True Compass: A Memoir

by Edward M. Kennedy

  Although it was not a determinant in my decision-making, I also knew that it did not help my presidential prospects that Chappaquiddick came spinning back into the nation's consciousness. On July 14, 1974, five days before the fifth anniversary of the accident, the New York Times Magazine published a retrospective essay by the journalist Robert Sherrill. Irrespective of its merits, the piece attracted great attention. Though the election was still two years away, my adversaries would almost certainly continue to make an issue of it.

  In the late summer, just before Labor Day, I gathered my family for a conference on the Cape to make certain I understood their feelings on the matter, and that they understood mine. What transpired led me, on September 23, to call a press conference in Boston to announce that I would not be a candidate for president in 1976. I made it as unequivocal as words would allow.

  My primary responsibilities were at home, I told the reporters and cameras. "It has become quite apparent to me that I would be unable to make a full commitment to a campaign for the presidency. I simply cannot do that to my wife and children and the other members of my family." My decision, I stipulated, was firm, final, and unconditional. I would accept neither the nomination nor a draft.

  If I needed any further reminder how deeply my loved ones agonized over the thought of my running for president, I received it a year and a half later, by way of my mother.

  Rose Kennedy was eighty-five in January 1976 when she trustingly consented to an interview in Palm Beach with a National Enquirer reporter named Charles Van Rensselaer, who'd developed some acquaintanceships among the Kennedys. When I learned of my mother's comments, I realized afresh the anxieties that coursed beneath her resolutely cheerful exterior.

  "I feel Teddy may be pressured into running for president this year," Mother was quoted as telling the reporter. "I don't want him to, but the pressures may force him.

  "He promised me, he promised me faithfully, that he would not run. I told him I did not want to see him die, too, that I could not stand another tragedy.... But even though he has given me his promise that he will not run, I realize there are considerations that could make him change his mind. He may feel it is something he has to do.... And if that is his decision, I would support him. I'll campaign for him, anywhere he wants me to. You know, I'm quite a campaigner.

  "But he shouldn't run, though. Oh, no. No. We've had so many tragedies already. I have prayed so much about this and I have asked God that Teddy will be led to the right decision. But in the end I have put it all in God's hands and I will follow His will, no matter what it is."

  With the question of my candidacy resolved, I turned my attention to a matter of much greater importance. Racial tensions had escalated in my home state over the issue of school busing to achieve integration. American schools had been desegregated by law since the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. Yet urban housing patterns in which populations remained stubbornly sealed within neighborhoods of their own ethnic and racial identities ensured that true integration would remain an unattainable ideal. Finally, the courts of the nation took it upon themselves to enforce the ideal.

  Boston was one of several American cities that had stalled for years in designing a desegregation plan, but it was among the most volatile, as events proved. Francis W. Sargent, a moderate Republican, was governor then. He advocated support of the busing order, but was tarred as an elitist by opponents. Kevin White, the mayor of Boston, also tried to play a constructive role, but there was no groundswell of support. The business community simply did not get involved. In those days, they were essentially isolated from this kind of thing.

  The Catholic Church, a potential bulwark for restraint, did not play a constructive role. Richard Cardinal Cushing, my father's old friend, was in the waning days of his life and physically too frail to be a force. Sadly, some local priests actually went on the anti-busing marches.

  At that time, Boston didn't have someone like Lenny Zakim, the late civic leader and civil rights activist who was known for building bridges between people. The civic leaders at the time of the busing crisis gave money to support the arts, but they really were not involved in this kind of community healing effort. We were not entirely bereft of people and groups who understood the common good and worked bravely for it. I think of some of the members of the African-American community like the Snowdens, Otto and Muriel, the creators of Freedom House in 1949, who remained vital and active through this era. I think of the great educator and NAACP activist Ruth Batson, who stood up to the Boston School Committee when it counted. Or Ellen Jackson, whose constructive work on behalf of affirmative action earned her tremendous vituperation. A Boston high school now bears her name.

