Product Description

Edward M. Kennedy is widely regarded as one of the great Senators in the nation's history. He is also the patriarch of America's most heralded family. In this landmark autobiography, five years in the making, Senator Kennedy speaks with unprecedented candor about his extraordinary life.


The youngest of nine children born to Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, he came of age among siblings from whom much was expected. As a young man, he played a key role in the presidential campaign of his brother, John F. Kennedy. In 1962, he was elected to the U.S. Senate, where he learned how to become an effective legislator.


His life has been marked by tragedy and perseverance, a love for family and an abiding faith. He writes movingly of his brothers and their influence on him; his years of struggle in the wake of their deaths; his marriage to the woman who changed his life, Victoria Reggie Kennedy; his role in the major events of our time (from the civil rights movement to the election of Barack Obama); and how his recent diagnosis of a malignant brain tumor has given even greater urgency to his long crusade for improved health care for all Americans.


Written with warmth, wit, and grace, True Compass is Edward M. Kennedy's inspiring legacy to readers and to history.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #78 in Books
• Published on: 2009-09-14
• Released on: 2009-09-14
• Format: Deckle Edge
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 532 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780446539258
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Amazon.com Review
Product Description
In this landmark autobiography, five years in the making, Senator Edward M. Kennedy tells his extraordinary personal story--of his legendary family, politics, and fifty years at the center of national events.

TRUE COMPASS

The youngest of nine children born to Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, he came of age among siblings from whom much was expected. As a young man, he played a key role in the presidential campaign of his brother John F. Kennedy, recounted here in loving detail. In 1962 he was elected to the U.S. Senate, where he began a fascinating political education and became a legislator.

In this historic memoir, Ted Kennedy takes us inside his family, re-creating life with his parents and brothers and explaining their profound impact on him. For the first time, he describes his heartbreak and years of struggle in the wake of their deaths. Through it all, he describes his work in the Senate on the major issues of our time--civil rights, Vietnam, Watergate, the quest for peace in Northern Ireland--and the cause of his life: improved health care for all Americans, a fight influenced by his own experiences in hospitals.

His life has been marked by tragedy and perseverance, a love of family, and an abiding faith. There have been controversies, too, and Kennedy addresses them with unprecedented candor. At midlife, embattled and uncertain if he would ever fall in love again, he met the woman who changed his life, Victoria Reggie Kennedy. Facing a tough reelection campaign against an aggressive challenger named Mitt Romney, Kennedy found a new voice and began one of the great third acts in American politics, sponsoring major legislation, standing up for liberal principles, and making the pivotal endorsement of Barack Obama for president.

Hundreds of books have been written about the Kennedys. TRUE COMPASS will endure as the definitive account from a member of America's most heralded family, an inspiring legacy to readers and to history, and a deeply moving story of a life like no other.

A Look at Edward M. Kennedy Through the Years
(Click on each image below to see a larger view)

Ted Kennedy with Bobby Kennedy at the opening of the Royal Children’s Zoo (June 9, 1938)

John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Edward M. Kennedy

Ted Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy at the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in South Boston

Ted and Vicki Kennedy (Photo by Ken Regan)

