True Compass (18 page)

The story has been told that Smith's appointment was arranged specifically to clear the way for me in 1962: he'd agreed to "hold" the seat until I was old enough to run at age thirty; then he would step aside. The truth is more complex. First, a slightly complicated bit of election background. My brother had four years remaining on his six-year Senate term when he was elected president. By law, the governor was only allowed to appoint someone to fill the vacancy for two years, until the next federal election, which was in 1962 (coincidentally, the year I turned thirty). The election in 1962 was in turn to fill the last two remaining years of my brother's six-year Senate term. Then, whoever won the election in 1962 would have to face the voters again in 1964 if they wanted to be elected to a full six-year term.

Governor Furcolo had appointed Ben to fill the first two of the remaining years of my brother's term "in the interest of promoting party unity." Jack and Furcolo had a tense relationship, and it seems that the governor had been resistant to appointing Jack's chosen person to the post. Some people felt that Furcolo himself wanted the appointment since he had run and lost for the Senate a few years before and felt that Jack had not gone all-out to support him at that time. I don't know whether Furcolo really wanted the post for himself. But I do know that there was some tension there.

The attorney general of the state, Edward McCormack Jr., was planning to launch an all-out campaign for the Democratic nomination for the 1962 election to fill out the two years remaining on the term. Eddie was the nephew of House Speaker John McCormack, and the son of Edward "Knocko" McCormack Sr., the Speaker's brother and a tough South Boston bar owner.

"Knocko" was just one of the colorful characters with colorful nicknames who have flavored Boston politics from the days before Honey Fitz down through the present time. They are part of the city's folklore. There was Peter "Leather Lungs" Clougherty, a supporter of McCormack's whom Jack never forgot because "Leather Lungs" took him for three thousand dollars once by cashing his checks. There was J. Ralph "Juicy" Granara, so nicknamed by Tip O'Neill because of his habit of chewing tobacco, though Juicy himself preferred to be called "the Colonel." Juicy was a former vaudeville dancer, an aide to several officeholders, a sometime mayoral candidate, and the Official Greeter of Boston. He made headlines in 1950 by retracing the midnight ride of Paul Revere "behind the wheel of a motor-car with the windshield wiper swinging," as the
Boston Globe
reported it, "humming under his breath, 'For I Must Go Where the Wild Goose Goes.'"

There was "Muggsy" O'Leary, Jack's longtime driver. It was completely typical of Jackie's self-humor that she used to enjoy telling of the time when Muggsy, impatient to transport her to an appointment, scowled at his wristwatch and then bellowed, "C'mon, Jackie, fer chrissake! Move yer ass."

No list of legendary Boston nicknames would be complete without "Tip"--the moniker sported by my great friend, the late Thomas Philip O'Neill Jr. The Democratic congressman for thirty-four years and Speaker of the House for ten could trade one-liners with the best of them. When a narrow vote was approaching once, Tip sought out Jimmy Burke, his fellow congressman from Massachusetts, and told him, "I need your help on this one. It's important to me." When Burke replied, dubiously, "I don't know. This is a tough one," Tip growled back, "I don't need your vote when it's
not
tough!" But as much as I relished Tip O'Neill's turn of a phrase--he once labeled Ronald Reagan "Herbert Hoover with a smile"--I revered him for his statesmanship. He took a tough, effective stand toward ending the Vietnam War, was a powerful partner with me in forging peace in Northern Ireland, and remained a staunch champion of working people. As a footnote to that salty tongue of his, Tip never made it personal. He and Reagan remained on friendly terms "after 6 p.m.," as Reagan himself put it.

Both of the elder McCormacks harbored political ambitions for Eddie. And to put it mildly, they didn't harbor a lot of love for the Kennedys. In 1947, Jack's first year as a congressman, he and John McCormack had locked horns on whether to press for Mayor James Michael Curley's release from jail. (He'd been sent up for a second time, after a conviction for mail fraud.) McCormack led the fight to get him pardoned; Jack refused to go along. In 1956, Jack and the congressman tangled again, over who would lead the Massachusetts delegation to the Democratic convention. So there was a history of tensions between the two political families.

