True Compass: A Memoir

by Edward M. Kennedy

  Another important area on which we found common purpose was Northern Ireland. British rule of the Protestant North, and the marginalization of the Catholic minority there, was of course an ancient and seemingly settled fact of history. It traced back at least as far as 1690, when the invading King William III of England and Scotland wore down the Catholic Jacobites at the Battle of the Boyne. The harsh peace terms that followed ensured British control of the six-county North and bitter resentments among the conquered Catholics for centuries to come. The Partition of 1921, which followed armed conflict in the South between British forces and the Irish Republican Army, created home-rule policies for both the North and the twenty-six counties of the South, but its unintended consequence was oppression for the Catholic minority in the northern counties. This led to Catholic civil disobedience in the North, which morphed into violence, which in turn provoked savage reprisals by Protestants. A cycle of death and devastation took hold, with arson, bombings, and shootings shredding the fabric of civilized life. The Irish Republican Army--the IRA--then turned into a Catholic nationalist paramilitary force, and waged a decades-long battle to end British rule of Northern Ireland.

  "The troubles," as they were known in Northern Ireland, remained off the United States' diplomatic radar until the late 1960s. America's close relationship with Great Britain, reinforced during World War II, lent a patina of self-interest to our official disinterest in this "internal affair" of the United Kingdom. But this cycle of repression and killing had to be stopped.

  My understanding of the situation in Northern Ireland really began to evolve after I met John Hume, a brilliant young member of Parliament from Northern Ireland. We had met briefly in 1972, after I cosponsored a resolution with Abe Ribicoff calling for withdrawal of the British troops from Northern Ireland and establishing a united Ireland. But it was really in late 1972 that John began the great education of Edward Kennedy about Northern Ireland and established the seeds that grew into a wonderful relationship.

  John Hume was a charismatic figure who believed in nonviolence. He believed in the political process rather than the bomb and the bullet, and that the different traditions should be able to work out their differences through mutual respect. Unlike those of us who said that the first step was for the British to withdraw troops, John believed that the ultimate resolution of the conflict would come through political evolution rather than by unilateral actions by any of the parties. As a native of Derry (as the Catholics always call Londonderry), John was outraged by the violence on January 20, 1972--Bloody Sunday--when a British paratroop regiment had fired on Catholics marching in Derry to protest the British policy of internment. Thirteen of the demonstrators were killed on the spot and a fourteenth lost his life a few months later. But he was adamant that retaliatory violence would only spark more violence.

  Hume's views of the situation made a very powerful impression on me and influenced the work I did on Northern Ireland from then on. I thought it important to listen to someone who was on the ground and suffering and experiencing the harshness that he was experiencing and risking his life in nonviolent protest. In 1976, I worked with Congressman Bruce Morrison of Connecticut, who was very involved in Irish issues, to address the issue of Northern Ireland for the first time in the Democratic platform. Although I did not have a strong personal relationship with Jimmy Carter, we were able to work with his staff, with his knowledge, to include the following language: "The voice of the United States should be heard in Northern Ireland against violence and terror, against the discrimination, repression and deprivation which brought about that civil strife, and for the efforts of the parties toward a peaceful resolution of the future of Northern Ireland."

  Hume urged that I encourage Irish Americans to withhold their support from organizations giving money to the IRA--a counterintuitive viewpoint for many such citizens, who tended to romanticize the IRA as freedom fighters, perhaps not understanding the endless cycle of violence that was being created. I sought out some other prominent Irish Americans to back me up in delivering the message. First, I was able to secure an alliance with the new Speaker of the House, the popular and credible Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill. Then New York's Senator Pat Moynihan and Governor Hugh Carey soon joined us as well.

  We became known as the Four Horsemen. Our first joint statement, issued on St. Patrick's Day 1977, was two-pronged. We urged all organizations engaged in violence to renounce their campaigns; and we called on Americans to renounce actions that supported such violence. Newsweek made our subtle point explicit. The Four Horsemen, the magazine said, "forced Irish Americans to consider the bloody use of their guns and money."

  Jimmy Carter committed his administration to supporting a form of government in the North that would "command widespread acceptance throughout both parts of the community," meaning Catholic and Protestant, and added the incentive of economic assistance in the event of a settlement. By this gesture, Carter ended the era of official nonintervention by America in the Irish conflict, an admirable accomplishment. Later, he built on this by stopping the sale of weapons to the Royal Ulster Constabulary, a force that many Catholics viewed as oppressive and dangerous.

  And so Jimmy Carter and I did find common cause in certain areas, after a fashion. The overarching political cause for me, however, was health insurance, and that is where the comity really broke down between us. In fact, health care and health insurance were the issues that damaged our relations beyond repair.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Sailing Against the Wind

  1976-1980

  A little more than two weeks before I first met Jimmy Carter in Georgia, he had unveiled his views on health care in a speech to African-American medical students. It was obviously tailored to the hopes of the United Auto Workers as expressed by the late Walter Reuther. Carter declared that coverage should be universal and mandatory. Later he told reporters that his plan was nearly identical to the one I had been shaping with Congressman James Corman of California. I had my doubts. He was certainly paying lip service to "universal" and "mandatory" coverage, but he never talked specifics. My father had a great rule of thumb: bet on what you think a man will do rather than what he says he'll do and you'll be right more often than not. I just wasn't sure with Carter.