From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley Like "The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant," Ted Kennedy's "True Compass" was written in the last months of its author's life as he struggled against an unknown deadline imposed by terminal cancer. Like Grant, Kennedy sought to be modest about the successes in his long public life and honest about the failures. Like Grant's, his memoir has been published soon (if not, in fact, with unseemly haste) after its author's death to a flurry of attention and impressive sales, exceeded at the moment only by the latest amusement from Dan Brown. Beyond these, resemblances are difficult to come by. "True Compass" is an engaging and at times moving book, but like virtually all political autobiographies these days, it has the air of having been written by committee. Grant did have the assistance of researchers as he plumbed his memory for details of his service in the Mexican and Civil Wars, but he wrote the book himself, in longhand, and it is an American classic. "True Compass," by contrast, was cobbled together from oral histories, notebooks that Kennedy kept over the years and extensive interviews. It is not always possible to tell where Kennedy's voice ends and that of his capable collaborator, Ron Powers, begins. Thus "True Compass" is at its core a celebrity autobiography, far better than most examples of the genre but the creation at least as much of the ghostly hands behind it as of the man whose name graces its cover. One need only read the acknowledgments at its conclusion to understand that (as Kennedy says of one of his collaborators) many people's "talents added immeasurably to the work" and that it was "enhanced and improved" by these and others. Thus the reader will do best to approach it not as a true memoir but as what Kennedy himself calls a "project." I go on about this because I am old-fashioned and expect memoirs actually to be written by the memoirists themselves, but that having been said, "True Compass" is a good book. It bogs down, as virtually all memoirs by political figures do, when it turns to the dreary business that so fascinates those in the game: legislative battles, policy debates and foreign travels to meet and greet alien eminences, from popes to prime ministers. Fortunately, though, there really isn't all that much gassing here, because what interests Kennedy most is his family, press-the-flesh politicking and the ups and downs of his own uncommonly interesting life. Readers looking for gossip mostly will be disappointed. Kennedy openly admits and deeply regrets the well-documented mistakes of his life -- cheating on an exam at Harvard, driving Mary Jo Kopechne into the water at Chappaquiddick, ending his first marriage in divorce, aiding and abetting younger Kennedys in misbehavior at Palm Beach -- but he would have us understand that he persevered through the pain these brought to others and the shame they inflicted on himself. His apologies (for that's what they are) are heartfelt and colored by an awareness that he learned from his mistakes and profited by those lessons. After the assassination of his brother Robert in 1968, he fell into the depths: "In the months and years after Bobby's death, I tried to stay ahead of the darkness. I drove my car at high speeds; I drove myself in the Senate; I drove my staff; I sometimes drove my capacity for liquor to the limit. . . . I generally managed to keep my public duties and my private anguish separated. Whatever excesses I invented to anesthetize myself, I could almost always put them aside in my role as senator. Almost, but not always." In passages such as this one there can be no mistaking the voice: It is Kennedy himself, speaking with an honesty that too often eluded him in the moment, most notably in the hours after the accident that killed Kopechne, when he tried to talk his way around it. "I am not proud of these hours," he says now. "My actions were inexcusable. Perhaps I have not made my acknowledgment of this clear enough over the years." Perhaps those who hate all Kennedys generally or this Kennedy specifically will not be satisfied with what he says here, but I say he's right: "Atonement is a process that never ends. I believe that. Maybe it's a New England thing, or an Irish thing, or a Catholic thing. Maybe all of those things. But it's as it should be." Kennedy was an enthusiast, a lover. Though the terrible losses he suffered doubtless contributed to the "desire to escape, to keep moving, to avoid painful memories" with which he was afflicted during the 1970s and '80s, much of what he did was simply true to himself: "I am an enjoyer. I have enjoyed being a senator; I've enjoyed my children and my close friends; I've enjoyed books and music and well-prepared food, especially with a generous helping of cream sauce on the top. I have enjoyed the company of women. I have enjoyed a stiff drink or two or three, and I've relished the smooth taste of a good wine. At times, I've enjoyed these pleasures too much." And I say, let