  In that same year, Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr. ruled in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts that the Boston Public Schools showed a lingering pattern of racial discrimination, and mandated busing as the remedy: transferring children out of their community schools by bus to those in distant and racially dissimilar neighborhoods to achieve the balance required by the law.

  Civil chaos tore through the city within weeks.

  Several anti-busing leaders had been elected to the Boston School Committee, the governing body of the Boston Public Schools. This group successfully had blocked implementation of Garrity's ruling. Towering above them all was the determined Boston lawyer Louise Day Hicks, who, with her severely parted black mane, her mouth set in a thin straight line, and her universally recognized catch line--"You know where I stand "--had nearly won the mayor's race in 1967. (She served a term as a Democratic congresswoman from 1971 to 1973, and in 1976 became president of the Boston City Council.) Hicks and her equally confrontational comrade-in-arms, Elvira "Pixie" Palladino, cofounded the aptly named ROAR (Restore Our Alienated Rights) in 1974. And there was John Kerrigan, the heavy-browed, caustic school committee chairman who spewed patently over-the-top claims and castigations to keep himself on the news and in the limelight.

  It is significant that Hicks, Palladino, Kerrigan, and others at the forefront of the anti-busing movement were Democrats. Hicks in fact voted for the Equal Rights Amendment as a congresswoman, and Palladino rather creatively tried to frame busing as a women's issue. Activists were holding public rallies all over the city in the early 1970s.

  Some of the opponents of busing were focused only on race, and I knew I couldn't have any impact on them. But others were concerned and bewildered, troubled and filled with anxiety about what was happening to their children, and I thought that maybe I could reach these parents. They had legitimate concerns. They were worried that their children would be far away from home if they fell ill at school. And they were upset because they were being denied access to the school in the neighborhood to which, in some cases, they had moved to specifically because of the school district. I understood those concerns.

  In August, I made a televised appeal for calm. Others did the same, and we had some success urging support for the courts. The federal courts had been instrumental in helping to break down the walls of discrimination, and I deeply believed that the worst thing we could do was to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the courts' decisions.

  But in retrospect, it may have been this very appeal, and others like it, that branded me as an enemy of the outraged dissenters. In their eyes, I had become just one more of those Boston elitists who didn't care about ordinary people and their children.

  I issued another plea for restraint shortly before the opening day of public schools. But as that day dawned, September 9, the entire nation seemed focused on South Boston. I went over to see it for myself: television trucks and reporters everywhere, swarms of police, rocks flying at school buses, mobs of red-faced people yelling insults at the African-American children as they walked to their schoolhouse doors, where metal detectors awaited them.

  A huge anti-busing rally was forming at City Hall. I debated whether or not to make an appearance there. I had not been invited, and so it would have been ea
sy to stay away. The prospects for violence were enormous. But I felt a responsibility to go. Boston was my city, and busing was the issue of the day. Hundreds of good people of both races were putting themselves on the line, trying to find a way through this struggle. There was no choice but for me to face this issue where it counted: at ground zero, on the street. That was when I discovered the price of calling for calm.

  When my car pulled up to City Hall, a massive crowd swelled the area between it and the John F. Kennedy Building. People screamed through bullhorns.

  I decided to walk to this crowd. I told my aides to stay behind: I did not want it to appear that I was coming with a group to protect me. As I walked alone across the mall toward them, I could hear voices say, "There he is! There he is! There he is!" They began yelling insults. But they did fall back a little and open just enough of a path for me to get to the podium.

  As I approached the microphone, a man shouted at me, "What do you want to do, speak? You're not going to speak! You've taken away our rights! We're going to take away your rights! How do you like that?!"

