True Compass (20 page)

And along with that note is a press release drafted by the White House press office at the time of my announcement, with the president's handwritten changes to the draft.

Jack's press office thought he should release the following statement:

The President has been advised of his brother's statement. The President's brother has made an independent decision to seek the Senate seat in Massachusetts. He has not sought the President's endorsement of his candidacy and he is not looking for the President's help in the campaign.

In other words, this guy is on his own! Here's how Jack edited it to read:

The President of course knows of his brother's statement. His brother prefers that this matter be decided by the people of Massachusetts and that the President should not become involved. In response to this request, the White House will have no comment.

I walked in the St. Patrick's Day parade in Boston three days after my announcement. The crowds were jubilant and friendly, and I was starting to think that running for office was pretty grand sport, until I ran into my first opponent: myself.

I received a telephone call from Jack. "Teddy, I think it's good if we get that Harvard story out." For a moment I couldn't even think what he was talking about. I said, "What do you mean by that?!" Jack answered, "Get it out, the whole story, from beginning to end. Get it out in the early part of this campaign."

I thought,
How nice of
him
to think about this
. But Jack was right once again. Through an intermediary, our family furnished the details of the incident to Bob Healy at the
Globe
. Jack himself urged Healy to slip the cheating episode into the body of a longer profile on me. Healy refused to negotiate, and on Thursday, March 30, the
Globe
played the story on its front page.

I had a speaking engagement in Milford that night. The hall down there held about four hundred people. As I pulled into the parking lot I said to myself,
They've all read the
Globe
. I've got to go in there and face that crowd. This is going to be bad
.

I steeled myself as I walked into the hall, and once again was reminded of the basic decency of people. The crowd rose to its feet and began to cheer me. I cannot describe the feeling of uplift that I felt as I walked up to the podium. It seemed that the people in that room, at least, were willing to look beyond the stupid mistakes of a teenager. Under my breath, before I began my speech, I murmured, almost as if it were a prayer,
Maybe I can get through this after all
.

My main opponent in the primary was Eddie McCormack. (The Republican primary was dominated by familiar political names as well: H. Stuart Hughes, the grandson of presidential candidate Charles Evans Hughes, and George Cabot Lodge, son of Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.) I didn't know Eddie well, but I thought him intelligent and a good politician. He knew how to connect with people. For instance, if we made a joint appearance at a synagogue, Eddie would speak some Hebrew. He had run statewide before--he was the Commonwealth's attorney general--and he had a strong record on civil rights.

Neither the press nor academia--which still had a voice in public matters in those days--had yet accepted me. The
New York Times
columnist James "Scotty" Reston hammered at my presumption and inexperience, and the editorial page was scarcely more friendly. Vaguely scolding terms such as "dynasty" and "Kennedyism" were cropping up in press coverage, along with such questions as, "One too many?" My alma mater seemed almost to regret having given me a diploma. One law professor denounced me around the state as a "bumptious newcomer" and a "coattail candidate."

More than my own political future was riding on this campaign. Jack's advisers made no secret to me that if I lost, it would be a loss for all the Kennedys. We had more or less taken the nation by storm as a family, and the rejection of one of us in his home state would harm Jack's career.

Jack helped me, not publicly of course, but from behind the scenes. He organized a strategy session at the White House on April 27, with politicians and aides from all over Massachusetts flying in to brief him on how the candidates were viewed in the state. After that, full control shifted to Steve Smith, who proved nearly as masterful as Bobby at running a campaign. As Steve's staffers--many of them attorneys working without pay--fanned out across Massachusetts to organize support, I plunged back into the marathon round of travel and speechmaking that I'd experienced two years earlier. Only this time, I was speaking not for my brother, but for myself.

And I was having fun doing it. Back in my home state now, I could campaign the old-fashioned way, the Honey Fitz way, with marching bands, flags, drum majorettes, buttonholing people on the street. Once, as I strode the aisles of a textile machinery plant in Worcester, I spied a grimy, sweaty fellow and closed in on him with my hand outstretched. He pulled back, signaling to me that his own hand was too greasy. "Gimme that, buddy!" I yelled. I wore his worker's grime on my hand as a badge of honor the rest of the day.

Joan also visited countless women's club meetings and teas around the Commonwealth, charming audiences with her enthusiasm, her persuasiveness on my behalf, and with the home movies of our family that she liked to show.

As strange as it seems, this was really the first time in nearly four years of marriage that Joan and I were actually working together toward a goal that would affect
our
lives. Even so, our campaigning was frequently separate.

