True Compass (10 page)

Joey Gargan and I were sailing on August 15, 1945, when we heard a deafening volley of explosions erupting from Hyannis Port. Fireworks. We headed for shore, and learned that World War II was over--Japan had announced its surrender, following that of Germany the previous May. A parade was organized, and Joey and I found ourselves in a convertible filled with happy relatives and friends, driven past the dancing, cheering crowds lining Hyannis's streets by Lieutenant Jack Kennedy.

I began sailing in earnest during those years. I had loved the sea even before I could name it, but now I began to take full command of my nautical skills and plunged into competitive racing. I raced Wianno Juniors with Joey and then Wianno Seniors, sometimes with Jack and sometimes with local friends such as Dickie Rounds. I did well and soon began to place second and third and even first. Sailboat racing is an indescribably joyous thrill. It combines the adrenaline edge of competition with the exuberance of simply being on the water, the boat leaning sidelong into the waves as its sails take the wind and convert it to velocity. I learned all the winds; I learned the tides and currents; I learned the movement of the boat through the sea; I learned to judge my location on the water by the distant cliffs and lighthouses and rooftops onshore. Those were the sparkling summers when the sea transformed itself into a home for me, a charmed universe that I could enter in any season, any weather, and find comfort, transcendence.

As I hit the books at Milton in November of 1946, Jack distinguished himself again by getting elected to Congress at age twenty-nine. Jack's initial interest in elective office registered as a mild surprise in our family. He had never to my knowledge talked about political ambitions. The last I'd heard, he was thinking about a career in journalism. He'd written articles for the
Chicago Herald-American
and the International News Service after his injuries in the Pacific. In the months after the war ended, he kept writing as a stringer for those outlets, covering stories in Ohio, London, Potsdam, and other places, and also did work for the United Fund in Boston.

Not even Dad saw this coming. Jack later credited those dinnertime political conversations, steered by our father, as stimulating his interest in the field, but as Jack saw it, Dad didn't think he had the stamina for politics. He weighed 120 pounds after the first of three operations on his warinjured back. He still felt and showed the effects of the malaria he'd contracted in the Pacific, and of the synthetic drug known as atabrine that was used to treat the disease, which tended to discolor the skin. The igniting spark, as we later learned, seems to have been a speech--the first public speech Jack gave. He delivered it to a Boston American Legion audience in August 1945, on his return to the United States from his reportage in Europe. It covered the wartime fates of Britain, Ireland, and Germany--"Victor, Neutral and Vanquished," as his title had it. The speech was a big success, to Jack's surprise, as were several others he gave not long afterward. The following year, James Michael Curley resigned his congressional seat to run for a fourth term as mayor of Boston. Jack, at loose ends and not sure of what to do with his life, decided to run for Curley's vacant 11th Congressional District seat. He won.

I was sleeping one early morning at Milton in the middle of May 1948 when I heard the door to my cubicle open. I opened my eyes to see the headmaster, Mr. Norris, peering at me. I immediately suspected that something bad had happened.

This time it was Kick. A small chartered plane in which she was flying had crashed in the south of France. Killed along with her was the man she wanted to marry, the Irish-born Lord Peter Wentworth FitzWilliam. The two had been flying to the Riviera and on to Paris where Dad awaited them. Kick was twenty-eight.

Even though it was spring, I remember that morning as exceptionally cold and dark. I waited alone for a long time before Jack arrived to pick me up and take me to Hyannis Port.

My mother was right when she observed in her memoir, "It has been said that time heals all wounds. I don't agree. The wounds remain. Time--the mind, protecting its sanity--covers them with some scar tissue and the pain lessens, but it is never gone."

Bobby graduated from Harvard that spring and set sail with a friend on the
Queen Mary
for a tour of Europe and the Middle East. Two years later he married Ethel Skakel, and they began to raise up a large new brood of Kennedys.

Jack remained a larger-than-life presence. The Edgartown regatta had been an annual chance for us to race together. One July not long after Jack's reelection to Congress, I entered the race with Joe Gargan as my partner. As the weekend approached, Jack decided that he wanted to sail too. He telephoned me at the Cape house to advise me of his intentions, but told me not to wait for him if he got there late. But of course Joe and I wanted him with us, and so on the day of the race we sailed our boat around and around the Edgartown harbor until it was almost time for the race to start. It was an overcast day, and suddenly out of the mist there appeared a single-engine plane, descending rapidly over Edgartown. The plane flew over our boat. We looked up and saw Jack grinning and waving down at us. He zoomed for shore and touched down on a grassy field at the edge of town.

