True Compass: A Memoir

by Edward M. Kennedy

  When he was asked about British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, Reagan said, "I hope Senator Kennedy will excuse me here." Then the new president proceeded to tell us how Thatcher had advised him to enact his entire program at once; otherwise, opponents would nibble away at it. So, he told us, that was what he was going to do.

  Toward the end of the meal, Reagan was asked whether he planned to travel much for the next three years, or whether he would host visitors. "You know, I just don't know the answer to that question," Reagan said. "I never get my schedule until five o'clock in the afternoon about what I'm going to do the next day. Here I am, the most powerful man in the country, and my wife has to tell me to take my coat off. But to tell you the honest to gospel truth, I really don't know what I'm doing the next day until I get my schedule at night."

  Someone at our table said, "Well, you must have some idea."

  Reagan responded, "Oh, I'm sure they've all got ideas about where to send me traveling or who I'm supposed to see; but, you know..." And then he just smiled and laughed. "To tell you the truth, they just come up and tell me about the trips."

  The questioner at our table persisted. "Well, does this continue for the next three years?"

  Reagan said, "Well, to tell you the truth, I don't even know the answer to that. I don't know if they do it more in the first year, or more in the third year. I'll have to find out more about that."

  I realized at the outset that Reagan's ascendancy would require a fundamental adjustment of my role in the Senate. For the first time in my career I found myself in the minority party. More challenging still, many colleagues whom I'd counted as reliably liberal began to move rightward from the issues we had championed together over the years.

  The action commenced almost at once. In February 1981, Reagan, laying the groundwork for his assault upon the tax code, announced his wish to consolidate eighty-eight federal programs into seven block grants targeted to states and communities. At the same time, he presented a plan to trim federal spending by 15 percent. He said he wanted to "reduce waste" and "give local governments more flexibility and control."

  I thought this was nonsense, and came out on the attack. At a glance, it was clear that the powerful petroleum companies were going to be shielded from sacrifice, while the "flexibility and control" of individual families would shrivel, as states would continue their long-standing habits of spurning the poor, the helpless, and the hungry--especially hungry children.

  I called on such allies as the liberal Republican Lowell Weicker on the Labor Committee to help me in opposing Reagan's block-grant proposals, and we were able to rescue a good deal of federal aid for health and education programs from dilution into block grants, though as in most other areas, we couldn't prevent slashes in spending.

  Nor could we really stem the full onslaught of the Reagan revolution, though we fought on every battleground that opened up.

  The administration's long-anticipated first full-scale offensive commenced in July, with the unveiling and swift enactment of the largest taxcut program in American history. Reagan's Economic Tax Recovery Act of 1981 called for $150 billion in tax reductions over the ensuing three years, and the president made clear that he would comb the federal budget for corresponding cuts in social (if not military) programs. I voted against this bill, one of a handful of senators to do so, and immediately launched out on a series of speeches and position papers excoriating its likely social effects. It was "scorched-earth economics," and would vitiate job training, elementary school education, unemployment compensation, cancer research, and science research in general, as it would cripple the National Science Foundation. Several months later, when these programs had indeed begun to achieve these effects, I groused to a meeting of Democratic loyalists that "Ronald Reagan must love the poor; he is making so many of them."

  My objections to President Reagan's policies are far too vast to enumerate, but one of them seemed to me to be based more on science fiction than reality--and it required us to spend enormous sums of money that might otherwise have gone to addressing our domestic needs.

  On March 23, 1983, the president took to the prime-time airwaves, raised the terrible specter of the Soviet Union launching a nuclear attack on America, and then asked, "What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack; that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?"

  This was the world's introduction to Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, on which, a few weeks later, I hung the nickname by which it would be known: "Star Wars." (I admit it, I had gone to see the movie. At the time, I'd seen the evening as an escape from reality.) The idea was that "the scientific community" would "turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace" and "give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete." Then we could change the course of human history.

  I will avoid a long recitation of what the scientific community was expected to create--the extended-range interceptors and exoatmospheric reentry-vehicle interception systems and X-ray lasers and chemical lasers and neutral particle beams and the rest. Suffice it to say that although some of the technologies developed in the pursuit of this notion proved useful in other antiballistic missile applications, Star Wars never quite got off the ground. In 1993 President Clinton significantly trimmed back its scope and budget and renamed it the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (it's now known as the Missile Defense Agency). One legacy of the budget-trimming Reagan's vision is a continuation of space-based defense research that has totaled well in excess of one hundred billion dollars. But unlike the movie its nickname evokes, Reagan's Star Wars never really had a successful sequel.

  On the question of American diplomacy in Northern Ireland, Reagan and I found a reason for some agreement. Reagan traced his ancestry to the village of Ballyporeen in County Tipperary, and visited there in the summer of his reelection campaign.