  With that, everyone in the crowd turned their backs on me and sang "God Bless America." A busing protester took the podium and gave a five-minute fire-and-brimstone speech. When I walked toward the microphone again after he'd finished, some of his supporters covered the mike with their hands. The crowd turned its back again and sang another song. The hostility level was rising fast. I was catching insults from both the crowd and those on the podium. I started down the stairs at the side of the podium. The crowd opened just a sliver. They raged insults at me that knew no bounds: "YOUR ONE-LEGGED SON! SEND HIM OVER HERE!" Eggs and tomatoes were in the air now, and there was pushing and shoving.

  I stopped on my way away from the plaza. Crowds such as this one are filled with cowards. If you turn and face them, they're reluctant to close the distance. I stopped a couple times more, and the crowd stopped. But it was showing signs of turning into a full-fledged mob. I was now about thirty yards from the doors of the JFK Building. The mob was still stopping, but it had edged ever closer to me. I turned resolutely and strode toward the doors. As I passed through them, the rocks started hurtling toward me in earnest. Window glass shattered, but police were inside the building, and my pursuers didn't try to enter.

  The crisis, for me at least, could have ended there. It almost did. I got into an elevator and started to take it down to the basement garage to get into a car that would whisk me to the airport, from which I would fly to Washington. Then it struck me: They'll say they ran me out of town. There was no way I was going to let that happen. I rode the elevator back up to street level and let them see me. Then I took the elevator up to my office on the twenty-fourth floor.

  More dangerous still was a situation that developed after a speech I gave in Quincy not long afterward. This time ROAR was an even more aggressive presence among the several hundred demonstrators outside the building. I realized that I would have to move through them on my way to my car. My driver, Jack Crimmins, usually stayed with the car on such occasions, but this time he left it and walked back to the meeting hall to give me and my aide Jimmy King some extra protection.

  We made it back to the car with people screaming and spraying spittle in our faces. The car's tires had all been punctured. Dog feces were smeared on the door handles and all over the windshields. The demonstrators had nearly encircled us. There was no security.

  Jack and Jimmy and I started to walk. I didn't know where the hell we were walking. It was a neighborhood, but one completely unknown to me. We walked on. The thing was to seem purposeful, resolute. I asked Jack, "Do we have friends around here? Is there a house?" But Jack knew of no one. We didn't even know the name of the street we were on. We kept walking. The mob followed us. It was starting to grow larger. The people in it were getting nastier. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a subway station. I looked at Jimmy and said, "Jimmy, we've got to get in there." But what I was thinking was, My God, we'll be in the subway and we'll be waiting there for who knows how long for the train to come. We broke for the entrance. Our pursuers ran after us. There was one gated doorway leading to the tracks. We squeezed through, and Jimmy somehow braced it shut against the mob. We boarded a train and were safe.

  Probably the most excruciating encounter of them all, though, was an event that wasn't physically threatening. I'd agreed to meet with some seventy South Boston parents in my office.

  They all crowded in and formed a semicircle around me, behind my desk. ROAR was ably represented by my old friend Pixie Palladino. She did not disappoint. But the woman who really burned her name into my memory on that long, long day was an organizer named Rita Graul. She was the toughest cookie I'd ever seen. I remember thinking, If I were ever to be fighting against the German lines, I'd want Rita Graul to be in that foxhole with me.

  Rita never spoke--formally, that is. She just introduced each one of the seventy people. Each of whom spoke. One. At. A. Time. The meeting lasted seven hours. Rita was the emcee, if that is the term. She knew every single person in that group; knew which neighborhood they came from; what part of Ireland their ancestors had come from. "Oh, golly," she'd say. "Now we'll hear from Mary over here. Mary O'Sullivan. You know, the O'Sullivans used to be a great community resource in the school there. But now--" She'd sigh, and go on in that quivering voice of hers, "Why are you torturing Mary's kids, Senator? She's got two nice children: Megan and Sean. Sean was on the baseball team. But he can't play baseball anymore, Senator, because he is being bused. Senator, do your kids play baseball? Why are you doing this to us, Senator? Why are you doing this to me?"

