True Compass (24 page)

About a half hour later they came back, loaded me in the ambulance, and transported me to a hospital. I was in so much pain that I asked for sodium pentothal. I'd dislocated my shoulder once, and I recalled that pentothal knocked you out. The doctors said, "No, no, we can't give you that." It seems that an anesthetic could have been dangerous if I had internal injuries. But as they cut my clothes away--boom! I passed out. Merciful relief from the pain. I'd suffered a broken back and a collapsed lung that had been punctured by the tip of a rib, one of several that had been cracked apart. I'd been given transfusions, and doctors had suctioned water and air from my chest cavity to keep me from suffocating. My life hung in the balance for a while. Doctors told me that I'd been lucky: had any of my broken vertebrae been cervical or thoracic, I'd have been permanently paralyzed. I was thirty-two years old, six feet two inches tall, and 230 pounds, not that far from my college football weight, and my relative youth and fitness worked in my favor as well.

I remember the first thing I saw when I woke up was Najeeb Halaby from the Federal Aviation Administration, who said, "What happened on the plane?" And I thought,
What the hell am I doing talking to this guy? What in the world am I doing talking to Jeeb Halaby about the plane?

Then Joan arrived. She had been waiting for me at the convention, about fifteen miles from the crash site. When she heard the news, she hurried to the hospital, escorted by the governor of Massachusetts, Endicott "Chub" Peabody. "Hi, Joansie," I managed when she rushed into the room. "Don't worry." Then my sister Pat came. Later I got the news that Ed Moss had not pulled through. I was devastated.

A White House aide, under orders from President Johnson, telephoned the home of Dr. Paul Russell, chief surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital. Roused from sleep, Dr. Russell sped the hundred miles from Boston to my bedside, joining two Cooley Dickinson doctors. Several hours later I saw the tousled hair and concerned blue eyes of my brother beside the bed. Bobby had driven all night from Hyannis Port. My brush with death just seven months after Jack's assassination was almost too much for him to bear. I tried to ease his mind with a joke. "Is it true," I asked him, "that you are ruthless?" Bobby stayed at the hospital for two days.

I remained at Cooley Dickinson until July 9, encased in a tubing-andstrap device called a Stryker frame that kept me suspended above my bed, occasionally rotating like a hunk of barbecue meat. My father arrived on July 2 from Hyannis Port, an arduous visit for him. He rolled into my room in his wheelchair in the midst of a debate by doctors over how to treat me. There were two options: (1) to perform surgery on my back now, with a long period of convalescence and rehabilitation, to repair the break and fuse my spine, hopefully preserving my ability to walk; or (2) to spend the next six months immobilized, giving my back the chance to heal and fuse on its own. If I could not walk at the end of that six-month period, then we could consider surgery, with an additional lengthy period of convalescence and rehabilitation. Dad made his opinion as clear as if he still had the full power of speech. Whipping his head from side to side, he shouted out, "Naaaa, naaaa, naaa!" I understood that Dad was recalling the back operation on Jack that had left him in permanent pain (and no doubt thinking of Rosemary as well). I made a decision that not only honored his wishes, but mine also: I would take the more conservative option of allowing the broken bones and vertebrae to heal naturally. The chances for complications from the surgery itself were significant, and in 1964 the techniques and equipment were not what they are today. I could very well have been paralyzed because of the surgery. No, I would take my chances with nature.

I made the right choice. I would spend the remainder of my life not being able to stand fully erect and always feeling pain from my injuries. On the bright side, which is how I prefer to look at things, I would spend the remainder of my life able to walk.

When the doctors had ascertained that I'd not suffered injuries to my spinal cord, I was transferred to New England Baptist Hospital in Boston. There I began to savor the simple joys of life as soon as a little strength began to return.

Joan and the children swam back into close orbit with me. Jack's death had devastated her. My accident further distressed her, but it also lent her a new sense of purpose. I was up for election to my first full term that fall. My reelection was not in serious doubt, but we still had a campaign. My opponent was a former state representative named Howard Whitmore Jr. So, as she had in my first Senate campaign, Joan became a surrogate for me. Over the course of the next five months, she barnstormed cities and towns all over Massachusetts, charming crowds and winning votes.

