THE REAL VICTIMS OF THE KENNEDY CURSE
. . . are not Kennedys, says Mark Steyn,
but the women who have come into contact with them
New Hampshire SMALL planes crash all the time in Ameri- ca. One did on Sunday, the day after JFK Jnr's was reported missing: a couple of peo- ple dead, not Kennedys, somewhere in Illi- nois. It's a large country, so people fly a lot — in small jets, twin-props, single-props. And the law of averages ensures that a cer- tain proportion of air disasters will be celebrity tragedies: Buddy Holly, Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves, Otis Redding, John Denver and a lot of other vocal artistes who never lived long enough to cash in their frequent-flyer miles. Miss Cline, you'll remember, was the popu- lar country singer who had hits with `I'm Crazy' and 'I Fall to Pieces', which may well be the aptest song ever recorded by a downed vocalist, though the soundtrack to John Jnr's final hours could lay claim to both numbers: certainly, he fell to pieces, but he was crazy to take off that night in the first place,
But here's the thing: can you name the two other country singers who died with Patsy Cline? Bet you a mil- lion bucks you can't. They were Cow- boy Copas and Hawkshaw Hawkins. And that's the way it goes, even in famous plane crashes: there's only room for one Patsy Cline, everyone else is reduced to a Cowboy Copas or a Hawkshaw Hawkins. Cowboy Copas status has already fallen on Lauren Bessette — in case the name's unfa- miliar, she's the small inset photo in the news coverage — and it will claim her sister, too: the network TV spe- cials are called 'America's Son' and America's Prince'; he gets the cover of this week's Time to himself. Two Bes- settes don't add up to one Kennedy unless, of course, you happen to be their mother or sole surviving sister. In which case, you may well be rueing the day your family ever got mixed up with the Kennedys. Or at least the day that he decided to fly your girls into a moonless black haze, with a wonky leg. There are a lot of Hawkshaw Hawkinses and Cowboy Copases in the Kennedy saga, because a family this starry needs a lot of bit players to fill out their misfortunes. 'It was 30 years ago this very weekend,' said a CBS reporter, 'that Ted Kennedy's presi- dential hopes were dashed when he was involved in a car accident that claimed the life of a young woman.' The 'young woman' doesn't rate a namecheck because what's significant about this incident is that it put an end to Ted's presidential ambitions, if not to his young women: one recalls fondly the incident in 1987 when a waitress at Washington's La Brasserie came upon the Senator in one of the restaurant's private dining rooms, on the floor, with his pants down, on top of another 'young woman'. I hope he's given up that sort of thing, because, from the close exposure I had to him during the impeachment trial, I'd say his figure's really gone to hell in the last decade and I'd fear for any 'young woman' underneath him: he no longer has to get behind the wheel to be life-threatening.
By all accounts, JFK Jnr didn't share the indiscriminate appetites of his fellow Kennedys. And, whatever else may be said of him, he did at least stay with Carolyn and Lauren to the end, instead of, as Teddy did, fishing himself out of the briny, staggering away and somehow neglecting to inform the authorities until the following morning that he'd left his 'young woman' down there. Her name, by the way, was Mary Jo Kopechne — though on Saturday the veteran CBS news anchor, Dan Rather, who broke down announcing Junior's death, was either unable to remember it or deemed it unworthy of mention. In contrast to Ted, John- John — 'The Hunk', 'The Sexiest Man Alive' — was uncommonly gracious and courtly and monogamous, for a Kennedy. But his womenfolk wound up the same way that so many Kennedy women do: victims of their men's selfishness. Carolyn and Lauren Bessette are on the bottom of Long Island Sound because John Jnr made a decision he had no right to make on their behalf. And by next year Dan Rather won't think their names worth remembering, either.