  Seven hours of it.

  The wounds inflicted on the people of Boston by the years of racial strife never reached a dramatic moment of healing. I wish I could say otherwise--but such is true in the nation as well. I certainly take comfort in the progress made since then: the fact that Massachusetts schools, in the fourth and eighth grades especially, are now among the very best in the country. More success has been achieved in reducing the racial disparity in Boston schools than in almost any other state. The enlightened business community has championed reforms that goaded government into taking action.

  Yet the scars remain: by the time the busing experiment ended in 1988, white flight to the suburbs had generated a kind of social segregation. The Boston school district, once a hundred thousand students strong, stood at fifty-seven thousand, only 15 percent of whom were white.

  The bicentennial year 1976 witnessed the election of Jimmy Carter as president over Gerald Ford. Carter won without any help of consequence from me. This was not my decision, but Carter's. I had in fact told him that I would go anywhere on the trail he needed me to go. I suggested, though, that he accompany me in these appearances; he declined. I believe that the prospect of standing alongside me in public activated his political insecurities.

  Jimmy Carter baffled me. He baffled many potential allies in his own party--Hubert Humphrey, Ed Muskie, and George McGovern found themselves as unwelcome as did I in their overtures to campaign on his behalf--but I believed then and now that he reserved a special place in his animus toward me.

  The year 1976 also saw my reelection to the Senate, an especially heartening outcome in light of the recent turmoils in Boston. The massed anger of the anti-busing voters of South Boston was still fresh in my memory, as was my sorrow that those furious crowds consisted mostly of people whose heritage I shared and respected, Irish Catholics. I doubt that many in those troubled neighborhoods had mellowed enough to vote for me--my opponent, after all, was the ROAR counsel Robert Emmet Dinsmore--but the Commonwealth returned me with 74 percent of the vote.

  Jimmy Carter's electoral victory over Gerald Ford seemed to cheer up the nation, but not everyone in the political world, even among liberal Democrats, was as charmed. The moment was certainly right for Carter. The electorate was hungry for a newcomer, a moral crusader who would play against Washington and its politics of cynicism. The smiling Geor
gia peanut farmer who campaigned on the studied folksiness of "My name is Jimmy Carter and I want to be your president" arrived on the scene just when American governance was ripe for transformation.

  Looking back, I think he simply had convinced himself that he was going to do it his way. He was an outsider, and he was going to run things from an outsider's point of view. This was true of his dealings with the Senate, and one of the principal reasons that he never won that body's cooperation.

  It seemed as though Jimmy Carter looked on me as a potential spoiler for his presidential hopes from the very outset. We first met when he was still governor of Georgia, in May 1973, when I traveled to Georgia to speak of my Soviet Union trip, and he invited me to stay at the Governor's Mansion in Atlanta. What I did not know then was that he had already decided to run for president in 1976, and regarded me as a competitor in the Democratic primaries--this even though I'd stated my intention to keep out of the race, and though these primaries were filling up with other serious contenders. I did notice that he was puzzlingly changeable in his manner toward me, a trait that would continue. In Georgia, he was cordial one moment, as when he extended the mansion invitation, and callous the next, as when he offered me and my aides the use of his official airplane for our flight to the University of Georgia at Athens--and then withdrew the offer on the morning of the talk, obliging us to speed by car along the seventy-five-mile route in order to get there on time.

  At the 1976 Democratic convention that nominated him for president, Carter chose not to offer me a speaking role. Still, as his administration began in 1977, our relationship was harmonious enough. I'm not a person who holds grudges or keeps political score in that way. I've never found it to be particularly conducive to getting things done. I was with him on most votes. We had started to work then on such important issues as airline deregulation, tax reform, arms control, human rights, energy independence, and the Panama Canal Treaty that Carter advocated and signed in 1977 to transfer sovereignty of the Canal Zone from the United States to Panama. I supported his stands in all those areas.