The Curse
For an American dynasty, tragedy tumbles on the heels of joy and triumph. Last week it happened again
Yet his focus on the magazine, a slick, breezy concoction that sought to package politics-as-entertainment, reflected larger reality. Over the years, the Kennedy clan has become less a purely political dynasty than an extension and symbol of America's celebrity cult. Politics remains in the family's blood, of course: Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is Maryland's popular lieutenant governor, and Representative Patrick Kennedy is a rising force in Congress. But political life is not the course of choice anymore, as it was when Joseph P. Kennedy, the late patriarch of the clan, pushed his sons into elective office and used his connections and vast wealth to help JFK win the White House in 1960.
Star-crossed. While the Kennedys have been star-crossed, other political dynasties have suffered their share of tragedy and personal setbacks. Even though President John Adams's son, John Quincy, went on to become president, his eldest son, George Washington Adams, died under bizarre circumstances after having apparent hallucinations during a steamboat trip at age 27. Quentin, one of Theodore Roosevelt's sons, died in World War I. Franklin Roosevelt contracted polio when he was 39. George Bush lost a daughter, Robin, to leukemia.
But it is the Kennedy family, far more than any other political dynasty, that has endured the worst that life can mete out. Perhaps that is why the tortured road that the Kennedys have traveled has been so illuminating for the rest of us and why John F. Kennedy Jr.'s fate meant so much to so many. It reminds us of our own vulnerability, illustrating once again that even a family so steeped in wealth and privilege cannot protect itself from ultimate and unexplainable tragedy.
John Jr. might have seemed the least likely to fall into the pattern of tragedy. He was not one of the members of the family who tempted fate in dramatic ways. Many of his cousins, especially the children of Robert and Ethel Kennedy, wanted to live at the edge and do daring, even reckless, things. John and Caroline were more sedate, in part, because their mother insisted on it.
His prominence in America's bizarre, ludicrous, and altogether unavoidable celebrity culture was driven home in 1988--long before he had really achieved much of anything on his own--when People magazine named him the "sexiest man alive." Americans knew little or nothing about the fallen president's only son, except for his sculpted, movie-star looks and a seeming quiet dignity that produced a penchant for privacy and led him to refuse to enter elective politics.
John Kennedy Jr. most often stood slightly to the side and did not participate much when the Kennedy cousins, the grandchildren of Joseph and Rose Kennedy, would talk about the terrors they felt watching their uncles and fathers fall as martyrs. Younger than most of his cousins, he would listen intently as they talked about what they felt as children and teenagers as disasters struck the family.
Madman. The Kennedy narrative of tragedy was well articulated by Michael Kennedy (himself later killed in another tragedy) and Ted Kennedy Jr. (who lost a leg to cancer as a young teenager). When President Kennedy was slain by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas in 1963, the event was horrific but, in an odd way, understood and explained. It was the act of a madman who singled out heroic Uncle Jack in his quest to alter history or simply to gain notoriety for some twisted purpose. But Michael would say that the murder of his father, Robert F. Kennedy, brought a different order of terror. "It was as if fate had turned against us," Michael would say. "There was now a pattern that could not be ignored."
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