True Compass: A Memoir

by Edward M. Kennedy

  One incident that has become part of our family lore is the one we call the "go back the way you came" story. When Patrick first became interested in running, I took him to meet the legendary pol John Pastore. John was eighty-one then and retired from political life. He'd served Rhode Island as both governor and senator, the first Italian American from the state to have held either office. He was a great Democrat. I remember those big soulful dark eyes of his, and the little mustache that he always kept trimmed. My brother Jack had thought the world of him and believed him the most electable figure in the history of Rhode Island. John had a great heart, and the people loved him.

  Patrick and I drove to Pastore's house one day in the early spring. It was in a neighborhood that John had never left. He was a fellow who literally never forgot where he came from. No one else was at home, so it was just the retired senator, entertaining Patrick and me. John served us cookies and tea and talked politics. We were there for almost an hour. When we finally said goodbye and returned to the car, it was getting dark and we weren't sure how to get back to where we were going. Patrick got out, went back, and rang the bell. I could see him talking with Pastore, who was gesturing while Patrick nodded. Patrick returned and got back in the car, but didn't say anything. I asked, "What did he say?" And Patrick, in a perfect imitation of John Pastore, barked, "'Go back the way you came, Patrick, go back the way you came!'"

  As I've noted, my son was challenging an incumbent, and within the close-knit Rhode Island Democratic establishment it was a rarity for anyone to support a challenger. Not long after his announcement, Patrick hosted a big kickoff breakfast, where lots of politicians made lots of speeches. It had gone on for quite a while, and it was time to wind it up. Half the room had emptied and the rest were walking out.

  Then Patrick spotted Senator Pell.

  Claiborne Pell was one of the most splendid and civilized public servants I had ever been privileged to call a colleague. ("He was a gentleman and a gentle man," I said at his funeral in January 2009, after he died at age ninety.) He counted a political lineage that stretched well back into the nineteenth century. He'd served on a convoy in the treacherous North Atlantic in World War II after receiving a master's degree in history at Columbia University. Claiborne's self-effacing wit and his humane vision carried him through a thirty-six-year Senate career distinguished by his creation of the Pell grants for college students in 1973, his sponsorship of legislation for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Endowment for the Humanities, and his effective support for the environmentally critical United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

  I watched as Patrick walked over to Claiborne and asked him whether he would speak for just a minute. I thought: poor Claiborne! What an impossible situation for any politician. People want to go. They are going. And now he's supposed to keep their attention.

  I should never have worried. The movement toward the doors ceased as Claiborne moved to the podium. He gave a talk I'll never forget. It was breathtakingly short, but he hit it out of the park. In his quiet voice, he said, "We're going to end, now, for this morning, but before we do I want to say why I'm here to support Patrick Kennedy. I believe that he shares the values of President Kennedy. And every night since we've lost President Kennedy, I've knelt down on my knees and prayed that this nation would live up to the promise of John Kennedy. I believe that Patrick Kennedy will, and that's why I support him."

  His election victory made me feel so terribly proud of my son. After all these years, I finally understood how my dad must have felt.

  I had won reelection and was in Hawaii with my sisters for a vacation that spanned the 1989 New Year when the representative-elect telephoned me. He wanted me present for his inauguration. He had earlier felt that I shouldn't be there, that he should be sworn in on his own, and I had accepted his judgment. I had seen my own father step into the background for his sons, and I was certainly prepared to do the same for mine. But if my son wanted me to be there after all, I was going to come through for him. So I flew fourteen hours from Honolulu to Providence for the swearing in. I arrived at his apartment late at night. It was cold and dark, and I was exhausted. Patrick greeted me with some interesting news. He said that he was so happy to see me, but his people thought it was best if I didn't go down for the swearing in. I said, "You must be kidding." He wasn't.

  I didn't really mind. I was just so proud of him and so happy.

