Fear and loathing in Camelot

The rest of Christopher's memoir deals with his plunge -- and that of his best friend, cousin David -- into a whirlpool of addiction, near-fatal overdoses, and, at least in Christopher's case, final resurrection. Uncle Bobby had made the kids feel "that we were going to be okay. He made us feel more like Kennedys than ever -- proud of what Jack had been, determined that our time would come again ... He demanded that we be better than we thought we could be."

But after Bobby's murder, "there was only a sense of splitting apart, and for many in my generation the only safety from here on out would be in escape and not giving a shit."

Christopher began his drug-fueled race from reality by dropping acid every weekend during his 8th-grade year at St. David's prep school in Manhattan, while his mother looked the other way and threw herself into a drug education campaign. "It was a fairly typical family response: solve the problem nationally, and avoid what was going on in your own house." For the next 15 years, he would snort, inject and guzzle every mind-altering substance he could get his hands on, exhausting his family trust fund and his family's forbearance, getting himself thrown into jail while stumping for Uncle Teddy's 1980 presidential campaign, and being hospitalized in nearly flat-line condition on more than one occasion. One of his innumerable low points came in Los Angeles, when he overdosed on a lethal dose of Mexican brown heroin in his bathroom while working as a summer intern for the narcotics division of the L.A. District Attorney's Office -- one of the many unlikely jobs he landed courtesy of his family name.

Not until David Kennedy, RFK's deeply wounded son and Christopher's "best friend to the bitter end," died of an overdose in August 1984 -- followed shortly by the death of Christopher's father, who finally wasted away on Christmas Eve after two decades of self-obliteration -- did the younger Lawford find the inspiration to free himself from his own slavery to drugs. He began by turning to "the one guy on the planet I didn't want to bow to, my cousin Bobby, and asked him what to do." Relying on Bobby, who had kicked his own heroin habit after overdosing on an airplane and being arrested, was his "first experience with humility," since he had aggressively competed with his cousin ever since they were kids.

Today, at age 50, after 20 years of sobriety, Lawford reports that he has reached a serene place in his life -- a divorced but devoted father of three children, an actor with a moderately successful career (his small but effective role as an Air Force pilot in the "Thirteen Days," the 2000 movie version of the Cuba missile crisis, seems one of his proudest Hollywood moments), and, as his new book indicates, a promising future as a writer.

What rescues "Symptoms of Withdrawal" from the tide of addiction literature washing over the bookstores of America is the author's wryly entertaining, no-bullshit voice and, of course, the company he keeps. Among the legendary characters who appear along the way in his odyssey are Mick Jagger, Frank Sinatra, John Lennon, Muhammad Ali and Elizabeth Taylor -- with whom he helicoptered in for a day of star treatment at Disneyland, while he was flying high on angel dust. The great thing about going to the Magic Kingdom "loaded on PCP," points out Christopher, "is that even It's a Small World is a cool ride."

But it's the Kennedys who come off as the most fascinating characters in Christopher's narrative. If, as he writes, the family lobbied him not to write the book and are now dreading its publication, they should relax. They might not come across as the strong-jawed statuettes dedicated to public service and public mourning that we have seen on TV for the past four decades. But, even through all the drinking and drugging and the other messy grappling with their terrible reversal of fortune, we see a family with enough life force to still cling together, and against all reason, still give something back to the country that had taken so much from them.

Christopher offers admiring snapshots of his cousins Joe and Bobby Jr., the two eldest sons of RFK -- who both managed to crawl from the wreckage of their early lives to become respected public citizens. The late John Kennedy Jr. is also remembered fondly by Lawford as one of the few younger Kennedys who had found a graceful way to deal with The Legacy. "He had the weight of 'the path' on him more than any of us, but somehow managed an aloofness and humanity that allowed him not to get eaten up by it. John was like David in that he understood what a dreadful, dreary burden the legacy had become, but unlike David he was capable of escaping it, creating distance, which allowed him to come to it on his own terms."

Lawford's portraits of Sargent Shriver and his wife, Eunice -- one of JFK's sisters and the mother-in-law of California's muscle-bound governor -- are particularly warm and appreciative. The Shrivers stuck with Christopher throughout his tribulations when others had long given up on him. He recalls sitting with Eunice in his lawyer's office one day, during yet another low point in his life, and the normally irrepressible Kennedy sister -- the one everyone said would have been president if she had been a man -- muttered sadly, "We're so goddamned good at taking care of everybody else's problems, but absolutely lousy at looking after our own."

Next Page: The heavy weight of the Kennedy legacy

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