SHE is a golden-haired Cinderella grown up, a fairy-tale heiress to a legacy of ambition and success, a curiosity, a sex symbol. As did Jackie and Ethel in their time and turn, Joan Kennedy has become a public personality in her own right. On the gilt and antique gristmill that is the Washington cocktail circuit, she has been no less a source of speculation in recent months than Teddy himself. One day, she is a shy, self-styled homebody. The next, she is playing the piano on nationwide television, or shocking Washington with dresses cut down to there or slit up to here. Asks one annoyed Democrat: "What is Joan Kennedy all about? Is she trying to make sure her husband does not get nominated?" -
When Joan arrived in Washington, the youngest—and some thought the prettiest—of the Kennedy wives, she entered the world of the Kennedys at its dazzling height. Now, nine years, two assassinations and a fatal accident later, that has all changed. She knows the hatred and passions the Kennedy name inspires, lives daily with the threats that come with unnerving frequency against her husband's life. "I don't want to be First Lady," she has said repeatedly, and her friends believe her. Says one intimate: "She is terrified that things are moving in such a way that Ted is going to wind up running. Terrified."
Still, she has acquired that Kennedy fatalism, and of her fears she says, "That's something you live with." She has made plain her view that the stakes are not worth the risks. "When Jack was in the White House," she says, "I saw what hard work it was. I don't see it as glamorous—it's everything that's unattractive." But if her husband decides to run, she will stand by him. "She is in awe of Ted," says a Kennedy cousin. "If he said, 'Jump,' she wouldn't argue or even ask why. She'd just ask, 'Head first or feet first?' "
Lissome, leggy, striking, Joan, 36, ought to be a visible asset to any campaign. On the hustings she does her part diligently. The last election, for Ted's re-election to the Senate in 1970, fought in the shadow of Chappaquiddick, was very clearly a strain on her; yet she gamely made the rounds of banquets and teas. Says Kathy Beatty, one of her closest friends: "I wondered for a while how she was going to get through those rough times, but she did it. That was when I felt she had moxie."