True Compass (19 page)

Later that same day, Jack announced his cabinet. His choice of Bobby for attorney general ignited controversy and charges of nepotism from press and party leaders alike. Jack had first offered the position to Senator Abraham Ribicoff, but he declined. Ultimately, against the counsel of his political advisers, Jack decided he wanted his brother by his side. Bobby was reluctant, but Jack and Dad (an advocate of the idea from the start) persuaded him.

The renewed bond of comradeship and trust that Bobby and Jack had forged on that seven-week tour of the East had taken deep roots. Bobby enjoyed his unqualified access to President Kennedy in moments of national and international crisis, and his counsel led to light in the darkness when even the judgments of generals and career diplomats proved inadequate to the task.

Jack learned to value Bobby's advice above all others the hard way. The first crisis of his administration that flowed from an act of aggression advocated by military minds was only weeks away.

Now it was time for me to get back to my own future in Massachusetts. Elective office had been on my mind as early as my days at Milton, where I first learned debating. I even debated national health insurance there. I was interested in public issues by then, and I was interested in people, and everything around me--my family's civic concerns, my brothers' careers--reinforced those interests. But I had a lot of groundwork to do first. Jack counseled me to get around the state. He said he'd take some soundings to see how I was doing before he weighed in on whether or not I should think of running for the Senate in 1962. His advisers were to a person opposed to my running, but Jack wanted me to get out there to see if I had the stuff.

First, it was time to go to work. Shortly after the inauguration, I was sworn in as a dollar-a-year assistant district attorney in the office of legendary Suffolk County district attorney Garrett Byrne--the man who, among his many accomplishments, had won convictions in the million-dollar Brinks robbery several years earlier.

I vividly remember the first case I tried in Byrne's office. Now, to be totally candid, I've loved telling this story so much over the years that I've taken to "improving" it with a few flourishes and embellishments. But the essential facts are absolutely true.

I had been in the DA's office for just three days when I was handed my first file--prosecuting a fellow named Hennessy for driving under the influence. After attending a Red Sox-Yankees double-header at Fenway Park, the defendant had consumed twenty-six drinks at the Little Brown Jug and crashed his car into Kenmore Square. My assignment was to prosecute Hennessy for driving under the influence and to free the people of Suffolk County from this danger on the public roadways.

As I prepared for trial, I devoured all of Clarence Darrow's closing arguments. Even though he was a defense attorney and not a prosecutor, I was inspired by his eloquence and thought process.

On the day of the trial, I was ready. I had a bar bill showing that Hennessy had bought the twenty-six drinks. I had the waitress who was going to testify that she had served him those drinks, as well as the arresting officer, who was prepared to describe how Hennessy had fallen out of his car, glassy-eyed, and was unsteady on his feet.

Oh, yes, I was ready.

As I walked into the courtroom, I saw the clerk hand the case file to a defense attorney, who apparently was seeing it for the first time. I thought to myself,
Ha! This poor fellow doesn't have a chance
.

I put on my case and felt good about it. When it came time for the defense, they rested without putting on a single witness. They didn't offer anything until the closing argument, when the defense attorney stood up and said, "Hennessy over there has been working since he was twelve years old." Then the lawyer looked me up and down, and then the jury all looked at me. I thought,
What does that have to do with anything?
Then the lawyer said, "His principal crime is that he cheered for the Boston Red Sox." I saw the jury smile, every one of them. "And when the Red Sox beat the Yankees--in a double-header--who wouldn't want to celebrate!"

I thought,
Oh my God, what does this have to do with anything?

The defender went on, "Hennessy is a carpenter, and if he's convicted today, he will lose his automobile license and won't be able to go from job to job. He's going to be on welfare, and he has seven children. It's going to cost the taxpayers of Suffolk County fifteen hundred dollars a month to support him if he's convicted." I thought I saw the jury looking at old Hennessy with sympathetic eyes. Then the lawyer said, "The defendant's name is
HENNESSY
." When he emphasized "Hennessy," half of the jury nodded their heads. Then he said, "My name is Bobby STANZIANI." And the other half of the jury nodded
their
heads. I knew it was all over.

Twenty-six minutes of deliberation. Not guilty!

I was a little more successful prosecuting armed robbery cases.

The people in the district attorney's office were great--and helpful. There was Jack Crimmins, who had been Paul Dever's driver when Dever was governor. He knew every road in Massachusetts. He was a great fellow. If he'd ever had an education, he'd have been president of a bank. We became good friends, and Jack would drive me around those roads as I got to know all of Massachusetts.