I remember riding along with Jack Crimmins, my longtime driver, through a South Boston neighborhood one day when we passed Knocko's house. Knocko was up on a stepladder with a hammer and nails. Jack pulled the car over, leaned out the window, and called, "Hi, Knocko! What are you doing up there?" Knocko yelled down, "I'm shingling the house. And every time I pound a nail in, I think I'm pounding it into that young Ted Kennedy's tail." I didn't quite catch this, and asked what Knocko had said. Crimmins, who was holding back laughter, said, "I'll tell you about it later on. I have to park first."

I understood my sudden opportunity as soon as Bobby confided his lack of interest in the Senate seat. But did I want to make that run in '62? There were many reasons to tell myself no. Inexperience was among the biggest. What had I mastered? In what areas had I proven my bona fides? Then there was the question of public opinion. If I won, would I be seen, and dismissed, as a mere beneficiary of the Kennedy family's political power? As someone for whom it was simply "my turn"?

Of course I wanted to make that run. My reasons were hardly frivolous. All my life, as I've said, I had wanted to catch up. I'd worshipped my father as a young boy. I had been swept up by the dash and nobility of Joe Jr., and admired his wartime self-sacrifice even as I wept over it. Jack and Bobby had been godlike figures to me and my sisters. Now Jack was about to be installed as a world leader, and Bobby had already earned national recognition as Jack's right-hand man and as a warrior against crime and injustice.

I remembered again my father's words to me as a boy:
"You can have a serious life or a nonserious life, Teddy. I'll still love you whichever choice you make. But if you decide to have a nonserious life, I won't have much time for you. You make up your own mind. There are too many children here who are doing things that are interesting for me to do much with you."

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.

But first I needed some seasoning. As soon as we returned to the States, I paid a visit to Jack in his Washington office. "Look," I said. "I'd like to be a part of the administration." I told him that I was interested in arms control. In fact, I cared about it passionately. This was the height of the cold war. The Berlin crisis was intensifying, fueled by the flow of refugees from the Soviet-controlled eastern sectors of that divided city to the autonomous and economically thriving West Berlin (part of the postwar Federal Republic of Germany). The exodus would lead a frustrated Khrushchev to start building the Berlin Wall the following August. The American U-2 spy plane and its pilot Francis Gary Powers had been shot down over the Soviet Union in May, infuriating the Russians. This occurred only a month after the United States had deployed ballistic missiles to Italy, adding more nuclear warheads capable of striking Moscow to the ones in place in the United Kingdom.

I knew that arms control would be a priority with Jack. An appointment somewhere in the State Department, say, would give me, at twentyeight, the chance to learn a complex and substantive issue, to be involved with competent people, and to travel and gain experience that would help me when I was ready to declare for the Senate.

Jack considered this. Then he brushed it aside. "Just go back to Massachusetts," he told me. "Every day you're up there, you're doing yourself some good. If you get involved in arms control, the world is never going to know about you or what you're doing. Go up there, Teddy, and get to work."

And then Jack was seized by another thought. "Go up to Massachusetts," he repeated, then added, "But before you do that, go back to Africa." (He was referring to my 1956 visit to Algeria as a reporter for the International News Service.)

"Back to Africa?" I said.

"Yes. Go back and see what's going on over there. That's a continent that's going to be enormously important. There are all kinds of things happening down in the Congo. This Tshombe's on the loose. And there's this East-West struggle going on in these countries. The Belgian Congo has just obtained its independence from Belgium."

As I stammered that I had little time to put such a trip together, Jack grabbed the telephone and rang up a Senate Foreign Relations staff member named Carl Marcy. Marcy told him that a group of senators had left on a fact-finding tour of West Africa just two days earlier. "If your brother leaves tonight," Marcy said, "he can catch up with them in Salisbury, Rhodesia. He can take an overnight flight to London. We'll set up briefings for him the next day. Then he'll go overnight again to Cairo, and get on an eleven o'clock plane and fly six hours down to Salisbury. He'll arrive around six o'clock and he can join them for dinner. They'll leave again the next day."

