Teddy Reveals All, Almost

Frank Curtin / AP Photo Kennedy biographer Adam Clymer on True Compass' revelations (Lyndon Johnson blamed the FBI for JFK's death) and omissions (Chappaquiddick's effect on his career).

True Compass, for anyone not a confirmed hater of Edward M. Kennedy, is a remarkable book. Those of us who interviewed him over his 47-year career, and I did 21 interviews just in writing his biography, never heard him talk as freely as he writes in this memoir about his joys and sorrows, his love for his brothers, his parents, his children, and his wife Vicki, and his opinions about the presidents he dealt with. (He finds good things to say about all except Jimmy Carter.) As he explains, “I rarely speak in public about personal matters. It’s something my generation was taught not to do.”

The abundance of personal recollection makes him more real than I think any previous account of his life managed to do.

Two other things he was taught not to do reverberate through the utter lack of self-pity in a book that chronicles his family’s outsized portion of tragedy. His father, Joseph P. Kennedy, had two mantras: “there’ll be no crying in this house” and “Kennedys never complain.”

• Samuel P. Jacobs: The Selling of Teddy

• Chris Matthews: How Teddy Took Down Nixon There are lessons here he has told of before, if in less detail, like his mother’s emphasis on the Sermon on the Mount, the verse on his funeral program in which, he wrote, Christ “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 verse in the Bible about salvation is tied to one’s willingness to act on behalf of one’s fellow human beings.” He doesn’t belabor the point, but from Meals on Wheels to drinking water for Alaskan natives to opening the nation’s borders to immigrants from Africa and Asia, that is his legislative legacy.

But if there was one single passage I wish I had had for my own book, it is this description of what his father said after an early teenage transgression: “You can have a serious life or a non-serious life, Teddy. I’ll still love you whichever choice you make. But if you decide to have a non-serious life, I won’t have much time for you. You make up your mind. There are too many children here who are doing things that are interesting for me to do much with you.”

We know the course he ultimately chose, if not that very day and not without a few relapses. We also know that he was always seeking to catch up with the accomplishments of his elders, and explains that as his motivation for running for the Senate in 1962: “I was ready to step into the public arena alongside these men who were my father and brothers. To be of use. And to catch up.”

True Compass. By Edward M. Kennedy with collaboration by Ron Powers 532 pages. Twelve. $35. There are only minor nuggets of news, more valuable to historians than to reporters. That Lyndon Johnson blamed the FBI for John F. Kennedy’s death, saying it should have warned the Secret Service about Lee Harvey Oswald. Or Robert Kennedy’s offer to serve as Johnson’s peace negotiator in 1967, a role that would have precluded a presidential candidacy. And he thinks that John F. Kennedy’s growing “qualms about Vietnam” would have led to withdrawal in two or three years if he had not been murdered in 1963.

More interesting are his accounts of meetings at the White House, with Johnson about bombing Vietnam, with Reagan about shoe imports (Reagan filibustered and never got to the issue), and Clinton about gays in the military. For future biographers of Kennedy, there can now be less guesswork and pop psychology. For historians generally, accounts like these, and there are several more, will whet their appetites for the deposit and eventual release from the John F. Kennedy Library of those journals he kept for 50 years and used for the book.