President Johnson visited me at the hospital at 12:40 p.m. on September 29. We'd spoken on the phone September 6--according to my notes, he said he'd had a "hankering" to call--and he'd asked if he could visit in person during a campaign swing through New England. He said he'd been following the reports on my recovery. "I still do not understand how you can shave on your stomach, but I guess you can get used to most anything." Then he asked, "Ted, is there anything I can do to make your life more livable?"

Upon his arrival, he walked into my room and gave me a kiss on the forehead. Then he kissed Joan and told her how well she'd done at the Democratic convention. Our conversation was mostly about his reelection campaign. He mentioned that he thought TV coverage had become more important than the daily newspapers. He talked about how poorly he was polling in Alabama and predicted he would lose Louisiana and Mississippi as well. We talked about prospects for Bobby's Senate campaign, which he said he would do everything to support.

And then President Johnson confided something to me regarding Jack's assassination and the findings of the Warren Commission. He felt the real responsibility had been with the FBI. As Johnson saw it, they were aware that Oswald was dangerous and that he had visited Moscow and Mexico. FBI agents had even interviewed Oswald, but they had neglected to warn the Secret Service of their suspicions, and that's why Johnson thought the agency was culpable.

It was only a thirty-five-minute conversation, but we also had time to discuss a Detroit autoworkers' strike (he was against it); South Vietnam, which he described as a very critical situation; and Rhode Island politics, which he believed had been heavily controlled by corporate interests until Theodore F. Green had been elected governor and then senator. As always, our exchanges were easy and cordial, and when he departed, at 1:15 p.m., I was in good spirits.

During my recuperation, I began to paint again--a hobby I had not pursued since those youthful days of competition with Jack. I'd forgotten the pleasure painting had given me. I have continued to paint since then, with the sea, and sailing boats, and the Cape Cod shoreline as my favorite subjects.

My thoughts turned often to my dad. What had I left unsaid to this great man? So many things.

An inspiration hit me: I would compile a book for him, a book of essays; mine and those of others in the family, which would express to Dad all the loving memories, the respect, the moments of laughter that lived unspoken in all of us. I sent the word out through the family, and the eloquent writings came in.

I chose the title--
The Fruitful Bough
--from Genesis, chapter 49, verses 22-24:

Joseph is a fruitful bough, even a fruitful bough by a well; whose branches run over the wall: The archers have sorely grieved him, and shot at him, and hated him: But his bow abode in strength, and the arms of his hands were made strong by the hands of the mighty God of Jacob.

As I reread
The Fruitful Bough
today, I see that most of its entries--mine, Mother's, Pat's, Eunice's, Joe Gargan's, and the rest--are gilded with a love that allows no hint of human frailty in their subject. I smile as I pause over the inevitable exception. "I don't believe he is without faults," Bobby's essay begins; and, a bit later: "His judgment has not always been perfect." This is Bobby being Bobby. My brother loved and admired our father as fervently as the rest of us, as his essay shows; yet sentimentality (as opposed to true sentiment) was never part of his nature.

The hospital room became my postgraduate seminar. More receptive to ideas even than in my latter years at Harvard, and motivated now by the intellectual demands of my office, I invited a series of professors to come and offer me tutorials in a variety of subjects, complete with reading lists. John Kenneth Galbraith folded his lanky frame into a chair and educated me in economics. Samuel Beer held forth on political science. And my understanding of civil rights issues was bolstered by a number of visitors, some of them famous leaders, who briefed me on the social and constitutional history of the movement. Furthermore, my hospital stay gave me more direct insight into health care and its costs.

I entered a world, at Cooley Dickinson and later at New England Baptist in Boston, of sufferers for whom the cost of being healed was often as great a hardship as the disease itself. I met people whose stories haunted me: good working people who scrimped and sacrificed to pay for a family member with tuberculosis; families, already struggling to pay their bills, beset by catastrophic illness.

I realized that access to health care was a moral issue.

I left New England Baptist Hospital on December 16, after six months of rehabilitation. At 4 a.m. on the day of my discharge, I quietly and temporarily exited the grounds with the help of Eddy Martin, who drove me through the cold darkness to Andover, and the cemetery where Ed Moss lay buried. It was Ed's forty-first birthday. His grave was on a hill, and the two of us had to struggle upward, Eddy Martin protecting me as best he could from slipping and falling on the icy slope. We returned to the car and drove to the Moss home, where I spent time talking to Moss's widow, Katie. Then we drove back to the hospital, where I completed my formal checkout and flew to Palm Beach to spend the holidays with my family.