I said, "I don't have my passport. I'm not sure Joan is going to like this. I mean, come
on
."

Jack said, "It's a great opportunity."

I left that night, December 1, for four weeks in West Africa with Senators Frank Church, Frank Moss, and Gale McGee. I joined the entourage as an observer, paying my own expenses. The senators were initially sort of glad to see me, but after the first headlines when we landed in the Congo--"Ted Kennedy Arrives with His Senate Delegation"--they cooled down just a little. Still, it was an incredible trip.

We were looking at the numerous independence movements in these countries, with an eye to whether the United States, with its various development programs, or Soviet communism would fill the vacuum of the old colonial powers.

We saw a Rhodesia still trying to yank itself free from the grip of the United Kingdom, and on the brink of violent upheaval. Years of bloody civil war between black nationalists and local European interests lay ahead. In Liberia, the small coastal republic settled by American slaves before the Civil War, we saw the economic fruits of U.S. investment and shared technology, and we also sensed the resentment of marginalized native Liberians that would erupt in bloody revolution twenty years later.

At the time of our visit, the overwhelming mood was optimism: a thrilling sense of expectations for President Kennedy. The United States was still the great symbol of hope to many anticolonialist revolutionaries, including Sekou Toure, who helped liberate Guinea from France, and who admired my brother; and Kwame Nkrumah, the brilliant prime minister of Ghana, author of the "Motion of Destiny" manifesto, leader of the Pan-African movement, soon to form bonds with Martin Luther King and President Kennedy.

I briefed the president-elect upon my return. I must say that my notes didn't provide the impact of our previous conversation about Algeria. But Jack was already ahead of the curve, on Africa and India as well. He believed that these areas would be the great testing grounds for whether democracy or communism would supplant the colonial powers.

In January 1961, Joan, Kara, and I moved to Boston, as Jack had suggested. Joan had found a small apartment on the top floor of a building in Louisburg Square on Beacon Hill. It was a wonderful little neighborhood. William Dean Howells had lived there while editor of the
Atlantic
in the 1870s. Louisa May Alcott had called it home.

Joan and I traveled to Washington to be there for Jack's inauguration. My parents had rented a house for the festivities, and we stayed with them. A day before the actual swearing in, an enormous snowstorm had hit Washington and the city was blanketed with snow. Unlike Boston, which is accustomed to clearing the streets and handling large snowfalls, Washington has less equipment to deal with snow removal and its drivers often are not proficient in maneuvering in wintry conditions. As a result, on the morning of my brother's inauguration, we almost didn't make it to the Capitol for the ceremony.

As we left my parents' rented house and piled into the cars that were to take us to the Hill, we were filled with joy and anticipation. The temperature was still quite low and everything was icy, but it was no longer snowing. As our driver tried to pull out of his parking place, we heard nothing but the sound of the engine and the whirring of the tires as they spun around and around. He tried again and again, but simply was unable to get traction on the ice and snow. None of us was happy, but my father was furious. "Hurry up. We're going to be late," he shouted. But we were stuck. Finally, my father decided to take things into his own hands. I can still see him getting out of the car in his full dress clothes, shouting and gesturing at the driver and directing him on how to turn the wheel, how to back up, move forward, while Dad finally just pushed the car, providing the necessary muscle to power the vehicle out of the parking spot. It was classic Joe Kennedy: take charge and do it right, even if it means having to do it yourself. We made it to the inauguration.

As we sat on the east side of the Capitol--until Ronald Reagan, all of the inaugurations took place on that side--we were all overwhelmed with emotion. Here we were, at the beginning of this new decade, with nothing but hope and promise ahead of us. I remember saying a silent prayer for my brother and for our country. The older brother and godfather that I had revered for my whole life, the war hero who had sneaked my twelveyear-old self aboard a navy vessel, the older, wiser brother who persuaded a young adolescent not to run away from home, the second father who had interceded when his boneheaded kid brother had screwed up at Harvard, the man I loved so deeply and had worked so hard to elect was going to be the president of the United States. At noon on the sunny, frigid Friday of January 20, 1961, my brother John F. Kennedy was inaugurated as our thirty-fifth president.