 | |
| Author | Edward M. Kennedy with Ron Powers, editor Jonathan Karp |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Anne Twomey (design); Denis Reggie (photograph) |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Memoir |
| Publisher | Twelve |
Publication date | September 14, 2009 |
| Pages | x, 532 |
| ISBN | 978-0-446-53925-8 |
| OCLC | 434905205 |
| 973.92/092 | |
| LC Class | E840.8.K35 A3 2009 |
True Compass is the posthumous memoir of United States Senator Edward M. Kennedy that was released September 14, 2009, by Twelve, a division of the Hachette book group. [1]
Ted Kennedy signed up to do the book in the autumn of 2007. [2] Kennedy received a reported $8 million advance for the work. [3] It was written with the help of Pulitzer Prize-winning collaborator Ron Powers and was based on contemporaneous notes taken by Kennedy throughout his life, hours of recordings for an oral history project, and long interviews. [1] [4] [5] Despite the collaboration, Kennedy literary representative Robert Barnett said that "every word" in the work was Kennedy's. [5] Kennedy's editor, Jonathan Karp, later said that "it was very clear from the outset that he was setting out to write a work of history, a work of personal history, and that he wanted this book very much to be a legacy." [2] After he received his brain cancer diagnosis in 2008, Kennedy halted work on the book for a while, but then returned to it with renewed vigor and as one of his top priorities. [2] He died the day a final copy of his book was delivered to his Hyannis Port, Massachusetts home. [2]
The work was originally intended for publication in 2010, then moved up to October 2009, and then finally moved up to September 2009, less than a month after Kennedy's death. [5] A Twelve spokesperson said, "The book was completed earlier this summer. Our original publication date was October 6. We’d always hoped to publish sooner. The production process moved faster than expected, so we were able to shave off some time." [5] After The New York Times obtained the book before its publication date and released some information about it, the Twelve spokesperson said he was "dismayed" that the Times had obtained it and that "we regret that the New York Times did not respect the September 14th release date of 'True Compass', which was carefully coordinated with the senator's family. That copy was obtained without consent or permission from Twelve – or if it was somehow purchased, then it was sold illegally." [1] True Compass had an announced first printing of 1.5 million copies. [3]
The memoir deals with Kennedy's experiences with the assassination of his two older brothers, John and Robert, the Chappaquiddick incident in 1969, his battle with drinking and with brain cancer, why he decided to run for president in 1980, his personal and professional relationships with Democratic presidents including his often tense, strained relations with Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, and his lifelong fight for universal health care. [1]
A broader theme of the book is, in the words of The New York Times 's Michiko Kakutani, "that persistence, perseverance and patience in pursuit of a cause or atonement for one’s failures can lead to achievement and the possibility of redemption." [6]
In his review for the Saturday Age , Guy Rundle wrote that the memoir "follows the party line" when discussing the various scandals that "marked" Kennedy's long career in the Senate. He thought it was useful in documenting the campaigns that Kennedy ran in the 1970s and 1980s. [7] Jonathan Yardley for The Washington Post said that "Kennedy [seeks] to be modest about the successes in his long public life and honest about the failures" but that "like virtually all political autobiographies these days, it has the air of having been written by committee. ... It is not always possible to tell where Kennedy's voice ends and that of his capable collaborator, Ron Powers, begins." [4] The Washington Times said that "Kennedy has produced a revelatory – though not tabloidesque – account of his storied life and career. While the Massachusetts Democrat was not without ego, he is willing to share the credit both with colleagues and family members for his successes and isn't shy about accepting blame for his many mistakes." [8]
Former television anchor Roger Mudd took issue with Kennedy's version of their 1979 CBS interview which famously did damage to his 1980 presidential bid. Mudd said there was no deceit about the purpose or context of the interviews, as Kennedy claimed in the book, and wrote that "I remain mystified, perplexed, angered, and saddened that the senator would have endorsed such a false account in what amounted to his last testament." [9]
True Compass sold 170,000 copies during its first five days of publication, [10] and debuted at number one on the New York Times Best Seller list. [11] By mid-December 2009, the book has had total sales of some 400,000 copies [3] and has spent 13 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list. [12]
An e-book edition was scheduled for release on Christmas Day 2009. [3] However, a planned paperback edition was pushed back to 2011 due to the renewed vigor of the hardcover book's sales following a November 2009 appearance by widow Victoria Reggie Kennedy on The Oprah Winfrey Show . [3]
Edward Moore Kennedy was an American lawyer and politician who served as a United States senator from Massachusetts for almost 47 years, from 1962 until his death in 2009. A member of the Democratic Party and the prominent political Kennedy family, he was the second most senior member of the Senate when he died. He is ranked fifth in United States history for length of continuous service as a senator. Kennedy was the younger brother of President John F. Kennedy and U.S. attorney general and U.S. senator Robert F. Kennedy. He was the father of U.S. representative Patrick J. Kennedy.
Prozac Nation is a memoir by American writer Elizabeth Wurtzel published in 1994. The book describes the author's experiences with atypical depression, her own character failings and how she managed to live through particularly difficult periods while completing college and working as a writer. Prozac is a trade name for the antidepressant fluoxetine. Wurtzel originally titled the book I Hate Myself and I Want To Die but her editor convinced her otherwise. It ultimately carried the subtitle Young and Depressed in America: A Memoir.