him who is without sin cast the first stone. The previous quotation appears at the opening of a chapter entitled "The Woman Who Changed My Life," in which we are introduced to Victoria Reggie, with whom he had "an old-fashioned courtship" in 1991 and '92 -- "We really took the time to know each other and we grew very close. As the months went on, I realized that I loved this woman very deeply and that my love for her was overcoming all the defenses I'd built up in myself against the potential heartbreak of marrying again" -- and whom he married in July 1992. The 17 years of their marriage seem to have been intensely happy, and he writes about his love for her with an affecting openness. No one will be surprised that Kennedy writes with equal openness about his love for his older brothers. As the runt of the large and boisterous family, born in 1932, he didn't know his brother Joe well but was (of course) grief-stricken by his death in combat in World War II. Still, the deaths of Jack and Bobby are the ones that haunted him. Jack "was more than a revered older brother to me. He was almost a second father." His "capacity for playfulness and laughter" was "a gift -- to him, but also to all of us around him," and "his laughter is among the things I miss the most about him to this day." As for Bobby, he had a keen sense of humor, though of a "self-deprecating" sort; "loyalty was one of [his] greatest virtues"; he "lived and made decisions in the moment and not in the cold, calculating way that some critics have tried to attribute to him"; he was a man of "conviction, compassion, courage, and eloquence." What may surprise some readers -- it certainly surprised me -- is the depth of Kennedy's love for his father. Joe Kennedy was a certifiable tough cookie -- a ruthless businessman, a compulsive philanderer -- and his son glosses over these aspects of his life; the name of Gloria Swanson, the actress who was Joe's mistress for many years, is not to be found here. Instead we have Joe Kennedy as loving father -- "Dad could be stern, but he not only loved us; he showed us all a deep respect. He always kissed us when we came home. Not many fathers kissed their children back then" -- and a source of support and wise counsel: "In the long hours and days and years, my father has been there to turn me around and send me back to do what is necessary. . . . I can envision him now, striding toward me, looking me straight in the eye, his handshake firm, his laugh wholehearted. I grew up eager not to disappoint him, determined never to meet any challenge in a half-hearted way, ultimately confident that if he knew I had done my best, he would -- even if things turned out badly -- give me what amounted to his benediction: " 'After you have done your best, then the hell with it.' " He has rather less to say about his mother, Rose. Clearly he loved her, as did all her children, but she seems to have been a tad on the dotty side, especially as she grew older, and one does wonder how seriously he took her. Still, she was very much a part of the family, and the family was everything. "We were just incredibly close, all of us," he writes, "through all our younger years and after. And even though the Cape house was our base, and you'd think we would be restless to get away from it now and then, explore other places, that was not the case. Our whole lives were centered on this one place." They had tons of money, but "Dad never wanted us to flaunt our wealth," and though he lived a life of great privilege, Kennedy reached out to "people who are facing injustice or pain," and this came from the heart. My emphasis in the paragraphs above has been on Kennedy himself and his family, because it is in the passages dealing with these that "True Compass" is at its best. Among the other things to savor are his accounts of politicking ("Politics and public service were in my blood. The euphoria of campaigning was almost an end in itself"), a tart portrait of Jimmy Carter and a bemused one of Ronald Reagan, and numerous passages in which he calls forth his passionate love of sailing and the sea. In these passages the reader does not question whose voice he is hearing. It is the voice of Ted Kennedy, a flawed man and in his way a great one. yardleyj@washpost.com
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Few reviewers doubted the significance of Kennedy's memoir, written in collaboration with Ron Powers, and most viewed it as an interesting read. The Los Angeles Times rated it as an American political classic on par with The Autobiography of U. S. Grant. But the Washington Post deflated the comparison, claiming that while Grant had some help writing his book, Kennedy's clearly shows the influence of his ghostwriter and should be viewed as a typical (if sometimes fascinating) celebrity autobiography. While most critics tended to side with Yardley on the book's literary merit, they all appreciated the various ideas and anecdotes from its pages, suggesting that most readers with an interest in American politics will, too.

