Joseph Patrick Kennedy III wants nothing more than to continue the legacy of his great American dynasty, the Kennedys. Named after his great-grandfather, the family patron and architect of all their dreams and ambitions, Joe is proud of what his ancestors have achieved. It doesn’t seem as if he feels he’s surrounded by, as Lem Billings once put it, “footprints, all of them deeper than his own.” Rather, one has a sense that Joe walks in tandem with his forebearers while charting his own political course with his own special brand of big-hearted liberalism. Especially given Ted Kennedy Jr.’s announcement in February 2018 that he would not run for a third term in the state senate, all eyes have been on Joe to continue to carry the torch for the family.
Joe serves because he wants to, though, not because he feels he must. Things have definitely changed in that regard in the Kennedy family. The pressure to be a public servant has dissipated with time, and maybe that’s for the best. Some of the new generation is involved in philanthropy, while some have no interest in it. For instance, Ethel’s granddaughter Michaela Cuomo, daughter of Kerry Kennedy and Andrew Cuomo, is an activist intent on raising money for sexual assault awareness. Kyra LeMoyne Kennedy—Bobby Kennedy Jr.’s daughter with the late Mary Richardson Kennedy—seems a little less invested in social activism. Unfortunately for her, at least for the time being, she’ll probably be best known for her great comeback to a bouncer after being refused entry into a club because she was nineteen in 2015: “I’m a Kennedy,” she screamed at him. “Google me.” She followed that classic line with a threat for the ages: “If you don’t let me in, the governor will be calling.” A year later, her father insisted she shut down all her social media when she fought back at a blogger who had criticized her and her friends. “I can play games, too, bitch!” she posted. Kyra is twenty-three as of this writing. “She’ll learn,” Bobby Jr. said of his daughter. “Give her time. You should’ve seen me at that age.” Two years later, her twenty-two-year-old cousin, Caroline Summer Rose Kennedy—one of Max Kennedy’s three kids—would make a few headlines with her own memorable line when she and her father were arrested for disturbing the peace during a house party in Hyannis Port: “You don’t know who you’re messing with,” she exclaimed. “I went to Brown and I’m a teacher, sweetheart.” The charges against father and daughter were eventually dismissed.
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DESPITE THE PERSONAL tumult her venture into politics had caused her back in 2008, Caroline Kennedy still knew she wanted to serve her country in some way. She knew it was what her uncle Teddy had wanted, too. What she didn’t know was how she might satisfy the family’s mandate while at the same time maintaining her privacy and also staying out of the line of fire of partisan politics. In early 2013, the right opportunity presented itself when President Barack Obama, grateful for her support during his campaign, asked her to be his nominee for the job of United States ambassador to Japan, succeeding Ambassador John Roos.
In September 2013, Caroline sat before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to answer myriad questions from Democratic and Republican senators about possible platforms and ideas. She’d come a long way in just a few years’ time. Now she presented herself as a completely different woman from the one five years earlier, who’d seemed unable to answer a simple question without becoming defensive. On this day, she was confident and calm, eager to put forth her ideas, anxious to impress and to be approved. If given the opportunity, she said, she wanted to focus on student exchange programs as well as military concerns and trade relations. In October, she was approved by unanimous vote as the first female United States ambassador to Japan.
For the next three years, Caroline would spend most of her time in Japan, though she and her family would also reside as much as possible in the States. Though her job was, for the most part, ceremonial, as are the duties of most ambassadors, it was the perfect fit for her in that it satisfied her desire to serve yet didn’t expose her to much controversy. When she resigned from the position in 2017 it was only because political appointees of one administration generally don’t stay on for the next one; President Donald J. Trump had ordered all Obama appointees to resign before his inauguration without giving them the customary extension to get their affairs in order.
Caroline moved back to the United States full-time, and she and Ed live in New York today.
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BESIDES JOSEPH P. KENNEDY III, another young Kennedy in whom people seem intensely interested is the only grandson of President Kennedy—Caroline and Ed’s son, John Bouvier Kennedy Schlossberg, better known as Jack. Born in 1993, as he reached adulthood and became more high profile, it was clear that Jack was well-spoken and ready for the attention.
Jack, a member of the John F. Kennedy Library New Frontier Award Committee, has become a confident speaker with the passing of time. In November 2013, he introduced Barack Obama at the Medal of Freedom award dinner commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of his grandfather’s assassination. A member of the committee for the Profile in Courage Awards, he also hosted the ceremony in 2014. He’s often involved in high-profile Kennedy honors and makes numerous television appearances to talk about them.
A Yale graduate (2015) with a history degree focused on Japanese history, Jack is presently attending Harvard Law School.
Though she appears to take the public’s growing fascination with her son in her stride, people with knowledge of the situation say that Caroline is keenly interested in seeing him pursue politics. “Caroline is a kingmaker,” said family friend R. Couri Hay, “a Kennedy kingmaker. The family is always looking to see who amongst them will rise to the pinnacle of power. All eyes are on Jack. Some of the other Kennedys, with the exception of Joe III, will likely fade away while Caroline anoints Jack as, forgive me for saying it, the crown prince of Camelot. It’s Caroline, with her vision and her ability to look back in history with moral judgment, who gets to decide when he’s ready to assume the mantle of her father and his grandfather.”