  My suspicion deepened, and was essentially confirmed, once Carter took office. He announced soon after the inauguration that his first priority was an energy bill; health care would have to come later. "Later" proved to be an understatement. The president assigned Joseph Califano, secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, the responsibility to draft a plan. It seemed to me unlikely that the administration would have a bill ready for the 1977 Congress, but I did not slow my own Committee's efforts in moving forward.

  My staff and I worked hard to craft a plan that would be capable of having broad-based support. Specifically, we negotiated long and hard in 1977 to persuade Lane Kirkland, the secretary of the AFL-CIO, and Doug Fraser, president of the UAW, to compromise on their strong commitment to a single-payer system, where health care providers would be paid from a single national fund like Medicare--and agree instead to support a plan built on our existing system of private insurance provided that coverage was mandatory and universal. I had personally supported single payer in the past and understood the benefits of it, but I also knew that it would be politically impossible to pass.

  In November 1977, Califano finally presented a series of options on national health care to the president. We then had extensive discussions between his staff and mine, incorporating the work we had done earlier in reaching agreement with Kirkland and Fraser. But there were tensions between HEW and our position. They seemed to be putting a negative spin on our proposal, and despite our efforts, Carter made it clear that he had no intention of bringing us into the process to work with his team to hammer out a legislative proposal. Instead, he told us he needed to take a month-and-a-half here and a few weeks there to have meetings and read memos and more discussions with his Cabi
net officers and staff. Then, he'd get back to us and we'd have a chance to make comments on what they'd decided. I thought that was a recipe for failure.

  The moment called for bold leadership and swift action built around a single piece of legislation. We continued to work toward that end. And Carter continued to slow down the process. By the summer of 1978, I felt that the president was squandering a real opportunity to get something done. The Jimmy Carter who had declared that he wanted mandatory and universal coverage and had a plan that was nearly identical to mine had now been replaced by the President Carter who wanted to approach health insurance in incremental steps, over time, if certain cost containment benchmarks were met--and after the 1978 midterm elections. According to my notes, I spoke with Carter by phone on June 26, 1978, and was very direct in laying out how politically untenable his position was: "I don't think you can go to an elderly group and say, 'You're in... the second phase [of coverage], but if we pass the first [phase] and if hospitals keep their costs down and the economy doesn't go so much into a deficit, then you might be phased in.'"

  When I met with Carter and his team two days later, he continued to pay lip service to the desirability of a single bill, but he clearly had no intention of going in that direction. He wanted to move slowly, through a series of small bills. After leaving the meeting, I knew he wasn't committed, and I didn't plan to wait around. The issue was too important to me. I called Califano to let him know that I was being besieged with calls about our meeting and was going to have a press conference explaining my differences with the White House. As I learned later, Carter regarded my efforts as a platform to challenge him for the presidency. If that's why he slowed things down, then he made a poor political calculation. If we had passed comprehensive national health insurance together, it would have been a huge victory for Carter. And it would have been much more difficult for me to have challenged him for the nomination, as I ultimately did.

  Clearly, President Carter was a difficult man to convince--of anything. One reason for this was that he did not really listen. He loved to give the appearance of listening. He made a point, for example, of bringing eminent people to the White House for colloquies in the summertime. You'd arrive about 6:00 or 6:30 p.m., and the first thing you would be reminded of, in case you needed reminding, was that he and Rosalynn had removed all the liquor in the White House. No liquor was ever served during Jimmy Carter's term. He wanted no luxuries nor any sign of worldly living.

  He apparently considered boating a luxury and a sign of worldly living as well: in April 1977 he sold at auction the presidential yacht Sequoia. I knew Sequoia as a magnificent 104-foot teak vessel that had been built in 1925, bought by the Commerce Department six years later, and first used by a president in 1933, when Herbert Hoover borrowed her for fishing getaways. Sequoia had served as a floating retreat for every president since then. Jack had held strategy meetings aboard her during the Cuban Missile Crisis and had celebrated his last birthday aboard her. After Carter got rid of her in the name of frugality, she endured many undignified years of changed ownership, lawsuits, and dereliction until she was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1987.

  At any rate, if you were a guest at one of these gatherings you would get to the White House, and you would mill around, and you'd go through the buffet line and eat quickly. And then for the next three hours Jimmy Carter would conduct a seminar: on Africa, for instance. He would let you know that he knew every country in Africa and the name of every president of every country in Africa. He would have the secretaries of state and defense talk about what was happening in these regions that would affect the globe. He could count on about a third of the Senate in the room every time, and about thirty members of the House.

