Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
The third generation of this legendary political family has underachieved to date, but would-be leaders are waiting in the wings.
Jul 21, 1999 | It wasn't just his stunning looks, his Ivy League credentials or his decent, modest speech at the 1988 Democratic National Convention that led people to speculate about John F. Kennedy Jr.'s political future.
It was something more -- a sense that he just might have that magic quality that appeals to the part in all of us that longs to be led. Also, of course, it was nostalgia for the days of his father and his uncle Bobby, but there was more to it than that. It was the power of someone who had an ability to appeal to our better angels.
John F. Kennedy had it. Robert Kennedy had it. Did JFK Jr. have it?
Coy refusals to rule out a future run for office were part of his M.O. -- the New York Observer recently reported that he had been considering a campaign for the Senate seat that Hillary Rodham Clinton is now pursuing. His friend and colleague at George magazine, Douglas Brinkley, wrote in Newsweek this week, "There was never any doubt in my mind that John planned to run for the U.S. Senate sometime in the next decade."
Kennedy family associate Bob Shrum seconded that on CBS when he noted, "I think that at some point he would have run for office, and I think he would have been extraordinarily good at it."
If Kennedy had run, his would have been a powerful candidacy for a nation starving for heroes. Former Nixon speechwriter William Safire acknowledged JFK Jr.'s palpable Kennedy charm. "He certainly had it. He had that charisma, that Kennedy charisma that all the Nixon people deeply resented and envied," Safire said on "Meet the Press" Sunday. "He could have been quite a candidate."
Now, tragically, that will never happen -- so who today from the Kennedy brood, other than aging Sen. Ted Kennedy, remains to fight the family fight?
Joseph and Rose Kennedy had nine children, six of whom -- Jack, Bobby, Ted, Eunice, Patricia, Jean -- begat 30 Kennedy grandchildren. Surely, among these men and women with at least remnants of the DNA of power, someone would emerge to lead the charge for Kennedy liberalism. Wouldn't they?
Not necessarily.
A columnist for the Providence Journal noted that "Kennedys of the third generation have encountered the usual troubles of people with too much money and time on their hands: Their personal lives have been messy; their professional, even political, careers unimpressive."
That may be so, but there's still a lot of promising material in the Kennedy third generation.
Some of the family's failure to produce obvious leaders to date has been by choice. Many of the Kennedy grandchildren are understandably wary of the limelight. Though she lives in the tabloid ground-zero of Manhattan, for instance, John Jr.'s sister, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, 41, is intensely private.
Other than a few charity chairwomanships and a couple of legal books (on the right to privacy), Kennedy Schlossberg has avoided the public spotlight -- though she did voice opposition, in writing, to a 1998 Washington state initiative against affirmative action.
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