A huge crowd milled around the pier, and twenty boats in each of two classes were tacking back and forth, their crews getting ready for the start. Joe and I realized that even if Jack could worm his way through the humanity, he would not have the proper racing identification, an official red tag, in his billfold. (He rarely even carried a billfold.) We began to appreciate how far-fetched his impulsive scheme had been. Still, he'd just flown over our heads, and so there was nothing to do but wait.

We didn't wait long. About six minutes after he touched down, a taxicab screeched to a halt at the edge of the pier and Jack jumped out, wearing a blue suit and tie and clutching his briefcase. He sliced his way through the mob of people toward the end of the pier and I steered the boat into the wind and alongside the pier for a quick pickup. An official started to yell, "Hey! You can't just pick people up here!" but Jack barged past him and leapt onto the boat. Just then the gun went off marking the start of the race. The three of us quickly pushed off, set the sails, and headed out to the starting line. Jack made a quick change belowdeck into clothes more appropriate for sailing, and I handed the tiller to my brother. We were late, but we were on our way.

It was a long course and a drizzly, misty day, and we had trouble seeing the other boats. But even with our late start, we managed a first in our division. Jack had taken a different route from all the other boats and there had been a wind shift that we were able to take advantage of before any of the other racers. What a thrill! There was a lot of cheer aboard
Victura
that afternoon. On the way into Edgartown harbor, Jack got drenched by a passing motorboat, but he quickly dried himself off and changed back into his blue suit. Pretty soon we saw his little single-engine plane flying over us again, en route back to Washington. He disappeared into the mist.

I said farewell to Milton in May 1950 and launched out with Joey Gargan on a summer trip through Europe. My letters home show that I complained of "paying an outrageous bill" and getting caught stealing ashtrays in Sorrento, eating cornflakes in Florence, upsetting a canoe on Lake Como, visiting Hitler's Eagle's Nest at Berchtesgaden, and contemplating the Nazi death camp at Dachau.

Harvard awaited me in the fall. I felt ready for it.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Harvard Screwup

1950-1958

The Harvard I entered in the fall of 1950 was in many ways the timeless Harvard of my father's and brothers' eras: a grand old national treasure of tree-scattered greens and yards and ancient redbrick buildings. Legendary professors such as Samuel Eliot Morison and John Kenneth Galbraith hurried to classrooms filled with intense young "gentlemen scholars" in their Harris Tweed jackets, their pipes tucked into their breast pockets. There were the final clubs, and parties.

Harvard was familiar to me from my many autumnal visits with the family to watch Jack and Bobby play football. I'd even visited Joe Jr. there once when he was in law school, and was amazed by how messy his room was. I savored an unfamiliar feeling--adultness--as I unpacked my suitcases in Room C-31 of the low-slung Wigglesworth dormitories that stretch along the southern edge of Harvard Yard. But I was still a kid in many ways--still
the
kid in the family. I looked forward to a rosy, uncomplicated existence as a Harvard man: good fellowship with new friends, stimulating contact with great professors, and playing football. As it turned out, my existence at Harvard was much more complicated than I had hoped.

I started off lucky, with a great roommate: a slim, sandy-haired boy named Dudley Richards. I'd casually known Dudley from summers in Hyannis Port. He and his older brother Ross were good sailors. Ross had sailed against Bobby and given him all my brother could handle.

Dudley's passion was ice skating, and by his early teen years he was a top Olympic prospect. But at sixteen he'd seemingly shattered that dream: diving into water that was shallower than he realized, he'd suffered a broken neck. He recovered, but only after two years of intensive physical therapy, during which time he did not skate at all.

By the end of freshman year, Dudley's hard work had paid off and he'd gained the rank of number two amateur skater in the nation. Our friendship continued after Harvard, and I cheered him from afar as he went on to win some Olympic bronze and silver medals. In January 1961, Dudley shared a gold medal in the pairs at the U.S. Championships with the young skating star he intended to marry, Maribel Owen. Tragically, they both were killed, along with the entire U.S. skating team, in a plane crash on the way to the World Figure Skating Championships in Prague in February 1961.

I drove to Cambridge in my mother's old blue coupe in that fall of 1950. As soon as I was able to buy a snazzy Pontiac of my own, I got a special horn for it, a horn that sounded like a cow's anxious "MOOOOO!" I considered that fairly stylish and amusing; but as always seemed to happen, word of the horn made its way back to my father, and I received the following letter from him:

I heard in my roundabout way that you are using that bell [
sic
] of yours on that car. I don't want to be complaining about things you do but I want to point out to you that when you exercise any privilege that the ordinary fellow does not avail himself of, you immediately become the target for display and newspaper criticism.

It's all right to struggle to get ahead of the masses by good works, by good reputation and by hard work, but it certainly isn't by doing things that [could lead people to say], "Who the hell does he think he is?"

