True Compass: A Memoir

by Edward M. Kennedy

  My nephew Joe Kennedy II, later elected as a congressman from Massachusetts, saw the debacle coming. He was the one person on my team who sensed that Iowa was going to be a bigger-than-life state, and that it was not in my pocket despite the good poll numbers. After he visited there he told us, "This is not a caucus. This is a primary state. There's so much activity and involvement."

  No one really paid sufficient attention to him. We did Iowa the oldfashioned way, from the top down: we located the state's local Democratic leaders who were leaning toward us and counted on them to turn out the voters on caucus night. I made a strenuous tour of the towns, hitting many of them two, even three times. I noticed that the turnouts were not gigantic--quite small in some cases--but attributed that to the thin population.

  On the evening of January 21, we counted more Democrats in our column than had shown up in either of the previous two presidential races. I looked at the numbers and said, "I'm going to win this thing. I'm going to win it."

  I didn't win it. We'd misread that surge of Democrats who favored me. They were a minority faction in one of the largest turnouts in Iowa history, more than a hundred thousand people. And most of them declared for Carter, by a margin of roughly 60 percent to 30.

  I could not believe it at first. I had campaigned with everything I had. I'd visited Iowa's cities and towns again and again--Ottumwa, Ames, Cedar Rapids, Davenport, Council Bluffs. What had gone wrong?

  I finally got the answer from Harold Hughes, the former governor and senator from the state. Hughes was a supporter, but other obligations had kept him away from my campaign. "I'll tell you why you lost," Hughes said. "The reason was, you'd arrive in one of these little towns, and there'd be a hundred people waiting for you at the church or the meeting hall. But you'd bring twenty Secret Service agents with you, and they would be pushing people around, telling them to sit over there. And then there would be thirty TV cameras.

  "Now, when I campaigned in Iowa," Hughes went on, "I would drive into, say, Ames myself, at the wheel of a car or a pickup truck. I'd get out, and I'd go into the meeting hall by myself, and I'd shake everybody's hand and tell them my name. Then I'd write their names down. And after my talk I would go back to the motel, and I'd take that list of names out, and I'd write a note to everyone on it. That's what you have to do when you campaign in Iowa."

  Hughes's folksy approach made sense to me. Unfortunately in my case, it was an impossibility. The Secret Service agents and the mass of TV people were following me around, on the assumption that I was a marked man. And so the heavy Secret Service was assigned. And the television crews were along to preserve it for posterity should it happen.

  Was I worried about my physical safety? I suppose so. But I never brooded about it. I could not live my life dwelling on that kind of thing. Threatening letters are regularly sent to my office. We deal with them in a professional way, but I don't read them. I choose not even to know about them unless absolutely necessary. I've decided that I would not live out my life in fear of the shadows.

  I flew back home from Iowa to McLean, where I listened to the results. When it became clear that Carter had carried the caucuses, I braced myself for a very unhappy duty. I knew I had to call my mother and tell her the bad news, that I was the first Kennedy who had lost an election. Her voice came on the phone, and I broke it to her as gently as I could. And I received one of Rose Kennedy's priceless, endearing reality checks.

  "Oh, that's all right, Teddy dear," she replied. "I'm sure you'll work hard and it'll get better."

  And then: "Teddy, do you know that nice blue sweater I gave you at Christmastime? Do you remember that?" I said I remembered it, yes. It was a turtleneck, and it had a small pocket on the front. It had been made in France.

  "Have you worn it?" I said, "Well, I'm not sure that I've worn it." She said, "Is there something special about it? Because I just got the bill for it, and it was two hundred and twenty dollars. Will you check it out, Teddy? And if you haven't worn it, will you send it back, because I've got another blue one here that I think is just as nice and is not nearly as expensive."

  By the next morning, I was ready to go into battle again. I was scheduled to speak at Georgetown University in less than a week, on January 28. I decided that if people were waiting for a strong message, they were going to hear it that night. No more fumbling or fuzziness.

  From my opening words that night at Georgetown, I took the fight directly to Jimmy Carter. Specifically, I assailed what I saw as the futile stridency in the "Carter Doctrine" that he'd unveiled five days earlier, in his State of the Union address. The doctrine was a response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Eve 1979, which had triggered shock and anxiety throughout the free world.

  Citing Carter's remark that he was "surprised" by the Soviets' strike, I pointed to the warning signals that the president had missed: the obvious Russian buildup of forces, and the murder of the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan while Soviet military advisers looked on.

  I drew attention to the hostage crisis in Iran. The Muslim students' detaining of American diplomats there, in retaliation for the U.S. admission of the deposed shah for medical treatment, was in its eighty-sixth day. "This is a crisis that never should have happened," I told the audience, because the administration had been warned of exactly this response to allowing the hated shah inside our borders. "The president considered those warnings and rejected them in secret."

