True Compass: A Memoir

by Edward M. Kennedy

  I left New England Baptist Hospital on December 16, after six months of rehabilitation. At 4 a.m. on the day of my discharge, I quietly and temporarily exited the grounds with the help of Eddy Martin, who drove me through the cold darkness to Andover, and the cemetery where Ed Moss lay buried. It was Ed's forty-first birthday. His grave was on a hill, and the two of us had to struggle upward, Eddy Martin protecting me as best he could from slipping and falling on the icy slope. We returned to the car and drove to the Moss home, where I spent time talking to Moss's widow, Katie. Then we drove back to the hospital, where I completed my formal checkout and flew to Palm Beach to spend the holidays with my family.

  By then, the Vietnam War was in full swing, and Bobby was a senatorelect from New York. The war had escalated in early August following the attacks, or alleged attacks, by North Vietnamese patrol boats against a U.S. Navy destroyer--the long-disputed "Gulf of Tonkin incident." On August 7, the House and Senate, under executive pressure and lacking an accountable version of the facts, enacted Lyndon Johnson's Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, granting him authority to wage unlimited war against North Vietnam without securing congressional approval. From my hospital bed, I announced my support of Johnson's resolution.

  Bobby declared his Senate candidacy on August 22, and resigned as attorney general on September 3; Johnson named Nicholas Katzenbach to succeed him. Bobby and Ethel kept Hickory Hill in Virginia and took an apartment at the United Nations Plaza. Naturally, Kenneth Keating, the incumbent Republican senator from New York, seized the opportunity to tar my brother as a "carpetbagger." Bobby handled it with his usual wit. He could have chosen to retire, he told an audience at Columbia University. After all, "My father has done very well and I could have lived off him." Nor did he need the title "senator" because "I could be called general, I understand, for the rest of my life. And I don't need the money and I don't need the office space." As the laughter and applause swelled, Bobby concluded, "Frank as it is--and maybe it's difficult to believe in the state of New York--I'd like to just be a good United States senator. I'd like to serve."

  Nonetheless, his campaign was rocky at the outset, as Keating went all-out to portray my brother as hostile to the interests of blacks. These attacks roused Bobby; he wound up his campaign at a fever pitch and with the support of NAACP officials. When President Johnson, en route to his own rout of Barry Goldwater for the presidency, campaigned alongside him in late October, Keating's lead, and chances, evaporated. Bobby won the election by more than seven hundred thousand votes.

  His victory made our parents unique in the annals of political families: they were the first Americans in history to have raised three senators.

  Any euphoria my brother may have felt was tempered by his lingering grief over Jack. In a meeting with reporters in his office shortly after he was sworn in, one of them asked him how he felt now as a member of the Senate. Bobby replied quietly, "I regret the circumstances that led to my being here."

  It is fair to say that Bobby and Lyndon Johnson had a complicated relationship. Bobby was not initially in favor of having LBJ as Jack's running mate--he worried about whether anyone who had been running so hard for the seat himself could suppress his own presidential ambitions so quickly. And I don't think either of them ever felt warmth or trust toward each other. Truth was, Bobby's close relationship with Jack prevented Johnson from ever really getting as close to Jack as he would have been had Bobby not been in the picture. It was, in my opinion, a classic "three's a crowd" scenario. But even though there was no love lost between Bobby and LBJ, I wouldn't go so far as to call them bitter and implacable enemies, as some have suggested. Johnson was capable of kindness toward my brother, and courtesy, and political support. Toward me, President Johnson was consistently solicitous and friendly. I liked him and always got along with him very well.

  Still, I know that there were times that Johnson tried to play Bobby off against me, which was totally bizarre, since there was no way that a Kennedy would side with an outsider against another Kennedy. With all of his political acuity, I would have thought he'd understand that. Nevertheless, Johnson never learned it and never gave up trying. "I love Teddy and Sarge is great," he used to say. "Now what is it with this strange fellow Bobby? Why is he so difficult?" Bobby cut right to the heart of the matter. "Why does Lyndon fear me so much, for chrissakes?" he said once. "He's the president of the United States and I'm the junior senator from New York!"