  There was continued violence in Northern Ireland and, in my view, an underappreciation of the need to stop the violence on both sides of the conflict. We drafted a series of statements and got them out to Senate and House members of both parties, to keep their awareness high. Tip O'Neill was very strong. He began a series of Speaker's lunches, and invited President Reagan to attend. At the same time, a number of us persuaded the taoiseach (the Irish head of state) and other key officials that this was the time for them to come to the United States. One incentive was that they would have an opportunity to talk with President Reagan about policy, most likely at the Speaker's lunch. And so they began coming.

  Reagan did not discuss policy at these lunches. That clearly was not his intention. The first few times he came, his aides told all of us very clearly that we were simply there to tell funny stories. Reagan would lead off by telling a couple of tales, and then Tip would call on people around the room. At first the president called only on the Americans at the table--our Irish guests must have wondered what they were doing there--but gradually as time went on, he would call on some of the Irish. They would dutifully tell their stories, but they'd also manage to sneak in some comments about the situation in the North.

  Eventually those lunches evolved into occasions for serious talk about substantive issues. They became an important and significant framework for dialogue, and continue today. Just as important, the luncheons helped motivate Reagan to prevail on his close friend Margaret Thatcher to somewhat soften her stance toward the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland. Thatcher had coldly responded to the Hunger Strike of 1981, but in1985, she signed the Anglo-Irish Agreement, which gave the Republic of Ireland a role in the affairs of Northern Ireland for the first time.

  Tip O'Neill privately joked with me that he doubted Reagan was really Irish because he could never take any of his kidding. Once, Tip ran into the president at a party to celebrate the launch of USA Today. Tip said to him, "Why do
n't you give me a call sometime, Mr. President, and have me come on down? I'll straighten out all those mistakes that you've made in the past two years." Tip was just joking, but he could see Reagan's fists getting clenched.

  On a personal level, I found myself among the countless people who enjoyed Reagan's company. In November 1981, I accompanied my mother and Ethel Kennedy to a White House visit with President and Nancy Reagan to express appreciation for a medal given to Ethel in memory of Bobby. In the car on the way over to the White House, I showed Mother a gift I intended to give to the Reagans, some of Jack's handwritten notes about football and politics. Mother was more concerned with knowing the whereabouts of the medal, in case she was asked any questions about it.

  When we entered the Oval Office, the president said to Mother, "I'm sure you recognize the desk over there."

  Mother said, "What about it?"

  "That's President Kennedy's desk," Reagan said, "with the little doors where John played."

  The president seemed genuinely interested in Jack's handwritten notes as I read parts to him. Then he said he had a gift for us too, but that it wasn't nearly as nice or personal.

  He presented us with a jar of jelly beans, noting the improvements in the quality of the candy in recent years. They used to taste a little bit differently according to the colors, he told us, but now there were jelly beans that tasted like steak and peas and other sophisticated flavors. "You can reach into a jar and pick up a whole meal," he joked.

  Mrs. Reagan added, "I wish we had bought stock in the company."

  He lit up a room, and he could summon laughter, intentionally or otherwise. In fact, sometimes it was hard to tell whether his whimsical side was intentional. The best examples of this were the times we met in the Oval Office to discuss whether to protect the American shoe industry from imports, and ended up discussing... shoes.

  The question of import quotas on consumer products was a critical issue in the 1980s. Massachusetts was among the states whose industries were struggling the hardest to compete with the flow of cheap foreign goods. Our shoe and textile industries especially were hurting.

  I was involved in drawing up legislation to curb imports on these products. My bill, like the two-hundred-odd similar bills floating around Congress, was strongly opposed by the White House. Reagan in fact vetoed two quota bills during his presidency, even as shoe imports soared toward a 90 percent penetration of the market.

  Several senators and I asked to speak with the president to press our cases, and he agreed to a meeting. About ten of us were on hand. John Danforth, the Missouri Republican whose state was hemorrhaging its small shoe plants and who favored some quotas, was present, as was the Missouri governor, Kit Bond. Strom Thurmond sat glowering as a defender of free enterprise to the bitter end. The president's response to our various presentations, everyone felt, could go far in determining the future of his administration's policy. And so we were all steeped in preparation.

  The president strode briskly into the Oval Office with his famous armswinging gait after we'd all arrived, and took a seat right next to me. His aides told us that we would have half an hour, total, to present our cases. John Danforth was chosen to go first. He got only as far as, "Good morning, Mr. President." Reagan was looking me over. He said, "Ted, you've got shoes on, haven't you?" I replied, truthfully, "Yes, I do, Mr. President." He studied them and said, "They look like Bostonians." I glanced down at the shoes on my feet. Bostonians? I wasn't sure. Why hadn't I checked the label on my shoes before I put them on that morning? But the president was moving on ahead.

  "Bostonians," he repeated. "That's incredible. Do they still make the Bostonian shoes around here?"

  I had no idea, but I ventured, "I believe so, Mr. President."

  Reagan seemed to want hard facts. "Does anybody know where the Bostonian shoes are made?" he demanded of the gathering at large.

  Kit Bond cleared his throat and said, "I know they produce shoes just like them down in Missouri."

