Edward Kennedy’s career comes as a stunning riposte to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous dictum that “there are no second acts in American lives.” Not even the author of The Great Gatsby would have dared to invent the extraordinary life of Rose and Joe Kennedy’s ninth child, the naughty boy who grew up to be the elder statesman of the Democratic party.
As all the family photographs show, Teddy was the baby of the family, partly raised by his more celebrated older brothers, Jack and Bobby. By some miracle, possibly the luck of the Irish, Teddy outlived them both, suffered spectacular failures in public life and was rescued by the love of a good woman.
Even his passing was marked by the kind of solemnity accorded heads of state and his reputation redeemed in extravagant public obsequies. Now, a month after his funeral, out comes this memoir, part autobiography, part apologia. You could hardly make it up.
True Compass has the narrative drive of a book written in the shadow of the grim reaper. When, in May of last year, Kennedy was diagnosed with brain cancer, his collaboration with Ron Powers took on a
new purpose.
The senator would supply his version; Powers would give the book shape, style and coherence. Cleverly, the ghost has also given his subject a certain salty charm. Kennedy is writing for posterity, spinning from the grave, but not much is left out. Only a dedicated Kennedy-hater could take issue with it. For anyone who has grown up with the fables of Jack and Jackie, this is an absorbing tour of the Kennedy back lot.
To be born a Kennedy was to be born fighting. Teddy’s father, Joseph Sr, instilled a family culture of remorseless competition, derived from his own insecurity. “What the hell do I have to do to be called an American?” he roared when, yet again, the press disparaged his Irish roots.
Teddy was lucky. He sat at a small table apart from his parents and brothers and grew up surrounded by sisters, averring a special love for Jean, closest in age. The pressure to succeed was remorseless. Although he followed Jack into Harvard, Teddy ruined his record by cheating in a Spanish exam. It was the first of many “screw-ups.”
Worries about his prospects were soon swamped by the presidential campaign of 1960. Jack’s run for the White House, as epic as Obama’s in 2008, was the culmination of Rose and Joe Kennedy’s extraordinary parental ambition and always a family affair. Teddy was his elder brother’s campaign manager, backed up by a team of college professors and political hacks, the “eggheads and hardheads.”
This, for my money, is the meat of this memoir. Kennedy’s recollections of his first exposure to national politics are fresh, vivid and surprising. Powers, too, relishes the tales from the campaign trail, the Democratic convention in Los Angeles, the televised debates with Nixon, and finally the snowy magic of inauguration day, 1961.
JFK made Bobby attorney general. There was no place for Teddy in Camelot. Instead, the 1960s became a progressively more brutal test of his resilience. A lesser man might have buckled, but now the famous Kennedy upbringing, almost Roman in its stoicism, came into its own.
In December 1961, his father, Joe, to whom he was exceptionally close, suffered a disabling stroke. In 1962, Teddy fought, and narrowly won, a vicious Senate campaign for Massachusetts. In November 1963, JFK was assassinated. Six months after this trauma, in June 1964, Teddy was nearly killed in a light-plane crash, an accident in which he broke his back and had to endure months of rehab.
When Bobby was assassinated in 1968, the baby of the Kennedy family suddenly became father to a brood of orphans. “I became,” he writes, “the family uncle.” This terrible decade must have left many inner wounds. Kennedy style, he hardly examines these.
If Teddy had stuck to this role, all could have been well, but the flipside of his resilience was his appetite for women and parties. Just as he was coming through the worst of the 1960s, his political ambitions were drowned in the midnight waters of Chappaquiddick.
Kennedy’s account of this scandal still smacks of special pleading and leaves important questions unanswered. There’s no doubt that he suffered deeply for his dreadful behavior that night. As a politician, he was finished; his campaign against sitting US President Jimmy Carter, whom he plainly loathed, never achieved liftoff.
Slowly he remade himself, becoming the custodian of his brothers’ memory, the keeper of the flame and, when he married Vicki Reggie, he put his “hellraising” behind him. In the 40 years between Chappaquiddick and his death, he became “the lion of the Senate.”
Like its author, True Compass tries to do several things simultaneously. More than a memoir, it is also a manifesto. Seeded through the narrative of a remarkable life are many references to Kennedy’s support for the burning issue of 2009, US healthcare reform.
If his death has deprived Obama of the majority he needs to steamroll the Republican diehards in the Senate, Kennedy’s ghostly appeals for a universal health policy will keep his name in the public eye and secure his memoir a place on Beltway bedsides. Insiders will also relish some delicious gossip, a hilarious portrait of Reagan’s White House, vignettes of the British newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook, Brezhnev and Clinton and, finally, a full-throated declaration of support for Obama. There, at last, the senator manages to get on the right side of history, at least for now.
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