The cases in the DA's office lasted from ten till noon, and from two to four. Francis X. "Frank" Morrissey, a friend of my father's who had also been a great supporter of Jack's, would arrange for me to go to a different place each day after work, a social club or a lodge, and give a talk. There are hundreds of such clubs in Boston. Frank would drive. I'd talk about whatever came to mind--my trip to Africa, for instance; I could do forty-five minutes on that one, with slides. I thought I was getting to be quite the orator.

Then the president of the United States called me up and said, "I hear you're talking for a very long time. How long do you talk?" I said, "Forty minutes." Jack said, "If I can do the State of the Union in twenty-three minutes, you can do Africa in twenty-five."

I said I'd try.

Frank Morrissey introduced me to a dozen or so state representatives in Boston who became the backbone of the organization I was slowly forming. They widened the range of meetings I'd attend: Communion breakfasts on Sundays at any and every church I could get to. School dinners. I set up my office at the same old apartment at 122 Bowdoin Street that Jack had used in his campaign--and that was the registered voting address for so many of our family members. It was a small compressed place with a living room, kitchen, two bedrooms, and a bathroom, that we rented for $115 a month. When the landlord threatened to raise the rent to $125, I contemplated leaving. But I didn't. My brother stayed there one night when he was president-elect, before giving a talk to the Massachusetts legislature--he said he preferred it to a hotel.

I hired my first staff assistant, Barbara Souliotis, during that time, and she has been with me ever since. After all these years, I think Barbara can probably read my mind. Barbs has a knack for spotting and hiring talented staff members and she is beloved by our constituents. She's been called a role model for running a senator's district office. I did amazingly well in my first hire.

Perhaps the most satisfying part of this new phase of my life was that I received the full measure of my father's focus and advice. My mother writes of me in her memoir that "quite considerably more than the other three boys, he had the wonderful advantage of having sustained attention and influence from his father.... Joe spent a great deal more time with Ted than with the other boys, and that counted." This is true, and those times were golden to me, as when we rode horseback side by side. And yet I was a child then. I was legally an adult when I entered Harvard, but as my Spanish exam transgression showed, I had not yet put away my childish things. Now, less than a year from my thirtieth birthday, I approached my father as a man, and it was as a man that he accepted me.

In the springtime, weeks before I told him that I was privately planning to run for the Senate, I could not know for sure whether he would approve, or even think me a good fit for public office. But I had a helpful advocate in Frank Morrissey, who issued updates to Dad on my community efforts. With his gift of gab and way of "gilding the lily" on my Boston-area talks so that Dad would hear only positive things, Frank raised my approval rating with the only "constituency" who then counted. My father thought I was just on fire up there. I will never forget a pivotal conversation Dad and I had on the subject in the early summer of 1961. We were out on the boat off Hyannis Port, a couple of fellows enjoying the sunshine and the lazy roll of the boat against the blue waves. Dad was talking about Jack and Bobby, when abruptly he shifted the subject. He said, "Well, Teddy, now these boys are well set in terms of their political lives, and now it's your turn. I'll make sure they understand it."

This was a great uplift and a great thrill. I was privy to an extended seminar in Dad's extraordinary judgment. In his own way, he was as much a living encyclopedia as Honey Fitz had been. He still knew the names of people who had worked on the waterfront from years past. He knew the fishing industries. He knew the old families. He could say to Frank Morrissey, "Now, look, are the Fulhams still in the fishing business?" Frank would say, "Yes, John Fulham has taken that over." "Has he? Well, I knew his father. Have Fulham get some of those people in the industry together and have them meet Ted."

My father had a great sense of the city. He'd lived in East Boston and knew the people there. He had a good feel for the newspapers, especially the
Globe
and the
Traveler
. The
Globe
was the voice of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Boston, and we could not assume any sympathy from its pages. The
Traveler
, the evening publication of the
Herald
, was ideologically conservative (as the
Herald
remains to this day, under Rupert Murdoch). But a man who was destined to become my lifelong friend and had been one of the paper's ace reporters became my press secretary. Edward T. Martin--Eddy--was Irish Catholic and a smart and fit product of East Boston, a marine veteran with a twinkle in his warm brown eyes. He'd covered Jack's early political career and his inauguration. His sharp wit coexisted with a political perception as sharp as that of anyone I've known, and a desire to do good in this world. Eddy died in 2006, and I still miss him.

