True Compass (32 page)

We walked on the beach, singly and in small groups, heads down, hands in our pockets, shoulders hunched against the November wind. Mother walked with Jean and Pat; I walked with Ann Gargan and my son Patrick, who was eight.

Later, I walked alone, letting the tears come, and struggling with thoughts more wrenching than those following any of my previous bereavements. I wondered whether I had shortened my father's life from the shock I had visited on him with my news of the tragic accident on Chappaquiddick Island. The pain of that burden was almost unbearable.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Hospital

1970

On July 25, a week after the accident, in a television address carried nationally, I asked the people of Massachusetts to give me their advice and opinion as to whether I should resign as their senator. The polls were in favor of my continuing on. I took this as a validation of my legislative efforts but also as an affirmation of their faith and goodwill.

My constituents underscored their previous summer's vote of confidence in me by returning me to the Senate in November 1970. I defeated my Republican opponent, the businessman Josiah H. Spaulding, winning 61 percent of the vote.

Naturally, there were questions about whether I would run against Richard Nixon for president in 1972. I made it clear every time I was asked that I had no interest in such a run. I supported George McGovern in that election, though I turned down his invitation to run on his ticket for the vice presidency. "I just can't do it," I told him. I held fast even when Ted Sorensen gave me a memorandum asserting that it was constitutionally possible to be a vice president and also a cabinet member. It was not the prospect of being bored or isolated in that office that held me back. It was my concern about my family, and my responsibilities to them.

As I settled back into the Senate, into something like a state of equilibrium, I recognized that I had grown almost completely devoid of a state of mind I'd taken for granted since my early childhood. That state of mind was joy.

What amazing fun it had all once been. What adventures, what friendship and laughter and travels I had shared with my brothers and sisters. What a thrill I'd felt at mounting a wild bronco in Montana, or diving off a cliff in Monaco, or setting my sails into the teeth of a squall, or even facing off against old Wharton in the barracks at Fort Dix. What a lift to the spirit it had been, watching Jack and then Bobby soar into the stratosphere of world events, and to watch each of them accomplish mighty and good things; and then, incredibly, to join them on that plane, standing with them to engage history, with laughter and good cigars and the pranks we still played on one another. No more.

I had looked upon my winning the majority whip position from Russell Long in January 1969 as a high point of my Senate career. In January 1971, as I accepted the new realities of my situation, I lost it to Robert Byrd of West Virginia.

My downfall was due in part to the loss of some key allies who had supported me when I unseated Long. Warren Magnuson and Henry "Scoop" Jackson, both of Washington, peeled away because I had opposed appropriations for supersonic transport, which they supported along with Byrd. Boeing was too important to their home state for them to do otherwise.

And then there was Bill Fulbright. The Arkansas senator had voted for me against Russell Long. Our paths had parted since then over an opportunity to secure the names of American prisoners of war in Vietnam, an objective we both supported.

I'd received a communication from the North Vietnamese in 1970, offering to release the names to a representative of mine. After notifying Senator Fulbright of the offer, I sent a trusted emissary named John Nolan, who had worked with Bobby to get prisoners out of Cuba after the Bay of Pigs. John was given the names, returned to the United States, and presented them to the State Department.

I sat next to Fulbright the following Tuesday, during some piece of business on the Senate floor. I leaned to him and said, "Bill, remember I called you last week about securing those names?" Bill replied, "Yes, that's right. We're going to have a committee meeting this afternoon to decide what to do." I wasn't sure he'd heard me right. I said, "I've already sent someone over there, and we have the names." And Fulbright replied, icily, "That's a matter for the Foreign Relations Committee."

He maintained an edge toward me from that point. I suppose he believed that I was still overreaching, though I had notified him about the matter. And so he joined the opposition to me.