Mary Jo Kopechne was an American secretary, and one of the campaign workers for U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign, a close team known as the "Boiler Room Girls". In 1969, she drowned when a car driven by U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy left a narrow road on Chappaquiddick Island and overturned into Poucha Pond after leaving a party. According to reports, Kennedy left the party at 11:15pm. Kopechne's body and the car was not reported until the next morning, approximately nine to ten hours later.
The Kennedy curse is a series of premature deaths, accidents, assassinations, and other calamities involving members of the American Kennedy family. The alleged curse has primarily struck the children and descendants of businessman Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., but it has also affected family friends, associates, and other relatives. Political assassinations and plane crashes have been the most common manifestations of the "curse". Following the Chappaquiddick incident in 1969, Ted Kennedy is quoted saying he questioned if "some awful curse did actually hang over all the Kennedys."
Theodore Chaikin Sorensen was an American lawyer, writer, and presidential adviser. He was a speechwriter for President John F. Kennedy, as well as one of his closest advisers. President Kennedy once called him his "intellectual blood bank". Notably, though it was a collaborative effort with Kennedy, Sorensen was generally regarded as the author of the majority of the final text of Profiles in Courage, and stated in his memoir that he helped write the book. Profiles in Courage won Kennedy the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. Sorensen helped draft Kennedy's inaugural address and was also the primary author of Kennedy's 1962 "We choose to go to the Moon" speech.
Roger Harrison Mudd was an American broadcast journalist who was a correspondent and anchor for CBS News and NBC News. He also worked as the primary anchor for The History Channel. Previously, Mudd was weekend and weekday substitute anchor for the CBS Evening News, the co-anchor of the weekday NBC Nightly News, and the host of the NBC-TV Meet the Press and American Almanac TV programs. Mudd was the recipient of the Peabody Award, the Joan Shorenstein Award for Distinguished Washington Reporting, and five Emmy Awards.
The "Boiler Room Girls" was a nickname for a group of six women who worked as political advisors for Robert Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign in a windowless work area in Kennedy's Washington, D.C. electoral offices. They were "political strategists" who received national media exposure from the infamous Chappaquiddick incident in 1969. It was in Chappaquiddick that Mary Jo Kopechne died in a car crash, in which Ted Kennedy was the driver.
Michiko Kakutani is an American writer and retired literary critic, best known for reviewing books for The New York Times from 1983 to 2017. In that role, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1998.
The Chappaquiddick incident occurred on the island in Massachusetts of the same name some time around midnight between July 18 and 19, 1969, when Senator Edward M. "Ted" Kennedy negligently drove his car off a narrow bridge, causing it to overturn in a tidal pond. This resulted in the drowning death of his 28-year-old passenger Mary Jo Kopechne, who was trapped inside the vehicle.
Monster: The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member is a memoir about gang life written in prison by Sanyika Shakur.
Rich Cohen is an American non-fiction writer. He is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone. He is co-creator, with Martin Scorsese, Mick Jagger and Terence Winter, of the HBO series Vinyl. His works have been New York Times bestsellers, New York Times Notable Books, and have been collected in the Best American Essays series. He lives in Ridgefield, Connecticut, with his four sons.
Colin McEnroe is an American columnist and radio personality. He hosts The Colin McEnroe Show on Connecticut Public Radio, writes a weekly column that runs in eight Hearst Communications, and writes a newsletter also for Hearst.
Going Rogue: An American Life (2009) is a personal and political memoir by politician Sarah Palin, former governor of Alaska and 2008 Republican candidate for U.S. Vice President on the ticket with Senator John McCain. She wrote it with Lynn Vincent.
Larry Tye is an American non-fiction author and journalist known for his biographies of notable Americans including Edward Bernays (1999) Satchel Paige (2009), Robert F. Kennedy (2016) and Joseph McCarthy (2020).
Paul Francis Markham was an American attorney who served as the United States Attorney for the District of Massachusetts from 1966 to 1969. He was one of two associates of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, in whom Kennedy confided most closely during the Chappaquiddick incident. Markham, along with Kennedy's cousin Joseph Gargan, participated in a futile attempt to rescue Mary Jo Kopechne from Kennedy's submerged car, and also wrote down Kennedy's dictated statement to the police about the accident.
Jean Ann Kennedy Smith was an Irish-American diplomat, activist, humanitarian, and author who served as United States Ambassador to Ireland from 1993 to 1998. She was a member of the Kennedy family, the eighth of nine children, and youngest daughter, born to Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald. Her siblings included President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Rosemary Kennedy, and Special Olympics founder Eunice Kennedy Shriver. She was also a sister-in-law of Jacqueline Kennedy.
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Chappaquiddick, sometimes known as The Senator, is a 2017 American political drama film directed by John Curran, and written by Taylor Allen and Andrew Logan. The film stars Jason Clarke as U.S. Senator from Massachusetts Ted Kennedy and Kate Mara as Mary Jo Kopechne, with Ed Helms, Bruce Dern, Jim Gaffigan, Clancy Brown, and Olivia Thirlby in supporting roles. The plot details the 1969 Chappaquiddick incident, in which Kennedy's negligence caused an automobile accident which resulted in the death of his 28-year-old passenger Mary Jo Kopechne trapped inside the vehicle, and the Kennedy family's response.
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