NEW YORK – Even before Senator Edward Kennedy's death, his memoir, True Compass, was one of the most eagerly awaited books of the season. Word went forth that this American political memoir actually contained revelations.
Indeed, the reported acquisition price ($8 million) and the secrecy surrounding its publication only added to the book's allure. True Compassis available now and it really is a sensation.
The news – Kennedy’s admission of bad judgment and “inexcusable” conduct at Chappaquiddick; the despair his brother Bobby felt after the presidential assassination in Dallas; even the notion that John Kennedy yearned to be free of Vietnam – has already leaked out and in any case merely amplifies, rather than transforms, what we knew.
Instead, it is the sentiment, even the sentimentality, of True Compassthat makes it so surprisingly compelling. Here is a son's great love for his father and brothers, reflections on his two marriages, the many tragedies he endured, the many eulogies he delivered, the vice-presidential nomination offers he didn't accept, the presidential campaigns he didn't join, and of course the one disastrous presidential campaign he did undertake.
Infused through it all is a sadness and vitality that is the Kennedy trademark, all the more poignant because this is the only memoir a Kennedy brother will ever write. Overall there is sweetness and a sense of resilience in the more than 500 pages of this memoir. Talk about picking yourself up – from three brothers’ tragic deaths, from complicity in a woman’s watery demise, from a failed marriage, from wild parties, from repudiations in the Senate and in the presidential primaries.
But no recitation of Ted Kennedy episodes amply represents the depths of emotion displayed in this volume. Like this: “From my vantage point as the youngest of the nine Kennedy children, my family did not so much live in the world as comprise the world.” And this, about his formidable father and dazzling brothers: “All my life . . . I had wanted to catch up.”
Then this, about his first marriage: “Joan was private, contemplative, and artistic, while I was public, political, and on the go . . . We thought we were in love. And I will grant that at the time I met her, I was keen to join my brothers as a married man, a family man.”
His final paragraph contains the man’s ethos, as told to his grandson, also called Teddy Kennedy: “If you’ll persevere, stick with it, work at it, you have a real opportunity to achieve something. Sure, there will be storms along the way and you might not reach your goal right away. But if you do your best and keep a true compass, you’ll get there.”
– (Bloomberg)