Kennedy's Son Reflects On Dad's Legacy

After his death last month, it seemed everyone had a story to tell about Senator Ted Kennedy: the president, his Senate colleagues, his family and even the Hyannis Port post master.

But Senator Kennedy was determined to tell his own story in his own words before he died. So over the last two years, through his illness, he wrote the only memoir ever written by anyone in the Kennedy family. The result is a revealing, emotional account of "Big Teddy," as he called himself, and the life he led.

The book, called "True Compass," starts with a harsh diagnosis of his brain tumor, and the doctor telling him somberly that he was about to die.

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Senator Kennedy went on camera to talk about the book five months before he passed away.

It was an interview he gave for his publisher, while he was on chemo.

"What I've tried to do in the United States Senate is to be true to the things which have been important in my life," Sen. Kennedy said.

Stahl asked his son, Ted Jr., about the book.

"Even though he really felt he needed to hold it together throughout some really incredibly emotionally difficult experiences, he was kind of able to let it out in this book," Kennedy said.

60 Minutes went to the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port to talk to Ted Jr., who recently bought Jack Kennedy's old house.

"It was actually right here where he held his press conferences when he was president. He learned that he became President of the United States. He woke up in this house," Kennedy explained.

His father's house, as well as Bobby and Ethel Kennedy's house, is located nearby.

He said one of the things that surprised him when he read the book was how personal and intimate it was.

"I think one of the things that comes out of this book is just what a humble man he is. His letter to the Pope, you know, just a few short weeks ago. You know, every time I read that letter, I cry. Because he's asking for forgiveness," Kennedy told Stahl. "And he says that he's fallen short in his life. But you know, he's never tried, never stopped trying to make right in everything he did. And that's a lesson we can all learn."

Redemption is a theme in the book; another is how hard it was for Ted Sr. to be the baby in the Kennedy family. "I was always catching up," he writes, "I was the ninth of nine."

"He was sitting there going, 'How the hell am I ever going to compete against these brothers of mine, who are just these, outstanding individuals?'" the senator's son explained.

"He felt a sense of inadequacy till he was quite old," Stahl remarked.

"I think that that's true," Kennedy replied.

There was a notion that Teddy was a mama's boy, but it turns out it was daddy who was the doting, loving parent. Joe Sr., the family patriarch, as Teddy writes it, taught them not to flaunt their wealth and imparted lessons about persevering and contributing.

"I had a sit-down with my dad. He said, 'Now Teddy, you have to make up your mind whether you want to have a constructive and positive attitude and influence on your time. And if you're not interested, I just want you to know I have other children that intend to have a purposeful and constructive life. And so you have to make up your mind about which direction you're going to go,'" Sen. Kennedy remembered during his videotaped interview several months ago.

"If you decide to have a non-serious life," his father went on, "I won't have much time for you."

Though Teddy says he chose the purposeful path, he had a way of straying from it, as when he cheated on a Spanish test at Harvard, which he calls "an immature...and wrong decision."

"He seemed to be more worried about telling his father than about being suspended from Harvard for a year," Stahl said during an interview with Kennedy's editor and publisher, Jonathan Karp.

"That's right," Karp replied. "There's this great quote from his father where his father says, 'There are a lot of people in life who can mess up and get away with, and Teddy, you're not one of them.'"

As it turned out, it was a prophesy. But Teddy was the baby, and his older brothers had his back.

Teddy adored his brother Jack, who was his godfather. When he was assassinated, it was Teddy who had to tell Joe Sr., who had had a stroke and couldn't talk.

"He was describing the experience of having to tell his father. And as Senator Kennedy was telling us this story, he actually began to cry and couldn't finish it," Karp remembered.

"Five years after Jack, Bobby is shot. I just want to read some things that struck me about this period from the book. And he says, "In the months after Bobby's death, I drove my car at high speed. I drove myself in the Senate. I sometimes drove my capacity for liquor to the limit. I might well have driven Joan deeper into her anguish," Stahl read.

"There had been so much loss in his life that he felt that he had to keep moving," Karp said. "And that was where the restlessness came from. He had to stay ahead of the darkness."

Kennedy also wrote about his fear of meeting the same fate as his brothers Jack and Bobby. When a car once backfired, he threw himself on the ground.

"I asked him about that," Karp said, "and he said that he tried not to let it get to him. But it was always there."

He struggled, he grieved, and then there was the Chappaquiddick incident. A year after Bobby's assassination, Ted was drinking at a party on Chappaquiddick Island in Martha's Vineyard and then drove a car off a wooden bridge, drowning his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne. He pled guilty to leaving the scene of an accident.

"He spent his life trying to atone for this. He says that atonement is a process that never ends, which is as it should be," Karp said.