Customer Reviews

"the greatest lesson anyone can learn"
Senator Edward M. Kennedy's deeply moving memoir is the story of how the youngest most underrated of the nine children born to Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, through great perserverence, through a long and difficult journey found real purpose carrying out the course his brothers had set.

An avid sailor, Kennedy said sailing helped him, "displace the emptiness inside me with the awareness of direction" and so it could be also said that the direction his brothers left him also helped displace the void left by their deaths. He not only picked up where they left off in politics but he took on the role of father-figure to all of their children too.

While there are hundreds of books about the Kennedys, this is the only definitive inside account from a member of the family, evoking high expectations for candor and revelation into the inner lives of this family like no other.

While this book is exquisite in its detail - a testament to Ted Kennedy's love of painting a picture, telling a story and lighting the dark with humor - it may leave you wanting for deeper introspections into the virtually relentless litany of tragedies that befell his life. Alas, this sailor didn't like to look back and peer too deeply into the darkness he had escaped - even in his memoir - for fear that the darkness might overtake him and engulf him in despair. Keep moving forward, stay ahead of the storm, "I can handle this" seems to have been his mantra and code for survival.

At the heart of this autobiography is the message that through perseverance, will-power and fortitude we can overcome any shortcomings, atone for any failures and succeed in our chosen course. By sticking with it and telling himself "I can handle this" he was able to survive everything from devastating deaths and accidents, to passing both legislation and kidney stones - and he unwincingly delivered a speech through the pain of these kidney stones in much the same fashion he survived all the pain in his life - through his mantra "I can handle this," "I can handle this."

Ted Kennedy even teaches his grandson "Little Teddy," "we might not be the best," but "we can work harder than anyone." That, he tells us in his memoir, "is the greatest lesson anyone can learn"... "stick with it," through everything life hands you, follow your "true compass," "work harder than anyone" and you will eventually "get there."

A great sailor indeed.

Sailing seems a metaphor for Senator Kennedy's life, and in turn his uniquely American life seems to be a timely metaphor and lesson for how we might endure the rough waters we find America in today, and prevail.

