The Curse
For an American dynasty, tragedy tumbles on the heels of joy and triumph. Last week it happened again
The surprise is that it was not surprising. At a moment of family bliss--the wedding of Bobby's youngest daughter--the Kennedy family has been punished again, leaving a nation grown perversely accustomed to gawking at one family's unending melodrama to wonder if it was accidental, reckless, or simply inevitable.
Just miles from the place where his Uncle Ted drove off the Chappaquiddick bridge and into the rolls of political infamy almost exactly 30 years ago, John F. Kennedy Jr. disappeared. Seven members of the American political dynasty have died in tragic circumstances in the last half century. The aptly mysterious crash of the single-engine Piper Saratoga he was piloting to Martha's Vineyard became the latest of more than a dozen calamitous events that have scourged the family and those who associated with them. In addition to Kennedy, his wife, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, and her sister Lauren were on board when the plane disappeared from radar screens late Friday night and fell into the Atlantic Ocean south of the Massachusetts resort island.
The pattern has repeated itself with startling regularity. Every happiness is overshadowed by tragedy. And every tragedy followed by another. John, elected president--then shot down in his prime. His brother, Bobby, on the verge of victory--assassinated as he celebrated. But it goes back further than that. The oldest brother--Joe Jr., a hero who they said had the most promise of all--killed on a mission during World War II. A beloved sister, dead in another plane crash.
So, it seemed almost ordained that a wedding--a celebration of new life together--would turn into a dark and somber deathwatch for this family, blessed and cursed all at once. The wedding was postponed. In its place--the expectation of a funeral for another of its young and promising members: John F. Kennedy Jr. It was almost too much to imagine that the small boy huddled under his father's desk in the White House and, later, bravely saluting at his funeral, was gone. That this time he would be the one mourned.
Beautiful people. As the Coast Guard scoured the waters and search planes crisscrossed the skies, the nation hoped against hope. But the time ticked agonizingly away, and there was less and less hope that the three beautiful people in the Piper would be found alive. Still, it seemed impossible to accept, and there persisted the same groundless rumors that people wanted to believe in 1963 after JFK was shot--and already dead. The reports, like the one that , perhaps, John F. Kennedy Jr.'s plane had landed on some remote farmland on Long Island. And the hope that perhaps he'd suddenly show up on the beach in all his sinewy splendor and wonder what the fuss was about. But that was not to be.
The latest tragedy struck one of the best and brightest members of the family just as life seemed most promising. The martyred president's only son was by all accounts content in his storybook marriage and pleased with his offbeat political magazine, George--although it was struggling with financial losses. He was, says longtime family adviser Bob Shrum, "very much his own person--who could have done almost anything he wanted in elective politics." Many friends assumed that one day, JFK Jr. would seek elective office--but at his own pace. "He wanted to define his own niche, and make his own way," says Shrum.
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."
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."
Indeed, John Jr. called his cousins to task for their reckless behavior, branding them "poster boys for bad behavior" in the pages of his magazine. It was right after Joe's remarriage and when Michael was caught having an affair with his children's nanny. In a remarkable editorial, Kennedy mused not only on his cousins failings but on the outraged public reaction: "Perhaps they deserved it. Perhaps they should have known better. To whom much is given, much is expected, right? The interesting thing was the ferocious condemnation of their excursions beyond the bounds of acceptable behavior. Since when does someone need to apologize on television for getting divorced?
"But perhaps there was some comfort in watching the necessary order assert itself. The discontents of civilized life look positively benign when compared with the holy terror visited upon the brave and stupid."
In the end, the boys made up and went back to being Kennedys. Those that were left were looking forward to being together for a sunny wedding on Martha's Vineyard. There were no comments coming from the family, which remained secluded in their vacation homes Saturday afternoon. But an appropriate sentiment came from an earlier interview with Ted Kennedy Jr. "You try not to think about it--to dwell on it--all the time," he said during his father's 1980 run for the presidency. "But it still sits there in your life. My father always tried to teach us that you can't let it defeat you. And he'd talk all the time about the things that had happened to my grandmother [Rose Kennedy] and point out how she kept moving ahead. 'You can't let the bad things win,' my father and my aunts and uncles would say."
LEGACY OF LOSSES
More tragedies than make sense
Since World War II, the Kennedy family has been plagued by a series of disasters that, taken together, stretch the bounds of coincidence
1944. Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. perishes in plane crash during World War II, at the age of 29.
1948. Kathleen Kennedy, daughter of Joseph and Rose, dies in plane crash at age 28.
1963. August 7. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy gives birth to son, Patrick, six weeks prematurely; he dies two days later.
1963. November 22. John F. Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas.
1964. June 19. Edward M. Kennedy is seriously injured in a plane crash; an aide is killed.
1968. June 5. Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated in Los Angeles.
1969. July 18. Edward M. Kennedy drives a car off a bridge on Massachusetts's Chappaquiddick Island. Aide Mary Jo Kopechne is later discovered dead in the submerged car.
1973. Joseph Kennedy, son of Robert, runs his car off the road in an accident that leaves a female passenger permanently paralyzed.
1973. Edward M. Kennedy Jr.'s right leg is amputated because of cancer.
1984. David Kennedy, son of Robert F. Kennedy, dies of a drug overdose in a hotel in Palm Beach.
1985. Patrick Kennedy, son of Edward M. Kennedy, seeks treatment for cocaine addiction.
1991. William Kennedy Smith, nephew of Edward M. Kennedy, is accused of raping a woman at the family's Palm Beach estate. He is acquitted later that same year.
1997. Michael Kennedy, son of Robert, is accused of having an affair with his children's teenage baby sitter. He dies December 31, in a skiing accident in Aspen, Colo., his family at his side.
With Harrison Rainie, Gloria Borger and Lisa Stein
This story appears in the July 26, 1999 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.