Decline and Fall

For nearly thirty years, his hopes centered on his first son and namesake, a strapping, gregarious figure who fell wholeheartedly in with his father’s ambitions. When Joe Jr. died during World War II, the father’s eye fell on his second son, Jack, a more complex figure, in terrible health, with whom his relations were trickier. Perhaps to his astonishment, that shy, sickly Jack became JFK, a charismatic and canny political leader. But then he was killed, and an attractive man and skilled politician became a Lost Prince.

The American people’s urge to find him again — and the Kennedy family’s urge to regain its lost power — created a dynamic that has roiled, confused, and sometimes distorted the political life of this country for forty years. In the premature loss of clever and capable political leaders like John and Robert Kennedy, the nation has suffered. In the destruction of two men who were “New Democrats” before the term was needed, the Democratic party has suffered. And the Kennedys themselves, tempted by and trapped within this drama, are suffering even today.

The only substantial volume in this season’s run of books on the topic is Evan Thomas’s study of Bobby, the third Kennedy son, whose life was consumed in struggles brought on by the family ethos: first to define himself as his brother’s helper, and then to define himself as the family leader.

He was, Thomas writes, the “runt” of the family, almost an irrelevancy in his father’s schemes. There was the “golden trio” of Joe Jr., Jack, and Kathleen, and there were the others, too young and too many to matter. Ted, the youngest, accepted his role as the baby, the comic relief. But Bobby, seven years younger than his next-oldest brother, had an intense need to prove himself.

Slighter, less graceful, less good looking than the others, he would find this difficult. As Thomas notes, in pictures that showed the other children smiling and radiant, Bobby “perches by his mother’s side, his face tense with anxiety. . . . He was not only smaller and slower than his brothers, he looked afraid.” What he was afraid of was being ignored and discounted.

Oppressed by a controlling father, John Kennedy rebelled by becoming elusive and skeptical. Neglected by an indifferent father, Bobby dove into the family ethos, defining himself as family guardian, the custodian of others. From time to time, he would try to break out to a life on his own, but he would always come back to the family orbit, always in service to somebody else.

His first rise came with the death of Joe Jr. in 1944, which pushed Jack into the role of heir apparent and Bobby into that of back-up son. The second came with Jack’s political campaigns, during which Bobby moved from near-stranger to his older brother’s closest associate. Thomas presents Jack’s relations with Joe Jr. as far more strained and remote than previous writers have suggested and says that Bobby was brought in at first to keep the peace between the overbearing father and the independent and frequently rebellious son. Bobby rose in their esteem to become the central cog in the family enterprise. The next-to-last had become the most important.

Some biographers claim that by 1960 Joseph P. Kennedy had plans to make all three of his sons president. It was certainly he who insisted that Jack make Bobby his attorney general and that Ted prepare to run for Jack’s Senate seat, when he was old enough, in 1962. Bobby functioned for most of Jack’s term as nearly a co-president, overseeing the war on crime, the civil rights crisis, backchannel approaches to the Soviet Union, guerrilla wars in Southeast Asia, and the Cuban missile crisis.

In some ways, however, Robert was less close to his brother than has been commonly thought. They did not socialize, and, while Bobby was an open book to his brother, the more elusive Jack Kennedy had facets Bobby seldom saw. The president (and his wife) disliked the rowdy atmosphere of children and celebrities at Bobby’s Hickory Hill estate. Nor were Bobby and Ethel often at the White House after working hours. The president “rigidly divided his relationships, separating ‘staff’ (the Irish Mafia and Ted Sorensen) from his social friends,” Thomas writes. “RFK was, in a certain sense, staff.”

Yet at work the brothers tended to blend, able to communicate in family shorthand, or even in no words at all. In the unwritten bargain worked out between them, John Kennedy gave his brother access to all arms of government, often overriding the authority of those technically in office. In return, Bobby picked up for his brother, in all his touchy areas of life. Being the keeper to this brother was no small endeavor, and Thomas entitles his final pre-Dallas chapter “Worn.” By late 1963, Bobby was visibly aging, losing substance and energy, and thinking of a change of duties inside the administration.

