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But it was Joe Jr.'s death that unnerved the elder Kennedy most completely. Not long after the disaster, the family received a letter that their son had posted just before he died. Rose Kennedy later recalled that "Joe simply threw the letter on the table and collapsed in his chair with his head in his hand, saying over and over that nothing would ever be the same again."
It would never be the same either for Jack, who inherited the burden of his father's ambitions and bore them to Congress, then to the White House and finally to Dallas. J.F.K. once said that "just as I went into politics when Joe died, if anything happened to me tomorrow, my brother Bobby would run for my seat. And if anything happened to him, my brother Teddy would run for us." After the assassination, however, R.F.K. entered a long and deep depression. "Without Ethel," a friend once said, "Bobby might well have gone off the deep end." He found some solace in Sophocles and Aeschylus, but it was only in March 1965, when he scaled Mount Kennedy, the 13,900-ft. Yukon peak, that he was able to overcome his own darkness.
And when Bobby was shot, it was Ted who seemed to go numb. A Kennedy aide recalled Ted in Bobby's hospital bathroom, "leaning over the washbasin, his hands clutching the sides, his head bowed... I never expect, for the rest of my life, to see more agony on anyone's face." Ted had already grown weary of politics and was emotionally spent. He confided to a friend that what he really wanted was to set sail around the Caribbean with his family and enjoy life, a fantasy Jack used to have. Close friends started to question his emotional state, watching his mood swings and his distracted conversations. More and more people began talking about his drinking habits, predicting that his love of the fast life would end badly.
By the time he had to bury Bobby, in June 1968, the 79-year-old Joe Sr. was so distraught that he did not go to the funeral. If he was able to transfer his hopes to Ted, it was not for long. The next summer brought Chappaquiddick, which seemed to doom Ted's chance for the White House. When Ted told his father about it, the ailing old man, already made speechless by a stroke, simply dropped his head to his chest. By November of that year, he was dead.
But if there really is a Kennedy curse, by now it may be nothing more complicated than the burden of growing up under the weight of the family legend. The third generation of Kennedys once included 29 cousins. Like his sister Caroline, John Jr. managed to carry his celebrity lightly, acknowledging the claims of his ancestry without being burdened by them. He even went to Brown University to avoid the mythic baggage of being a Kennedy at Harvard. And many of the Kennedy cousins inherited the public-spiritedness of their parents' generation. Bobby's daughter Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is Maryland's Lieutenant Governor. Ted's son Patrick is a Congressman from Rhode Island.