GOING THEIR WAY

Mark Steyn complains that Kennedy

deaths aren't what they used to be

New Hampshire `YOU have to wonder if it's something in the genes,' said the veteran Time magazine man, Hugh Sidey. To the historian Michael Beschloss, this latest tragedy had `almost Shakespearean' overtones, but, for the rest of us, as Michael Kennedy was lowered into his grave in Brookline, Mass- achusetts, there was mostly the forlorn sense that even Kennedy deaths aren't what they were. Michael's Uncle Joe was shot down over the Channel in 1944; his Aunt Kathleen died in a plane crash in 1948; his Uncle Jack was assassinated in 1963; his father was killed in 1968; his brother David died of a cocaine overdose in a Palm Beach hotel room, which at least can be passed off as 'wrestling with inner demons'. But Michael died on New Year's Eve at Aspen, playing pitch 'n' catch on skis with a water-bottle filled with snow, which he managed to catch just before hit- ting a tree.

The press did their best. 'Ironically,' according to the New York Post, Michael's mother Ethel had 'had a hand' in her son's `deadly game'. It was she who had brought the fatal snow-filled bottle, the icy chalice, up to the slopes at Michael's request. But, even as the clan gathered at Hyannis Port and the flag at the gate was lowered to half-mast, it was hard to escape the feeling that this death was just too silly to support the burdens of the Kennedy myths. There has always been a reckless side to the Kennedys, but until now the victims have mostly been those caught in the family's slipstream — from Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick to the former friend of Michael's brother Bobby Jnr, who last year was awarded a million dollars after Bobby, in one of the more benign cases of Kennedy Driving Syndrome, ran over her foot at an environmental-awareness festi- val.

It's been that way ever since childhood. When they were young, Michael and his siblings decided to have a go at baking muffins at Hyannis Port. His brother Joe lit the gas oven, but, unfortunately, their attention was distracted by a passing rabbit outside. 'So they all go chasing after the rabbit,' recalled the family physician, Dr Watt. 'In the meantime, this gal from South Carolina looks in and lights a match. It blew her right across the room. She went from black to white. She had flash burns.' After a week in hospital, she recovered.

Not all family friends are so lucky. After a cook-out on Nantucket, Joe borrowed a Jeep, crammed six pals into it, two stand- ing in the back, and careered happily through the woods at breakneck speed, until he swerved to avoid another truck and all seven occupants were thrown from the vehicle. One of those standing, a teenage girl, injured her spine. In court, Joe was fined $100 and the judge told him he had 'a great father and a great mother' (Robert F. and Ethel Kennedy). Pam Kel- ley remains paralysed from the waist down. It's a measure of the family's diminished status that Kennedy excess should now be rebounding on the Kennedys themselves.

There are now more Kennedys than even the swollen political establishment of Massachusetts can support. At the funeral of Michael's grandmother Rose in 1995, the relatives present included one US sen- ator, two US congressmen plus the lieu- tenant-governor of Maryland and a member of the Maryland House of Dele- gates. According to the calculations of the Washingtonian magazine, 256 Kennedys would be holding political office by the year 2050, and 4,096 by the end of the 21st century. Many of them have the same names. Joseph Patrick Kennedy II, son of Bobby, is the congressman from Mas- sachusetts; Patrick Joseph Kennedy, son of Ted, is the congressman from Rhode Island; or, if you prefer, Patrick Joseph was a bona fide drug addict, while Joseph Patrick merely 'abused drugs'. If that's still unclear, the cover of the New Republic, which last year profiled young Joe, provid- ed a useful shorthand: 'The Dumbest Kennedy', a title for which the competition grows ever more intense.

As Bobby did for Jack and as Ted did for Bobby, it was Joe II who led the eulo- gies for his 39-year-old brother, cut down in the prime of his ski vacation. Michael, they say, looked most like his father — i.e., a toothy, tousled brunette — but some- how, whatever points of resemblance can be found, with this generation of Kennedys the whole has a completely different effect: the aura of power that hung around Bobby and Jack has fallen away, and most of the present crowd look, frankly, dorky. A whole nation knows his name,' said Joe. That's true. But, insofar as America can distinguish Michael from the rest of the third-generation Kennedys, it knows him as the one whose wife came back and caught him in bed with the kids' teenage babysitter.

Michael apparently began the relation- ship when the girl — 'an Alicia Silverstone lookalike', according to the Boston press — was just 14, which in Massachusetts Counts as statutory rape. But the district attorney was forced to drop the case after the young lady suddenly decided not to co- operate with the prosecutors. For long- time Kennedy watchers, the collapse of the investigation was a faint echo of the way things used to be handled when old Joe, the celebrated bootlegger, election-fixer and dynastic founder, ran the clan: cheques would be written, the authorities would turn a blind eye, and suddenly no one could remember a thing.