One of the most interesting and inspiring things I worked on that year was the Cancer Crusade, where I joined with Dr. Sidney Farber, a pioneer in children's cancer research, and a Republican named Lloyd Waring. I learned so much from Dr. Farber. Our goal was to raise awareness about the disease and money for cancer research. We traveled around the state and I gave fund-raising talks to two or three audiences a night for two or three months. This experience was a cornerstone of my interest in health matters throughout my Senate career. And it was certainly an inspiration for my work years later to bolster federal funding for cancer research at the national level.

I was enjoying it all immensely. Politics and public service were in my blood. The euphoria of campaigning was almost an end in itself. I loved every corner of the state it took me to, and the people I met. I loved meeting with the students of Ware High School at nine o'clock on a cold January morning, with five more high schools still to visit before the day ended. I loved the tours of woolen factories and the people of the League of the Sacred Heart. I loved showing up at the plant gates, even when some of the workers brushed past me, ignoring my outstretched hand. I loved the summertime picnics all along Route 128, and the communion breakfasts.

I remember how moved I was at some of the plants and factories. I learned that West Virginia had no monopoly on squalor or hard labor. In some of the tanneries on the North Shore, I was advised to put covers on my shoes so the acid on the floor wouldn't take the soles off. In the shoe manufacturing plants, women and men would spend the day grabbing a length of leather and then bringing a heavy slammer down on it to shape it, or to punch eyeholes and buttonholes into it. I would walk down a line and find that many workers had lost two or three fingers. I met people who were too embarrassed to smile because their teeth were so damaged, because of what was in the water they drank.

But campaigning, of course, is hardly the whole of politics; it is merely prelude.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The New Frontier

1961-1962

Jack enjoyed being president. This was clear from talking to him, or just watching him. At the time of his election and the opening days of his presidency, he was the happiest that I'd ever seen him. For years he had been out campaigning constantly. Now he finally had the chance to do what he enjoyed best: to read and study and try to implement the ideas and programs that he'd always cared so deeply about.

I felt happy along with him, felt happy
being
with him, felt once again that old boyhood awe at being around him. It was like those days on the beach in Hyannis Port when Jack would bat a ball to me on a line like a thrown football and I'd race to catch it. Or that day I'd sailed for a few hours with him and his patrol torpedo crew. Or the times he'd enlist me as a prop in those congressional campaign luncheons. Or the time he persuaded me to come back home by telephone after I'd decided to run away--his concern for me wiping away whatever grievance I'd felt. Now we were men together, and Jack was president of the United States. Some of the happiest memories of my life are from those early, impossibly sunlit days I shared with him, when there seemed no limit to the splendid quests and triumphs that lay ahead.

Jack drew happiness as well from working with the people close to him: Powers and O'Donnell and Sorensen and Schlesinger and the rest--certainly Bobby. These men identified themselves with the kind of nation he wanted America to be, and with the agenda he was creating to make that America a reality. He had full confidence in these close aides, and he felt that with their help he could make a really significant contribution as president.

The nation picked up on his mood. People were going about their lives with renewed vigor, taking (or trying) fifty-mile hikes and joining the Peace Corps. Jack gave me good counsel during his crowded daily routine. Even en route to the inauguration, he wanted to know how my plans were taking shape and what progress I was making. It was such an optimistic time for all of us, and for the country.

Since the end of World War II, the focus of American anxieties and the source of the cold war had been the prospect of globally ambitious communism, emanating chiefly from the Soviet Union. Thus it was that a Caribbean island of only forty-two thousand square miles proved the crucible in the early 1960s of America's reckoning with the communist threat, and with the prospect of nuclear war. As a Soviet proxy, Cuba came to enmesh itself in my brother's administration, and his destiny.

In February 1960, one year after Fidel Castro had overthrown the government of the corrupt dictator Fulgencio Batista, Cuba began shipping millions of tons of its most lucrative crop, sugar, to the Soviet Union in return for oil and grain. On May 8, its government established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union.

Each of these moves accelerated the collision course of Castro's regime with American security interests. The president of the United States held the mandate to defend these interests, in ways accountable to the American public. But it was the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency that shared the mandate to counter the threat to these interests. Their strategies--their de facto policies, which Jack would inherit from the Eisenhower administration--were not limited by accountability.