Byrd never did openly announce for my whip position, though he had been hard at work behind the scenes. One of his most influential allies was Richard Russell, but Russell lay dying of cancer at Walter Reed Hospital. Russell had given Byrd his proxy vote, but had he died before the balloting took place, it would be meaningless. On the day of the balloting, Byrd checked the hospital. Russell was still alive. He gave the go-ahead to his supporters--including four incoming senators who had all assured me of their support. Byrd scored a stunning upset, a vote of thirty-one to twentyfour. Russell died four hours later. Had the incoming senators voted the way they'd promised, I would have beaten Byrd by one vote, twenty-eight to twenty-seven. I figured out how they'd actually gone by a pair of telltale misspellings among the Byrd ballots: "B-I-R-D." No one who enjoyed more than a distant knowledge of the West Virginia senator would make such a mistake.

The fact is, those four did me a favor--they and the others who voted to oust me as whip. Robert Byrd went on to do an admirable job in the role, and eventually became a distinguished majority leader. As for me, the defeat served as a prompt to immerse myself more deeply in the necessary basic work of a U.S. senator.

And so I burrowed in. I gave myself over to contemplation and study. I absorbed the Senate's history, the careers of its greatest members, the principles that lent it constancy over the years, and the many social movements and powerful figures that at times altered its influence and character. I reread the Constitution in the context of the mandates it prescribed for the Senate; and, in doing so, reexperienced the awe of this document that had first been opened to me by the likes of the great Arthur N. Holcombe, my teacher at Harvard.

I grew interested in every aspect of the Senate: its arcane rules both permanent and new; its parliamentary procedure; the functions of its many committees and subcommittees, some of which were well known and others half-forgotten or unsuspected, and therefore of potentially great use. I doubt that anyone has ever managed to completely internalize the immense font of knowledge that these areas comprise, but I committed myself to learning it as thoroughly and in as much minute detail as I could.

As I had during my hospital days in 1964, I sought out mentors. I called once again on John Kenneth Galbraith of Harvard and on another distinguished economist, Carl Kaysen of MIT, who had once been an aide to Jack in national security affairs. I also asked business executives and union leaders to meet with me for luncheons at which I asked endless questions about their expectations of this body and about its impact on their lives.

Always available to me in his office, or so it seemed, a pipestem caught between his fingers and a scowl of contemplation narrowing his dark eyes, was Senator Mike Mansfield. In his late sixties now, the majority leader looked every inch the statesman he was. Mansfield conveyed his understanding of and reverence for that institution to me.

Instead of doing this research during my Senate workday, I always did it outside the Senate: it was genuine "homework." I have a policy of not reading memos or signing letters during office time. I use that time for Senate business, committee work, meetings with other senators and constituents. My homework begins as soon as I'm in the car, headed to or from Capitol Hill. A staff member drives me, so I can use that time to make phone calls or read memos. And then, after dinner, I make my way through The Bag.

The Bag is divided into several compartments. There is the "must do" compartment, which includes material that needs action ASAP. Another section holds briefing memos from the staff on various issues, correspondence to be signed, correspondence to be read. Then I might dive into the section jammed with news clips from Massachusetts and around the country, Capitol Hill news, current newspapers, and magazines that I might not have yet seen.

By definition, we senators are generalists. But we must at least know more about the issues that fall under the jurisdiction of our committees than about other issues. That's one of the main reasons for my "policy dinners" and for my regular meetings and talks with experts.

I'm certainly not alone in my determination to master policy. I had a wonderful experience a few years ago with Mike Enzi, the popular Republican senator from Wyoming. I was chairing a subcommittee meeting on safety in the workplace. The first item on my agenda was toxins in the workplace, and Mike spoke up, saying that he'd just gone to a conference on that issue and had very specific recommendations. A little later I said, well, let's move on to poisons in some other aspect of the workplace, and he had specific recommendations on that too. He had gone to a conference on
that
. I raised a third issue, and Mike knew all about that issue as well, because he'd gone to another conference on that one. In just a few minutes, Mike Enzi showed us what a superb legislator he was and what it took to be a good one: knowledge, information, hard work. There's no substitute.

As I studied and contemplated the Senate, I kept myself involved in the great issues that had always mattered to me. Refugees, to name but one example. I had led the fight for U.S. aid to the millions uprooted from their homes and communities in Vietnam. Now a fresh wave of terrified, starving victims of war welled up--this time in Africa.

