Book of the week: True Compass: A Memoir by Ted Kennedy

(Twelve, 532 pages, $35)

Ted Kennedy was a teenager when his father sat him down one day and delivered a resonant ultimatum. “You can have a serious life or a non-serious life,” Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. said to the youngest of his nine children. “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.” Joe Kennedy’s youngest son, who died last month while serving his 47th year as a U.S. senator, discovered across the next several decades that simply choosing a purposeful life was no safeguard against sorrow, egregious mistakes, and self-damaging behavior. He came to believe, however, that he had early on fixed his sights on a worthy ideal and given himself tirelessly to its pursuit.

The late senator’s memoir turns out to be “a book that all but the most toxic Kennedy critic could love,” said Matthew V. Storin in The Boston Globe. Written mostly during the 15 months after his fatal brain cancer was diagnosed, “it is no more flawless than its subject.” In it, Kennedy accepts responsibility for the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, the young woman who was in his car when he drove off a Chappaquiddick Island bridge in 1969. Still, he tells us nothing new about such details as why he waited to alert the police. Nor does he recount particular moments when his love of the bottle caused others harm. The flawed “lion of the Left” is mostly forthright and winning, though, in recounting his remarkable life.

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Kennedy tosses in some “telling portraits” of other Washington bigwigs, said Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times. He found Ronald Reagan charming, judged Lyndon Johnson to have been the greatest president of the past half-century, and clearly abhorred the pettiness he saw in his onetime Democratic rival Jimmy Carter. Even so, it’s the personal reminiscences in True Compass that are most memorable. No doubt conscious of being the only Kennedy brother who lived long enough to produce a memoir, he grounds his story in an affecting family portrait, said Tim Rutten in the Los Angeles Times. Some readers today might consider his father’s approach to child-rearing harsh, “even abusive.” The author himself appears to have been nothing but grateful for the lesson.