  Expanding from there, I rebuked the president for his failure to resolve a number of issues affecting ordinary Americans as he groped for a coherent foreign policy: rising inflation, unemployment, and energy prices. I called for gasoline rationing and for freezes, followed by controls, on prices, wages, profits, dividends, interest rates, and rents.

  "Today," I concluded, "I reaffirm my candidacy for president of the United States. I intend to stay the course. I believe we must not permit the dream of social progress to be shattered by those whose promises have failed."

  Press reaction in the following days ratified my sense that the speech had infused my campaign with the snap and focus it had so far lacked. "He gave some real reasons for running, based on issues," Anthony Lewis declared in the New York Times of January 31. "And he sounded like a man who wanted to run."

  Contrary to all doubts that might have arisen at the time or since, I did want to run. I did want to be president. The bad news, though, was that the campaign coffers were running on empty. We were nearly broke. The big money began to fade away after the Iowa caucuses.

  There were some on my team who wanted it to end. My two hundred campaign aides had worked without pay since mid-January, but pay was not the issue for them. They were willing to continue, and did. Their concerns were not for themselves, but for my political future.

  I can remember Steve Smith telling me on that night, "Look, no money now. We're in debt. If you get out now, no one will really blame you. You took a crack. Your career is still intact. If you go back to the Senate, it's not a real blemish on your record. But if you stay in... I have the poll here from Massachusetts. You're getting beaten by twenty-five points in your home state. If Carter beats you in Massachusetts, your career is gone. Finished. That's what you're looking at. You have no money, and I don't know what's going to turn this thing around."

  That was a very tough conversation. I remember walking around outside for a while after Steve spoke his mind. I'd told him, "I think I'll just wait a couple of days before I make my mind up." After a couple days, I said, "I'm staying in it."

  My reasons were not complicated. I genuinely cared about the issues I was running on, and I knew that my team did as well. I felt we could get traction with our message and win some of the upcoming primaries and keep faith with our supporters around the country.

  There was hardly any shortage of issues to care about in that year: health care, the economy, foreign policy. One frustrating problem in propounding my stand on these issues was simply being heard. I competed for airtime (and often
lost) on the evening news with the Iran hostage crisis and then the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. Some in the press continued to raise the issue of Chappaquiddick.

  We won some. We lost some. We won some more.

  We were in constant need of funds, but delighted with creative sources. Politically engaged artists created lithographs for us to sell on behalf of the campaign. James Rosenquist. Jamie Wyeth. Andy Warhol. Bob Rauschenberg. These artists probably raised a couple of million dollars for us. They kept us going.

  As the weeks and months went on, I was able to refine my message in interviews and speeches, yet that did not neutralize the media obstacles to getting that message out on a daily basis. Several times, I challenged Carter to a public debate. In late May I even offered to drop out of the race and release my delegates if the president would debate me before the convention. Carter and his people deflected these offers, perhaps finding it impossible to believe that I would leave the race if my beliefs for the party received an adequate hearing.

  We broke new ground in campaigning openly for gay rights. Toward the end of the campaign, I was the beneficiary of a fund-raiser at the Hollywood Hills home of a couple named Clyde Cairns and John Carlson. As my entourage made its way toward the party, someone informed me that it had been declared off-limits to the news media. I asked all the cars in the caravan to stop while my staff phoned up news outlets in the city and invited them to come along. We were overwhelmed by TV cameras. No major-party candidate had ever appeared at a fund-raiser organized by gay supporters.

  I opened up a question-and-answer session at the event, and the complexity of some of the questions really fascinated me. One person wanted to know whether a partner from another country without legal status to remain in the United States would face deportation. Others raised fairness issues about the tax code and health care. I did a lot more listening than answering that night, and left with greater awareness of issues lawmakers were not yet confronting.

  I met with Carter at the White House on June 5, to discuss the campaign and a way that we might go forward. We sat opposite each other in front of the fireplace, with a vase of flowers between us.

  I tried to set a formal tone. I told him I certainly understood that, mathematically, I didn't have the delegates to win the nomination. But I felt that I was representing the concerns of millions of Americans who deserved to have their voices heard. The president had ducked debating me for the entire primary season, and as a result the people in our own party had been deprived of a give-and-take on the issues that mattered to them. I said that I was concerned about the economic issues facing our country and wanted to have a public dialogue with him about them. I also said that I was in the process of making decisions about how I was going to proceed in the next few weeks as we moved toward the convention, and that what I was most interested in was this dialogue. Finally, I told him that if we had a debate on economic issues and were able to make some progress through good-faith, constructive efforts on both our parts, then I would say that I would support the party's nominee.

  It was a respectful exchange, about fifteen minutes. He listened to what I had to say, and raised only a few points of contention. After I told him that I was not interested in being divisive, he criticized the "harsh" tone of my campaign rhetoric and said he had never attacked me personally.

  I responded, "Mr. President, those ads of yours aren't handling me with kid gloves."

  At one point, he said, "You know, I too grew up in a family that was political, and we were very combative."

