True Compass: A Memoir

by Edward M. Kennedy

  At St. Albans, he and the other students were required to memorize one poem each week. I remember listening enchanted as Teddy mastered Yeats's "The Second Coming": "Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer..."

  On November 6, Teddy came down with a cold and remained home from school at our McLean house, where he padded about in a bathrobe. I was in the library, just winding up a briefing session with staff. As I walked out, I spotted my son and noticed that the area just below his right kneecap was discolored by an ugly reddish lump. He grudgingly admitted that it hurt a little--which meant, in Kennedy lexicon, that it hurt a lot. I assumed that it was nothing more than just a football bruise. (Teddy himself said later that he'd thought it was Osgood-Schlatter disease, a common affliction to fast-growing young knees that several of his classmates had experienced.) I asked our governess, Teresa Fitzpatrick, to telephone Dr. S. Philip Caper, who had been affiliated with Harvard Medical School, but was then in Washington as a staff member for my Senate health subcommittee.

  The doctor rang our doorbell scarcely half an hour later. He was en route to a formal event and was dressed for the occasion, yet he examined my son with fully professional concentration. It was probably nothing to worry about, Phil said, but we should keep an eye on it. He'd check back in a couple of days.

  I flew to Boston on Thursday, November 8, to complete some work out of my office there and had planned to fly down to Florida the next day for a brief visit with my mother in Palm Beach. But when Teresa called me to say that Teddy's leg was not better, I really became concerned. I told Teresa to call Dr. Caper, and I made plans to return to Washington the next day when my Boston events were finished, instead of visiting my mother. Phil arranged for Teddy to see the chairman of orthopedic surgery at Georgetown University Hospital, Dr. George Hyatt. Dr. Hyatt examined my son and had X-rays taken.

  As I flew back to Washington the next day, I began to have an almost overwhelming sense of dread, but I willed myself not to think of the possibilities. In truth, they were unthinkable. Phil Caper met me at the airport, and the expression on his face made me brace myself. He told me the situation was serious: that Dr. George Hyatt at Georgetown felt certain that we were looking at a bone tumor. We immediately went to Georgetown, where Phil and I met personally with Dr. Hyatt, and he repeated the same devastating news. He added that if we were indeed looking at bone cancer, then Teddy's leg would most likely have to be amputated. He wanted to bring Teddy into the hospital for more tests and to consult with a broader group of experts from other institutions as well. I readily agreed.

  Later that day, my good-natured twelve-year-old son checked into the hospital for more X-rays and blood tests and examinations. He was so innocent and trusting. I could barely absorb the realities of the situation, and I didn't feel that it was the time to discuss it with him. Joan was traveling in Europe, and I hadn't even been able to talk to her yet.

  After two days of tests, the news was no better, but the doctors let me take him home for the rest of the weekend. We wanted his life to be as normal as possible for as long as possible. When we got back to our home in the Washington suburbs, I grabbed a football, went out to the lawn, and threw passes to my son. As he ran to catch them, I was fighting not to be crushed by emotion, knowing that this was probably the last time that Teddy would be able to run on two legs. I didn't tell him what the future held. There would be time enough for that. I just played ball with my son and savored every moment and prayed that he was going to survive. There had been so much loss. But please God. Not Teddy.

  I called Joan. She needed to come home from Europe. We were facing a life-and-death situation for our son.

  Teddy returned to the hospital after the weekend and on Tuesday, November 13, the doctors operated on his leg to remove a small slice of the tissue believed to be malignant. The tissue was analyzed immediately by Dr. Lent Johnson of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, the country's leading expert in analyzing this kind of tumor.

  I did not leave the hospital. Dr. Hyatt delivered news both devastating and hopeful: Teddy's right leg would have to be amputated above the knee, and quickly, in an attempt to overtake the cancer that was probably spreading. The hopeful news was that the type of cancer seemed to be chondrosarcoma, which attacked the ligaments and was a good deal less deadly than osteosarcoma, cancer of the bone, which took the lives of 80 percent of its victims within five years. Still, no one was sure.