  I will not deny that it was well worth attending these events. They were informational--you could say they were nothing if not informational. But they were so broad-gauged as to not be of much specific importance. They were personal tours de force, and every one of my colleagues recognized them as such, designed to impress us that the president knew so much about the minutiae. In contrast, when you read about Franklin Roosevelt, you realize that he was the master of the situation he needed to know about. He didn't know every name and every place, but he knew what was worth knowing: the key people, and what motivated them, and why they were doing what they were doing.

  Through all this, I told reporters, and myself as well, that I expected President Carter to be renominated and reelected in 1980, and that I intended to support him. I informed Carter himself of this intention.

  On Christmas Eve 1977, I embarked on my first and only visit to China. I brought along a large entourage that included Joan; our three children; Eunice; Caroline and Michael Kennedy (both were then sophomores at Harvard); the Harvard law professor Jerome Alan Cohen; and some aides and reporters. Joan had moved out of our McLean house that fall and into our old Beacon Street apartment in Boston, but we still traveled as a family. I had notified the government of the People's Republic that I wanted to meet with the vice premier and de facto leader of the country, Deng Xiaoping. A tough-minded survivor of political purges by Mao Zedong, and little known in the West, Deng was just then making his mark as an architect of China's recovery from the calamitous Cultural Revolution. His Four Modernizations, in agriculture, industry, science, and technology, would soon transform the vast country, earn him recognition as Time's Man of the Year for 1978, and propel China's economic rise.

  My main mission was to serve as an unofficial ambassador for the United States: specifically, to try to firm up diplomatic relations with China despite the United States' refusal to acknowledge the People's Republic's claim to Taiwan. At the same time, I hoped to secure a commitment that the mainland would not use arms to enforce its claims upon the island nation of sixteen million people. As in Moscow in 1974, I brought a list of detained people--twenty-two Chinese, in this case--who sought to leave the country. And Joan encouraged several members of the Beijing Symphony to request permission to study the following summer with the Boston Symphony.

  The trip produced no significant breakthroughs, certainly not in the matter of Taiwan's hopes for independence. But I was happy to hear one high-ranking diplomat strongly hint to me that the island could expect "a peaceful and prosperous future."

  By the summer of 1978 my associates and staff had done their consensus-building job well, and we had in place the elements to move ahead on the comprehensive health program. And so I began negotiations with Joe Califano, the president's secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. Like his boss, Califano wanted to pass legislation that would be sequenced: when a bill was passed to cover one element of our plan, we would have to come back to Congress to initiate another one. I saw that approach as completely unworkable. It was too risky; it gave Congress too many chances to say no. I spoke to Carter himself about this in late July, but I could not convince him. The failure signaled that on health care, at least, the president and I were irrevocably on separate tracks.

  Still, I remained committed to his reelection.

  My commitment buckled a bit in the fall of 1978, when some friends of mine inside the administration leaked to me some portions of Carter's proposed budget requests. It was clear that in the name of harnessing inflation, the president intended to starve some important domestic programs that mattered a great deal to me. Health care legislation was clearly among those endangered programs.

  I had the chance to express my outrage at this timidity shortly afterward, at a December symposium on health care in Memphis. It was part of the Democratic "mini-convention" that attracted twenty-five hundred grassroots stalwarts of the party, such as campaign workers, teachers, union people, and officeholders from the cities and states--people who passionately embraced the traditional core principles of our party.

  "There could be few more divisive issues for America and for our party," I told the receptive audience, "than a Democratic policy of drastic slashes at the expense of the elderly, the poor, the
black, the cities, and the unemployed." Rebuking the tactic of presidential pandering to the presumed selfishness of the middle class, I chose an abiding metaphor from my life as a sailor. "Sometimes," I declared to the crowd, "a party must sail against the wind!"

  The phrase drew cheers and applause from the crowd. The symposium's chairman, the young governor-elect of Arkansas Bill Clinton, later said he had never experienced anything like the crowd's reaction.

  I returned to the Soviet Union in September 1978. Again, Brezhnev welcomed me on a Saturday morning, despite the fact that I'd sent him a series of rather blunt but private messages stating my wish for further easing of restraints against dissidents. I took his willingness to meet as a positive sign, particularly since he was not feeling well and had declined to meet with President Carter's representative the day before.

  When I arrived, I presented him with gifts of native foods we had acquired on our travels--bread from Tashkent, melon from Samarkand, and apples from Alma Ata. We had been able to carry the crate of fruit into Brezhnev's office and set it down on his desk without so much as a question from his security guards. He expressed delight in receiving what he described as the best food in the Soviet Union.

  Brezhnev showed how little he really understood about our country in general and me in particular when he tried to separate me and President Carter for his own political advantage. "Concern about human rights has become an unclean political game," he declared, a spurious attempt to bring pressure on Russia. I felt obliged to reply that American demands for human rights were legitimate; I reminded him that I shared them, and warned that no real breakthroughs in arms control could be achieved unless this area could be resolved.