Kennedy’s Rough Waters and Still Harbors

Kennedy’s Rough Waters and Still Harbors

John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston

The Kennedy family in Palm Beach, 1948. From left to right, Joseph, Rose, Eunice, Robert, Edward (foreground), Patricia and Jean.

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: September 3, 2009


At the end of his deeply affecting memoir, the late Senator Edward M. Kennedy writes about his grandson “Little Teddy” — the son of his son “Medium Teddy” who delivered such a heartbreaking eulogy at the senator’s funeral on Saturday — and his difficulties mastering the family tradition of sailing. The senator told the 10-year-old “we might not be the best,” but “we can work harder than anyone,” and Little Teddy stayed with it, grew eager to learn and started winning races. That, the senator writes, “is the greatest lesson anyone can learn”: that if you “stick with it,” that if, as the title of his book suggests, you keep a “true compass” and do your best, you will eventually “get there.”

And that, in a sense, is the theme of this heartfelt autobiography: that persistence, perseverance and patience in pursuit of a cause or atonement for one’s failures can lead to achievement and the possibility of redemption. It’s the story of how this youngest and most underestimated of siblings slowly, painfully, incrementally found genuine purpose of his own in shouldering the weighty burden of familial expectations and the duty of carrying on his slain brothers’ work. He found a purpose, not as they did in the high-altitude pursuit of the presidency but in the dogged, daily grind of being a senator — of laboring over bills, of sitting through endless committee meetings, of wading through briefing books and making deals with members across the aisle. The resulting legislation — including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program of 1997 would help the poor and the disenfranchised and those with disabilities.

Mr. Kennedy is not a particularly introspective writer — he acknowledges in these pages that he coped with the assassinations of his brothers Jack and Bobby by pushing his grief down, by trying to keep moving forward so as to stay ahead of the darkness and not to be engulfed by despair. But he writes in these pages with searching candor about the losses, joys and lapses of his life; the love and closeness of his family; the solace he found in sailing and the sea; his complex relationships with political allies and rivals. Mr. Kennedy’s conversational gifts as a storyteller and his sense of humor — so often remarked on by colleagues and friends — shine through here, as does his old-school sense of public service and his hard-won knowledge, in his son Teddy Jr.’s words, that “even our most profound losses are survivable.”

In these pages (Ron Powers is credited as a collaborator) Mr. Kennedy draws some telling portraits of other politicians. Of Jimmy Carter, he writes, “He baffled many potential allies in his own party,” but “I believed then and now that he reserved a special place in his animus toward me.” He writes that his objections to Ronald Reagan’s policies are “far too vast to enumerate” but that he admired the optimism Reagan brought to the country after the Carter era. More revealingly, Mr. Kennedy says that he is convinced that had his brother Jack lived, he would have sought a way out of Vietnam (“He had spoken with McNamara,” referring to Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, “about a plan for withdrawal within two or three years,” he writes) and that he, Teddy, is “satisfied that the Warren Commission got it right.”

But it is Mr. Kennedy’s personal rather than political reminiscences that are most memorable in “True Compass.” He was a talented amateur painter, and there is a vivid, almost pictorial evocation of his privileged but pressured and sometimes lonely childhood and youth. He sometimes felt, he says, that his life was “a constant state of catching up” to his glamorous, larger-than-life brothers, whom he hero-worshipped as a boy: Joe Jr., who died young in war; Jack, who Teddy believed would always win even when the odds were against him, who “could do anything he wanted”: and Bobby, who was not “cold, calculating” as some of his critics charged, but who “lived and made decisions in the moment,” completely absorbed in whatever he was doing.

Teddy is always the one who through sheer will and fortitude — whether passing a piece of legislation, finishing a perilous mountain climb or gritting his teeth through the pain of kidney stones to deliver a speech — keeps on keeping on, telling himself “I can handle this,” “I can handle this.”

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/books/04book.html?hpw