Within months of the coup, the CIA was monitoring Castro. The State Department and the CIA gained Eisenhower's approval for a covert plan to support anti-Castro elements in Cuba. Eisenhower approved a CIA-drafted paper, "A Program of Covert Action Against the Castro Regime." Only a handful of State Department and CIA officials knew of it: Allen Dulles, director of the CIA; Richard M. Bissell Jr., Dulles's director for plans; and a few others.

On July 23, 1960, Allen Dulles briefed my brother, by then the Democratic nominee, at Hyannis Port, emphasizing the recruitment and training of Cuban exiles for operations against Castro. In November, Dulles handed the president-elect a copy of the covert action plan.

Cuba was not the only dot on the world map that was brewing trouble. At roughly the same time, another sliver of land in Southeast Asia was moving toward violent upheaval.

In 1949 France, which had held the southern third of Vietnam as a colony, permitted its unification with the central and northern regions. But old antagonisms persisted: Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh had declared a Democratic Republic of Vietnam before the French reestablished control. Ho's forces dealt a devastating military defeat to the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and a debilitated France agreed that the communist Viet Minh would rule the South until elections could be held in 1956.

But the premier of the South, Ngo Dinh Diem, gambled that the United States, with its foreign-aid bounties and its phobia of communism, would provide deterrence to the North. He canceled the 1956 elections, kicked out the French military, and, with the help of his younger brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, rigged public opinion polls and elections. His armed followers decimated rival factions. He denounced communism loudly and repeatedly. And the American aid poured in.

In October 1955, Diem declared himself president of Vietnam. Resistance fighters assembled in the jungle and launched a murderous campaign of subversion that by 1959 had killed some twelve hundred government workers in the South. In December 1960, as Jack focused on absorbing the details of the plan to overthrow Castro, Ho Chi Minh took a giant step toward civil war against Diem: he sanctioned a resistance movement of several guerrilla groups that he dubbed the National Liberation Front. Jack, feeling his way through the opening weeks of his presidency, grew skeptical of the ever more ambitious and complex Cuba invasion plan. Bissell and others assured the president that the invading force (of some fifteen hundred Cuban expatriates) would overrun Castro's defenses (which eventually totaled twenty thousand); defections from Castro's army would follow; the population would rise up to embrace the invaders; and the hated regime would be ousted with minimal casualties. As history shows, the invasion was a failure, a serious one.

On Friday, April 21, President Kennedy stepped before the microphones at a press conference and accepted sole responsibility for the Bay of Pigs disaster: "There's an old saying that victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan." He added, "I am the responsible officer of the government." He never recanted that responsibility in public. But he privately, and bitterly, remarked to Ted Sorensen that he had placed too much faith in the CIA, State Department, and Pentagon men who sold the invasion to him. "You always assume," he said, "that the military and intelligence people have some secret skill not available to ordinary mortals."

Jack was very low, and Bobby knew just how to perk him up. "Let's call Dad. He always finds something positive in situations like this. Let's see what he has to say." Dad did not disappoint. "Jack, well done. Well done. You took responsibility. People like that in their leaders. Take my word for it. People like leaders who take responsibility." And then, with almost prophetic wisdom, our father told the president that "this is going to turn out to be one of the best things that ever happened to you."

Indeed, when our nation was faced with the Cuban Missile Crisis and the prospect of nuclear annihilation just eighteen months later, my brother's experience with the Bay of Pigs disaster
did
end up being one of the best things that ever happened to him--and to the country: it gave him a healthy skepticism about the military advice he was receiving, with the result being a peaceful solution to the nuclear showdown.

I found time in mid-July 1961 to launch an intense, self-financed monthlong tour of several Latin American countries: Colombia, Chile, Costa Rica, Brazil, Panama, Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, and Mexico. Again, I was traveling both to bolster my own knowledge of political and economic trends in this area of the world, and to report back to the president, who was extremely interested in the region. In March, Jack had proposed a tenyear plan for economic aid, literacy education, social planning, and structures for democratic governments--his Alliance for Progress, an idea that had begun in the Eisenhower administration. It was soon to be ratified at a conference in Uruguay.

Discontent over wages, food, and living standards had begun to breed talk of revolution in some of these countries; guerrilla activity had commenced in Guatemala, and was brewing in Nicaragua. As had been the case in Africa, the specter of communism was distracting many American leaders from a clear analysis of human needs. It was these troubling movements and countermovements that President Kennedy wanted to neutralize with his Alliance vision.

