The first time John Kennedy Jr. registered in the national imagination, he was at the side of a coffin. On his third birthday, holding a flag and saluting his murdered father, he was already mastering the Kennedy protocol of premature farewells, the leave-takings that are nearly as much a family tradition as touch football and big weddings. The assassination of J.F.K. seemed to many people the terrible culmination of a Kennedy-family saga that began in the ambitions of father Joe. It turned out instead to be just the most spectacular episode in a family history littered with misfortunes: plane crashes and assassinations, overturned cars and drug overdoses, death by gun and death over water.
Some of these tragedies came unbidden, like the assassinations and the plane crashes. Some were partly self-inflicted, like the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick, which happened 30 years almost to the day that J.F.K. Jr.'s plane went down in waters not far from there. Taken together, they make a chain of mishaps that has shadowed the Kennedy name for more than a half-century. But when John and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, their death seemed, if nothing else, at least commensurate with the drama and weight of their public life. When their children die prematurely, it can seem almost as if fate were picking them off for sport.
The mystique of the Kennedy curse is such that even one of the clan's own members, Chris Lawford, the son of Peter Lawford and Pat Kennedy, could say once, "The Kennedy story is really about karma, about people who broke the rules and were ultimately broken by them." The story begins with the son of a Boston saloonkeeper, Joseph P. Kennedy, the founding father who became chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and ambassador to Britain. By 1957, he had also assembled a $100 million fortune, some of it in ways that were not entirely wholesome, including bootlegging during Prohibition. But his ambitions went much further than mere wealth. At his 25th Harvard reunion, he described his occupation as "public affairs," and to that end he single-mindedly directed the destiny of his four sons.
Joe's first choice to accomplish the family's ascent to real power was his eldest, Joe Jr. When Jack Kennedy made the papers for his exploits as skipper of PT-109, the father sent the press clippings to Joe Jr., then a 29-year-old naval air lieutenant, to provoke him into getting started on his own heroic legend. It worked all too well. In the summer of 1944, Joe Jr. volunteered to fly a plane loaded with explosives into a Nazi missile site. The plan was for him to bail out before the plane struck its target. Instead he was killed when the plane exploded prematurely over the English Channel. It was later discovered that the missile sites Joe Jr. was supposed to destroy had been abandoned by the Germans some time before his flight.
The senior Joe Kennedy had already in effect lost his eldest daughter Rosemary, who was mentally disabled. Kennedy biographers still argue over how serious her disabilities were. But in 1941, without consulting his wife Rose, Joe decided to subject Rosemary to a prefrontal lobotomy that left her deeply retarded. Rosemary, now 80, has been institutionalized ever since. In 1948 another daughter, Kathleen, died in a plane crash over France after her companion urged their pilot to fly through bad weather.