As I look back on this period of my life and at my marriage, I realize that Joan and I were young and naive about what it took to have a successful relationship. We certainly had not spent a lot of time together during our courtship, and we didn't spend the necessary time together in the early years. Almost immediately after the wedding celebrations were over, I plunged back into law school and the moot court competition, my travels, and campaign work for Jack. And so we never benefited from that critical but fleeting interval in which a young husband and wife get to know themselves and each other as a married couple.

Joan was bright and beautiful and talented. We shared the same religious faith. She was a graduate of the same Catholic college that my sisters and Mother had attended. We both had high expectations for a successful marriage. Sadly, that was not to be. Joan was private, contemplative, and artistic, while I was public, political, and on the go. We probably would have realized that we had fundamentally different temperaments if we had taken more time to get to know each other before we married, but we didn't want to wait. We thought we were in love. And I will grant that at the time I met her, I was keen to join my brothers as a married man, a family man. I certainly
wished
to be a family man. How could I not, given that "family" virtually defined my entire consciousness? Perhaps I'd assured myself that the core requirement in a marriage, compatibility, would develop naturally once the vows were exchanged.

My parents and siblings were well disposed toward Joan. Yet as time went on, the awareness deepened among all of us that something fundamental was not working right.

Our relationship atrophied. We remained together for many years longer than we were happy, but I don't think either of us seriously considered a divorce for most of those years. So many other things were going on in our lives, so many difficulties, so many tragedies, that breaking up our marriage just wasn't on the agenda. The reasons were many: our children, our faith, my career, and perhaps fear of change.

To compound our mutual unhappiness, as Joan herself has discussed publicly many times, she suffered with alcoholism. I myself drank too much at times and feel exceedingly lucky to have been spared addiction.

I do not blame Joan for the demise of our marriage. Nor do I agree with some of the accounts that she has given as to the reasons for its demise. I regret my failings and accept responsibility for them and will leave it at that.

In 1961, the worst of these troubles were still in the future. Joan, not yet twenty-five, did her best to be a mother and wife to an aspiring senator.

When I was able to get off the hustings, I'd immerse myself in long rounds of political "homework" assignments and quizzing. These were run by some of Jack's senior aides, and held mostly at the Cape house. The old house was buzzing.

By June, the time of the Democratic state convention, Steve Smith's groundwork had paid off. The party's endorsement was at stake, and our side had projected 1,196 of the 1,719 delegates. The roll call had given us 691 voted to McCormack's 360 when Eddie conceded the endorsement but demanded a primary contest in the fall, which he had a right to do. The primary contest led naturally to debates. Eddie and I had two of them, but the first was probably decisive. It was held on August 27 at South Boston High School, and carried on radio and television.

I'd flattered myself that I was a pretty good debater based on my training at Harvard and in moot court at the University of Virginia. But I was hardly ready for the ferocity of McCormack's attack. "You never worked for a living," McCormack began railing at me as he pointed a finger in my direction. "You never held elective office. You are not running on qualifications. You are running on a slogan, 'He can do more for Massachusetts.' That is the most insulting slogan I have ever seen. It says, 'Vote for this man because he has influence, connections, relatives.'"

And this, mind you, was only in Eddie's opening statement.

As the debate went along, he dropped such insinuations as, "We need a senator with experience, not arrogance," and, "The office of United States senator should be merited and not inherited." He mocked my trips to Europe. He mentioned that I had once been arrested in Pamplona for throwing a cushion into the bullring, and was held for six or seven hours. (This happened to be true. In my defense, I will say that it was a terrible bullfight and everyone was throwing cushions.) It struck me later that the likely way Eddie could have obtained this information was through the CIA or Henry Cabot Lodge.

The papers later said my voice shook as I spoke. But I refrained from firing back at Eddie on the same level of hostility and personal attack. Instead, I emphasized the sincerity of my claim that I could help the people of Massachusetts, and the similarity of my political philosophies to those of Jack.

At the end, Eddie McCormack could not stop himself from one last ad hominem jab. "If his name was [simply] Edward Moore," he said, pointing at me again, "his candidacy would be a joke. Nobody is laughing. Your name"--turning to me--"is Edward Moore Kennedy."

I was seething, not least because of the insult to a good and decent man, Eddie Moore. Joan and I returned home--by this time we were living at 3 Charles River Square--shaken, and not knowing whether my candidacy was finished. I called his widow, Mary Moore, to apologize that Eddie's name was dragged through the mud because of me. The living room was quiet for about forty-five minutes. And then, close to midnight, the telephone began to ring, and it kept on ringing, call after call. People were telling us that although the TV newscasts had Eddie "blasting" me, the late-night talk shows struck a different sentiment from the callers. People felt that Eddie had overdone it, and they admired my restraint.

