Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
Others of the brood are lying low, however, trying to lead as normal a life as a Kennedy can. Christopher Kennedy, a son of RFK, may be best known to the world for telling Vanity Fair that at least eight members of his immediate family attend daily meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. But in Chicago, where his term as chairman of the Convention and Tourism Bureau just ended, he's famous for his business acumen.
The clear heir to the Joseph P. Kennedy type-A businessman's trophy, Christopher, last year sold the world's largest wholesale design center, the Merchandise Mart, which Joseph P. Kennedy bought for $12.5 million in 1945, for $625 million. Christopher Kennedy will remain executive vice president of Merchandise Mart Properties Inc. for at least the next few years.
Other cousins remain as far from public view as they can. Victoria Lawford Pender, Sydney Lawford McKelvy and Kym and Amanda Smith have seemingly done everything they can to keep their names and faces out of the papers.
Some cousins, of course, have gone charging right for the cameras -- as members of the media. Maria Shriver, wife of Arnold Schwarzenegger, is a broadcast journalist for NBC. Her brother Robert "Bobby" Shriver, an L.A. venture capitalist, developed a story that eventually became "True Lies" -- featuring brother-in-law Schwarzenegger. (According to MSNBC's Jeannette Walls, Bobby Shriver was also dating Lauren Bessette, Carolyn Bessette's 18-months-older sister.)
Their cousin, former attorney and substance abuse counselor Christopher Kennedy Lawford, is a low-list actor, and recently produced and appeared in "Kiss Me, Guido."
Robert and Ethel's 10th child, Doug Kennedy, co-founded the somewhat lame Third Millennium organization to raise Gen X political awareness as well as, no doubt, his own public profile. After a stint as a cub reporter for the Kennedy-obsessed New York Post, Doug is now a reporter for Fox News in New York.
And Doug's younger sister, Rory Kennedy, is a documentary filmmaker with a gift for nuance who was, of course, scheduled to get married last weekend.
John Kennedy Jr. is not the first promising Kennedy grandchild to suffer the cruel hand of fate. Before Michael Kennedy's skiing death on New Year's Eve 1997, he had been considered the most promising Kennedy -- some thought even more so than John Jr.
After Joe II took off for Congress, younger brother Michael ran the CEC and in 1994 helmed his uncle Ted's successful reelection campaign. He coordinated relief missions to West Africa, co-chaired the Walden Woods Project and worked with Boston's Stop Handgun Violence Inc.
But all of this was wiped out when the baby-sitter scandal hit, and then of course his life ended when he hit a tree while skiing down an Aspen mountain.
Not that fate has been kinder to the Kennedy grandkids with less potential. In 1984, David Kennedy, another son of Robert and Ethel, overdosed on cocaine and prescription drugs after being kicked out of the family estate in Palm Beach. He was 28. And John Jr.'s younger brother, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, died two days after his birth -- only weeks before his father was assassinated.
These four, in tragedy if not entirely in achievement, were every bit their father's sons.
It would be a shame if the venue of disaster were this generation's only clear resemblance to the ones who came before them. After all, as Sen. Ted Kennedy noted in his one true moment of Camelotian inspiration -- his 1980 Democratic National Convention concession speech -- "For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives and the dream shall never die."
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