I got rid of the cow horn.

Pulling a Harvard jersey over my head and shoulder pads to play freshman football was one of the thrills of my young life. At six foot two and 210 pounds, I had the right size for a college player in those days. Making cleat marks and crashing into other solid bodies on the same field where my brothers had played--it didn't seem that life could hold anything better than that. Dad made all my home games, where he helped out the coach by pacing the sidelines wearing a beret and shouting instructions.

One dear figure's passing tempered my joy that fall. John Fitzgerald, my grandfather, succumbed to a long illness on October 2. He had been delighted in Jack's congressional victory four years earlier. Grampa's death not only marked the passing of an era; it also served as a bright line marker for the end of my childhood.

In due course, I would awaken to Harvard's intellectual bounties and find in them the building blocks for my lifelong education, in particular my grasp of national and international political thought. My fall semester, in fact, was respectable if not stellar in my coursework. But in the spring of 1951, my mind turned, or returned, to thoughts of football, and to staying in condition so that I could go for the varsity squad in the fall. There were other reasons for my gridiron passion. Most of the friendships I'd made at Harvard were through football--John Culver, Claude Hooton, Dick Clasby--and I loved being part of a team. I didn't want to lose that. In most other ways that first year, I don't remember Harvard as being a particularly hospitable place. Not for me, at any rate.

So I threw myself into the spring football drills, to the extent that my grades suffered, my Spanish grade especially. I worried that if I flunked or made a D on the final exam, I wouldn't be eligible to play football in the fall.

I expressed my concerns to a friend in the dorm, Warren O'Donnell. He jokingly suggested that I let another buddy, Bill Frate, take the exam for me. I laughed off the idea. But then Warren brought it up again, in Bill's presence. Bill laughed and said he might get a worse grade than me. But then, trying to be a friend in need, he checked the exam schedule and saw that he was free at the time of the Spanish test. I'd already dropped the idea, but when I ran into him at dinner that night, Bill told me that if I wanted him to do it, he was willing. To my lasting regret, I said, "Great." I didn't think it through. I made an immature, spontaneous, extremely poor and wrong decision.

Bill took the exam--under the eye of a proctor who happened to be his adviser, and who knew he'd already passed a Spanish test, which had exempted him from having to take the course. Harvard sentenced each of us to a year's suspension. We were told we could come back if we'd done something useful with that time.

I felt terrible. I knew I'd screwed up. I felt even worse about having to face my father. I called up Jack and told him what had happened. Jack agreed to give Dad a heads-up while I drove to the Cape to see him. It was the longest and worst drive I ever had to make. I recall thinking as I drove that there were so many "ifs" involved:
If
I'd not confided my worries about Spanish to Warren.
If
he hadn't suggested to Bill Frate that he might take my place.
If
Bill had not been free.
If
there had been another proctor.

But in the final analysis, the "ifs" didn't matter. I knew I was to blame because I had embraced the idea.

My father met me in the sunroom. He alternated between disappointment and anger for quite a while.
Why didn't you get ahead of this?
he asked me.
Why didn't you act responsibly? See what happens when you do these things?
The more we talked, the quieter his voice would get. But then the phone would ring; one of my brothers expressing concern, offering advice. And when I came back into the room, he'd tee off on me again. "There are people who can mess up in life and not get caught," he advised me at one point, "but you're not one of them, Teddy." Boy, was he ever right.

By the next day, he'd settled down and begun to think about what my options were. We thought about other schools, but I wanted to prove myself and return to Harvard. Serving in the military made the most sense.

I signed up for the army, at the old building that still stands along the docks in Boston. My father thought the military would do me good. He was tough and he was deeply disappointed in me. But he never gave up on me. He wanted me to learn from this experience.

Another thing I recall about Dad during this crisis was that he was concerned on behalf of Bill Frate. He recognized that Bill had been trying to help me, and wanted to be supportive of him. Bill, to his great credit, took responsibility for his own actions and said he wanted to stand on his own. He went to another school for a year, then came back and graduated from Harvard.

Vicki and I still see Bill Frate and his wife, Anne. Once a year, we find a weekend to get together with some of my old football buddies and their wives for a Harvard game. Often it's the Harvard-Yale Game and the company includes Bill and Anne, John Culver, destined to be a lifelong friend of mine and an outstanding Democrat--he represented Iowa both as a senator and a congressman--along with his wife, Mary Jane, as well as Dick Clasby, who was one of the greatest ever to play at Harvard. He was a three-sport man, football team captain, and in 1952 broke loose for a ninety-six-yard touchdown run from scrimmage in the game against Washington University of St. Louis. Dick married Joe Gargan's sister and my very dear friend and cousin Mary Jo. We're joined by my dear friend Paul Kirk, who played for the Crimson a few years later, and his wife, Gail, and Bill Cleary, the All-American hockey player for Harvard and Olympic gold medalist, and his wife, Jo. Until his death, my classmate Jeff Coolidge was also part of our annual gathering. And Claude Hooton has joined us. We have a big dinner at an Italian family-style restaurant. Then the next day we go to the stadium and have a great tailgate party. Then we see the game.