  Actually, Bobby's relations with Johnson in 1964 and 1965 were not all that bad, certainly not as tense as they are often portrayed in the press. Some historians have written that Bobby longed for Johnson to name him as his running mate in the '64 election, but that Johnson kept him at bay. The truth is that the vice presidency under Johnson did not loom large as an option in my brother's mind. He might have been briefly tempted, but he was never possessed by the idea. There is no denying that Bobby had been awakened by the ovation he'd received after his remarks at the Democratic convention in Atlantic City. It was so overwhelming and so extraordinary that he thought briefly of letting his name go before the convention as a candidate for vice president. But a few hours' reflection convinced him that this was not worth the try. Johnson had made his mind up about Hubert Humphrey. Still, the enormous affection and respect he enjoyed at the convention gave Bobby heart as he launched his campaign for the Senate from New York.

  Bobby typically addressed his career decisions in that manner. He lived and made decisions in the moment and not in the cold, calculating way that some critics have tried to attribute to him. Bobby never really thought about what he was going to do next. He was absolutely absorbed in whatever he was doing at any given time. He started his career on the labor committee investigating racketeering, and for him, that was enough. Our father said to him, "Well, why don't you think about moving to Maryland, and then after this thing is over, you could run for the Senate?" Bobby had by then settled into Hickory Hill. He replied to our father, "No, I'm not thinking about anything else. I just want to do this. I don't really care where I live."

  As he began campaigning in New York, Bobby discovered, as he told me, that the city had a particular kind of energy that he had not thought much about until then. The writers and journalists there, he said, had a set of social concerns unlike their counterparts in Washington, who prided themselves as "insiders." As such, they tended to focus on the politics of a given situation. Many of the writers in New York were less sophisticated in practical politics, Bobby observed, but they were far more concerned about the moral and social substance of the issues.

  Bobby was most stirred by Michael Harrington, whose landmark study of "invisible" poverty, The Other America, had been published two years earlier. JFK and LBJ were also struck by the book; it energized Jack's attention to the poor, and served as an impetus for Johnson's War on Poverty.

  Bobby and I took the oath of office together on January 4, 1965--me, for my first full term. I was still navigating with the aid of a cane. Having my brother as a colleague in the Senate was wonderful. He brought energy into any room, any hearing; and his presence delighted and uplifted me as it did everyone who came into his orbit. Our new proximity brought with it the spirit of the old times; the laughter and teasing and optimism of our boyhoods; the easy intimacy of our autumn garage weekends at the Cape house.

  We'd struck up our old needling even before I left the hospital. Bobby had come to visit, and as the newsmen's cameras flashed, one photographer leaned toward my brother and said, "Step back a little, you're casting a shadow on Ted." I quickly responded, "It's going to be the same in Washington."

  As he recovered his old intensity and drive, my brother found the Senate's pace infuriatingly slow in relation to the changes he wanted to make. Jack had been in the Senate for five months before he made a speech. I'd been in office for sixteen months. Bobby managed to wait all of three weeks before taking the floor. He was advocating a bill that would have included thirteen upstate New York counties that bordered Pennsy
lvania in an Appalachian Economic Development Plan.

  Bobby never wanted to give the impression that he planned to coast through the Senate on his name. He understood power well. He knew that there was an inside Senate and an outside Senate, and that his fastblossoming idealism made him basically an outsider. Some historians have wondered if Bobby's transformation was provoked by Jack's death. I believe it was.

  Bobby decided that he would take on issues that championed America's dispossessed, such as antipoverty bills and further civil rights reform. He searched out injustices and moral causes. His involvement in them lent them a sense of urgency they might not otherwise have inspired. As he grew and learned, he became more and more interested in people, as opposed to abstract issues.