  Patrick thus became the second member of the emerging generation of Kennedys to gain political office. Joseph Kennedy II, Bobby's eldest son, had been elected to Congress from Massachusetts the previous year, and would serve until 1999. Kathleen Townsend, Bobby's firstborn, would be elected lieutenant governor of Maryland in 1995. But Patrick became the youngest officeholder of us all.

  Not all of the 1988 elections had gone so well. Incumbent vice president George H. W. Bush had defeated Michael Dukakis, the governor of Massachusetts, which meant another four years of Republican control of the executive branch.

  I enjoyed a warm relationship with President Bush, and whenever the talk was about foreign policy, especially Russia, we had productive conversations. On domestic policy, however, he told me, "Relax." He had no plans for new social programs.

  Nevertheless, my colleagues and I were able to get some things through Congress. On July 26, 1990, President Bush signed into law the Americans with Disabilities Act, which I'd co-advocated for many years and cosponsored with Senator Bob Dole. It brought some forty-three million disabled Americans into the mainstream via special services and protections, and has been called the most sweeping civil rights act since the original back in 1964.

  At first, the administration had resisted our efforts. When I started discussing the legislation with John Sununu, Bush's chief of staff, he wanted to know how we were going to deal with a person in a wheelchair on a ski slope, or a blind person in a bookstore. He was looking for problems and putting up a lot of roadblocks. He was always available to talk to, but progress was slow.

  Finally, after much negotiating, all of the important issues had been resolved. Key members attended a meeting in a Republican Senate conference room, with Dole presiding, to review everything--one last massage. Sununu was present, and once again, he became obstructive and said something aggressive to a Senate aide, Bobby Silverstein. I'd had it with Sununu's bullying and slammed my hand down on the table. I told him that if he had a problem, he could deal with me. I didn't want him yelling at our staff. At one point, Sununu said that all of the staff should leave so that the principals could finish negotiating. I said, fine, then he should leave, because he was staff. That seemed to quiet things down.

  Everyone stayed and the rest of the meeting moved along smoothly.

  Around this time, I had the privilege of meeting three great men. Our conversations weren't long, but their influences on me were profound.

  In May 1987, at the Vatican, I was received by His Holiness, Pope John Paul II, in his "private workroom." He was sitting in a hard wooden chair near a plain wooden desk. I had just visited Poland, so I told him about an extraordinary religious experience I'd had in Gdansk with Lech Walesa. The pope said he'd been following Poland very closely and had been hearing many things from friends, not all of it good. He said he was concerned about the social and economic conditions, that young people might lose hope. "It's not good that they don't have a real sense of their future." Walesa provided great symbolism, he said. That Walesa continued to live in Poland could be a powerful example for people.

  In February 1990, during a dinner at Katharine Graham's home, I met Vaclav Havel, the playwright and former dissident leader who, despite years of imprisonment and government intimidation, had led the 1989 Velvet Revolution against Czechoslovakia's communist regime. He had recently ascended to the presidency of his country and was hailed as a hero on his visit to Washington.

  At the dinner table, he told me that when he was in prison, he was permitted to write for only one hour. Every three months, he
was permitted a new pencil. He could write one letter, which could express no philosophy or poetry. It had to be factual.

  When he mentioned that he hadn't been able to see much of America, because he was in his car constantly, I suggested that he visit the Lincoln Memorial. To my delight, he agreed, and together we made a late-night visit to the memorial, from which I read him the inscriptions on the wall from Lincoln's second inaugural and the Gettysburg Address. He said, "I am not able to understand the language, but I understand the poetry."

  That same month, on February 15, I had my first conversation with Nelson Mandela, on the phone. He had been freed four days earlier, after twenty-seven years of imprisonment. While in South Africa in 1985, I had gone to Soweto and visited Bishop Desmond Tutu and Mandela's wife, Winnie. Mandela told me that he knew I'd been outside his prison on that day, and that it had given his friends hope and renewed power.