  Someone else said, "You know, you can get the best shoes, shoes that are better than those shoes, if you come on up to Maine. They've got good shoes up there."

  Reagan said, "They do have good shoes up there, don't they? Do they give them a real good polish?"

  "Yes, Mr. President, they give them a good polish."

  Reagan said, "You know, my father owned a shoe store, and I used to sell shoes. So I know all about them. To measure the length of the foot, you go across the top, like this." He began to demonstrate how to measure people's feet for shoes. "You can also put them in the foot measurer, and you turn the knob like this until you know exactly what size shoe will fit. And then to break them in, you take the heel in one hand, and the toe in the other, and you push toward the middle. That gets the leather to soften and bend, you see."

  He went on in this vein for twenty minutes. Several of us began conspicuously to glance at our watches. At some point, I tried politely to intervene: "Uh, Mr. President, we've only got, uh--I mean, while you're here, we'd like a chance to--"

  "Well, Ted, it's been a wonderful meeting. And I hope we can continue this discussion at another time. I really enjoyed it. Thank you and do come again."

  And it was over! No one ever got a word in about shoe or textile quota legislation. The ten of us got up and walked out of the White House like goofballs to face the thirty or so TV reporters who wanted to know what sort of progress we'd made on the issue.

  A larger assemblage met in the Cabinet Room to address the same topic on June 15, 1981. This time the gathering was about equally divided between Republicans and Democrats. Vice President Bush was present, and also Secretary of State James Baker, Secretary of the Treasury Donald Regan, and several others.

  This time the focus was on the Orderly Markets Agreement put into place three years earlier to limit shoe imports by Taiwan and Korea. The Trade Commission had indicated that the limits should continue on Taiwan, but not Korea, because the imports of the latter were no longer a serious competitive threat to the United States. When my turn to speak came I told the president that what we were arguing for, essentially, was a continuation of the status quo. We felt that the status quo, combined with the administration's new tax program, would motivate the American shoe industry to invest in expansion, which would provide more employment. I also stressed that we were not looking for long-term arrangements, just temporary measures to stabilize the shoe industry over the short haul.

  Senator William Cohen of Maine began his presentation in a way that might connect with Reagan's sense of humor. He said he remembered the time when Nikita Khrushchev banged a shoe on the podium at the United Nations to emphasize a point. We want to make sure, Cohen went on, that Americans were going to keep on having shoes in case they ever wanted to follow a similar procedure. Turning serious for a moment, Cohen emphasized the importance of the shoe industry to Maine, and said he'd just received word of two additional shoe plants shutting down in the state.

  Paul Tsongas and Robert Byrd followed with closely reasoned, emphatic arguments. A couple of others spoke. And then we sat back and awaited Ronald Reagan's response.

  He said--well, the fact is that he asked about cowboy boots. He wanted to know whether cowboy boots would be protected. Then, after getting some assurance on this point, Reagan told all of us that he was particularly interested in this issue. He was interested because his father had owned a shoe store. And so he, President Reagan, had always thought when he was a young man that the sign of really having made it in the world was wearing a pair of Bostonians. He wondered whether there was still a Bostonian company going. This time I'd done my homework. I told him there was.

  On those occasions when one did manage to get Reagan to focus on the issue at hand, the net results could be about the same: just a little bit maddening. In that same month of June I secured another meeting with the president, to discuss gun control. I began by assuring him that I just wanted to make a few points very quickly, because I knew his time was limite
d.

  I told him that I'd grown up in a family that did not own guns, but I respected families that do, and I respected the gun tradition in rural America. I hoped, I said, that we could make some progress on gun control with respect to the types of weapons that really had no sporting purpose whatsoever. I wanted to work with his administration, I told Reagan, to eliminate some of the terrible gun problems in this country. Sentencing for gun crimes was one issue of interest to me; another was one that had worked well in the president's home state of California: a twenty-oneday waiting period, to allow background checks on a firearm purchaser that would help keep guns out of the hands of psychopaths. To put a waiting period into federal law might make some sense. And it would amount to a compromise, if gun opponents in return would be willing to put less emphasis on the manufacture and distribution of certain weapons.

  President Reagan nodded and looked thoughtful. He said that he had thought about the gun issue for some time. Yes, it was true. In California they had a good law: mandatory sentencing. But those legislators in California had written into the law an exception for "extraordinary circumstances" that could mean everything under the sun. They'd just taken the heart out of that law. Yes, something more has to be done out in California.

  I said that that was interesting. This waiting period, I went on carefully. That might help.

  Well, Reagan replied, what would happen? Suppose we passed a national law that required the states to have a waiting period? I don't like mandating the states to have this waiting period. But if we did, then what would we do in the twenty-one days? Will we have to ask Washington to set up a whole new bureaucracy to review all these gun applications? If someone wants to buy a handgun in Mississippi, does that mean Washington is going to make the judgment whether that person can or cannot make the purchase?

  I said: What about running these matters through local law enforcement, and let them make the judgment?