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Patrick's friends say the setbacks have liberated him from the expectations that have defined his political career. "Not just the expectations of others," says an adviser, "but the expectations of his own family." Last year, for the first time in his life, Patrick passed up an advancement opportunity, opting not to run for the seat left open by Senator John Chafee's death. For now, he says, "I've gotta be in my own skin." He says he feels "free from having to cringe. There's no sense hiding anything, because it's all out there. It makes you honest about your frailties, because guess what? You've got to get to a place where you can deal with them. There's no running away from them in this business."
THE QUEST FOR IDENTITY JOE KENNEDY II/MAX KENNEDY
To be a successful Kennedy in public life, it helps to have already come to terms with what it means to be a Kennedy in private life. Both Joe II, the firstborn male of the third generation, and Max, the younger brother born too late to know his father as anything but an icon, seemed to feel entitled to hold office. But they learned the hard way that modern politics spits out Kennedys who don't make the grade.
Matthew Maxwell Taylor Kennedy was three when R.F.K. was assassinated. Born the ninth of 11 children, he grew up in the sad, chaotic shrine that was Hickory Hill. Ethel, Robert's widow, was intent on keeping his memory alive through her children. "The R.F.K.s had a very different [experience]," William Kennedy Smith says of his cousins. "There is an enormous focus there on that legacy that perhaps other branches of the family don't quite have to deal with as much."
But it was the darker Kennedy storylines that Ethel's unruly boys often followed, with their recklessness and substance abuse. There was a lost quality to affable, flaky Max. He told interviewer Matt Bai that in reading the 1958 psychoanalytical text The Quest for Identity, he saw himself.
Max's quest drew him to Bobby. He became curator of R.F.K.'s papers and pored over his father's book collection to see which parts had been underlined. Eventually, he compiled Bobby's best speeches and favorite passages into a book, Make Gentle the Life of This World: The Vision of Robert F. Kennedy. "Obviously, this project is an attempt to make whole a part of myself," he told the Palm Beach Post. But Max insisted he was not interested in bearing the weight of his father's legacy. "Carrying the torch?" he said. "That is so not me."
At least not until Joe Moakley, South Boston's beloved 15-term Congressman, announced last February that he was dying of leukemia. Max had bounced around the country from Los Angeles to Philadelphia, but in the carpetbagging Kennedy tradition, he suddenly bought a five-bedroom colonial in Moakley's blue-collar district. Patrick arranged for his cousin to have an audience with Moakley. Max tapped the Kennedy union connections, fund-raising network and advisers. Almost overnight, he became the presumed front runner in a potential field that included at least half a dozen seasoned pols.