  I invited him to visit the Kennedy Library, and four months later, on June 25, he attended a lunch in his honor, where I could not help but be impressed by his seriousness and honesty. He had not yet been elected president, but he expressed optimism about the integrity of South Africa's leader, F. W. de Klerk, and his intent to bring about substantive change.

  I asked him what he thought was the most important thing the United States could do. He said it was very simple: jobs for the sixteen thousand exiled political activists who were returning to the country. Those people would need housing and job opportunities in order to be a source of stability for South Africa's future.

  As inspiring as these men were, it would be a woman who changed the course of my life.

  PART FOUR

  Renewal

  Ken Regan/Camera 5

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The Woman Who Changed My Life

  1991

  I have always believed that there are three stages of enjoying life: looking forward to something; experiencing it; and then having the memory of it.

  There came a point in my own life when I had to admit that I'd stopped looking forward to things.

  There had been so much loss. I understand that everyone suffers loss; it is hardly unique to me. Yet preparing myself to savor new experiences, and especially experiences that involved new personal commitments--I faced the fact that I no longer wanted to take that risk.

  This is not to say I didn't enjoy life during those years. I am an enjoyer. I have enjoyed being a senator; I've enjoyed my children and my close friends; I've enjoyed books and music and well-prepared food, especially with a generous helping of cream sauce on the top. I have enjoyed the company of women. I have enjoyed a stiff drink or two or three, and I've relished the smooth taste of a good wine. At times, I've enjoyed these pleasures too much.

  I've heard the tales about my exploits as a hell-raiser--some accurate, some with a wisp of truth to them, and some so outrageous that I can't imagine how anyone could really believe them. But I never tried to correct the record.

  I decided long ago never to respond to tabloid gossip. Never. Once you respond to that kind of trash, you elevate it to something worth responding to. And anyway, once you begin refuting, you can never stop. Because then if you fail to deny even one such story, that might be taken as evidence that it is true. (The downside here, of course, is that rumors and fictions frequently enter the public consciousness as settled fact.)

  Still, there was enough that I was doing to cause concern to those who cared about me. My friends didn't tell me that my drinking or my private life was getting out of control, but maybe that's because we were all having too much fun at the time. Certainly it didn't affect my Senate work. What was unspoken between me and my friends was my reason for excess. It was all part of my desire to escape, to keep moving, to avoid painful memories. And so I lived this string of years in the present tense, not despondently, because that is not my nature, but certainly with a sense of the void.

  All of this began to change when I rang the doorbell of the home in Northwest D.C. where I had been invited to dinner on the evening of June 17, 1991, and found myself looking into the beautiful hazel eyes of Victoria Reggie.

  The occasion was a dinner party to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Vicki's parents, Judge Edmund and Doris Reggie. The Reggie and Kennedy families had been friends for many years, beginning with the judge's strong support for Jack as the presidential nominee in 1960. Inviting me had been the elder Reggies' idea, Vicki later told me. They'd said, "Oh, let's invite the Commander"--their nickname for me. Vicki and I were not strangers. Over the years, I'd seen her and her family a fair amount, usually on Nantucket where her family has a summer home, and I'd dined from time to time with them when the Reggies were in Washington. I was aware that Vicki and Grier Raclin had ended their nine-year marriage the previous summer.

  When I walked up to Vicki's door that evening, I really wasn't expecting anything other than a pleasant evening with old friends. I got quite a bit more.

  As Vicki ushered me into her home, she looked at me quizzically and then leaned over and looked behind me. And with a teasing half smile on her face, my future wife sort of looked me up and down and asked, "What's wrong? Couldn't you get a date?"

  "I thought you'd be my date," I fired back. To which she responded, "Dream on, Kennedy."

  I learned later that her mother had overheard the exchange and was horrified: "Oh, Vicki! You're just never going to find a man if you talk like that!" But I was enjoying the banter. Vicki was quick-witted, playful--and fun.