One of the calls was from the president. Jack had been so nervous he could not sit still and watch the debate. He'd asked others about it, and they'd said I held my own.

And I suppose I had. Viewers and listeners seemed to see my restraint as a virtue, a sign of dignity. And they felt Eddie had gone too far. The next morning, I was out meeting and greeting voters when a laborer came up to me and said, "Hey, Kennedy. They say you haven't worked a day in your life." Then he stuck out his right hand and clapped me on the back with his left, saying, "Lemme tell you. You haven't missed a thing!"

Eddie and I had one other debate, and it was pretty mild. Perhaps his advisers had suggested that he try a little restraint and dignity himself. It was too late, though. On primary night, the numbers were Edward Kennedy 73 percent of the vote, and Edward McCormack 27 percent.

I will always remember that evening as being enormously exciting, but also incredibly sad. The exciting part was the victory. A malfunctioning ballot box up in Salem gave us an early tip-off about the outcome: when workers opened it so they could repair it, they could see that I was winning by 60-40, and transmitted the news down to the Cape. That put everyone in festive spirits. But later that evening, my father suffered his second stroke. I canceled all the television appearances and spent time with him in the hospital. That November, I made my father proud in the best way I knew: I defeated the Republican George Cabot Lodge, by 53 percent to 44. The next day, I was sworn in as a senator.

CHAPTER NINE

Drinks with the Senator

1962

I arrived in Washington to begin my Senate career on November 7, 1962, the day after being elected. Given that I was technically filling out the last two years of Jack's unexpired term, the appointed Benjamin Smith having stepped aside, we did not wait until the new Congress began on January 3, 1963--although I was sworn in on that date too, along with the other incoming senators, including Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, with whom I still serve. The press was enormously interested in this event. I was nearly blocked by them from coming over to the Capitol from my hotel on Massachusetts Avenue. Lyndon Johnson performed the ceremony in the Senate gallery as Joan and my sisters and parents looked on from the seats.

As proud as I was of this personal milestone, I was also proud of what the 1962 midterm elections affirmed for my party and my brothers. President Kennedy and his attorney general, Robert Kennedy, had just averted nuclear war with Russia. The Soviet atomic missiles secretly installed on Cuban soil earlier that year would not, as the world had feared little more than a week earlier, be unloosed upon American cities. The most dangerous thirteen days in history had ended: thirteen days of a superpower standoff in which millions gathered silently to watch the news in fear.

Those thirteen days ended with a peaceful agreement on October 28. Some credit could be claimed by the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, but most of it was due to my brothers: to their intertwined judgment, their moral and psychological acuity, and their resistance to the panicdriven pressuring of generals and cabinet members to strike, lest we be struck. Instead, the Kennedy administration ordered a naval blockade of Cuba and secretly promised to satisfy some Soviet demands. It worked.

The resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis brought exhilaration and a wave of renewed support for the New Frontier. On November 6, voters had turned out in record numbers. The morning headlines announced "a remarkable success" for the Democrats, as Tom Wicker in the
New York Times
put it: a gain of four seats in the Senate, minimal losses in the House, and gubernatorial victories highlighted by Edmund G. "Pat" Brown's surprise victory in California over Richard Nixon. It was all the more remarkable given that a new president's party nearly always suffers reversals at midterm.

The voters understood that devastating warfare had been averted by temperate statecraft. Dad had been right in his consoling remark to Jack after the Bay of Pigs, when he'd said that this was going to be one of the best things that ever happened to him.

I had followed the crisis from a distance. I learned of it along with millions of others on my car radio on Monday night, October 22. I'd been campaigning outside Boston, debating with Lodge at a service club, I believe, and was driving home when I heard Jack's voice informing the nation of a "secret, swift, and extraordinary buildup of communist missiles" on Fidel Castro's island and announcing a "strict quarantine" of military equipment being shipped to Cuba. The deadly game was then actually at its midpoint, but Jack's address marked its disclosure to the world.

After detailing the rest of his seven steps in response, the president shifted directions and spoke to "the captive people of Cuba" themselves. (A special radio hookup was beaming the broadcast into homes on the island.) "I speak to you as a friend, as one who knows of your deep attachment to your fatherland," Jack told them, and voiced sympathy that their revolution had been betrayed by Castro, whom he did not name. The United States, he assured Cubans, had "no wish to cause you to suffer or to impose any system upon you."

