True Compass: A Memoir
By Edward M. Kennedy
(Twelve, 532 pages, $35)
“The state and city of my birth are extensions of myself
and my family,” Sen. Ted Kennedy writes in his memoir,
True Compass. I think this sentence is
an error: one of remarkably few editorial lapses in a book that was
rushed to market just days after the legendary senator’s death.
Presumably he intended to say that the Kennedy family is an
extension of Boston society, not that Boston is an extension of the
Kennedy family.
Yet in an odd way, the text as it stands is accurate. The
Kennedy political dynasty dominated Boston so thoroughly, for so
long, that shifts in the political sympathies of the Kennedy family
have produced changes in the Massachusetts political
landscape.
Old Joseph P. Kennedy, the founder of the dynasty, was a
very conservative Democrat: an isolationist before World War II, a
supporter of Sen. Joseph McCarthy thereafter. His views roughly
matched prevailing public opinions in Boston, where Democrats had
gained firm control of the political system but ethnic Irish and
Italian Catholics retained strong conservative
instincts.
By today’s standards, certainly, John F. Kennedy was a
conservative president. As James Piereson has pointed out in his
perceptive book Camelot and the Cultural
Revolution, the JFK of liberal myth is not the
man who, during his tenure in the White House, enthusiastically
slashed taxes, boldly confronted the Soviet Union in Cuba and
Berlin, and initiated an undeclared war in southeast Asia. The
“Camelot legacy” bears scant resemblance to JFK’s actual career.
Piereson shows how the political left transformed the image of JFK
after his death, converting a conservative Democrat into a liberal
icon. But he may underestimate how much Ted Kennedy influenced that
process. For 40 years the youngest of the Kennedy clan was the
guardian of the Camelot legacy, and unlike his brothers Ted was
never linked to any conservative cause.
At his death last summer, Ted Kennedy was hailed as the
“liberal lion of the U.S. Senate.” His friends cited his long
record of legislative accomplishment, which cannot be denied.
Rather than arguing about the merits of the bills he sponsored, his
critics were more likely to point to the character flaws that were
exposed at Harvard, at Chappaquiddick, and at Palm
Beach.
Actually Kennedy is quite forthright when he addresses
those missteps in his memoir. In a chapter unflinchingly titled
“The Harvard Screwup”—a reference to the episode in which he was
tossed out of school for cheating on an exam—Ted recalls his
father’s scolding:
“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.”
Old Joe was right. Teddy didn’t get away with it; he
overcame it. The tragedy at Chappaquiddick left a permanent stain
on his reputation, and although he does not bare the details in
this book, he does acknowledge his wrongdoing. His drinking and
womanizing later in life were well known; he acknowledges those
failings as well. Neither his colleagues in Washington nor his
constituents in Massachusetts were under the impression that Ted
was an angel. He was accepted for what he was: a flawed man who was
an effective legislator.
Because they concentrated so heavily on the misbehavior
that he never denied, most of Kennedy’s conservative critics failed
to realize the real political masterstroke that he never discussed.
Over the course of his political career, Kennedy steered steadily
leftward without endangering his popular support in Massachusetts;
he brought his constituency along with him. Still more remarkably,
he became more and more open in his conflicts with the Catholic
Church—eventually becoming the most influential opponent of
Catholicism on key public issues—while remaining the most visible
Catholic legislator in Washington.
Throughout his public life, and especially at his death,
Ted Kennedy was identified as a devout Catholic. He was, after all,
the standard-bearer for the most famous Catholic family in
America. His brother had been the country’s first Catholic
president; his father was so close to Boston’s Cardinal Cushing
that he referred to him as “Richard” (which is curious, really,
since everyone else in Boston called him “Dick”); he himself had
received his First Communion from Pope Pius XII.
How did Kennedy manage to maintain the public perception
that he was a loyal Catholic, even while he worked to shatter the
solidarity that once characterized the Catholic voting bloc? How
did he keep alive the traditional presumption that ethnic Catholics
belonged in the Democratic Party, even as the Democratic Party
began to marginalize anyone who upheld Catholic moral teachings?
That question is never addressed in True
Compass. In his memoir, as in his public career,
Ted Kennedy deflects attention from his most remarkable—albeit
ultimately destructive—achievement.
IN MOST RESPECTS True Compass
is a typical political memoir, marred only by the usual
defects of the genre. The author guides us through the historic
events to which he was an eyewitness— and in Ted Kennedy’s case
there are quite a few, ranging over an extraordinarily long career
of political involvement, from the Court of St. James before World
War II through the Obama inauguration. But these events are always
seen from the author’s peculiar perspective. History always seems
to bear out his arguments. Like the hero in a spy novel, he turns
up at the critical time in countless instances, and his speeches
are depicted as the turning points of political battles.
