N early 40 years ago, I came across a useful snapshot of the creative, chaotic, consequential life that Edward Kennedy lived in the public square. It was somewhere in the bowels of the Senate office building that Kennedy made his headquarters for 47 years–a two-office suite inhabited by two remarkable people. The first office I walked into was run by a young, up-and-coming politician and lawyer whom those of us condemned to follow national politics had first noticed in Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign. On any given day, other pols and officeholders, favor-seekers, and would-be allies could be found in this lair, eager to do business with the man who even then was handling just about anything of a sensitive nature on Kennedy’s behalf: Paul Kirk.

Within another 20 years, Kirk would help arrange the senator’s divorce, play a role in the Democratic Party’s long march back from Reagan-era debacles, and then join his Republican counterpart, Frank Fahrenkopf, in a two-decade-plus reign staging the general election season’s presidential debates. In the end, the first true moment of comfort after Kennedy’s poignant death was the appointment of Kirk (by then the executor of his friend’s estate) to mind his Senate seat until a successor is elected.

In the office beyond Kirk’s sat Dale de Haan, a typically brilliant Kennedy hire from the then-fledgling human rights community and a person of remarkable intellect and diligence. He greeted a decidedly different kind of visitor: diplomats from all over the world, intelligence agents, human rights campaigners fresh from some torturer’s dungeons. De Haan ran one of Kennedy’s most important fiefdoms, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on refugees and immigration. This hitherto ignored unit turned out to be the mechanism that Kennedy used to oppose further escalation of the Vietnam War in 1967 and then move into opposition to the entire, mad enterprise. De Haan’s portfolio would eventually go global as he became one of the leaders in the office of the U.N. High Commission for Refugees, whose work would richly earn the Nobel Peace Prize in 1981.

Truth be told, there was nowhere in the Kennedy empire–from the mid-1960s right through last year–you couldn’t find workaholic geniuses toiling on the major questions of the day, most of them on their way to distinguished, high-profile careers. Part of the wonder surrounding what is easily the most significant legislative career in American history is that no matter which of these cubbyholes you stopped by over the years, you could pick up a thread that reached all the way back to the New Frontier and all the way forward to the present. Follow the threads that Kennedy directly dominated, from education and health care to immigration and income support, and the number of Americans directly affected easily surpasses 200 million, more than most presidents.

In his surprising, even stunning memoir completed just before his death this past summer, Kennedy hasn’t followed quite every thread; this is memoir, not autobiography. In 500 pages, however, he has managed to follow many of them, including the most complicated one of all–the tale of his own journey from privilege to power, from tragedy to tragedy to tragedy, and from wound to wound (more than one self-inflicted).

Introspection was never a Kennedy strength or habit, but True Compass has surprised and astonished those who knew him well. That includes me, a baby reporter in the late 1960s gleefully sucked into the vortex of Kennedy’s involvement in all the burning issues of his time. I dealt with him for 40 years in a happy evolution from quasi-student to willing accomplice on scores of causes (some hopeless, many successful) to something more personal; my real bias is that I never stopped being stunned by his work ethic, his relentlessness and diligence, not to mention his kindness. In the commercial-publishing trade there have been three similarly notable memoirs in recent years, each by a glass ceiling-shattering woman–Katherine Graham, Sandra Day O’Connor, and Madeleine Albright. Kennedy’s is their equal–another valuable contribution to understanding Americans of consequence who emerged after World War II.

The books all present an uncommonly thorough effort to understand or at least account for their emergence. In Kennedy’s case, I never got the impression that he thought his family’s size, clout, or wealth was unique or all that important to understanding him. He was hardly the only final child in a large family to play (in his words) catch-up to older siblings. In our conversations through the years, I did manage to sense the importance to him of his family’s closeness, its competitiveness, and the emphasis it put on relentless perseverance, all of which are prominent in his narrative and familiar to anyone with even a casual awareness of his life.

His memoir, however, sheds considerable light on aspects of his life–notably his childhood and his faith–that this extremely private person rarely talked about. The discussion of his childhood is loaded with stories about his father, and by comparison very sketchy about his mother (he notes almost in passing that she spent a good deal of time in Europe while he was a young boy in the 1930s). Perhaps because Joe Sr. was more of a presence in his childhood homes after having spent much more time away building his immense fortune before Kennedy was born in 1932, and because most of his siblings were older and beginning to make their own way in the world, Kennedy writes of an extremely close relationship, replete with constant instruction on elemental life lessons. Most revealing is his summary of Joe Kennedy’s sermons while he was still a non-serious adolescent, especially after he got bounced from Harvard for arranging another freshman to take a Spanish exam for him. His father made it clear he would always love him no matter his accomplishments or failures but he also made it clear he would be disappointed if he failed to use his good fortune and education to try to make a difference in the world as a serious person–the source of my favorite Kennedy one-liner, first used by John Kennedy in 1960: "All of us can make a difference, and each of us should try."

More surprising is the importance of faith as a thread through the memoir. Here Kennedy’s remarkable mother looms larger:

Both of my parents were deeply religious and the family prayed together daily and attended mass together at least weekly. Yet it is Rose Kennedy, mainly, to whom I owe the gift of faith as the foundation of my life. It is a core factor in my understanding of who I am . . . [It is she] to whom I owe the gift of faith as the foundation of my life.

His "center," however, was the social gospel, not rigid, theological doctrine. He and Robert Kennedy (whose devout faith is better known), as well as his father, were strong advocates of a less restrictive, more welcoming faith even in the years before Pope John XXIII initiated his celebrated reforms. In his words:

My own center of belief as I matured and grew curious about these things, moved toward the great Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 25 especially, in which he calls us to care for the least of these among us . . . It’s enormously significant to me that the only description in the Bible about salvation is tied to one’s willingness to act on behalf of one’s fellow human beings. The ones who will be deprived of salvation–the sinners–are those who’ve turned away from their fellow man. People responsive to the great human condition, and who’ve tried to alleviate its misery–these will be the ones who join Christ in Paradise.

Kennedy did not talk like that outside his family until this book. It is one reason so many people were stunned when parts of his letter to Pope Benedict were read at his gravesite. On one level, it was a Senator seeking a blessing from his Holy Father in a note hand-delivered by Barack Obama. But the words were those of a penitent on his deathbed seeking a prayer from his priest.