There is no 'Kennedy curse'. That was a concept invented by Ted Kennedy — or, more likely, for him, by a member of the 'brains trust' (Robert McNamara, Ted Sorenson, Arthur Schlesinger Jnr) assembled at the compound to come up with strate- gies for post-Chappaquiddick damage control. The family machine had gone to work; Miss Kopechne's body had been flown by the Kennedys back to her home- town in Pennsylvania; there would be no autopsy; it was felt the Senator ought to attend the funeral, but tastefully acces- sorised in a neck brace never seen before or after that one occasion. But more was need- ed, so he went on TV and explained that he'd been confused, distraught, and then went on to muse about whether there was a `curse' on the Kennedys. I think not. If there were, he'd have been drowned off Chappaquiddick, and Mary Jo would be a middle-aged lady. Still, in his own tasteless way, Ted did neatly establish the contours of the 'curse': it's a Kopechne who's dead, but somehow that's evidence of a curse on the Kennedys. And so it would be repeated in every successive Kennedy 'tragedy' from the Kelley (Pam) paralysed from the waist down after being thrown from young Joe's careering jeep, to the two Bessettes who plunged into the waters off Martha's Vineyard. No matter how many Kopechnes, Kelleys and Bessettes the Kennedys kill, cripple, statutorily rape, it's all just further evidence of the Kennedy curse.
In Congress, Ted is one of the strongest proponents of Federal 'hate crimes' legisla- tion — that's to say, laws that punish you not just for killing someone but for killing him because you're motivated by racism or homophobia. No doubt it's never occurred to the Senator that his own actions might fall within the scope of such legislation. But one day perhaps some canny member of the Massachusetts bar will file a class- action suit against the Kennedy menfolk for rampant misogyny. At its most benign, it's the casual thoughtlessness of JFK Jnr last Friday night — the failure to under- stand that he didn't have the right to expose others to the risks of a night run to the Cape. At its most brutal, it's Ted at Chappaquiddick, Bobby's son Michael bed- ding his kids' 14-year-old babysitter, William Kennedy Smith at Palm Beach. And somewhere in the middle is Joe II get- ting the Boston Archdiocese to strongarm his ex into agreeing to an 'annulment' of their 12-year marriage. When women become a problem, you fix them. And, if the fix doesn't work, you get rid of them. That's a Kennedy pattern dating back at least as far as 1941, when Joe and Rose's eldest daughter Rosemary, after a botched lobotomy, was banged up in a mental insti- tution, where she remains to this day.
Already the familiar trajectory is at work. Was John Jnr 'irresponsible' to take off that night? In that case, let's make it clear that he was only doing so because Lauren insisted he drop her off en route: why, the golden boy hadn't even wanted to take his sister-in-law along, but was simply bending to his wife's wishes. Lauren is the unknown character, the Cowboy Copas: the public has no emotional investment in her; she's easy to blame. And, if her family's clever, they won't let it come to that. In the 48 hours before either clan released a state- ment, you can bet the phone lines between Hyannisport and Greenwich, Connecticut were humming. As others have come to appreciate, what's happened has happened: why compound your woes by taking on the Kennedys? So the families of their victims return silently to obscurity, although every now and then some unreliable Kennedy flack screws up and fails to make the call in time. For a moment, it looked as if the par- ents of Michael's 14-year-old babysitter were going to take the Kennedys on. But eventually they wised up; the young lady revised her decision to co-operate with prosecutors and the DA was forced to drop the case. It was a faint echo of the way old Joe ran things: cheques would be written, the authorities would look the other way, and suddenly no one could remember a thing. That was what made Shattered Faith, Sheila Rauch Kennedy's book about young Joe, so extraordinary: for the first time, a Kennedy woman was nuts enough to try to fight back. 'I was, as he so often reminded me, a nobody; and nobody in his town would be on my side.'