All Memoirs Are How Their Authors Want to be Remembered
As a Massachusetts resident, Ted and the rest of the Kennedy's have been a part of fabric of the Boston since before this reviewer arrived here nearly 50 years ago. Naturally, I was anxious to see this memoir. Over the years our family has supported him but sometimes supported his competition as well. We had supported his nephew Joe Kennedy and attended the latter's birthday parties at the Hyannis Cape Cod Compound where Uncle Ted was always in attendance. My kids have strolled the famous sandy dune paths with some of the Kennedy brood and chased their dogs around the circus-sized tents set up by the Kennedy's for their many social and political events. Our family will never forget the "Blues Brothers Production" the Kennedy family acted out at one of these rallies and sing-alongs for political supporters. They are like a troop of uninhibited traveling performers. My Mother-in-law practically swooned when she met Senator Kennedy and commented on how much he resembled the picture she had of JFK on her living room wall. The entire Kennedy family is a well-oiled political machine.
The fact that the Senator died just before his memoir's release made me want to see it even more. At a hefty length of 532 pages I was hoping to finally hear Senator Edward Kennedy's explanation of a couple of important events in his life that he hasn't been exactly forthright about in the past. The most important of those events was his driving his car off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969 and swimming to safety while his passenger Mary Jo Kepechne, a campaign worker and maybe much more, drowned. That accident destroyed his chance to become President because by not even reporting it while there was still a chance of saving the young woman's life, he clearly was either drunk out of his mind, frightened, perhaps terrified of the bad publicity that would effect his career and he had panicked. Clearly not the actions of a man who people want to have his finger on the nuclear war button. His actions were so different than the historic rescue of his PT 109 shipmates that JRK performed in WW II also in the shark infested waters of the ocean in the pitch blackness of night. Ted's panicked actions plus the manipulation of the local legal system that followed and allowed him to cop a plea of leaving the scene of an accident have no doubt haunted him and all the rest of his friends and supporters for 40 years. I was most curious as to whether Ted would provide his readers with the whole truth, even if it weren't brutally exact. The Kennedy's haven't exactly been very upfront about the truth in the past if it was negative. They much preferred to seal it away and then spin it to death.
So, did the good Senator from Massachusetts come clean or at least enlighten his friends, supporters and admirers in this final official testimony of his life? Yes, and no. He said his actions were "Inexcusable and he made terrible decisions." He was drunk, frightened and confused. But what about the rest of the story? The memoir doesn't add anything to his accounts of those terrible days even though Ted kept a daily diary throughout his long career. He and co-author/collaborator/ghostwriter Ron Powers probably decided to leave those unhappy memories shrouded in mystery and just concentrate on the more positive aspects, of which there were many, of Kennedy's long and fruitful life.
If the old folk saying that a picture is worth a 1,000 words, then this book is twice as long as the word count would indicate. The book is packed with wonderful photos that most people have probably never seen before. In the caption next to one photograph of baby Ted in an old fashioned baby carriage is the comment that "Jack wanted me to be named after George Washington because I was born on his birthday." On another page is a picture of Bobby and his younger brother Ted at the reopening of the Royal Children's Zoo in 1938." It's Ted's first encounter with the Republican Party. Still further along in the memoir is a picture of Ted Kennedy, dressed in cowboy gear "Coming out of Chute 4 on Skyrocket, Miles City, Montana, August 27, 1960." The bucking bronco is rearing back to launch the future U.S. Senator off his back. Who among us has the guts to try this dangerous rodeo event? Across the page is a copy of 1962 campaign poster "I Need You and Your Two Votes" that reminds us of the young Kennedy's movie star good looks. A more recent color photo shows the Senator "Dressed as the Grinch for the office Christmas Party." He is wearing the Santa Claus Grinch costume complete with green face paint. He actually looks like the cartoon character and that is kind of scary. Opposite that picture is a color reproduction of "`Daffodils' a painting I made for Vicki." The readers don't have to be an ex-photographer like this reviewer to see some of the Kennedy's real personality captured by the terrific selection of photos included in this volume. And yes, all the Kennedy's inherited their parent's good looks. One is better looking than another. It's nice to see the photo portraits of their parents as young adults so one can compare the family's looks.
This book is of course a very valuable resource for historians. Even though all memoirs are how their authors wish to be remembered, they can still be valuable even if they ignore the warts and only focus on the triumphs. There include insights, memories and thought processes connected to any individual that only that individual is privy to and only they can explain why the event was important to them. This memoir is filled with personal stories about life within his family. Joe Sr. comes across particularly wise in the ways of the world in business as well as being a good father and passing on to his children what is really important in life. It's good that this book was produced and it's also good that Senator Kennedy sat down for a series of recorded interviews about the events in his life. Hopefully, there may even be material included in those personal histories that was left out of this memoir, but will eventually be released for future historians to better understand the life and accomplishments of the youngest of Rose and Joe P. Kennedy's sons. To be honest, this reviewer finds Joe P. Kennedy Sr. the most interesting member of the family. That's usually the case with the founding founders of a dynasty. However, Joe Kennedy's children have made extraordinary contributions to their country. Like every human, they had flaws but they still succeeded. What a shame that Joe Kennedy's namesake was killed in WW II because the entire family felt he was destined for true greatness. Both Ted and his sister Eunice's deaths closed the books on their long careers of public service. It remains to be seen whether Ted or Eunice will have made the greater contributions to humanity. This is an excellent read even for people who may not have always agreed with Kennedy's political causes or decisions. Every reader will learn more about the warm human being that was Edward Kennedy. Frankly, most readers will probably find the personal information and family anecdotes much more interesting than the good senator's detailed reminisces about behind the scenes hardball politics within the U.S. Senate itself. It's definitely a good read.

Last words from the Liberal Lion
I enjoyed reading this book. It was written well, it's easy to read, and it is interesting. That being said I can't give it five stars because there is so much more to Ted's story, good and bad than what is in these pages. Ted gives us a glimpse behind his life and it's well recorded highs and lows. The most poignant moments include his childhood school experience, including his teacher who molested some of his friends and his life after Vickie arrived. To all those that would judge Mr Kennedy based on the low moments in his life I say read this book. You might find some compassion in your heart for this all to human man.