  The surgeons made plans to amputate Teddy's leg on Friday, November 16. Only Teddy's persistent cold prevented them from operating the next day, as they'd have preferred.

  As of Thursday, I still had not told Teddy of what lay ahead. I'd consulted a child psychiatrist to get help on how to break the news. He said that we shouldn't tell Teddy too far in advance, to minimize his level of anxiety, and we had to tell him in the right way. On the day before Teddy was to have surgery, I went with Phil Caper and Dr. Robert Coles, the renowned child psychiatrist from Harvard, to deliver the news to my son. I'd heard and delivered more than my share of bad news in my life, but this was the worst of the worst. My twelve-year-old son started crying, and I was fighting back emotion with every ounce of my being. I held Teddy in my arms and told him that I'd be there with him, that we'd face this problem together, that surgery would take care of the problem so he could be well, that we would have many happy days still ahead. I needed to believe those words as much as he did. In the end, he accepted the news bravely, but I'm not sure that his young mind could truly absorb what it really would mean to lose his leg above the knee.

  My visits to the hospital had attracted press attention, and few secrets can be kept in great urban hospitals. I decided to prevail on the essential humanity of the reporters, who were by now asking insistent questions. I told them the facts, but asked them not to print their stories until the following day, when the operation would occur. The reporters said they would comply. Just in case someone had not heard of the agreement or elected to ignore it, I removed Teddy's radio and TV set. I made the excuse that we were offering them to other children in the hospital who could not afford such luxuries.

  Because of Teddy's lingering cold, the doctors postponed the surgery again, until 8:30 Saturday morning. This posed a distressing new dilemma. Saturday, November 17, 1973, was a date I'd circled on my calendar many months ago. My niece Kathleen was to be married on this day: Kathleen, the sparkling, great-hearted eldest child of Bobby and Ethel. Kathleen, named in honor of our late sister "Kick," the eldest grandchild of Joe and Rose and the first to be wed. Her thick shock of raven hair has always reminded me of Bobby, as has her devoutness, her curiosity, and her passion for public service.

  At 11 a.m. on this day, Kathleen was to marry David Townsend, then a doctoral candidate at Harvard in history and literature. The church was Holy Trinity, where Jack had worshipped during his time as president. I had promised to give my niece away at the ceremony. Kathleen had offered to postpone the wedding after she'd heard about Teddy's operation schedule, but I dissuaded her. I wanted nothing to cloud her memories of this milestone in her life. But the delay in Teddy's surgery caused me anguish. I needed to know that my son was going to be all right before I left the hospital.

  At around ten that morning, the doctors appeared from the operating room to announce that the surgery had been a success and Teddy, still anesthetized, was well out of danger. Only then did I rush the several blocks to Holy Trinity to walk Bobby's firstborn down the aisle on her wedding day. As soon as the nuptial mass was over, I rushed back to the hospital.

  As difficult and painful as the surgery and the loss of his leg were for him, Teddy's positive and upbeat nature carried him through his recovery and rehabilitation. But even as Teddy was working hard on his exercise regimen and enjoying visits by special guests (the entire offensive line of the Washington Redskins, for example), the doctors were revisiting their conclusion that his cancer was strictly chondrosarcoma. Pathology lab results showed dreaded b
one cancer cells indeed present in my son's tumor.

  This fresh blow to my hopes for Teddy left me stunned at first; but a more aggressive emotion quickly took hold: defiance. If the cancer has escalated, we'll escalate back. However unwittingly, I began to form the template for future counterattacks against the disease in my family, including my own test thirty-five years on.

  I got on the phone and called doctors from around the United States who I knew were working on experimental forms of treatment--doctors I'd gotten to know in our shared crusade for cancer funding. I convened a meeting at my home in McLean. The practitioner whose results seemed the most promising to me was based right in Boston: Dr. Edward Frei III, of Children's Hospital. In this period before the general advent of chemotherapy, Dr. Frei had found success administering a drug called methotrexate, which destroyed cancer cells efficiently. (Sidney Farber was experimenting with this drug in the 1940s as well.)