One character trait Jack—who is now twenty-six—has in common with his uncle John Kennedy Jr. is his openness; he seems to have no fear of public scrutiny. Maybe that’s ironic given that ever since he was a child, his mother has cautioned him to be leery of others. He has rejected that advice, as have his sisters, Rose, thirty-one, and Tatiana, twenty-nine.
Rose is a Harvard graduate with a degree in English who got her master’s in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She’s also a comedian who wrote a digital web series called End Times Girls Club. Tatiana is a Yale graduate whose internship with The New York Times led to a job as an environmental reporter for that newspaper.
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ROBERT KENNEDY JR. married Cheryl Hines in 2014. From all accounts, the two have had a happy union, with Bobby’s rabble-rousing days long behind him. He has also apparently conquered his sexual addiction. He and his mother, Ethel, with whom he’d long had a contentious relationship, have had a détente for many years now. “I was also able to recognize that my mother’s passing storms of nettlesome temper were mainly the fruit of her own personal miseries, and I began to see the extraordinary qualities in her character,” he wrote in his memoir, American Values. “She always put her children first, while understanding that ‘I love you’ and ‘No’ could be part of the same sentence.”
Bobby has continued his tireless advocacy for environmental issues. He continues to argue, for instance, that vaccines containing mercury are unsafe for children. While he’s not opposed to all vaccines, he does seek to make them safer.
Recently, Bobby set his sights on unraveling the mystery of his father’s murder. He’s long suspected that Sirhan Sirhan didn’t act alone and was possibly not even the shooter. As he points out, the autopsy report indicates that Kennedy was shot at point-blank range from behind, including a fatal shot behind his ear. Sirhan was standing in front of him.
In December 2017, Bobby had what must have been an incredible experience of visiting Sirhan Sirhan at the
Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility outside San Diego, where he has been imprisoned for nearly fifty years. “I went there because I was curious and disturbed by what I had seen in the evidence,” said Bobby, who was sixty-three at the time. “I was disturbed that the wrong person might have been convicted of killing my father. My father was the chief law enforcement officer in this country. I think it would have disturbed him if somebody was put in jail for a crime they didn’t commit.”
With Cheryl waiting in the car outside the facility, Bobby spoke to Sirhan Sirhan for about three hours. As of this writing, he hasn’t yet revealed what he learned, but he’s now more convinced than ever that, while somehow likely involved, Sirhan Sirhan didn’t kill his father. It’s been reported that he plans to examine all angles in a book that he’s writing about the subject.
Postscript: Permission to Speak Freely
On April 11, 2018, Ethel Kennedy turned ninety. All her children and many of her grandchildren celebrated the milestone with a party a month later in Palm Beach, Florida, where she resides for about half the year (the other half being spent at her home at the Kennedy compound). As expected, during the festivities there was no shortage of robust, Kennedy-esque speeches from some of Ethel’s grown children, such as Kathleen, Joe, and Bobby Jr. The grandchildren—more than thirty—also came forth with homemade cards and other demonstrations of great affection for “Grandma.”
Ethel’s life has been a long and incredible journey full of breathtaking highs and crushing lows, so much of it entwined with rich and important American history. She remains, even at her advanced age, a vital woman, still eager to serve. “In recent years, my mother has made more than a dozen human rights pilgrimages to deliver food and medical supplies, repatriate refugees, afflict the tyrannical, and comfort the afflicted,” Bobby Kennedy wrote in 2018. “By standing up to bigotry, corporate misbehavior, and confronting cowardly or venal public officials, whether on the left or the right, she has won freedom for prisoners of conscience all over the world.” Her daughter Kerry has noted of her mother’s most recent humanitarian efforts: “She’s gone on human rights delegations to Namibia, Albania, Czechoslovakia, Haiti, Hungary, Kenya, Mexico, Northern Ireland, Poland, and South Africa.”
In June, Ethel took part in a symbolic one-day hunger strike organized by the RFK Human Rights Center protesting the Trump administration’s policy of separating families at the border to Mexico. Almost fifty other members of the Kennedy family participated, including Ethel’s daughter Kerry and her grandson Massachusetts Representative Joe Kennedy III. “Generations of Americans did not toil and sacrifice to build a country where children and their parents are placed in cages to advance a cynical political agenda,” she said.
“So many people in our family are involved in social justice work, and it’s always attributed to my father, which he deserves,” Kerry notes. “But the truth is he died when we were very, very young, so that really comes from my mother. Those are her values. Those are the aspects of Daddy that she chose to have us remember and think about.”
