Who will carry the Kennedy torch?

Joe Kennedy II, Robert Kennedy's eldest son, was the first of the third generation to be elected to public office, in 1986, when he won the Boston seat formerly occupied by House Speaker Thomas "Tip" O'Neill Jr. Up until that time, Joe had been running the Citizens Energy Corporation, or CEC, providing cheap home heating fuel to low-income families.

As a legislator, Joe Kennedy II was a meat-and-potatoes guy who reminded many observers of the all-business family patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy. Unlike his father and his uncle, he was not an orator, a lack that helped prompt the New Republic to put him on its cover with the headline "The Dumbest Kennedy."

But he was smarter than he was given credit for. He continued to work, true to his CEC roots, on obscure but pithy issues, toughening up '70s-era laws like the Community Reinvestment Act and the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. Joe II's legislative efforts eventually gave these two laws teeth, a move that has since been credited with helping low-income Americans get billions of dollars worth of loans.

But Joe II, 47, had a tough year in '97. First, his gubernatorial hopes were sidelined when his ex-wife published a book offering readers a harsh assessment of their marriage. Then came revelations that his younger brother Michael had carried on a multi-year affair with a teenage baby sitter. And Michael died in a December 1997 skiing accident.

Since then, Joe II has kept a low profile, returning to Boston and the CEC. But it's tough to imagine that he'll remain out of politics forever -- indeed, rumors that he'll run for governor in 2002 continue to circulate within Boston political circles.

"The more I'm around politicians, the more I appreciate him," says a longtime aide to Joe II who continued working on the Hill after his boss left. "As exasperating and infuriating as he was, he's got a soul. He gives a damn." In the late '80s, Democratic leader Dick Gephardt tried to enlist Joe II into becoming a party spokesman and fund-raiser in exchange for committee chairmanships and a helping hand onto the leadership track. That wasn't Joe II's style, however. Impatient and hotheaded, with little tolerance for the go-along-to-get-along ways of the House, he rebuffed Gephardt and did his own thing instead.

Gephardt found a more willing soldier in Joe II's cousin Patrick, however. The second son of Sen. Ted Kennedy, Patrick was elected to the House in 1994 at the age of 27.

Patrick was lucky he had Gephardt as a steward; he didn't exactly hit the ground running. The belief that the fabled Kennedy intelligence, as exemplified by JFK and RFK, ran throughout the family was first questioned when Ted Kennedy was caught cheating at Harvard, and his son's slack-jawed partisan hacking only added to theories of devolution. (New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd once suggested that Joe II and Patrick come from "the shallow end of the Kennedy gene pool.")

Though he has reportedly tended well to the interests of seniors and his home-state military needs, Patrick's political career has been, well, underwhelming.

But Patrick's marble-mouthed, rumpled and slightly dim exterior hides the fierce ambition of his father and uncles. Handpicked by Gephardt, now minority leader, to run the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee -- the arm of the Democratic Party charged with reclaiming a House majority next year -- Patrick has approached the job with the tenacity displayed in a Hyannisport touch football game.

Since Gephardt gave him the opportunity (and two key aides) last fall, Kennedy's DCCC has set a quarterly fund-raising record.

Even Democrats concede that Gephardt calls the shots at the DCCC, however, and Patrick's recent invitation to big donors to attend a Hyannisport clambake dispirited many Kennedy admirers, who thought the gesture crass and reeking of ambition.

The forthcoming retirement of Rhode Island Republican Sen. John Chafee had prognosticators wondering if the hubristic Patrick had designs on Chafee's seat, but, perhaps sensing that his future is hitched to Gephardt, Patrick opted to stay where he is, for now.

Next Page: "I wish I didn't always disappoint people"

• View blog reactions