By then, the Vietnam War was in full swing, and Bobby was a senatorelect from New York. The war had escalated in early August following the attacks, or alleged attacks, by North Vietnamese patrol boats against a U.S. Navy destroyer--the long-disputed "Gulf of Tonkin incident." On August 7, the House and Senate, under executive pressure and lacking an accountable version of the facts, enacted Lyndon Johnson's Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, granting him authority to wage unlimited war against North Vietnam without securing congressional approval. From my hospital bed, I announced my support of Johnson's resolution.

Bobby declared his Senate candidacy on August 22, and resigned as attorney general on September 3; Johnson named Nicholas Katzenbach to succeed him. Bobby and Ethel kept Hickory Hill in Virginia and took an apartment at the United Nations Plaza. Naturally, Kenneth Keating, the incumbent Republican senator from New York, seized the opportunity to tar my brother as a "carpetbagger." Bobby handled it with his usual wit. He could have chosen to retire, he told an audience at Columbia University. After all, "My father has done very well and I could have lived off him." Nor did he need the title "senator" because "I could be called general, I understand, for the rest of my life. And I don't need the money and I don't need the office space." As the laughter and applause swelled, Bobby concluded, "Frank as it is--and maybe it's difficult to believe in the state of New York--I'd like to just be a good United States senator. I'd like to serve."

Nonetheless, his campaign was rocky at the outset, as Keating went all-out to portray my brother as hostile to the interests of blacks. These attacks roused Bobby; he wound up his campaign at a fever pitch and with the support of NAACP officials. When President Johnson, en route to his own rout of Barry Goldwater for the presidency, campaigned alongside him in late October, Keating's lead, and chances, evaporated. Bobby won the election by more than seven hundred thousand votes.

His victory made our parents unique in the annals of political families: they were the first Americans in history to have raised three senators.

Any euphoria my brother may have felt was tempered by his lingering grief over Jack. In a meeting with reporters in his office shortly after he was sworn in, one of them asked him how he felt now as a member of the Senate. Bobby replied quietly, "I regret the circumstances that led to my being here."

It is fair to say that Bobby and Lyndon Johnson had a complicated relationship. Bobby was not initially in favor of having LBJ as Jack's running mate--he worried about whether anyone who had been running so hard for the seat himself could suppress his own presidential ambitions so quickly. And I don't think either of them ever felt warmth or trust toward each other. Truth was, Bobby's close relationship with Jack prevented Johnson from ever really getting as close to Jack as he would have been had Bobby not been in the picture. It was, in my opinion, a classic "three's a crowd" scenario. But even though there was no love lost between Bobby and LBJ, I wouldn't go so far as to call them bitter and implacable enemies, as some have suggested. Johnson was capable of kindness toward my brother, and courtesy, and political support. Toward me, President Johnson was consistently solicitous and friendly. I liked him and always got along with him very well.

Still, I know that there were times that Johnson tried to play Bobby off against me, which was totally bizarre, since there was no way that a Kennedy would side with an outsider against another Kennedy. With all of his political acuity, I would have thought he'd understand that. Nevertheless, Johnson never learned it and never gave up trying. "I love Teddy and Sarge is great," he used to say. "Now what is it with this strange fellow Bobby? Why is he so difficult?" Bobby cut right to the heart of the matter. "Why does Lyndon fear me so much, for chrissakes?" he said once. "He's the president of the United States and I'm the junior senator from New York!"

Actually, Bobby's relations with Johnson in 1964 and 1965 were not all that bad, certainly not as tense as they are often portrayed in the press. Some historians have written that Bobby longed for Johnson to name him as his running mate in the '64 election, but that Johnson kept him at bay. The truth is that the vice presidency under Johnson did not loom large as an option in my brother's mind. He might have been briefly tempted, but he was never possessed by the idea. There is no denying that Bobby had been awakened by the ovation he'd received after his remarks at the Democratic convention in Atlantic City. It was so overwhelming and so extraordinary that he thought briefly of letting his name go before the convention as a candidate for vice president. But a few hours' reflection convinced him that this was not worth the try. Johnson had made his mind up about Hubert Humphrey. Still, the enormous affection and respect he enjoyed at the convention gave Bobby heart as he launched his campaign for the Senate from New York.