  The other doctors agreed on this treatment, and on February 1, 1974, my resolute twelve-year-old commenced a rigorous pattern that would be repeated without interruption over two years. Every three weeks, I would fly with Teddy from Washington to Boston, where he would endure six hours of lying nearly motionless in his hospital bed while a needle dripped medicine into his bloodstream, followed by another long period of citrovorum injections. The entire process covered three days.

  Helping Teddy recover took precedence over every other activity in my life, including my duties in the Senate. I slept beside him in his hospital room. I would hold his head against my chest when the nausea overcame him. In time, I learned the technique of injecting him myself, so that we could cut the visit short by a day and get him into his classroom on Monday mornings.

  My many hours at Boston Children's Hospital were precious in another way. While Teddy was asleep or in treatment, I wandered the halls and the waiting rooms, and sought out other parents who, like me, were keeping vigil over terribly ill sons and daughters--many of them with the dreaded osteosarcoma. These were mostly working people: salesmen, secretaries, laborers, teachers, taxi drivers. Their long hours and modest savings allowed them to raise their families comfortably and with hope--until catastrophe struck. It was in these conversations that the inhumanity of our health care system truly hit home to me. We shared common ground in our anxieties about whether our children would live or die, or survive with debilitating frailties. But for my new friends, this was only one terrible part of a larger nightmare.

  Teddy's treatment, like that of the other children suffering from cancer, was free in the first six or seven months, because it was part of an NIH experimental grant: a clinical trial with uncertain results, to which we had all agreed. The results in fact proved highly promising for all the young patients, a dividend of the rise in research funding. But this happy news brought with it a heartbreaking downside: once the usefulness of the treatment and medicines had been verified, the experiment ended, and the patients' families were billed for the remaining treatment.

  I will never forget sitting down and listening to those parents. Suddenly they were faced with finding a way to scrape up three thousand dollars for each treatment. The treatments were necessary every three weeks for two years. These families were terrified. They could not begin to afford it. They would tell me of being reduced to a grim, almost macabre calculus: How much of a chance, they would ask the doctors, did their children have if they purchased the resources for only a year? Or eight months? Or six months? They were not being stingy. They were bargaining based on how much they could afford. Many had already borrowed to the limit. Others had sold or remortgaged their homes. Several had run the risk of being fired from their jobs for the crime of taking time off work to be with their son or daughter. In a few cases, debt or bankruptcy was compounded by the knowledge that the child would never recover: the illness had no cure, because funding in that field remained inadequate.

  I began directing my Senate health committee's work toward the realities of lives such as those: the uninsured, the underinsured. I held hearings--but not always just ordinary hearings. Whenever feasible, I would take my committee and witnesses to hospitals in rural and inner-city neighborhoods. I wanted my colleagues to be taken out of their comfort zones, as I had been taken out of mine. I wanted them to experience the ravages of preventable illness and death as I'd learned to experience them: not as abstractions on a printed page, but as blood, and bandages, and needles, and wails of pain down a hospital corridor, and tears, and mourning.

  The field hearings did not produce instant, dramatic results--cries of empathy from hardheaded Senate conservatives, a raft of new legislation, fresh winds of enlightened consensus. I never assumed that they would. I had no illusions about the battle for health care. But now that battle had my complete attention. I had even won an early fight in it: my son would live.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Nixonian Radicals

  1969-1973

  There was not much reason for me to distrust Richard Nixon at the outset of his presidency. The early stages of my acquaintanceship with him were congenial. He was both interesting and entertaining. In the spring of 1953, when I came home from the army, I went down to Washington to visit my brother the new senator, and Nixon, the new vice president, spotted me in the Capitol. (As president of the Senate, the vice president has an office in the Capitol building.) He invited me in, and we spent a cordial forty-five minutes in conversation.