  For all our fraternal closeness, Bobby and I did not work in tandem as senators. Even when we tried, we couldn't manage it. Once, not long after his election, Bobby arrived late for a vote on some long-forgotten bill and looked over at me from his seat to see how I was voting. I looked back at him, not understanding what he wanted. He kept looking at me, and finally shook his head as if to ask, "Is the vote no?" I got it. I nodded back at him, meaning, "Yes, the vote is no." But Bobby thought I meant, "The vote is yes." So Bobby voted yes. I then voted no, which set the Senate buzzing--were the Kennedy brothers at odds with each other?! I looked at Bobby again and shook my head no. Bobby then shook his head no--in agreement, he thought, with the no vote. But I thought he meant, "No, I'm not voting no." So I vigorously nodded my head yes, as if to say, "Yes, you are supposed to vote no." Bobby shook his head, changed his vote to no, then bent over his desk and quickly scribbled me a note: "Now I get it. When you nod, you want me to vote no, and when you shake your head, you want me to vote no. So I guess I'm always supposed to vote no!"

  We served on one committee together--Labor and Public Welfare--but otherwise chose separate legislative paths, and reinforced one another to the extent we were able. Bobby gravitated toward Vietnam-related issues, such as reforming the draft. I focused on immigration and civil rights. I was, after all, a member of the Judiciary Committee, and in 1965 especially, civil rights virtually defined the committee's agenda. Martin Luther King had received the Nobel Peace Prize in October 1964, a reminder to Americans that the world's enlightened societies supported his quest. In the spring of 1965, a voting rights bill was making its way through both houses. Its cosponsors were Mike Mansfield and Everett Dirksen. It aimed to expand upon the Civil Rights Act's social impact by outlawing literacy tests and other impediments long enshrined in southern state laws to discourage Negro voting.

  Some Judiciary members, myself included, believed that the bill did not go far enough, and that liberal lawmakers had not been adequately consulted. We felt that it ignored one of the most onerous tools of disenfranchisement against impoverished black voters, the poll tax. In 1964, a constitutional amendment devoted exclusively to outlawing the poll tax had been ratified--the Twenty-fourth. But this amendment covered only voting in federal elections. In Texas, Alabama, Virginia, and Mississippi, along with stubbornly independent (and virtually all-white) Vermont, the tax was still imposed on state and local balloting.

  In April 1965, I led the fight for an amendment to the voting rights bill that would ban poll taxing at all electoral levels. I drew upon an inspirational ally in this effort, the visionary NAACP lobbyist Clarence Mitchell. This was the first time I floor-managed a piece of legislation in the Senate.

  I faced some unlikely opponents. Attorney General Katzenbach opposed it on the belief that federal intervention in local elections could be ruled unconstitutional regardless of the Twenty-fourth Amendment. Hubert Humphrey, a champion of civil rights well before the movement, lobbied against it on the Senate floor. Cosponsor Mike Mansfield, a progressive on many issues, lined up against it--as did two other famous liberals, Eugene McCarthy and Vance Hartke of Indiana. At the time, I was not able to figure out why. Much to my surprise, it was later publicly revealed in Congress that Martin Luther King himself wrote to many lawmakers asking them not to vote for the poll tax removal, since he saw it as jeopardizing the passage of the Voting Rights Act as a whole.

  I drew upon every scrap of procedural savvy that I had observed in my brief career as a senator. I drilled with professors from Howard University, Harvard, and several other sources, including Thurgood Marshall, until I'd mastered the constitutional underpinnings of the issue. (An extension of my hospital "tutorials," this practice would remain with me.) I kept in close touch with civil rights leaders, including Dr. King, to make sure I understood the direction and depth of their feeling. I believe that I met and spoke personally with every senator. On the Senate floor, I declared that the poll tax not only was conceived in discrimination and not only did it operate in discrimination--it was obviously ineffectively discriminatory, given that it would inhibit voting by the poor of any race.

  I lost that battle by four votes: forty-nine to forty-five. Its defeat may have turned partly on a letter from Katzenbach, which was read by Mike Mansfield on the floor. Nonetheless, I took pride in having championed the amendment. I felt even better when my constitutional judgment was vindicated: the Voting Rights Act, signed into law on August 6, did not abolish the poll tax, but it did direct Attorney General Katzenbach to file suits against the states that used it. In the ensuing four years, Katzenbach won every one. Millions of southern blacks registered as new voters.