Biafra, a territory of seven million people, most of them Catholic Ibos, on the southeastern coast of Nigeria, had declared its independence from the much larger and heavily Muslim federation in May 1967. (Nigeria itself had only just gained independence from Great Britain in 1960.) Riots and armed fighting between these religious and ethnic adversaries had flared up for years, but Biafra's secession triggered an immediate fullscale civil war, with catastrophic results. It took weeks of horrific fighting, marked by massacres on both sides, but a quarter million Nigerian troops finally overwhelmed the tiny breakaway state, gunning down and starving the Ibos by the tens of thousands. By the time of Biafra's capitulation in 1970, the total dead on both sides exceeded one million. Well before that, the victors' merciless crushing of the rebel state had begun to smack of genocide.

In my first Senate speech following Bobby's death, on September 23, 1968, I pointed out that while the United States and other nations did nothing to intervene, more than seven thousand Biafrans were dying of starvation each day. After that I spent weeks pressing administration officials and State Department leaders to do their humanitarian duty. By the end of that year, my lobbying had produced results. Some relief planes were flying into the devastated area, but several were shot down--by both Nigerians and Biafrans.

The war itself was nearly at an end when I called hearings before my refugee subcommittee in early January 1970. But the suffering was far from over: the victorious Nigerian armies were running unrestrained through Biafra, ransacking households, murdering and raping. After testimony on the extent of the brutality, I renewed my call for America to intervene in this open-ended massacre. The hearings generated enough press coverage that President Nixon, encouraged by Henry Kissinger, joined with Great Britain to once again ship tons of food and medicine to the helpless Ibos.

On the domestic front, I committed myself to the issue that had already caught my passion. I recognized that improving health care, and ensuring Americans' ability to pay for it, would be my main mission, and I would fight for it for however long it would take.

I knew that this mission would require many years and a great deal of energy. How many years, and how much energy, I could not then imagine. Health care, and its inadequacies, have been woven into the fabric of my life.

As a young boy I had witnessed Rosemary's struggles. I had watched Jack endure his many ailments, diseases, and near-death experiences. I had shared the family's shock over my father's stroke in 1961 that robbed him of his speech. I had tried to comfort Jack and Jackie in 1963 as they grieved the loss of the newborn Patrick Bouvier, who died from inadequate lung development. In 1964, with my broken back, I had been personally introduced to the pain and helplessness of a debilitating injury, and to the numbing routine of lengthy hospitalization. And these family crises of health were but prologue for what was to come.

My family's good fortune had insulated me from the desperation that for most Americans compounds the trauma of drastic illness or injury--the effort to meet crushing medical bills and, often, of having to make life-and-death decisions imposed by the enormity of those bills. Perhaps it has been this acute awareness of my own good fortune, as well as the suffering of so many of my loved ones, that has spurred me to always look beyond mere statistics, beyond conventional cost-benefit analyses, and to insist that "health care" be rooted in care.

I was in fact an activist in this area--a "foot soldier," as I've called myself--even before I entered the Senate. As I've mentioned, I had the extraordinary privilege of working with Dr. Sidney Farber in 1961 on the Massachusetts Cancer Crusade. Dr. Farber is recognized as being the father of both modern pediatric pathology and of chemotherapy as a treatment for neoplastic (tumor-forming) disease. He taught me about the ravages of cancer in American society, the depths of suffering caused by it, the self-defeating and unnecessary shame felt by victims and their loved ones, and the staggering costs of the disease.

I could never have dreamed back then how intimately I was destined to experience cancer's dark realities. Or how transformative those informal seminars were to prove, to me personally as well as to the cause of cancer research. It was this singular physician who ignited my long campaign as a senator to increase funding for this research.

The morass of genetic, environmental, and human-intake causes and the intricacies of its play among human cells, make cancer perhaps the greatest of all challenges to medical science. In 1971, still inspired by Farber and aware that the annual death toll from cancer was at nearly 340,000 and rising, I felt the time was right for a major offensive against the disease. I wanted to pass a National Cancer Act, and bolster it with enough funding to offer realistic hope for new discoveries and breakthroughs. I had recently become the chairman of the health subcommittee, and I was in touch with several of America's most distinguished health advocates and economic experts who felt the same way.