The rule used to be that as soon as someone named Kennedy let it be known that he was testing the political waters, they parted. The media anointed him the front runner, the competition scattered, and the campaign dollars rolled in. But last week the opposite happened. First, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that William Kennedy Smith was considering a run for Congress from a solidly Democratic North Chicago district; his consultants had been quietly assembling focus groups to determine whether voters would forgive or forget his 1991 trial on a rape charge, of which he was acquitted. But three days after the story broke, Smith backed out of the race, saying he still hoped "to have that honor and that experience at some point in my life." For Smith even to think about running was a leap, given the notoriety of his Palm Beach trial--the first media frenzy of the cable-news era. That he did think about it proves that the Kennedy sense of entitlement is alive and well in 2001--and that the family business still beguiles and beckons those who grew up in it, lived with its ghosts, and were scorched by its relentless scrutiny and boundless expectations.
Running was too big a risk--for Smith and for the family's aura of invincibility. (Only one family member, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, has ever lost a general election.) Smith is the fifth member of the clan this year to float a trial balloon, then pop it. Almost as many have entered races to stay. Four Kennedys by birth or marriage are running--two for Governor, two for Congress. Should they all prevail, there will be five family members in federal or statewide office--the most ever--including patriarch Ted Kennedy, who won an easy re-election last year and is at the height of his power in the Senate. Not bad for a dynasty that enjoyed its heyday before most living Americans were born.
The 559,000 people who stood in line to see the Jacqueline Kennedy show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City testify to the enduring power of Kennedy nostalgia, and the flock of Kennedy books coming this fall (and they come every fall, as surely as touch football and Cape Cod rain) demonstrate the family's enduring power in the marketplace (hot title: The Best-Loved Poems of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, by Caroline Kennedy). But that exhibit and those books summon the magic of departed Kennedys--J.F.K. and Jackie, R.F.K., J.F.K. Jr. The story of the new generation isn't about magic; it is about making peace with a myth that can kill you if you let it. The Kennedys have been downsized, not only by their frailties but also by what politics has become. Most of the third-generation cousins do public-service work that doesn't require voter approval. Tim Shriver runs the Special Olympics, Will Smith fights to ban land mines, and Rory Kennedy makes films about poverty, addiction and human rights. Robert Kennedy Jr. made headlines last month when he was jailed in Puerto Rico for breaking into a bombing range to protest U.S. military exercises on Vieques Island. While he was in prison, his wife Mary gave birth to their sixth child; they named him Aidan Caohman Vieques Kennedy. After Bobby returned home, he won a major battle in his long crusade to clean up the Hudson River. If such causes appear modest next to staring down the Russians, integrating the South or going to the moon, they are not. They are simply of their time.