The Castro fear was not entirely unjustified. I witnessed a powerful example of Cuba's influence as I visited small villages in Colombia and Venezuela. People in the region had devised an amazing bit of primitive technology: a can filled with kerosene, with a wick on top. When lit, the fuel burned at a rate just fast enough to power a small fan. The fans, in turn, generated enough electricity to power radios the size of a human fist. The radios pulled in one station: Havana. In the poorest of villages, listening to news from Cuba was a communal event. This moved me tremendously. To my mind, it was not an indication of communist passions. It was a cry for community. I was able to convey this sense of things to my brother. I believe it reinforced his determination to see the Alliance for Progress through.

I returned home in time to be present in Boston at the birth, on September 26, 1961, of our first son, Edward Moore Kennedy Jr. The joy and miracle of the birth of this child moved me beyond words. The love I felt for him that day has continued to multiply with each passing day since.

A little less than three months afterward, my world changed forever. On December 19, while Dad was playing golf in Florida, he suddenly grew weak. Cousin Ann Gargan, who was with him, drove him back to our home in Palm Beach, and from there he was taken by ambulance to a hospital. The diagnosis was severe: an intracranial thrombosis--a stroke--that paralyzed the right side of his seventy-three-year-old body.

All the family converged at his bedside. My mother went to the hospital immediately. Jack and Bobby flew down from Washington on Air Force One. Pat, Eunice, and Jean arrived.

I located a vascular specialist in Boston and persuaded him to fly to Florida with me, where I found my father conscious but near death. Pneumonia had set in, and last rites had been administered. All of us gathered for a vigil in Dad's room. I stayed there by his bedside for three days.

We learned that Dad would survive, but that he would probably never walk again. Worse, the brain hemorrhage had damaged the part of his brain that controlled his speech. He would be able to make sounds; but the familiar sharp, confident, Boston-inflected cadences that informed, inspired, cajoled, and instructed me--the voice that had read me the Sunday funnies in my early childhood and spoken for Roosevelt on the radio in 1940--was to be heard no more.

My father's illness hit me very hard. He had been so strong, so vital, so important in all our lives. And finally, for the first time in my life, the two of us had been together as men, sharing a common purpose. Now that aspect of our relationship was lost to me. It was almost more than I could bear.

There were some people around me who thought my political plans would end with Dad's illness. But that would have been at odds with everything Joe Kennedy believed in or that I had worked for. I would continue with my plans, but I had to be sure that even without Dad able to strategize with me, I would do it the right way. My close friend and brother-in-law Steve Smith made regular visits to Boston to help out. He made an enormous difference. And he gave reports to Jack and Bobby, who were following my progress very closely.

On Sunday, March 11, 1962, as rumors of my running escalated, I was scheduled to go on NBC's
Meet the Press
. I'd flown into Washington the previous Friday for a meeting with Jack in the White House. When I arrived, the president instructed his secretary Evelyn Lincoln, "Don't bother me for a while." Then he sat me down behind his desk and pretended to be Lawrence Spivak, the host of
Meet the Press
. He was very tough as he asked me questions about foreign and domestic policy, and he was not satisfied with my answers. "Well, we're going to have to sharpen these up a bit," he said as he called in Ted Sorensen and another aide, Meyer "Mike" Feldman. They peppered me for an hour and a half with the toughest questions I could possibly imagine. I was stunned. But they wouldn't let up. We went over and over possible questions and answers until we all started to feel pretty good. I learned something that day, and have followed that method of preparation for Sunday morning interview shows for all of my public life. It has generally served me fairly well.

On the morning of my
Meet the Press
appearance, Jack was down in Florida and watched the program from the Palm Beach house. Dave Powers tells the story of how my brother was so nervous that he kept walking in and out of the room, and at the end had to ask Dave how I did. Dave said I did fine. This wasn't enough for Jack. He phoned up Lawrence Spivak. I can only imagine what Spivak must have thought when he received a call from the president asking him how his kid brother did on the show. Spivak said, "He did just fine. I just never could get an answer out of him on this aid-to-education issue. I couldn't pin him down on whether he was for aid to Catholic schools or against it." Jack laughed and replied, "That's just fine, Larry. That's just where he ought to be."

I resigned my position as assistant district attorney and announced for the Senate three days after the broadcast. One of my most cherished possessions is a framed note from my sister-in-law Jackie that hangs on my wall at home:

For Teddy

Jack wrote this about you, and you know how proud and happy he was when you won.

With love, Jackie