As Jack spoke, I was driving along Stonington Street in North Andover. I veered into a parking space outside a coffee shop, ran inside, and dialed the White House from a pay telephone in hopes of getting through to my brother. I reached a National Security Council member who told me, reasonably, that President Kennedy was unable to talk just now. This person did assure me that the crisis was as grave as the president had said it was, and I continued home to Joan with my mind churning. I reached Jack the next morning. He told me the outcome was still far from certain, and that he could not discuss any details over the phone. I understood.

I'd prepared a statement of my own on Cuba, but Jack's advisers asked me not to deliver it. With less than two weeks until the election, I figuratively paced the sidelines as my brothers and Nikita Khrushchev played out the fate of the world.

I still chuckle when I recall that even my
mother
was more involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis than I--although not in a way that Jack especially appreciated.

At the height of the standoff, when nuclear warfare remained a live option on both sides, the head of the KGB in Moscow burst through the door of Khrushchev's office. He carried a letter to the Soviet premier from one Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy of Hyannis Port and Palm Beach. Mrs. Kennedy wanted the premier to autograph some of his books and send them to her.

The transatlantic cables hummed with this baffling new development. When Jack found out about it, he called up our mother and demanded, "What in the world are you
doing
?!" Rose assumed that Jack knew very well what she was doing. Each Christmas, Mother made it a practice to give her children books signed by heads of state. This year, it was Mr. Khrushchev's turn, and she had methodically forged ahead according to her schedule.

"The Russians won't assume this is innocent!" Jack sputtered. "They'll give it some interpretation! Now I have to get my CIA people speculating on what that interpretation might be! The strengths! The weaknesses! The contingencies!"

The kicker is that, after the threat of World War III had been defused, Khrushchev did send Mother the autographed books.

As I began to feel my way in the Senate, I was helped by Jack's counsel. One useful piece of advice was about committees: "Take whatever they assign you; don't depend on me for a recommendation. If I get into it and you don't get the committee, that'll reflect on me." I said that was fine.

Jack also suggested that I attend the prayer breakfasts. "That's the inner sanctum of the Senate," he said, "and you ought to go on down there." And so I did, every Wednesday morning. There were about twelve or fifteen regulars--Republicans and Democrats both, but a force unto themselves. When a measure came up for a vote, unless it was an especially partisan bill, these men would generally vote together. Jack was right: they were a power clique, one of the many that I soon discovered.

The prayer breakfasts were fascinating, and Jack always wanted me to regale him with who was there and what got said. A new member got carefully scrutinized at them. The first or second time I showed up, the scrutinizer was none less than Richard Russell Jr., the powerful senator from Georgia. His statue now stands in front of the Senate office building named after him.

Senator Russell asked me to say the blessing. All eyes turned to me. Being a Catholic, I was not exactly steeped in biblical verse. I thought fast, and gave the Catholic grace before meals. It's a pretty short grace, and when I finished it the other breakfast attendees were still looking at me expectantly. I darted my eyes at them, and then said the after-meal grace. More silence. I repeated the two graces, then resolutely sat down. They seemed satisfied. Jack roared at that story.

He roared even louder the next week when I repeated a yarn about Pharaoh's daughter as spun out by Senator Willis Robertson of Virginia--the father of the TV evangelist Pat Robertson. It more or less went this way:

"Now, the Pharaoh's daughter, she was out one morning in Egypt, just walking along the river, and she looked down in those bulrushes. And in those bulrushes she saw this little baby in a kind of a little cradle, a little boat. So she leaned down there and pulled that baby out of those bulrushes. She walked back to the Pharaoh, and she said, 'Pharaoh, I've got this baby. I found him down in the bulrushes.'

"Of course, that's what
she
said. That's how she said she got that baby. You and I know where that baby came from that she said she found in the bulrushes."

Not long after that, I walked into a Senate debate and listened to Senator Robertson speak very ardently in favor of a certain bill--the content of it eludes me now. The time for the roll call came. Impressed with the Virginia senator's passion, I cast an "aye" vote when my turn came. When the call got to Robertson, he voted "no."

I couldn't believe my ears. I went up to him afterward and said, "Senator, I just listened to your speech on this issue, and you spoke strongly in favor of it. Then you voted 'no.' I'm confused." Robertson smiled at me. "Well, Senator," he said, "in my state, the people are evenly divided on this bill. To those who favor it, I send my speech. To those who are opposed, I send my vote."

