The Curse
For an American dynasty, tragedy tumbles on the heels of joy and triumph. Last week it happened again
Sometimes young Ted Jr. would remember that the second assassination was the one that convinced him his own father would be slain. "I hated to have him leave the house," he recalled years later. "I feared he would never return." Young Ted often wept inconsolably as his father left the home for his work in the Senate. Their friends and cousins guessed that John Kennedy Jr. and his sister, Caroline, had a similar sense that the hand of God had swung against them, though they did not nearly as often talk about it and never put it in quite those terms. "John was so young when his father died and he was not quite as swept up in the Bobby and Ethel clan that he was as devastated as some of his cousins," recalled one childhood friend. "He also didn't connect as readily with the gloomy Irish part of it, either."
Kennedy stuff. Instead, John had a wry sense of what his fame meant. It was built on tragic events and the projections of hundreds of millions of global citizens who were aware of the Kennedy story. John had a sense of distance from it that made him different from some of his mates. As a young adult, he was asked after a long family summertime reunion how things had gone at Hyannis Port, Mass. John smiled and said, "Aw. It was a lot of 'Kennedy' stuff. It was a bit much for me." Still, he adored his family and reveled in their company, especially as an adult. He and his sister, Caroline, were given a bye on lots of family activities when they were young, in great measure because their mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, had wanted it that way. She craved normalcy and the greatest level of anonymity possible for her children. But as he grew older, John Jr. rebelled in mild form by embracing celebrity, toying with it, exploiting it for his purposes, and mixing it up with his cousins. One friend recalled watching an exchange between Jackie and her boy. She worried, good-naturedly, that the other Kennedys "are so wild." "But mother," he grinned back, "that's the fun of it."
It was this sense that a particular doom hung over the family that pervaded the lives of the 29 grandchildren of Joseph and Rose Kennedy during the period they were growing up. "When Daddy died, there was some feeling [among the older cousins] of 'what the hell, we're all marked by a curse,' " Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in the early 1980s. Bobby Jr. and some of his peers simply went crazy for much of that period. There were drugs and uncontrolled behavior and a reckless goading of everyone at the front of the pack. "It was completely out of control," says one Hyannis Port acquaintance. "Nothing could stop them and few people tried." But John and Caroline did not run with their cousins during the worst periods. They were held apart by their mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. "I had the feeling John was interested a bit in what his older cousins were doing, but he knew they were heading for a fall."
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