  When I raised the prospect of a debate, Carter asserted that no incumbent had ever debated in the history of our country. Besides, he said, people understood our policy differences. Ultimately, his response was: You present your views to the platform committee. I'll present mine. And we'll stay in touch through our people. No debate.

  As our conversation drew to a close, he asked me whether there was any part of the campaign I had enjoyed. I said it was least satisfactory when things were electronic, rather than person-to-person. He said he couldn't agree more.

  The 1980 Democratic convention was set to begin on August 10 in New York. I maintained my candidacy through the convention, so that I could speak to the issues and address the delegates and the people I'd been fighting for. We had been on the trail for nine months, 100,000 miles, through forty states, and we were not victorious. But neither were we defeated.

  Our cause, I declared, was the same as it had been since the days of Thomas Jefferson: the cause of the common man and the common woman. Our commitment had remained, since the days of Andrew Jackson, to all those he called "the humble members of society--the farmers, mechanics, and laborers."

  I spoke out of a deep belief in the ideals of the Democratic Party, I went on, and in the potential of that party and of a president to make a difference. I offered the promise of the dignity of useful work to those who were idle in the cities and industries of America. I called for the reindustrialization of America. I asked for a resolution against the risk that prosperity be purchased by poisoning the air, the rivers, and the great natural resources of the continent. I affirmed the need to defeat inflation, reshape the unfair tax structure.

  And finally, avowing that we cannot have a fair prosperity in isolation from a fair society, I reaffirmed my stand for national health insurance: "We must not surrender to the relentless medical inflation that can bankrupt almost anyone and that may soon break the budgets of government at every level."

  I congratulated President Carter on his victory, and voiced my confidence that the Democratic Party would reunite on the basis of Democratic principles. "And someday, long after this convention, long after the signs come down and the crowds stop cheering, and the bands stop playing, may it be said of our campaign that we kept the faith....

  "For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end.

  "For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."

  The delegates' response was warm and generous. NBC News said they were still cheering after forty-five minutes. I didn't know it was that long. But it was gratifying. Our message got through.

  I returned for the final night of the convention to be on the stage after President Carter's speech. I reached the convention floor shortly after the speech ended, but a whole crowd of other Democrats were already there. The cheering after the speech had not gone as long as some had expected, so the platform was filling up earlier than anticipated. Tip O'Neill was right behind me, and behind him was the former party chairman Bob Strauss, and then Fritz and Joan Mondale, and party leaders of all kinds.

  I shook the president's hand, and then Mrs. Carter's hand. I did not elevate his hand, and he made no effort to elevate mine. But then the press began to point out that I had not elevated Jimmy's hand, and that became a sore spot that has lasted, I suppose, to this day.

  I thought that what we did on the podium was proper enough. Had he made an effort to raise our hands together I certainly would not have resisted. It just wasn't a big deal--certainly it wasn't as if we'd just gone fifteen rounds in the ring for a heavyweight championship.

  President Carter continues to believe that I weakened him for the general election and caused him to lose the presidency to Ronald Reagan. In fact, he makes a point of saying so frequently, especially when he speaks in Boston. But I'm not really sure he needed any help from me.

  Carter's approval rating in the summer of 1979--before his "malaise" speech--was 25 percent lower than Richard Nixon's after Watergate. The nation was suffering through an energy crisis and double-digit inflation. The American people were looking for new leadership. And Ronald Reagan was capturing the imagination of the American people with his sunny optimism. Having said that, President Carter was still quite successful against me. His political strategy worked. And my improvement in the closing weeks was too little too late.

  What would have happened had I gained the nomina
tion?

  Frankly, I don't know that I could have beaten Ronald Reagan. He was more than a candidate at that time; he was a movement.

  After the election, I phoned President Carter on December 15, as his administration was nearing its end. He asked me if I was looking forward to the new administration.

  I answered, "Not one day sooner than they take office."

  He said he would be staying in the White House until the last possible day. (There had been reports that Mrs. Reagan had suggested the Carters should vacate the residence prior to January 20, 1980.)

  I thanked him for nominating the former Senate Judiciary Committee counsel, Stephen Breyer, to the U.S. Court of Appeals. The president said he didn't know Breyer personally but had heard a lot of good things about him.

  It wasn't a long conversation. He asked me about Reagan's cabinet nominees, and I said they would not be subject to much dispute, except, possibly, Alexander Haig. We also talked about the status of fair housing legislation. And skiing. (We both had trips planned for the holidays.)

  Then we wished each other a Merry Christmas and said we hoped to stay in touch.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The Reagan Years

  1980-1988

  One of my first encounters with President Ronald Reagan was on St. Patrick's Day in 1981 during a small luncheon at the Irish embassy. We were seated at the same table. He was warm and friendly, full of laughter and small talk.

  He told us of his recent meetings with Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau, whom he described as a rather lonely man; and Mexican president Jose Lopez Portillo, who showed Reagan his detailed doodlings of horses while expressing a desire to become a painter after his term ended.