David Anthony Kennedy: 1955-1984
The sheer longevity of the Kennedy melodrama is astonishing. Some Americans have grown weary of the spectacle, of course, the high American soap opera verging now and then upon Greek tragedy, and of the cruelly ingenious turns that the story takes. But there is something fascinating and emblematic about the family still. For a long time it dramatized the American possibilities of self-invention—old Joe Kennedy by sheer will contriving to raise up a President, to start a dynasty. But after Joe Jr., and John, and Robert, the darker, the converse American principle intruded upon the drama, the principle that tends toward disintegration and failure, toward annihilation.
Last week a new generation of Kennedys trudged into that complexity. The long lens caught their photogenic Irish-American faces, eyes all downcast at the same angle of mourning, some shirtsleeves rolled up, a shirttail out the way that Bobby's sometimes was. The cousins walked up Hickory Hill bearing one of their own, David Anthony Kennedy, Robert and Ethel's fourth child, their third son. Except for infant deaths years ago, David, at 28, was the first of the new generation to die.
It was a Kennedy death that was different. When John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, theirs were the public deaths of public men brought down in the enactment of large public dramas. The same aura surrounded the death of the first Kennedy brother, Joseph Jr., killed in a plane explosion while on a secret military mission from England in 1944.
David died alone in a hotel room in Palm Beach, a sad and private capitulation to drugs and confusion and an unappeasable grief. The burden to which he was heir was not the burden of public service and sacrifice, but the (for him) unbearable burden of being a Kennedy. And the burden of an appetite for drugs that he could not control. Yet though his death was miserably private, being a Kennedy he also became a public example, a sermon against drugs that parents will preach to their children for months hence.
David had tried, off and on for years, to get free of drugs. Not long ago he completed a course of treatment at St. Mary's Rehabilitation Center in Minneapolis. Just before the Easter weekend, David flew down to Palm Beach to spend the holiday with his ailing 93-year-old grandmother Rose and other members of the family, including Caroline Kennedy. He did not stay at the oceanside Kennedy winter mansion on North Ocean Boulevard, but checked into a $150-a-night room at the Brazilian Court Hotel, a rambling three-story place five miles away.
It seemed to be a quiet stay. David visited his grandmother every day and went to Mass with the family on Easter Sunday. By most accounts, David behaved himself. Said Hotel Owner Dennis Heffernan: "He swam more than once every day. I would see him three or four times a day. He did have a few drinks at the bar, but no more than anyone else, not an unusual amount. I never saw him take a misstep, never saw him stagger or anything."