Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Is the clan's Irish stoicism linked to its history of alcoholism, risk-taking and self-destruction?
Jul 22, 1999 | Like millions of Americans I'll be watching whatever is televised of John F. Kennedy Jr.'s funeral Friday. But I may be alone in hoping to see somebody in the stoic Kennedy clan defy history and break down over the loss of their cherished relative.
All week long, reports from inside the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port said the same thing: The mood there was somber, but composed. "Kennedys don't cry," commentator Rowland Evans told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Sunday. Evans had been at the compound to attend Rory Kennedy's wedding, and he was there when it turned into a wake. He praised Ethel and Ted Kennedy for their stiff-upper-lip sense of orderliness, making sure Mass was said daily and everybody got fed. Ethel and some of the cousins even went out sailing twice, in the same waters that had claimed their beloved John. Life went on, if sadly.
But I'd have been happier if Evans had described wailing and keening and rending of garments inside the compound. Because I think the Kennedy way of grief is linked inextricably with the Kennedy way of tragedy: alcoholism, addiction, risk-taking, self-destruction and early death -- a flight path that is particularly male and congenitally Irish.
There's not an Irish American alive who doesn't feel some connection to the Kennedys, even if they resist or reject it. Jack Kennedy's 1960 election was a huge psychic boost for American Catholics -- he was the first and last Catholic elected president, remember -- but particularly for Irish Catholics. It was a step toward recovery from that vicious sense of inferiority and Irish self-loathing that's made worse by the fact that no one ever admits to it.
My Irish-American parents, just a few years removed from Brooklyn and the Bronx (and in my father's case, one generation from Ireland), worked hard to belong when we moved to the suburbs, to shed their working-class, ethnic roots. I remember my mother in the kitchen, obsessively transferring all food from cooking pots to serving dishes, because "only the shanty Irish eat from the pot." Bringing a pot to the table, even for seconds, would trigger a scolding. She had reason to worry: Our next door neighbor, a working-class first-generation Russian-American, called us "shanty Irish" whenever the grass got too long or the shingles needed painting. "Just like the niggers," he used to mutter.
The Kennedys, of course, were lace-curtain Irish at minimum, but Jack Kennedy's ascent to the nation's highest office took the rest of us up a notch with him. Although separated from the Kennedys by millions of dollars, private-school pedigrees, yachts, planes and several homes, we felt a part of the family. I was brought up on the full-strength Camelot myth: that JFK started the civil rights movement, tried to stop the Vietnam war and with his youth helped awaken the conscience of a generation.
As I got older, I realized my family had more in common with the Kennedys than roots in Ireland and Democratic politics. I saw a dysfunctional Irish stoicism in the Kennedy way of grief that I would notice later in my childhood, when tragedy hit my family, and my mother, youngest cousin, favorite uncle, grandmother and grandfather got sick and died within a seven-year span, in what felt like our own not-for-television version of the Kennedy curse.
I saw that stoicism first in President Kennedy's death, the first big loss of my childhood. Wild with grief, my family watched TV all weekend, and the images are indelible: the flag-draped coffin in the Capitol rotunda; Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald; the funeral procession; the riderless horse; and the salute, John-John's goodbye to his father, televised over and over.
But even at age 5, I remember feeling a queer, animal revulsion at the salute. I was sick with sadness over the Kennedy children. Already a daddy's girl, I couldn't imagine losing my father, and if I did, I'd knew I'd be howling in fear and grief, not saluting. John-John's salute, and Caroline's composure, seemed the cost of being Kennedy. What others praised made me cringe, to this day.
So I comforted myself, at age 5, by writing letters to Caroline Kennedy, who was a year older than me, and was, like me, a precocious oldest daughter with a mischievous little brother named John. My parents encouraged my epistolary ministry, though they warned me not to write about her father, so as not to upset her. My letters asked her about school and invited her for play-dates. I don't know how many I sent: more than one, fewer than five. My mother would write our return address on the envelope.
One day Tony the mailman came running up my street with some neighborhood kids trailing behind him. He was carrying a large manila envelope addressed to "Miss Joanie" at my house (I'd never signed my last name), from "Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy, 1040 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY." There was a picture of the Kennedy family, and a typed thank-you card, signed by Jackie. It was my 15 minutes of childhood fame.
We kept the picture and the note for a long time, but it eventually got lost, after my mother died and my father moved away and there was nobody to keep track of the family lore, ours or the Kennedys.
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