It was Jacqueline Kennedy who retro- spectively bestowed on her husband's pres- idency the mantle of 'Camelot' and, in the years since, family courtiers have pillaged almost every lyric from that Lerner and Loewe score for the title of fawning biographies: One Brief Shining Moment, A Fleeting Wisp of Glory. Curiously, no biog- rapher in need of a title has felt minded to quote the show's big ballad, 'How to Han- dle a Woman'. The Kennedy men have handled more women, from Gloria Swan- son to Marilyn Monroe, than any other family in Massachusetts, yet without ever refining their technique. To paraphrase Hugh Sidey, you have to wonder whether it's something in the jeans.

The electorate has traditionally been sympathetic to the Kennedy males' impressive appetites, and it could be argued that, as they must have been through every available woman over the age of consent in the state by now, adoles- cent babysitters are all that's left. But, if Michael's brief life merits any place in the Kennedy history, it's as a sobering reminder of how one minor cousin can trip up the whole family. Ted's presiden- tial hopes were supposed to have been scuppered by Chappaquiddick, but in 1980 he still ran for the nomination and, consid- ering he was running against a sitting pres- ident, did respectably enough. And even the most pessimistic observer would never have argued that Ted's judgment over Chappaquiddick would harm any other Kennedy's chances, least of all in Mas- sachusetts, where conventional wisdom has it that a lump of rotting roadkill can get elected if it's labelled 'Kennedy'.

But last summer Michael pulled off an impressive feat: he scared another Kennedy into withdrawing from an election in his own home state. After ten years in Congress, Joe II wanted to run for gover- nor. But then the story about Michael and the babysitter broke, and Joe's ex-wife Sheila published a traumatic account about Joe's and the Catholic hierarchy's attempts to bully her into going along with an annul- ment of their 12-year marriage. Michael apologised for 'the pain I have caused' and checked himself in for treatment of the usual addictions, but Joe's poll numbers went into free-fall and, faced with the pos- sibility of being the first Kennedy in half a century to lose an election in Mas- sachusetts, he withdrew from the race. The quintessential Kennedy genius for damage control is now faced with third-generation specimens even the Massachusetts Demo- cratic party machine can't sell.

The usual excuse for Kennedy excesses is that no family has suffered such appalling tragedy. But it's three decades since any- one tried to kill a Kennedy, and since then most of their problems have been self- inflicted: Teddy Jnr's alcoholism, Kara Kennedy's alcoholism, Michael's brother David getting robbed and beaten up while trying to buy heroin in New York in 1982. Of course, one should never underestimate the family's capacity for survival. The last time I saw Ted Kennedy was a couple of years ago, when we shared the water-shut- tle from Logan airport to Rowes Wharf in Boston late one evening. He came aboard at the last moment and, even allowing for the trepidation one feels when being with Senator Kennedy anywhere near water, the small launch lurched dramatically as he stumbled on and fell towards me before being steadied by his new wife, Victoria Reggie. He was bloated, puffy, pitted, erubescent and, even in the night air as we crossed the harbour, there appeared to be some truth in the rumours that he was neglecting his personal hygiene.

In those days he was swigging back a bottle and a half of wine in 15 minutes, washed down with a couple of tumblers of Scotch, and was prone to blackouts. But the new wife got him under control and an effective apology to the people of Mas- sachusetts began Ted's turnaround. Sena- tor Kennedy looks better than he's done in years, and he's finally got the hang of the role history marked him out for: fallen greatness. The problem for Michael Kennedy and most of his ten brothers and sisters was that the only role they could manage was that of fallen mediocrities.

The protection afforded by old Joe is long gone; so too, it seems, is most of his ill-gotten wealth. Those who can, work for a living; it's the dimmer ones — 'the shal- It's chicken flu, I'm afraid.'

low end of the Kennedy gene pool', as the New York Times columnist Maureen Down called the barely articulate Joe and Patrick — who've wound up in Washington.

The clan put its best foot forward at Our Lady of Victory Church, but, if they really are America's royal family, they seem to have shrivelled away to a cheesy Mone- gasque one: Maria Shriver was there, a `television newscaster' whom one never sees on television, her husband Arnold Schwarzenegger, and a family friend, Andy Williams. For tabloid readers, the main point of interest was Michael's father-in- law, Frank Gifford, host of ABC-TV's Monday Night Football, a man whose own marital troubles had paralleled his son-in- law's — married to Goody Two-shoes talk- show host Kathie Lee Gifford, he was recently videotaped having sex with a bimbo in some hotel room. Celebrity is the great leveller: the son of a United States attorney-general and a television sports anchor, all are grist for the mill.

What's left of glamour in the family was represented by John F. Kennedy Jnr John-John — and his wife Carolyn. Joe Kennedy Snr used showbiz, the motion pic- ture business, as a springboard to politics; his grandson has used politics as a spring- board back to showbiz. He'd much rather do guest shots on sitcoms than stump the dreary precincts of Massachusetts. He edits a glossy magazine called George which pre- tends to be about current events, but instead enables him to hang out with starry cover-girls like Barbra Streisand. The late President's son's embrace of celebrity and gossip as an end in itself is the most telling example of where power now gravitates in America. Wherever he is these days, old Joe Kennedy must be shaking his head in disbelief: what was it all for?