  Soon after that, thanks to the courtesy of James Eastland, I was given my first chance at another cause that would become a career passion of mine: immigration.

  President Johnson's Great Society program was redressing one social imbalance after another in the mid-sixties. One of these was to dismantle the quota system that since 1924 had allowed masses of northern Europeans to enter the United States, while keeping stringent limits on Asians, Africans, and people of color generally. Jack had cared about immigration reform, but it was what happened to newcomers once they had been allowed in that stirred his conscience: the indignities heaped on the boatloads of poor Irish disembarking at Boston, for instance.

  The immigration bill before the Judiciary Committee had been proposed by Emmanuel Celler, the great Democratic congressman from Brooklyn, and was cosponsored by Senator Philip Hart of Michigan. I was happy to accept its management when Eastland offered it to me. Eastland was hardly a champion of immigration reform, but he was a realist. The momentum was running against him, and perhaps he would need a favor from me someday.

  My Boston Irish constituency was not thrilled to see me at work reducing Ireland's proportionate access to U.S. citizenship, and some loud voices were raised. But I kept in touch with opposition groups in Massachusetts and managed to calm everyone's fears that the measure would lead to a deluge that would overwhelm American society. The bill passed by seventy-six votes to eighteen on September 22, 1965. President Johnson signed it into law in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty.

  In October 1965, I had an experience that did not produce such satisfying results.

  The issue was a federal judgeship for Francis X. Morrissey, the Boston municipal judge who'd been a friend of our family for years. He was the same Frank Morrissey who'd steered me through the city's political and jurisprudence cultures after I left law school and began to form a career, and who'd reported to Dad on my successes at giving talks and winning acceptance in Boston. Before that, starting in 1946, he had mentored Jack in a similar way, then helped manage Congressman Kennedy's Boston office.

  Our father was fond of Frank. He'd seen something noble in Morrissey's classic Irish-American working-class story. Frank was a dockworker's son from Charlestown, a part of Boston across the Charles River, just north of the city proper. He was one of twelve children who'd grown up in a household without electricity. He'd studied law at Suffolk Law School in Boston, taking night courses while working as a bank teller in the daytime.

  Dad believed in Frank Morrissey, and in 1961 asked Jack to appoint him as a federal judge. Jack unders
tood the odds, and held the nomination in abeyance.

  But now Jack was gone. It was four years later and Dad was frail and in decline from his stroke. I didn't want unfinished business, and I asked him whether he still cared about the Morrissey appointment. He made clear to me that he cared very much. This was the only request my father had ever made of me. Interestingly, Jack had told friends the same thing back in 1961. Jack and I both believed in our father's judgment; and his request for a favor--literally a once-in-a-lifetime event--was just about impossible for either of us to ignore. It was a matter of loyalty.

  I backed Frank Morrissey for the federal judgeship. I went to the White House to personally ask President Johnson to nominate him, and the president agreed. With me sitting next to him, the president then placed a call to my father to tell him the news. According to Johnson's own White House tape recordings, he said, "Mr. Ambassador, we are sitting here with Teddy and we're getting ready to recommend your friend Judge Morrissey for the federal bench, and we wanted to tell you about it first."

  Then the president handed me the phone. "Dad, well, it looks like you're the man with all of the influence," I said. "The president said he is doing it for all of you and Jack and Bob and myself, so it's really fine. But I think he is giving a little extra push because of your interest in it." My father was overcome with emotion.

  As much as I wanted to make my father happy, I understood full well that there would be opposition to Morrissey. And I also wanted to do the right thing. I searched my conscience. I polled senators whose moral clarity I respected, including the deeply principled Phil Hart, whose early support of gun control and school busing inspired recall petitions against him. Senator Hart told me that Morrissey was indeed qualified to assume the federal bench: "He isn't the brightest of all the people we have, but he's certainly very competent and able to handle it." Bobby sent a letter supporting the nominee. Attorney General Katzenbach sent a report to James Eastland saying there was no basis to question the nominee's credibility. The Judiciary Committee recommended Morrissey's confirmation by a vote of six to three.