In a book studded with terse, pungent headings, “Mourner” comes right after “Worn.” JFK’s death in Dallas cost Bobby not only his job and his brother, but his sense of himself in his world. He had been the servant, and now there was no one to look up to and work for. There was a parallel problem, as well, for it is sometimes forgotten how much his brother looked after him. John Kennedy had given Bobby unparalleled access and power, without his having to think about manners or consequence, shielded by JFK’s office and political skills. Jack could laugh at Bobby, but he also admired him. “He thought Bobby was . . . the sacred one,” said Jack’s friend Charles Spalding; he was the one who expressed the anger and the moral vision the cooler president was reluctant to let show. Jack had a constituency of two hundred million; Bobby a constituency of one. Now, for his own ambition and his brother’s memory, he had to work for the good will of others, to have them want to have him as a leader.

John Kennedy was the last iconic figure of the World War II-Cold War consensus, a group that was elite, bipartisan, and assured. Robert Kennedy was the first iconic figure of the disruption that followed, and what made him so “hot” as a political leader was that the era’s sense of anger and perceived injustice mirrored what he felt inside himself. In 1964 he won a Senate seat from New York, but, bored with the Senate’s rules and procedures, he took more interest in productions like his community development program for Bedford-Stuyvesant and in trips to Poland, South Africa, and South America, where he was treated like a god by the oppressed.

As time went on, it became increasingly easy for even dispassionate people to be troubled by Lyndon Johnson’s handling of the war in Asia and the turn the Great Society was taking. But with Robert Kennedy, the policy dissension was also fueled by inner rage. It was unfair that some people were terribly poor, that race was a burden, that young men, most of them poor, died in a war past explaining. And it was unfair too that his brother was dead, unfair that he and his friends had lost power, unfair that, largely through his own hard work, a man he detested now sat in his dead brother’s chair. Interviewing him in 1967, Saul Bellow saw the origin of his ambitions: “He never for a moment stopped thinking about his brother. He seemed to be continually grieving. . . . He was literally, muscularly, tense about it. His face was convulsed with some great emotional charge. He was nourishing his grief. It gave him energy.” Bellow thought he never wanted it to die.

For the Kennedy family, the dynastic goal after Bobby’s death on June 6, 1968, became more than ever a burden: It is likely that, without the fierce pressure to run for president that descended upon him, Edward Kennedy would now be more slim and sober, his first wife would have been less self-destructive, and Mary Jo Kopechne would be alive today. Certainly the current political career of his son Patrick is a striking example of the temptations and traps of the dynastic dynamic, which can make a career out of practically nothing and destroy one’s private happiness at once.

Patrick never knew his uncle John, who was murdered four years before he was born. He was one year old when his uncle Robert was murdered, and two when the accident at Chappaquiddick doomed his father’s presidential hopes. His mother was a severe alcoholic, his father an intermittent one; their marriage broke down when Patrick was seven and ended formally when he was thirteen. Through his childhood, he suffered fierce bouts of asthma, and he entered a program for drug and alcohol abuse in his late teens.

After dropping out of Georgetown because of “the overwhelming presence of my family in Washington,” he went to Providence College — and then startled everyone by running for the Rhode Island General Assembly. Politics, said an observer, “had one virtue that Patrick found desirable. It provided structure, and gave him people who organized his life.”

Darrell M. West’s recent Patrick Kennedy: The Rise to Power is useful, but shallow and partisan. It takes at face value Patrick Kennedy’s faith (not shared by his two most famous uncles) in the expanding welfare state and his view that, under a Republican Congress, centuries of progress in the human rights area “are under constant threat of being eroded and dismantled every single day.” Worse, West seems determined to portray Patrick Kennedy as a more-or-less normal politician, while the truth is that his career has been based wholly on the family money that got him elected and the money that can be wrung by the family name out of gullible donors.

In Patrick’s first race, photogenic members of his famous family stood outside the polls to have their pictures taken with voters before they went in to pull the lever. “His campaign was an all-Kennedy affair, complete with appearances by JFK Jr. and Patrick’s father,” Robert Dreyfuss wrote in the Nation. “Patrick spent $ 87,000 to win the part-time, $ 300 a year position.” When Patrick ran for Congress in 1994, the entire dynasty helped him. “Star-studded fund-raisers . . . included numerous Kennedys and friends like . . . Sargent Shriver, Pierre Salinger, Jack Valenti, and Tip O’Neill, helping Patrick amass $ 1 million.”