Predictably, the author also has a few scores to settle.
Ted Kennedy is fairly gentle in his treatment of his family’s
Republican foes, tossing only a few barbs at Richard Nixon and
Ronald Reagan. But he is caustic in his portrayal of the Democrats
whom he and his brothers sought to unseat. He is completely
negative in his treatment of Eugene McCarthy. (“I believe he’d felt
himself more Catholic, more liberal, and more intellectual than
John Kennedy,” Ted writes. If McCarthy thought that way, he was
right on all three points.) True
Compass suggests that President Jimmy Carter was
hostile because of an unreasonable fear that Ted would challenge
him for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1980. But of
course Ted did just that.
Against those flaws—which, again, are typical of a
political memoir—one must weigh the strengths of this book. Kennedy
is moving in his description of the fierce loyalty that united his
family. He provides a convincing explanation of how Joseph P.
Kennedy instilled such exceptional vigor and drive in his children.
His devotion to his second wife, Vicki, comes through clearly in
these pages, as does his tremendous love for the sea and especially
for sailing. On the other hand, the late senator’s Catholic faith
remains an elusive quality. He identifies strongly with
Catholicism, but it is never clear what it is, exactly, to which he
feels so attached. He writes of the Church, but not of the
sacraments; he speaks of his faith, but not of God.
As a freshman senator, Ted Kennedy relates, he joined
Protestant colleagues at a regular prayer breakfast. (He says quite
candidly that he joined for purely political reasons.) When the
venerable Sen. Richard Russell asked his young colleague from
Massachusetts to lead the group in prayer, Kennedy could think of
nothing to say except the standard Catholic formula for grace
before and after meals— both of which he said, and then repeated
for good measure. He was certainly capable of extemporaneous public
speech, but not of spontaneous public prayer.
At times Ted Kennedy refers to Catholicism with a
proprietary air, as if the faith were something he owned (or,
perhaps, another extension of himself). Although they were never
known for theological erudition, the Kennedys were personally
acquainted with many Catholic prelates, and Ted seems to
believe—against all evidence—that his family influenced the
decisions of the Church hierarchy. He makes the preposterous claim
that his brother Bobby’s argument against the controversial
preaching of Father Leonard Feeney at Harvard “became an animating
impulse of the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican
[sic], which opened under Pope
John XXIII in 1962.”
Kennedy mentions his Catholicism hundreds of times in this
book, but almost invariably he is referring to the cultural
heritage of Catholicism rather than to its doctrinal content or its
spiritual exercises—the form rather than the substance of his
faith. Still he insists that his faith shaped his political
outlook. In one of the book’s most revealing passages, he relates
how his thoughts matured as he entered adult life:
My own center of belief, as I matured and grew curious
about these things, moved toward the great Gospel of Matthew,
chapter 25 especially, in which he calls us to care for the least
of these among us, and feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give
drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, visit the imprisoned.
It’s enormously significant to me that the only description in the
Bible about salvation is tied to one’s willingness to act on behalf
of one’s fellow human beings.
It boggles the mind that an adult Catholic—who presumably
heard the Scriptures read at every Sunday Mass, even if he never
read the Bible himself— could claim that there is only one passage
in the Bible addressing the question of salvation. But the above
quotation contains another sign, less obvious but even more
telling, of the author’s detached attitude toward his faith. When
he says that “he calls us to care for the least of these among us,”
Kennedy never identifies who “he” is. The name of Jesus does not
appear anywhere in this memoir.
“All of my life, the teachings of my faith have provided
solace and hope,” Kennedy wrote as he faced the prospect of death.
He surely did draw solace from his faith, but not guidance. He knew
that the Church offered words of comfort; he never recognized that
the Church also spoke with authority. So in his final illness,
while he felt the need to write to Pope Benedict XVI, asking for
the pontiff’s blessing, he still saw no need to renounce his long
history of public opposition to Church teaching on the dignity of
life.
A Christianity without Jesus, a Catholicism without
sacraments, a doctrine without authority: this is the conception of
the Church that emerges from True
Compass. Ted Kennedy saw Catholicism as an
important part of his identity, of his family history, of his
cultural patrimony. But his life story provides very little
evidence that his faith shaped his political ideals. On the
contrary, it seems clear that his political ideals shaped the
content of his faith. The story of Ted Kennedy’s public life is, to
an alarming extent, the story of a generation of Catholics—in
Boston in particular, in America in general. It is, regrettably,
not a story of how these Catholics shaped the popular culture, but
of how that culture changed their faith.
