A Supreme Sense of Entitlement

But blame does not rest exclusively, or even primarily, with Paterson: The origins of this embarrassing spectacle may be traced to the influence of the late Joseph P. Kennedy–and to a lesser extent his wife, Rose. For whatever else that successful Boston speculator/whiskey impresario/philanderer/movie magnate and his wife instilled in their numerous descendants, a supreme sense of entitlement, especially in politics, seems to have firmly taken root.

Consider Kennedy’s three politician sons, John, Robert, and Edward. Robert and John, with strikingly minimal qualifications, and temperaments ill-suited to legislative careers, supplanted two distinguished veteran Republican senators (Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., Kenneth Keating) in two separate states for the sake of their own national ambitions. Their younger brother Edward, barely 30 years old and already marked as the family delinquent, moved effortlessly into John’s seat–kept warm by a compliant tribal retainer–in 1962 by defeating Lodge’s son George, later a much-admired writer/professor at the Harvard Business School.

Like our new vice president, Teddy Kennedy has spent his adult life almost entirely in the Senate, and while he is celebrated as the “Lion of the Senate” during his terminal illness, his place in the history books is undoubtedly secured by his status as the driver of the Oldsmobile 88 that plunged off Dike Bridge at Chappaquiddick, drowning his female passenger, in 1969.

In the 40 years since that memorable night, the Kennedy fortunes in politics have fallen surprisingly low, and may be said to be near extinction. It is sometimes difficult to discern this interesting fact, inasmuch as the popular culture has never ceased to be entranced by the spectacle of the ever-expanding family, and the journalistic-academic world has ascribed to them all manner of impressive capacities and civic virtues even as the blood runs distressingly thin.

Here a quick glance at some of Robert’s children is instructive. One of them, David, died of a drug overdose in Palm Beach just a year after another, Robert Jr., was arrested for possession of heroin at the Rapid City, S.D., airport. Courtney’s second husband was an Irish Republican Army militant named Paul Hill. Max, who had threatened to run for Congress in California, began campaigning for a House seat in Massachusetts but ceased his efforts when, in his first public appearance, “he scratched his head, giggled nervously, lost his place several times and misnamed at least one member of the U.S. Supreme Court,” according to the Los Angeles Times. The fact that, as a student at Harvard, he had assaulted a campus policeman didn’t help, either.

Michael was in the midst of accusations of having sexual intercourse with his children’s teenaged babysitter when he was killed in a skiing accident. Joseph II, the great hope of the family after his father’s murder, was elected to Congress from Massachusetts in 1986 and served six terms, but enjoyed a reputation for bumptiousness rather than statesmanship, and is probably best known for his penchant for befriending Caribbean tyrants (Jean-Paul Aristide of Haiti and, more recently, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela). His sister Kathleen arrived in Maryland in 1986, promptly ran for Congress, and was defeated. A decade later she served two terms as lieutenant governor on the ticket with Governor Parris Glendening, but lost her own 2002 campaign for governor–in a state with an overhwelming Democratic edge in registration.

As it happens, the various personal disasters, rape trials, Ivy League diplomas, abortive annulments, air catastrophes, and exhaustive press coverage that have characterized the Kennedy saga in our time have obscured the fact that, at this moment, only two members of the family (apart from Teddy) are in public office: Arnold Schwarzenegger, a mere in-law who is also a Republican, and Teddy’s younger son, Patrick, whose history is sadly emblematic.

Having washed out of Georgetown and retreated to Providence College, Patrick was elected to the Rhode Island legislature while pursuing his undergraduate career, then in due course was elevated to Congress. He was, at first, taken up by the minority leader, Richard Gephardt, as a Democratic fundraising device; but his own peculiar demons–vandalizing a rented yacht, abusing an airport employee, crashing his car into a police barrier in the dead of night while en route to an imaginary House vote–soon reduced him to laughingstock status in the nation’s capital, and deprived him of Gephardt’s patronage. Poor Patrick is now condemned to life tenure in the lower chamber, on behalf of Rhode Island, where his (now publicly acknowledged) manic depression has made him a pharmaceutical role model.

When John F. Kennedy Jr. crashed his private plane into Long Island Sound, killing himself, his wife, and his sister-in-law in 1999, it was said that John, publisher of the now-defunct George magazine, was considering politics and assessing his presidential prospects. No one says such things about Patrick.

As with the hapless Patrick, the most impressive aspect of Caroline Kennedy’s brief campaign for appointment was its sheer presumption. Some have argued, with scant evidence, that her sex had something to do with the collapse of her effort–that she was held to some undefined double standard–and that a male member of the Kennedy family would have prevailed.

This argument is difficult to take seriously, however, when even so mild-mannered an observer of the process as the Washington Post‘s David Broder could describe the transcript of her debut interview with the New York Times as “so studded with ‘you knows’ and broken sentences as to invite a Tina Fey imitation.” The sad truth is that the elaborately crafted persona–the saccharine mystique, Harvard imprint, coauthored books, well-advertised noblesse oblige–disguised a woman with no claim to a Senate seat apart from her maiden name, unwilling to present herself for election to voters, and demanding a plum that, as a Kennedy, she had every reason to expect would fall in her lap.

Philip Terzian is literary editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.