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That night, only hours later, Bobby Kennedy was giving his victory speech in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. David Kennedy was sitting up late, alone in his hotel room, watching. He was doubtless in a daze of pride and gratitude and excitement. The television cameras followed Bobby Kennedy off the platform and back through the hotel kitchen toward an elevator. As David watched on TV, Sirhan Sirhan shot his father in the head. The cameras focused interminably on the chaos, on the body and the head lying in a pool of blood. In the confusion, no one came to check on David for several hours. When Astronaut John Glenn and Author Theodore White at last discovered him, David was sitting before the television set, unable to speak.
David never recovered. There was a profound emotional undertow in his life, and his father was not there to help him. If he found being a Kennedy difficult before, with all of the competition and crushing expectations, he now saw the price that his father had paid, that they all had paid, for that identity, and his soul seems to have recoiled from what he was. David began experimenting with drugs not too long after the assassination. In a new book that Ted Kennedy's press secretary has bitterly denounced, Authors Peter Collier and David Horowitz offer a procession of harrowing stories not only about David's adventures with drugs but also about those of his older brother Bobby and cousin Chris Lawford. According to Horowitz and Collier, David began to shoot heroin in the fall of 1973, his senior year at Middlesex School in Concord, Mass.
David managed to get admitted to Harvard in 1974, but he dropped out of college two years later. He completed a term at Harvard last fall, but took the spring term off to take stock of his life. One night in 1979, he went to Harlem in his BMW, presumably to buy drugs. He was mugged in the lobby of a sleazy hotel.
David ended up in Massachusetts General Hospital with bacterial endocarditis, an infection of the lining of the heart. It is sometimes caused by using dirty needles to inject drugs. After that, according to Collier and Horowitz, a psychiatrist agreed to prescribe the painkiller Percodan in order to keep him away from heroin. David took up other drugs as well—cocaine and Dilaudid. Bobby was arrested in South Dakota last year for possession of heroin, and entered a drug-treatment program.
Ethel Kennedy had eleven children to raise. She did what she could with David and with Bobby. But something in the vigorous family ethic that had driven the second generation now came unhinged in at least part of the third. Bobby Kennedy's assassination may have shaken down the superego, the dynastic sense of discipline, and let loose something anarchic and despairing. David, brilliant and gifted in many ways, seems to have felt an orphan's lostness.
When he received the news of David's death last week, Ted Kennedy issued a statement that expressed the gripping sadness: "All of us loved him very much. With trust in God, we all pray that David has finally found the peace that he did not find in life."