The Globe and Mail

In the autumn of 1963, Edward Moore Kennedy buried his brother, the slain president, and fled to Cape Cod to comfort his septuagenarian mother and ailing father. Stricken with grief, Kennedy resolved to keep up appearances for the sake of his parents.

The family was in agony. Bobby Kennedy was near suicidal. Jackie Kennedy allowed privately that “my life is over and I will spend the rest of it waiting for it really to be over.” Fused by grief, the two are said to have begun an affair.

And there was Teddy, the youngest of the brood, holding up Rose and Joe. Teddy would suffer alone, allowing himself to cry only on solitary walks between the sea and the sand. His self-discipline was the greatest expression of filial love.

Lord knows, this wouldn't be the first or the last time he would deal with death. It clouded his epic life. He had lost his brother, Joe, and he would lose his brother Bobby. Later on, he would nearly lose a son and daughter to cancer, and he would come close to dying in a plane crash that killed two others.

“I respect the seriousness of death,” he muses in True Compass. “I've had many occasions to meditate on its intrusions.”

And here, in his posthumous memoir, it intrudes again. In the last chapter of the life of Edward Kennedy, he tells his story as he lies dying of brain cancer. It is an exquisite irony.

None of that makes this is a lugubrious book, though, because Ted Kennedy had no self-pity. If Jack was a realist and Bobby a romantic, Teddy was an optimist. He was cheerful, funny and mischievous. It made him the most gregarious and natural of the clan, the best retail politician and the most vulnerable.

Of course, Teddy had the gift of years denied his brothers. He died in bed, on August 25, at 77. Time allowed him to reflect on his long, eventful march to old age.

His memoir is more engaging than introspective. It is at once light and dark, flattering and disappointing, guarded and candid. It is the story of family and fortune that none of his brothers or his father (silenced at 73 by a stroke) lived to tell.

To Ted, nothing eclipses the pater familias

This alone makes True Compass a literary event. Of all the Kennedys, only Rose, the matriarch who died at 104, had offered a first-hand story of the most influential, glamorous and tragic family of the postwar United States.

Ted poignantly recalls what it was like growing up as the last of nine children in a family so rich, so large and so prominent that it did not “so much live in the world as comprise the world.”

The saga of the Kennedys – their self-contained universe of rivalry, excellence, toughness, loyalty – is not new. We know they fight with each other, tease each other, protect each other. We know they never lose, never cry and never complain.

But now we hear it from Ted with new authority. Riding horses with his father, racing sailboats with Jack, campaigning with Bobby; his family was his life. But unlike the sardonic Jack, who resented his mother's absences and called her “a nothing,” sweet Ted expressed only adulation.

The same for his father, Joseph P. Kennedy. To his uncritical son, he is not the ambassador, financier, bootlegger, blackguard, anti-Semite and appeaser. He is the wise father, the purveyor of Solomonic advice, who is “eternally and solely, my dad.”

To Ted, nothing eclipses the pater familias. Father offers straight talk (“never violate people's privacy”) and sound advice (“after you have done your best, then the hell with it”). For the pudgy, pasty nomadic Ted, who spent his early life struggling to “catch up” with everyone else, it is a clarifying tough love.

“You can have a serious life or non-serious life, Teddy,” Joe tells him. “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. You make up your mind.”