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But quite a few of them also inherited a sense of entitlement that edged into recklessness and worse. They played daredevil games with one another and other people that led to tragedies like the 1973 accident in which Joe Kennedy III, Bobby's eldest son, overturned a Jeep, leaving one of his passengers, a young woman, paralyzed for life. They sauntered into episodes like William Kennedy Smith's night on the town with his Uncle Ted, which ended with the encounter that left Smith accused (and ultimately acquitted) of rape.
Bobby's children grew up fatherless, and some of them grew up fast and hard. His second son, Robert Jr., ran into drug problems early and was arrested for heroin possession in 1983, just a few weeks after he finally passed the bar exam. He was given two years of probation and ordered to spend time in community service. Bobby Jr., now a much respected environmental lawyer and activist, put the problem behind him. His younger brother David was not so lucky. For days after his father was murdered, David, who was 12 at the time, did not speak a word. Later he complained that no one in his family would talk to him about his father's death.
By his teens, David was struggling with a drug problem. His brother Robert Jr. gave him his first tab of mescaline at 13, and 10 years later he was mugged in a sleazy Harlem hotel that was known as a drug supermarket and shooting gallery. It was David's girlfriend Pam who was paralyzed in his brother's Jeep accident. Although the family repeatedly sent David to rehab, in 1984 he died of an overdose of cocaine, Demerol and Mellaril in a hotel room near the Kennedy compound in Palm Beach, Fla.
Michael, Bobby's fourth son, was 10 when his father died. For most of his life, if he turned up in the news at all, it was for work such as heading a nonprofit company that provided heating oil to homeless shelters in Boston or for his marriage to Victoria Gifford, the daughter of the sportscaster and football hero Frank Gifford. Michael didn't make real headlines until 1997, when he was accused of having conducted a five-year affair with a girl who baby-sat for his three children. The girl was 14 when the affair began.
Soon after Kennedy and his wife separated, in 1997, the Boston Globe reported that Victoria had found Michael in bed with the girl two years earlier. He had claimed then that heavy drinking was at the root of it all and entered rehab, but sobriety didn't improve his judgment much. The relationship continued until the girl left for college. When the story broke, Michael resigned as campaign chairman for the gubernatorial bid that his brother Joe had planned; a few months later, Joe announced that he was leaving the race. But something worse than humiliation was in store. On New Year's Eve 1997, while playing football on skis with his cousins on the slopes of Aspen, Colo., Michael was killed when he struck a fir tree head on. He was 39.
It was Michael's sister Rory who cradled his head as he lay dying that night, crying, "Stay with us, Michael!" and trying vainly to save him with mouth-to-mouth resuscitation while his children cried and prayed by his side. And it was Rory, 30, a documentary filmmaker, whose wedding John Jr. and his wife were headed for when their plane went down. Big weddings are part of the Kennedy-family tradition. And as she would know, so are untimely goodbyes.