In 1998 he reached the House leadership, being named chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, less for any political talents than for wringing huge sums of cash out of liberal donors, by touching the sacred chords of Kennedy memory. He has created a club for $ 100,000-plus donors, whom he invites to picnics at the family estate. “What Kennedy excels in is raising money,” writes Michael Barone in The Almanac of American Politics. “He is probably the single biggest draw at fund-raisers around the country.”

When they first reached Congress at the start of 1947, both John Kennedy and Richard Nixon were picked out by party leaders as spokesmen and as possible presidents. No such assessments have come Patrick’s way. “My strengths are not being a legislative titan,” he once admitted. “My strengths are not being taken that seriously on the substance side.” Despite his fast rise and current celebrity, this fact may now be weighing on the young man who has always worried that he wasn’t “Kennedy enough.” He revealed last fall that the pressures of being a Kennedy caused him to suffer anxiety and depression.

Among those electioneering in Patrick’s first race was his cousin John F. Kennedy Jr., though, as observers noted, he seemed half-hearted, and had to be pushed into doing his job. Later, he sought out the assemblyman Patrick had challenged to say, “I don’t like being here. I don’t think it’s fair for me to be here. . . . The only reason I’m here is for my cousin. But I don’t believe in it.”

From stories like this, and details in The Day John Died by Christopher Andersen, it becomes clear that this most courted of heirs to Camelot spent his short life trying to avoid the kind of career his cousin Patrick embraced. Stunningly handsome, appallingly rich, heir to his mother’s glamour as well as to the mystique of the father he could not remember, this most striking of all the grandsons of Joseph P. Kennedy seemed terribly wary of being too tempted by even more fame than he had already, of being made use of by other people, and of being steamrollered into doing something he might not want.

John’s cousins, the senator’s sons, were brought up in largely political households. The president’s son was raised in a more private setting, by a mother who attempted to forearm him. She sent him to survival camps and to work on ranches while she minimized his exposure to the raucous Kennedy kin. What once seemed charming — if hectic — in the Kennedys now appeared toxic and threatening. (“One of the big decisions Jackie made in her life was to get the children . . . away from the Kennedys,” said her friend Peter Duchin. “One summer, Jackie sent John on a diving expedition to Micronesia. . . . She said to me, ‘Do you think that’s far enough away?'”)

Pursued all his life by political suitors, JFK Jr. learned early on to evade them. He led them on with his appearance at the 1988 Democratic convention, but then withdrew, uncertain of what he wanted but sure enough of what he did not want. “I have a slightly contrarian impulse I can’t seem to shake,” Andersen quotes him. “It’s always sort of fun to try and play with blocks and see what you can come up with that’s a little bit different.”

What he came up with was George, a magazine mixing dazzle and politics, that may have mirrored his experience of life. It surprised many by being relatively non-partisan. Would he ever have gone into electoral politics? He defined himself as having an inquisitive, as opposed to a partisan, temperament. Friends think he would have been reluctant to give up what little remained of his privacy or to take something he did not think he had earned. When he died last year at thirty-eight in a plane crash, he was apparently still toying with the idea of running for an executive post, such as mayor or governor. A friend of his said that he and Senator Al D’Amato “tried to convince John to run for mayor of New York City — as a Republican. It was in jest at first, but John was really thinking it over. In many ways, John was quite conservative . . . more of a Republican than a Democrat. He had such a sense of what was appropriate behavior — John knew right from wrong.”

What John Jr. seemed to realize is that a family connection, without some defining vision of one’s own, can sustain only a small life in politics. His father had followed his father’s wishes to take up a life in politics. But JFK became a leader — and legend — only when he defined his own public persona apart from his father and different from what his older brother’s would have been. Robert Kennedy became a powerful figure only when he found his own voice. Ted Kennedy could not appeal to a national audience, even with the nostalgia for two murdered brothers. Nor could Bobby’s sons.

It is notable that the one rising star in the Kennedy family now is Kathleen Kennedy Townsend — who was never brought up to be president, did not use family fanfare, did not run in a “Kennedy state,” lost her first race for Congress, and paid her dues while toiling in dull government jobs.

An instant career, based on one’s relatives’ fame, can seem very appealing. But like most presents, it never comes free.

A frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Noemie Emery is a writer in Alexandria, Virginia.