We must accept the verdict at Palm Beach — that Patty Bowman was not raped by William Kennedy Smith. Instead, let's take William at his own word and accept his version of events: she comes on to him, he can't even get her name right, but he gra- ciously 'allows' her to perform oral sex on him. It's what attorneys like to call 'the ass- hole defence' and it's surprisingly effective. In William's case, as an account of a wild night on the tiles with Uncle Ted, it was also utterly plausible. This is the kind of family where the men 'allow' you to give them blowjobs. Jean Kennedy Smith, later Bill Clinton's Ambassador in Dublin, turned up for the trial, and her sisters dutifully showed up to support her: Pat Lawford, Eunice Shriver, Ethel Kennedy. As the defence pre- sented its case — in essence, that William was no rapist but merely a typical boorish Kennedy male who, having shot his load, had no further interest in the broad and just wanted her to go away so he could sleep off the booze — the Kennedy women sat like dowagers on the Tube smiling serenely through the obscenities. 'They're not hear- ing it,' said a friend of mine at the trial. 'Not a word. The only way a woman can survive in that family is by being in deep denial. And they've had years of practice.' Presum- ably, somewhere deep down, Pat knows that Ethel knows that Pat's husband loaned his beach house to Ethel's husband for one hor- izontal encounter after another, but, like Jackie and Rose before them, they long ago learned to block it out.
Now who does all this sound like? Bill and Hillary are the Ozark equivalent of Jack and Jackie, Bobby and Ethel, and all those other Kennedy couples of priapic men and enabling wives. The only difference is that, whereas the Kennedys needed a football team's worth of guys to stack up the human wreckage of Mary Jo, Pam, Sheila, the nymphette babysitter et al., Bill has evened the score (Paula, Monica, Kathleen, etc.) all by himself. Kennedys normally stay quiet when the subject of sexual harassment comes up, for fairly obvious reasons. But, as impeachment loomed and it seemed briefly that a bigshot Democrat might be forced from office for using female subordinates as semen receptacles, the Kennedys rose up against what was obviously a direct slur on their noble line. In the Senate, Ted dis- missed a Republican plan for 'findings of fact' against the President as just 'findings of fiction'. In the House of Representatives, his son Patrick, a Congressman for Rhode Island, emerged as Mr Clinton's most prominent defender, albeit considerably less adroit than his dad. Seeming almost on the verge of tears, Patrick raged hysterically about 'the fundamental process of due pro- cess' and how 'we have been so busy holding our cheeks that we have even examined the evidence'. The young Congressman was not only holding his cheeks but apparently talk- ing through them.
Still, I was saddened to learn that JFK Jnr felt much the same way. During the impeachment trial, CNN's Christiane Ammanpour, an old college friend, had din- ner with him, at which he said, heatedly, `This isn't politics, this is destruction!' Per- haps at the back of his mind he wondered what would have happened to his father's presidency in such an environment. Answer: not much. His father didn't have to contend with all the sexual harassment laws that theoretical feminists like Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy have helped pass. In this respect feminists seem to have reached the same accommodation with the new men's old weaknesses as those Victorian ladies who turned a blind eye to their husbands' whoring: they'll overlook their private fail- ings as long as the chaps maintain a public facade — say all the right things about abor- tion, back anti-stalking laws, hate-crimes bills and so on. So, during the impeachment debate, the most distinguished Clinton defenders turned out to be the well-prac- tised Camelot apologists. Why, the Kennedy historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jnr assured the House Judiciary Committee that a 'gen- tleman', by definition, is obliged to lie about his lady friends; only a 'cad' would do other- wise. When one considers the 'gentlemen' Professor Schlesinger has spent the past 40 years hanging around, this argument is per- haps more understandable than it might at first seem.
As the week began, the media line was that the torch had been passed to a new gender. The real talent in the Kennedy family was now female: there was, er, Maria Shriver, a 'hard-hitting reporter' as evidence, there was a clip of her reading the Emmy nominations on breakfast TV and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Lieu- tenant-Governor of Maryland. Lieutenant- Governor, in Maryland as elsewhere, is one of the great non-positions of American life — so inconsequential that here in New Hampshire we don't even bother having one. But, again, there's something quaintly Clintonian about the media's urge to hail a family of male sexist clods as a repository of strong independent career women. The truth is that even the nicest of the third- generation Kennedy men shared the care- less attitude to the opposite sex, that has disfigured their history. 'Like Icarus,' said someone on ABC, for the umpteenth time, `he touched the sun and fell to earth.'
Say what you like about Icarus, but at least he didn't take his wife and sister-in- law up with him.
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