  So, all right, perhaps it wasn't love at first sight. Vicki, in fact, charges me with not even remembering her from those '70s days, when she interned in my Senate office mailroom with her long hair pressed straight down below her shoulders, a charge to which I plead nolo contendere.

  But as much as Vicki and I had seen each other at various events over the years, I think that anniversary dinner party night was the first time I really saw Vicki. I helped her as she took the place setting away for the date I didn't bring, and I hung out with her in the kitchen as she prepared dinner. We shared easy conversation about issues of the day and spent a lot of the evening laughing. I hadn't felt that relaxed or lighthearted in a long time.

  Maybe that was what encouraged me to ask Vicki, as I left her house that night, "Well, can I call you? How about dinner tomorrow night?" Vicki said, "Sure." I've since learned that after the door closed, she went, "Did I just say yes? Have I lost my mind?"

  Bear in mind that this was a woman who did not exactly have to worry much about whether she would ever "find a man." Vicki was then in the midst of a very fulfilling career in the law. She was a successful partner in a law firm in Washington, and she was rearing two young children. Her life was full and very busy.

  We had dinner the next night, and in the weeks following I did everything I could think of to impress this amazing woman. I sent her bouquets of roses and fresh wildflowers. I telephoned her--a lot. We went out to restaurants. We had dinner at my home. I met her friends. She met mine. And we kept up the fun banter. As strange as it now seems, we didn't discuss any of the difficult things that were going on. One night at dinner, I did make reference to a poll that showed my approval rating plummeting to 48 percent, and Vicki comforted me by cracking, "That's a relief, because I never go out with anyone whose approval is less than 47." I developed instant friendships with her children: Curran, who was eight then, and Caroline, who was five. There is no question that I'd have been good pals with these two even if I hadn't been dating their mother. Curran was seriously into sports, so I found myself following football and baseball even more closely than usual; and I spent a lot of time coloring pictures on the living room rug with Caroline--who has blossomed into a very fine painter, incidentally. At night, I would read them to sleep.

  One of our best adventures was trick-or-treating that first Halloween. I really enjoy Halloween with children, and used to make the neighborhood rounds with my own, along with my nieces, every October 31. On this night, Vicki and I walked w
ith Curran and Caroline through their neighborhood. We received a lot of surprised looks from Vicki's neighbors that night, but none more than at the house occupied by the cultural attache of China.

  The children rang the doorbell and a gentleman opened the door to give them candy. As he looked up, he saw me and squealed, "Oooooooh, Kennedy!" I put out my hand to shake his and said, "How are you?" He asked us to come in and sit on the sofa. Actually, it was more like he ordered us to come in and sit on the sofa. Vicki and I looked at each other and the children kept asking why we weren't still trick-or-treating.

  We could hear the gentleman who opened the door as he ran upstairs and knocked on what we assumed to be the cultural attache's room. We heard them speaking in loud, rapid Chinese, which we could of course not understand, except for the periodic shouting out my name: "Ted Kennedy!" This back-and-forth went on for a few minutes. Vicki and I decided that the gentleman was trying to convince the attache that it really was me and the attache was telling him that it was just some person in a Ted Kennedy mask. Eventually we tiptoed out the door.

  Ironically, given that we've spent so many happy hours together at sea, our first little falling-out was over a disagreement about sailing. (Vicki maintains that "falling-out" is too strong a term for it.) In mid-August, I sailed Mya over from Hyannis to Nantucket to pay a visit on the judge and Doris and, of course, Vicki, who was visiting them. I invited Vicki to sail back to Hyannis Port with me.

  August was the beginning of the Atlantic hurricane season. The opening show, just then spiraling northeastward along the coast, was a doozie. Hurricane Bob had already bumped twice against Rhode Island, and according to news bulletins was now heading straight for Massachusetts. On Cape Cod, its peak winds would later be clocked at 125 miles an hour.