True Compass

"Generally, I’m not a fan of memoirs . Maybe it’s because I’m a biographer. I don’t like it when autobiographies are confused with biographies; they’re very separate, very different. But there’s just something about the stories that Ted tells in this book that is so engaging; you get a real sense of this Kennedy mission, this Kennedy commitment to public service – and you also get some idea of what holds the family together. It’s religion; it’s love of the sea; it’s commitment to making the world a little bit different. You really get a sense, in this book, of the wit and the glamour that the Kennedys are able to combine with public service and politics in a rather unique way. This is one of these Kennedy books that is just extraordinarily honest. Ted was a remarkable mimic, and a great storyteller, and that comes across on page after page of this book. He tells such wonderful stories… There’s one about his mother sending him to school in Rhode Island with his brother Bobby. Ted’s only nine years old, and the next-youngest kid is 13. Ted gets picked on and bullied, and his only friend, the only thing he’s got going for him, is his pet turtle who comes with him – and who dies two weeks after he gets there. You just get the sense of this incredible, intense individual life, and then this life as a Kennedy. I loved it. I think you can certainly compare them to all those families. I mean, that’s how we understand people – by comparisons. But comparisons also focus on differences. The people behind this latest television series, ‘The Kennedys’, said in the very beginning that they were going to tell the Kennedy story as The Godfather. That’s just nonsense; I think it’s absurd. You can certainly compare the Kennedys to other families, but in the end I think they do stand out in a way. I mean, Franklin Roosevelt ’s children never succeeded in politics, or in any other part of life. Teddy Roosevelt’s children didn’t. The Bush family – I just don’t think it’s possible… The more you compare the Kennedys to other families, the more their uniqueness comes back. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Oh, yes – it’s incredible. It’s so incredible that you don’t need to make stuff up! There are probably more bad books about the Kennedys, and more bad television shows, and more bad movies, than about any other family, and there’s no need for it. I mean, the drama, the everyday drama… It’s there even in that story about the young Ted Kennedy and his pet turtle that I told before. Whether you love them or you hate them, I think you’ve got to respect – at least, I respect – their commitment to public service, which comes from their father and their mother. God, I don’t know. I’m not going to watch it. I’m not going to watch it because, one, I know I’m not going to learn any history from it; two, I know I’m probably going to throw things at the screen as they make up stuff; and three, from all the reviews I’ve read, it sounds like there’s no real drama to it! Tom Wilkinson is a great actor, but he has to read somebody else’s lines, and I don’t know if they work. And four, it’s just ludicrous to make the story of this family into a Godfather epic, and structure it like that. So, I’m not going to watch it. That’s all I can tell you."