Fear and loathing in Camelot

In a stunning memoir, JFK's nephew Christopher Kennedy Lawford reveals the darker side of the Kennedy clan -- and bravely attempts to liberate his family from its crushing legacy

By David Talbot

Sep 27, 2005 | Kennedys don't cry -- that was dynasty founder Joe Kennedy's famous dictum. Nor do they spill their guts. For more than four decades, family members have maintained a stoic front through assassinations, scandals, fatal accidents and the other ordeals collectively known as the Kennedy Curse. There was something heroic in the Kennedys' stony embrace of their fate, particularly in this age of compulsive confessionalism. But over the years it has also trapped the family in a bell jar of morbid celebrity. Unable to confront the terrible meaning of the murders of Jack and Bobby -- the two brothers who brought the family to such political heights -- the Kennedys were doomed to live in the shadows of these martyrs. But now comes "Symptoms of Withdrawal," a raw, exposed wound of a memoir by Christopher Kennedy Lawford, one of the baby-boom generation cousins, that tries to liberate the family from its crushing legacy.

It's a book, as Lawford makes plain, that the family desperately did not want published. The son of Patricia Kennedy and actor Peter Lawford, Christopher inherited his father's addictive hungers and his mother's need for emotional anesthesia after the unbearable shocks to the family that occurred on Nov. 22, 1963, in Dallas and June 5, 1968, in Los Angeles. For the nation and the world, the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy were acts of history-changing dimension. But for the family, as Lawford powerfully brings home, they were personal tragedies that ripped out their hearts and led them down into a tunnel of such pitch-black grief that for some, like Christopher, the only escape was through soul-killing intakes of drink and drugs. Written in a style that is both conversational and deeply compelling, humorous as well as harrowing, "Symptoms of Withdrawal" presents what Lawford calls a "fear and loathing in Camelot" version of the Kennedy epic. While Lawford fails to explore the political mysteries that still enshroud the crimes that forever changed his family -- a determined reluctance he shares with the rest of the Kennedy clan -- he eloquently etches the terrible emotional damage these deaths wrought among them.

Lawford offers an idyllic portrait of the first eight years of his life, growing up on the beach in Malibu with his glamorous parents, whom the press dubbed "the Hollywood Branch of the Kennedys," and whose drinking and partying in those early years possessed a Nick and Nora effervescence. His father toasted his birth with Cary Grant at Madame Wu's famous bistro. Young Christopher was taught to twist by Marilyn Monroe. He roamed the casino at the Sands with his little sisters while his father filmed "Ocean's 11" with the rest of the Rat Pack. His mother and her brother -- the future president of the United States -- woke him up in a Los Angeles hotel room the night JFK won the Democratic nomination to tell him the good news. "Christopher, I won. I am going to be running for the president of the United States ... We're all going to have to work very hard. Will you help me?" JFK asked him. The 5-year-old assured his beloved uncle he would, if it could wait until the morning.

Peter Lawford might have belonged to one of the entertainment world's most exclusive clubs, along with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. But Patricia Lawford made it brutally clear to her husband, and even to her own children, that they did not have full membership in an even more restricted clan, the Kennedy family. Christopher Lawford writes that on the climactic summer night that John Kennedy was to climb onto the stage at the Los Angeles Sports Arena to accept his party's presidential nomination, flanked by his telegenic family, his mother tried to stop her husband from joining them, telling him, "Peter, you can't come. You're not a Kennedy." A more levelheaded JFK quickly intervened on his brother-in-law's behalf, telling his sister, "Pat, he's your husband. I'd say that qualifies him. Besides, it doesn't hurt having a good-looking movie star around."

Lawford writes that his mother was never happier than she was that night, "standing at the apex between the worlds of politics and Hollywood," where she had the joy, as a California delegate, of voting for her brother as the next president of the United States. And his father, despite his mother's proprietary attitude toward her family, enjoyed an easy and friendly relationship with JFK, with whom he swapped fashion tips and Hollywood dish. Even as his parents' marriage began to hit the rocks and Lawford went to the White House to seek Kennedy's advice, the president reassured him: "Don't worry, Peter. I will always be your friend."

This world ended for young Christopher and the rest of his family on the afternoon of Nov. 22, 1963, when his teacher, Sister Agnes, took him out of class to tell him his uncle had been shot and killed. Jack and Bobby had been the sun and moon of the family, the fulfillment of their father's Olympian ambitions and the celestial lights around whom the others orbited. Now the older brother was gone and everything began spinning off its axis.

"The next morning when I woke up," Lawford writes, "I found my father sitting at the flagpole where I used to raise the presidential flag when Uncle Jack came to visit. He was crying like a baby. Strangers held a vigil on the beach outside my parents' house for days after the assassination." Christopher's mother began drinking with a new seriousness. Neither of his parents could muster the will to talk with their children about the cataclysm that had befallen them. "Maybe they thought it was being covered by so many other people they didn't have to. Maybe they were too busy dealing with the aftermath. Maybe it was too painful." His parents left him at home to go to the president's funeral in Washington. That night, Christopher "reached over to turn the light off by the side of the bed and I said goodnight to Uncle Jack for the first time. It was the beginning of my long relationship with the dead."

Next Page: "God gave Peter Lawford more than he could bear"

• View blog reactions