Even though Ethel remains an activist for social justice and human rights, it’s her influence over the entire Kennedy family that best defines her. She remains the head of the dynasty with more than one hundred family members. She once called Ted the “keeper of the castle,” a title that most certainly now defines her. President Barack Obama was sure to point out as much back in 2014, when he awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom:
… we give thanks to a person whose love for her family is matched by her devotion to her nation. To most Americans, Ethel Kennedy is known as a wife, mother, and grandma. And in many ways, it’s through these roles that she’s made her mark on history. As Bobby Kennedy’s partner in life, she shared his commitment to justice. After his death, she continued their work through the center she created in his name, celebrating activists and journalists and educating people around the world about threats to human liberty. On urgent human rights issues of our time—from juvenile justice to environmental destruction—Ethel has been a force for change in her quiet, flashy—unflashy, unstoppable way. As her family will tell you, and they basically occupy this half of the room, you don’t mess with Ethel.
That same year, Ethel went on camera, along with her son Max and many young members of the Kennedy’s fourth generation, to take the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. Probably nothing demonstrates more how much things have changed in her world than seeing the family’s redoubtable matriarch—a woman for whom people would jump to their feet when she entered a room—raise a plastic bucket over her head and drench herself with freezing-cold water.
The day after her birthday, Ethel’s old friend Sister Pauline Joseph called to extend her congratulations. Though she’d been retired for the last twenty years, she’d stayed in touch with Ethel. She found her in an unusually contemplative mood.
Ethel noted that even though she has few of the infirmities of the aged, she does use a wheelchair from time to time. She couldn’t help but remember when Joseph and Rose Kennedy were similarly confined. Joe lived to be eighty-one, his storied life interrupted by and ultimately ended by a stroke. Rose, despite her own strokes, lived to be 104. “I’m sure that’s not for me, though,” Ethel said of Rose’s longevity. “I’ll be ready to go sooner than that.”
In a long-ranging conversation that seemed like a meditation on her life, Ethel had to admit to certain regrets. This was unusual for her; she’s definitely not a woman given to much introspection, preferring to live her life in the moment. “While I’ve accepted who I was as a mother,” Ethel told the nun, “it’s sometimes harder to accept who I wasn’t.”
She said that she still struggles with the reasons she wasn’t more equipped to handle David’s and Michael’s problems. However, she now understands how uninformed she and everyone else in the family were about the realities of addiction. She grapples with the senselessness of John’s airplane crash, too. “However, she’s comforted knowing he’s with Jack and Jackie in heaven,” said the nun. “She feels the same about David and Michael being with Bobby.”
“I do think about the girls a lot,” Ethel said. She then spoke a little about Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy and Mary Richardson Kennedy. Both young women had come into the family with such excitement and hope for the future but then found themselves so completely disillusioned because, as Ethel aptly put it, “being a Kennedy isn’t for the faint of heart.” The one question that still haunts her about Carolyn all these years later, she said, was “Why in the world did she have to get on that plane?”
In the end, Ethel said, she now understood that almost everything that had happened to her generation of Kennedys as well as to the next one was in one way or the other intrinsically tied to the murders of Bobby and Jack. She’d spent years believing that blaming their deaths for subsequent misfortunes was a way to excuse bad behavior. Now, at ninety, she said she finally understood that “you just don’t get over something like that. People think you move on, but guess what? You don’t. Then again,” she said, “nobody gets a free ride in this world. Pain is a part of life. You can’t escape it.” She also said that not a day goes by when she doesn’t think about all Bobby and Jack missed of seeing the generation that followed their own, and even the one after that. She still prays on her knees every day for both brothers, as well as for Ted, Jackie, Eunice, Sarge, and everyone else who has passed. “Maybe they’re all sitting around in heaven agreeing that I could’ve handled a few things differently, though,” Ethel concluded.
“Permission to speak freely?” Sister Pauline Joseph asked, just as she’d always done over the years before becoming candid. Ethel said, of course. The nun began, “Please have no regrets about—” But Ethel interrupted her, saying she didn’t have any, “not a one.”
“You were a good mother, Mrs. Kennedy,” continued her friend. “You loved your children with everything you—”
Ethel cut her off again. “I know that,” she said, seeming a little annoyed. Irascible as e
ver, she would never change.
“She then asked how long we’ve known each other,” recalled Sister Pauline Joseph. “I had to really think about that one. ‘Gosh,’ I said. ‘Going on sixty years, I would imagine. Can you believe it, Mrs. Kennedy?’”
According to the nun, Ethel was quiet for a moment, maybe pondering the passing of so much shared history. “We sure have had our moments, haven’t we?” she finally asked. “And with that being the case,” she continued, “don’t you think it’s time to start calling me … Ethel? After all, we’re not getting any younger, are we?”
“That’s certainly food for thought,” said Sister Pauline Joseph, surprised. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, she thought better of it: “Okay, well, goodbye for now … Mrs. Kennedy.”
Ethel had to laugh. “Yes, Sister,” she said as she hung up. “Goodbye for now.”
After the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, the next generation of Kennedys—the children of JFK, RFK, their brother, Senator Edward Kennedy, and his three siblings Eunice, Jean, and Pat—would bear the weight of triumph and tragedy as they sought new ways to serve their country. Here is the widowed Jackie and her children, John and Caroline, at the President’s gravesite in Arlington on May 27, 1964, the day he would have turned forty-seven. (United States Army Corp of Engineers, Public Domain)
The Kennedy Heirs: John, Caroline, and the New Generation Page 53
