the inevitable exception. "I don't believe he is without faults," Bobby's essay begins; and, a bit later: "His judgment has not always been perfect." This is Bobby being Bobby. My brother loved and admired our father as fervently as the rest of us, as his essay shows; yet sentimentality (as opposed to true sentiment) was never part of his nature.
The hospital room became my postgraduate seminar. More receptive to ideas even than in my latter years at Harvard, and motivated now by the intellectual demands of my office, I invited a series of professors to come and offer me tutorials in a variety of subjects, complete with reading lists. John Kenneth Galbraith folded his lanky frame into a chair and educated me in economics. Samuel Beer held forth on political science. And my understanding of civil rights issues was bolstered by a number of visitors, some of them famous leaders, who briefed me on the social and constitutional history of the movement. Furthermore, my hospital stay gave me more direct insight into health care and its costs.
I entered a world, at Cooley Dickinson and later at New England Baptist in Boston, of sufferers for whom the cost of being healed was often as great a hardship as the disease itself. I met people whose stories haunted me: good working people who scrimped and sacrificed to pay for a family member with tuberculosis; families, already struggling to pay their bills, beset by catastrophic illness.
I realized that access to health care was a moral issue.
True Compass: A Memoir Page 23