The Fall of the House of Kennedy

Michael Skakel and a dynsaty's decay.

Last week a Connecticut jury convicted Michael Skakel of the murder, in 1975, of a neighbor, Martha Moxley. Skakel is the nephew of Ethel Skakel Kennedy and the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and his disgrace forces an American dynasty to perform the delicate task of expressing support for a relative without appearing to condone a crime.

The family, however, has experience in these matters, and the case is not nearly as difficult as that of the death of Mary Jo Kopechne on Martha's Vineyard in 1969. There, the reputation of the family's scion, Ted Kennedy, was on the anvil. Kennedy courtiers hurried to Hyannis Port to devise a strategy that would preserve the senator's ability to run for president in the future. It would not be easy. The Kennedy prince had, like Henry II after the murder of Becket, to do a certain amount of self-flagellation, but not so much as to unfit himself for public office in the process.





There are two aspects to Kennedy damage control. There are, first, certain rituals to be performed in the public eye, the sad-eyed statements of sorrow, the talk of finding meaning in tragedy. And there are, second, the knottier questions about the way the incidents in question will affect the family's pursuits and ambitions--how, for example, the murder conviction of a cousin will effect Kathleen Kennedy Townsend's race for governor of Maryland or Andrew Cuomo's race for governor of New York. (Mr. Cuomo is married to RFK's daughter Kerry). The Kennedy faithful need to know what to tell the press when they are asked about the conviction's effect on the family's morale. There is, in any Kennedy crisis, the public text, and the more quietly disseminated subtext.
The subtext here may well be that "Michael Skakel isn't really a Kennedy." He isn't even what Garry Wills and Victor Navasky called an "honorary Kennedy," one of those pals who play a prominent part in the family's political endeavors. Taxonomists of Kennedy misbehavior will catalogue his vices in the subcategory of Skakel misdeeds, which are legion, but which differ in character from Kennedy malfeasances.

George Skakel, Michael's grandfather, was a Dutch Protestant who made a fortune in petroleum coke; his wife, Ann Brannack, was a Roman Catholic of Irish descent. Their children were high-spirited, the brothers in particular somewhat wild. But the wildness of Greenwich, Conn., in the 1940s--air rifles and stunts with cars--looks innocent in retrospect, and in any event was not, like so many of the Kennedy misdeeds, intertwined with political power. The wildness had apparently progressed, by the 1970s, to the pathological point where a neighbor could be bludgeoned to death; but it had nothing to do, as some of the Kennedy improprieties have, with the corrupting effects of power.

The real tragedy for the Kennedys is not so much that, three decades after Chappaquiddick, they are still obliged to manage family crises as though they were affairs of state, but that this business of packaging their tragedies for public consumption has become their most visible occupation. In the past, the family tragedies, whether noble or sordid, formed the underplot; the larger story was always the family's devotion to public service. But the various forms of public mourning have come to overshadow the political work, which has in recent years grown dull and predictable.





The family patriarch, Joseph Kennedy, bred his boys to lead the patrician administrative state which the two Roosevelts had created. John F. Kennedy, with a show of graceful manners and elegant wit, was especially eager to master the mandarin style; he even published a book, "Profiles in Courage," about high-toned senatorial statesmanship.
But history began to work against the Kennedys' ideal. In the 1960s and '70s, conservative populist politicians like Ronald Reagan laid the groundwork for a revolution against the mandarin state. The westward movement of power and people undermined the old Northeastern traditions of aristocratic statesmanship. Some dynasties, like the Bushes, adjusted to the new realities. The Kennedys did not. The farthest south the family has yet gotten is Maryland. There is talk of a Kennedy candidacy for a Chicago congressional seat; but to date the family's influence remains concentrated in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New York.

Nor are the Kennedys' eastern strongholds particularly secure. The family lost its Boston congressional seat when Joe Kennedy II retired from politics. They have not been able to get it back. Andrew Cuomo's candidacy is floundering in the aftermath of his criticism of Gov. George Pataki, whom he disparaged as Rudolph Giuliani's coat holder.

The family's brightest hope in New York, John F. Kennedy Jr., was still a political virgin when he died at 38 in 1999. There was talk, before the fatal flight to Hyannis Port that summer, of his running for the Senate; but it would have been difficult for him to challenge Hillary Clinton for the open New York seat.

One reason friends of the family are now criticizing Richard Blow's best-selling portrait of the younger Kennedy may be that the book, sympathetic though it is, reveals just how difficult its hero's predicament had become by the end of his life. JFK Jr. had inherited his parents' glamour; but a trick of fame only works once. As he approached his 40th year, there were already signs that he had begun to know the burden of Robert Todd Lincoln, the feeling that one has not lived up to expectations.

There is a difference between honoring the ashes of one's fathers and being overmastered by their ghosts. John F. Kennedy Jr. was the prisoner of political aspirations he seems never wholly to have shared. His sister, Caroline, has recently brought out a book in imitation of "Profiles in Courage." Andrew Cuomo's rhetoric echoes that of his late father-in-law. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went to Vieques in a parodic recreation of his father's pilgrimage to Delano, Calif., to honor Cesar Chavez. But there has been too much daylight shed on this magic; the morbid efforts at repetition point to the bankruptcy of a dynasty, its failure to reinvent itself.





As the Kennedys struggle with the latest tarnishing of their name, they might remember that the revitalization they need does not have to take the form of political triumph. There are other ways for the offspring of distinguished families to serve. Both Oliver Wendell Holmes and Edmund Wilson criticized Henry Adams for his failure to render the kind of public service that had marked his ancestors' careers. But Adams's histories, together with his memoir, "The Education of Henry Adams," represent a service to the country more valuable than that rendered by some presidents.
The scions of illustrious families are as important to republics as they are to aristocracies and monarchies. The prestige of their names, the breadth of their connections, the eminent places they occupy, all enable them to do things ordinary citizens cannot. The Kennedys aren't just now living up to the possibilities of their situation; when they ask themselves what they can do for their country, they need to exercise more imagination than they're currently showing.

Mr. Beran is the author of "The Last Patrician: Bobby Kennedy and the End of American Aristocracy" (St. Martin's, 1998).