TRUE COMPASS. By Edward M. Kennedy. Twelve Publishing. 507 pages. $35.
A dying man's memoir is akin to a defendant's closing argument. It's his last chance to tell the jury his side of the story, laid out exactly as he sees it and with only the facts he chooses to include.
The late Sen. Ted Kennedy's memoir, True Compass, published only weeks after his Aug. 25 death, is his final argument to the jury. In this case, the jury being the American people. On the controversial aspects of his life, he presents his facts with his spin.
On Chappaquiddick, he says he had no recollection of ever meeting Mary Jo Kopechne before the night that she died in the car wreck. They were not having an affair, and he did not abandon her after his car ran off the bridge. He says he dove back into the water several times, trying to find her. When that failed, he says, he returned to the party for help. He notes that he also suffered a concussion that night and was not thinking straight.
On the interview with Roger Mudd and CBS News in 1979 shortly before announcing his intention to run for president, he says he was ambushed. Mudd was supposed to interview his mother, but she was ill. The interview was held several weeks before he was ready to announce his candidacy. He had not consented to a political interview, and the first 40 minutes covered other matters for which he was prepared to talk. Finally, he was also distracted because his son, who was present during the interview, had wandered off toward the water without supervision.
On his reasons for challenging Jimmy Carter in 1980, he says it was all about Carter's reluctance to bring forth a workable national health-care plan.
Although initial coverage of the memoir's publication focused on these issues, the full text is quite a bit more than a defense. At times it is funny, at times adventurous. But mostly, it is a sad story.
It is hard to imagine any American family that has suffered more tragedy than the Kennedys: both a son and son-in-law killed in World War II; one son assassinated while president, another while running for president. One daughter killed in a plane crash, another horribly injured in a freakish medical procedure. The grief did not stop with Ted Kennedy's generation. Several of his nieces and nephews died in accidents early in life, and his own son lost a leg to cancer at age 12. True Compass covers them all.
Some would call the Kennedys fearless, others reckless. Joseph Kennedy Jr. was killed while on a suicide mission in World War II. Bobby ran for president despite his brother's murder just five years earlier.
Ted was reckless, or fearless, too. He once rode a bucking bronco in a Montana rodeo as a campaign stunt. As a pilot, he flew in risky conditions and, even late in life, he sailed his boat across open water as a hurricane approached Massachusetts.
True Compass will not go down in American political literature as a great work. It's an easy read, and a compelling one at points. He covers a great deal of material, some in detail and some superficially. A sizable portion of the book is tedious and mundane.
There are times, however, when his writing is eloquent. He was a lonely child without school friends because he was shifted frequently from one school to another. Such stories, told about any child, are heartbreaking. And his chapter on faith in the face of so much family tragedy is truly remarkable.
Now that he is gone, Kennedy will certainly be the subject of independent, objective biographies that will measure his full life, everything from his recklessness to his redemption. Readers of history will probably prefer those books. But this is what we have right now, and for those interested in Ted Kennedy and the story of his family, it is a mostly worthwhile undertaking.
Paul O'Connor is a former Journal editorial writer.
Email
Facebook
Google
Twitter
Favorites
More
Advertisement