"Thank you very much," I said to him. As I walked away, I added to myself, "I think I might be able to make it here after all."

As for the committee assignments, I knew who it was I needed to go to. Senator James O. Eastland of Mississippi was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, but this does not begin to express this man's influence on Capitol Hill. He'd served continuously in the Senate for nineteen years by then (after a brief stint in 1941), and would continue until his resignation in 1978 as the body's senior member. Power flowed through him and a handful of other senators, mostly southern, such as Richard Russell of Georgia, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, and Eastland's fellow Mississippian John Stennis. These senators were bright men, masters of procedure, and--perhaps with the exception of Thurmond--shapers of valuable legislation, in such areas as defense, agriculture, and the refurbishing of the navy. They were also segregationists to a man, although in some cases they moderated their views with the changing times.

The remarkable thing about Eastland--one of many remarkable things--was that he held his power despite being rather detached from the full life of the Senate. If you were to visit his office during the day, more often than not you would find his desk covered with oil maps. There would be oilmen in there, from Mississippi and the Gulf areas, and they'd all be bent over these maps absorbed in oil deals that they were working out. These oil meetings would go on for the better part of the week. Everything that happened on that committee, in fact, happened after 5 p.m. That's when Eastland would invite his people in for a drink. Everett Dirksen of Illinois would come in and drink with him, and Richard Russell, and Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania. John McClellan of Arkansas would stop in, but he didn't drink.

These men had little use for other committee members--people such as Charles "Mac" Mathias of Maryland, or Phil Hart of Michigan, whom I've always thought of as the conscience of the Senate at that time. It was Eastland and his reliable Old Bulls, conservatives from both parties. They knew they had the votes, and so they worked on what interested them the most: deciding which judges would get appointments and which wouldn't. They controlled Judiciary as a sort of fiefdom.

Eastland's racial views posed a moral problem for me. Civil rights became one of the defining causes of my career. How could I seek guidance, or cooperate in any way, with a proponent of segregation?

My decision regarding Eastland--in fact, my abiding impulse to reach across lines of division during my career--took strength from the concluding phrase of Lincoln's first inaugural address, on the eve of the Civil War. I decided to put faith in "the better angels of our nature." I worked with James Eastland; in fact, the two of us became friends. Then and always, I would work with anyone whose philosophies differed from mine as long as the issue at hand promoted the welfare of the people, and I would continue to await those better angels, and to remain confident in ultimate justice.

When I called on Senator James O. Eastland in his office to seek committee assignments, he rose and greeted me cordially: a tall, moon-faced man with a penetrating squint behind his dark-rimmed glasses and a resolute set to his mouth. I told him the reason for my visit, and he said, "Well, you take the weekend and figure out which committees you want to go on." I said that would be fine, and excused myself to consult with my staff.

My "staff," by the way, consisted of one administrative assistant and one legislative assistant. That's a telling figure, one of many, as one reflects on how the U.S. Senate has changed over the past half century. These days, most senators have staffs of at least fifty, including legislative directors, staff assistants, researchers, and press secretaries. I spent the weekend talking to trusted intimates, mostly Jack, about my committee preferences. We narrowed my interests to constitutional rights, civil rights, criminal law, immigration and refugees, antitrust, and perhaps one or two others. None of these seemed especially likely. The following Tuesday, the phone in my office rang, and my education in the ways of the Senate reached another colorful plateau.

"Chairman Eastland wants to see you now," the voice on the other end said.

"Now?" I replied. There seemed to be no ambiguity. I hurried over to his office.

This time, the senator's greeting was, "Do you drink bourbon or scotch?" I had not prepared myself for that particular query, but I blurted, "Scotch." Eastland summoned an aide, who brought in a tray of ice. He then placed a bottle of scotch on the table for me, and a bottle of bourbon for himself. The aide put ice in my glass, then poured scotch over the ice, and added some water. Not enough water, I thought.

"Now, I think I know what you want," said Eastland as he leaned back and swirled his drink. "Let me see if I'm right. You've got a lot of Eye-talians up there in Boston, don't you?"

Before I could answer, he went on, "You've got a lot of Eye-talians. Now, the Kennedys are always talking about immigration and always talking about Eye-talians and this kind of thing. You drink that drink there, and you're on the immigration committee."

I managed something like, "Oh, gee, that sounds great," and raised my glass. Even before I sipped, I could tell that it had the power to curl my hair. I noticed that Eastland had gotten up from his desk and crossed the office to fiddle with something. I quickly poured half my drink into some potted plants near his desk and swallowed the remainder.