  Jack liked him as well back then. My brother and Nixon had both been elected to Congress in 1946, and the two of them would often chat and joke with each other. Jack respected that Nixon was also a navy man, and he found him to be intelligent and pleasant. I suppose that neither of us had been paying all that much attention when Nixon ran his lessthan-pleasant campaign for the Senate in 1950, which he won by attacking his Democratic opponent, Helen Gahagan Douglas, as a communist sympathizer and dubbed her "the Pink Lady--pink right down to her underwear."

  In later years, Nixon did not feel quite so pleasant toward me or members of my family. He was bitter over his narrow loss of the presidency to Jack in 1960. And he had lost the governorship of California to Pat Brown just two years later. Still, he came back again to win the presidency over Hubert Humphrey in the rubble of all that had disintegrated in the year 1968. He won by less than a percentage point, as the third-party candidate George Wallace of Alabama swept five traditionally Democratic states in the Deep South and pulled away more than 13 percent of the total votes.

  It was clear I'd infuriated Nixon with my May 1969 speech denouncing Hamburger Hill and, by extension, the Vietnam War policies that he now administered. Almost immediately after that, I began tangling with the administration over a series of Supreme Court nominations that I and others felt were antithetical to the court's independence from ideology. My base of operations was an obscure Judiciary subcommittee that I had agreed to chair in that same year: Administrative Practices and Procedures.

  In the past, "Ad-Prac" wielded little legislative influence, and few people outside the Senate even knew it existed. But my growing understanding of the ways the Senate operated told me it had the opportunity to be otherwise. It was true that Ad-Prac had statutory jurisdiction over only a small number of areas. But as I discovered, it enjoyed a surprisingly broad mandate--essentially the entire federal bureaucracy--for administrative oversight. Over the ensuing years, our subcommittee was able to change federal policy in varied and substantial ways. For instance, with the help of a young staffer who served as special counsel to the committee in 1974, we deregulated the airline industry and abolished the Civil Aeronautics Board. That young staffer was Stephen Breyer, now associate justice of the United State Supreme Court.

  My opposition to the administration's policies was not personal, but Nixon took things quite personally indeed. I quickly drew his distaste, as well as his need for control and vengeance. By 1971, although I didn't know it at the time, I was a member of his infamous "enemies list." Since the tally of those "enemies" e
ventually reached forty-seven thousand, I was never really able to savor a sense of prestige at being included, even after I found out about it.

  In May 1971, the president directed his chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, to wiretap my telephones, along with those of Ed Muskie, Hubert Humphrey, and several other Democrats. He also had assigned his operatives to research and put their own spin on the Chappaquiddick tragedy to maximize the damage to my reputation and perhaps end my Senate career. He ordered his aides to plant two spies within my Secret Service detail. Their assignment would be to catch me in the company of another woman. It is not clear whether that directive was ever carried out. A batch of recently released papers from the Nixon Library included one of Haldeman's notes, reminding himself, "Get him--compromising situation.... Get evidence--use another Dem as front."

  As to Nixon's Supreme Court appointments and his other misadventures with the Constitution:

  My daughter Kara not long ago gave me a lovely Christmas present: 200 Notable Days: Senate Stories, 1787 to 2002. It was written by the splendid Historian of the United States Senate, Richard A. Baker. Its narratives contain several references to James Madison's seminal Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, the event known familiarly as the Constitutional Convention. Madison shows clearly that the last major decision on the appointing of justices effectively divided the responsibility between the president and the Senate. This principle--"advise and consent" is its familiar label--is far too often overlooked during consideration of appointments to the federal bench. The president is usually able to convince the American people that he has sole authority and responsibility for these appointments, and that unless one can find an egregious circumstance, the overwhelming requirement on the Senate is to defer to the president and approve the nominee. But the Founding Fathers did not intend it that way. Quite significantly, they stipulated that justices would have lifetime appointments--which implies enormous responsibility for interpreting the Constitution. To help regulate that responsibility, they provided for the utmost deliberation, and assigned that deliberation to the Senate.