In his book, Kennedy recounts the events of that night but adds nothing new to the record, and still leaves questions about his behavior unanswered.

"He says he knew it was going to be damaging to his own political career. Now, one of the big questions has always been: why did he wait so long to call anybody and report the accident? He doesn't directly address that. But is he acknowledging a cover up? Or an attempt at a cover up?" Stahl asked Karp.

"I don't want to pass judgment on it. What I will say is he thought it was inexcusable, what he did," Karp said.

"He uses that word?" Stahl asked.

"Yes. And it was a terrible accident. And in fact, one thing he says that he's never said before is that he was tormented by the idea that his father's death may have been hastened by Chappaquiddick. Which for Senator Kennedy was a thought that was almost too much to bear," Karp said.

Ted Kennedy's life could be told in a series of painful chapters. At his office in 1998, he showed Stahl a picture of his son Teddy in a ski race.

"He lost his leg to cancer and still raced the handicapped skiers race," Sen. Kennedy explained.

"It (the picture) says, 'To Dad, who has taught me that you can always be a winner,'" Kennedy added, choking up with emotion.

In telling the story of his son getting bone cancer in 1973, Ted Kennedy cannot keep his pain off the page. "There has been so much loss. But please God. Not Teddy," he writes.

And on having to tell his son his leg had to be amputated, he writes, "I'd heard and delivered more than my share of bad news in my life, but this was the worst of the worst."

And then there was the two years of chemo.

"I was undergoing an experimental treatment up in Boston. And he slept in the bed right next to me for that for every three weeks for the two-year period," Kennedy remembered.

Kennedy Jr. couldn't move or get out of bed at the time.

"And he came - this is the Senator. He took off three days every three weeks and sat in that hospital with you?" Stahl asked.

"Yeah, he did," Kennedy said.

"He held your head when you were nauseous, as he writes in the book," Stahl remarked.

"He did, yeah. He did," Kennedy replied. "And he learned how to give me injections, too. In the middle of the night, he'd come in my room and give me my shots."

When Bobby was killed, Ted Sr. became surrogate father to Jack's and Bobby's children. He was 37 years old.

"I can't imagine having that kind of responsibility," Ted Kennedy Jr., who is 47, told Stahl.

"Could you have done that?" Stahl asked.

"No, I don't think I could've done that, no," he replied.

One of the issues Ted Kennedy confronts in the book is whether he really wanted to be president when he ran in 1980.

"Why do you want to be president?" CBS News' Roger Mudd asked the senator during an interview.

Kennedy stumbled in his answer.

Teddy says his stumbling wasn't because of ambivalence about the race, but about "displeasure" with Roger Mudd for blindsiding him with the question before he had announced his candidacy.

He writes that he did want to be president in 1980, and again in 1984, but Teddy Jr., his brother Patrick and sister Kara were afraid of his running and begged him not to.

"Most people keep coats and umbrellas in their coat closet. My father kept bulletproof vests in his coat closet. And believe me, we would walk by that coat closet every day, fearful about some crazy person out there wanting to make a name for themselves. And that, I think was in the back of our minds, almost every time that my father would appear in public," Kennedy told Stahl.

In his memoir, Ted Sr. acknowledges that after his divorce from Joan, he drank too much at times and that his "bachelor lifestyle…stirred up public doubts about…his judgment."

Then just when his career looked as though it might go off the rails, he met "the love of his life" and everything changed. Teddy married Vicki Reggie in 1992 after what he called an old fashioned courtship.

She brought wholesomeness and stability to his life. "Vicki is my soul mate," he writes.

She shared his love of sailing and she helped him write the book over the last year, during his illness. Vicki told Stahl that as long as she knew him, he wanted to write a memoir, and that he had been keeping notes for 50 years.

At the end of his life, they read the book aloud to each other including the parts about him finding comfort and peace out at sea.

"The sad part is that when the book was finished, when we had the final printed book, we mailed him the very first copy. And it arrived at this house exactly on the day he died. And so I don't know whether he actually got to see it. I think that's too bad," Karp said.

Ted Jr. and his family moved to Hyannis Port about a year ago to be near his dad.

"It struck me that he had come and stayed with you in the hospital when you were sick… You came here. You moved here when he was sick… And you were here for the last year," Stahl noted,

"My dad knew what his odds were. He knew what he was facing, and I wanted to be around for as long as I possibly could," Kennedy replied.

Ted Kennedy spent his last days on his beloved boat, Mya, with Vicki, his children and his grandchildren.

"My father wasn't a perfect human being. But he did believe in redemption. And he did believe in atonement. He talked about that, and that is why his story is such a powerful story," Kennedy said. "He felt badly about a lot of decisions that he had made in his life. But he kept on trying to work harder and right those wrongs. And that is really the story of his life."

Produced by Rich Bonin