But of course all this was years into the future. At the time, I wondered whether I'd ever get back to Harvard in any capacity.

I did my basic training at Fort Dix, New Jersey. I was in the 39th Infantry of the 9th Infantry Division. I worked hard through sixteen weeks of summertime heat and didn't sleep much. KP duty saw to that. I received thorough training in washing dishes and emptying garbage cans.

I also found myself in combat. Hard fighting. Against my will, and with my fists. And not with the enemy.

Up until then I'd had very little contact with African Americans. I was now at close quarters with several in our platoon, including another enlisted man named Wharton. One day Wharton and I, along with a fellow named Fessia, got gigged for having dirty rifles. Our penalty was to take some brooms, go over, and clean out the Officer's Quarters.

I wanted to get it done early because Harvard was playing football and it was being televised, and I wanted to see it. When I realized that Wharton was missing from our three-man detail, I suggested to Fessia that he go and find him. Fessia went to Wharton's barracks and returned with the news that "Wharton says he may come, or he may not."

I snapped, "That's ridiculous!" Fessia suggested, a little too casually in retrospect, that perhaps
I
should go over and reason with him.

I did. On the second floor of the barracks, I found probably eight men rolling dice against a footlocker. I said, "Is Wharton around here?" This fellow stood up--he was African American, about six foot four and 185 pounds of muscle--and said, "I'm Wharton."

I said, "Wharton, you got gigged."

"Yeah, I got gigged."

I said, "You've got to come over and clean out the BOQ like the rest of us." He said, "Well, maybe I'm comin' and maybe I'm not." I said, "You're coming." He said, "You telling me something?" Then the "reasoning" began. We launched into a really bad fight.

It was the wrestling I'd learned from Louie Andrews at Milton, and my football conditioning, that saved me. As it was, I had my hands full with Wharton. Had the fight been outdoors, on an open field, the techniques I'd learned in wrestling would have made it nearly impossible for him to stay with me. If you can take an opponent down, roll him, get a leg lock on him, you've pretty well got him. But in a barracks, you're rolling, and you roll into a footlocker, and suddenly he's on top of you. And Wharton got on top of me, pounding away and grabbing at my face. I thought he was going to put my eyes out. I put up a hand, and he bit right through it. He bit harder than the zebra.

I think I got the better of him in the end. Wrestling is defensive, and I finally managed to immobilize him. Which was good enough for me. There was blood all over the barracks, some of it Wharton's, much of it mine.

A sergeant named Maguire came storming into the room, blew his whistle, and ordered us both to get back over to the BOQ and finish cleaning it. "And you fellows can continue your fight at six o'clock on the parade ground."

Continue the fight at six o'clock on the parade ground?!
I couldn't believe it. That's the last thing in the world I wanted to do. But if I had to, I had to. So at six o'clock I was pacing around the flagpole on the parade ground. And at 6:05 I was outta there. Wharton hadn't showed up. Lucky for me. I heard that in his next fight, he knocked out every tooth in the other guy's head.

With about two weeks still to go in basic training, I started formulating another idea. I would volunteer to go to Korea. I believed that it was my duty; a necessary phase of my atonement. I knew the risks. The war had stalemated, peace talks had begun, but American and Chinese troops were still slaughtering one another on the misty slopes of Bloody Ridge and Heartbreak Ridge.

On a three-day pass, I met Bobby and Jack in New York. Over lunch, I told them about my idea. Both were appalled, and strenuously argued against my volunteering. "Mother and Dad have suffered enough," one of them said to me. "We can't afford to have you go over and risk getting killed. You just can't do this kind of thing. Go where the army assigns you, and do your part."

I thought about this. I realized that I was being selfish and was risking unspeakable grief for my parents.
God, I don't want to do that
, I told myself.
I've been enough of a screwup already
.

I accepted an assignment to the Counter-Intelligence Corps Center at Fort Holabird, Maryland. CIC agents had guarded the Manhattan Project against spies during the war, and as anticommunist fervor took hold in the 1950s, the potential for spy-versus-spy intrigue promised to increase. Unfortunately, my career as a spy was fleeting. After two months, I found myself transferred to Camp Gordon, Georgia, for training with the military police.