Young Kennedys

The Decline of an American Dynasty

When he thought about it later on, Chris Lawford was struck by how much that Saturday afternoon resembled others he had spent at his uncle Bobby's house, Hickory Hill--a swirl of activity, laughter and argument erupting almost volcanically from groups of guests, children and dogs battling against the mainstream of adults in endless serpentining games. He and his cousins had been on their own all day, as they usually were at such functions, playing catch-as-catch-can, a game his uncle Bobby said he and his brothers and sisters had played when they were young. Then a pudgy 13-year-old who barely managed to hold his own in the nonstop family athletics, Chris had managed to keep from being caught for quite a long time, hiding first in the stable area near the 300-year-old stand of hickory trees for which the estate was named, then inside the tack room. After almost half an hour had passed without anyone's looking for him, he came out into the open and noticed that the guests were beginning to leave. He went back cautiously toward the house, trying to find Bobby, Jr., 14, and David, 12, the cousins who were also his best friends. Unable to locate them, he finally saw Ina, the family's Costa Rican maid, and asked where they were. She gave him a strange look, and when she answered, her voice was sharper than usual. "Don't you understand? They buried their father today. They are feeling sad and have gone on up to their beds."

At that moment, Chris understood how successful his aunt Ethel had been in maintaining her illusion since it had happened: that nothing had really changed; that Bobby was in heaven, happy to be with Jack and awaiting an eventual reunion with them all. He sat down on the grass, physically sickened by the feelings of loss and abandonment he hadn't had time to feel on first hearing that his uncle had been shot. There on the lawn at Hickory Hill, he tried to piece together events of the past few days, understanding that he could never make a coherent story out of it, that it would always be a mosaic of rumors and impressions.

His cousin Bobby, Jr., had told him during the funeral about how he had gone to bed soon after the announcement that his father had won the California primary and then had gotten up eagerly the next morning to read about the details of the victory in The Washington Post, only to see headlines about the shooting; he had sat by the living-room hearth for an hour, feeding the newspaper page by page into the fire. Joe, nearly 16 and the oldest male of his generation, had been at boarding school when Teddy called to say there had been a shooting but not to worry, because it wasn't as serious as it sounded. When Joe arrived in Los Angeles and saw his father inside the oxygen tent, the familiar face so black and distorted from the bullet that had smashed into the back of his head, he had known immediately that it was more serious than he had been told. And when death had finally come, the operating room at the Good Samaritan Hospital had become what Joe, trying to describe the scene to Chris and others who hadn't been there, called a "hellish environment," with doctors and nurses crying and screaming and the adults in the family so incapacitated that he had been the one who had to tell his younger brothers and sisters that their father hadn't made it.

After the body had been brought home, those Chris was closest to in the family--his uncle Bobby's oldest boys, Joe, Bobby, Jr., and David--had served in the memorial Mass at Saint Patrick's. Then the entire family had boarded the funeral train winding slowly down to Arlington. For much of the trip, David--who had been sitting alone in a Los Angeles hotel room, watching his father's victory statement on television one moment and watching him bleed on the floor the next--had kept his head out the window of the train, letting the wind batter his face. At one point, as they were entering a tunnel, Philip Kirby, David's close friend from Hyannis Port whom Ethel had asked along to keep him company, noticed that David didn't see the protruding arm of a steel girder and yanked him back into the compartment just in time to keep him from being decapitated. Both David and Chris had their heads out the window again when a train on a parallel track struck a group of mourners and killed two of them, cutting one in half. David had been mesmerized by the bloody scene, unable to tear himself away until a Secret Service man got him back into his seat.

The climax of the train ride, at least for Chris and the others of his generation, had come when Joe, accompanied by Ethel, had walked up and down the aisles of some of the passenger cars, wearing one of his father's pinstriped suits and shaking hands and saying, "I'm Joe Kennedy, thank you for coming" with such composure that Ethel later remarked excitedly, "He's got it! He's got it!" The pronoun needed no antecedent; it meant the touch, the destiny, the political genes all the Kennedy children were already talking and wondering about.

As the last guests departed from Hickory Hill and shadows began to creep across the grass, Chris Lawford thought about all those events of the past few days, trying to make sense of them; feeling alone and, even worse, unprotected. When Uncle Bobby was alive, he thought, we knew who we were. But now he's gone. What will happen to us? What comes next?

•

Those questions were on the minds of many of the other Kennedy cousins as well. Together in one place, they looked like a remarkable experiment in eugenics--several strains of one particularly attractive species. There were the five darkly handsome children of Eunice and Sargent Shriver, with their father's sensitive eyes and their mother's aggressive jaw; Jean and Stephen Smith's three, especially their two sons, whose round-faced impassivity emulated the mask that had allowed their father to prosper in the family; the son and three daughters of Pat and Peter Lawford, with the actor's good looks--and a hint of his troubled vulnerability--in their faces. Among those bearing the family name, Bobby's ten children had the big bones and imposing size of Ethel's family, the Skakels, while Teddy's three were blond and surprisingly frail. Posing for nonstop photography since infancy, Caroline and John-John had acquired a poise all the others lacked.

The country had seen these wind-swept, photogenic faces at different stages of development and watched their growth and change as if by time lapse. They were, as one journalist had remarked, "America's children." But as in their parents' generation, it was the opinion of family members that really mattered. Each of the children was always looking for an opening to outperform some rival in the family, always searching for an opportunity to improve his standing, always wondering if someone in an age or ability group just above him would slip, always aware above everything else that their parents were watching and assessing their performance to see which of them had it. If the Beals Street house where some of the prior generation had been born had been an enigma of latency, the Compound where they gathered every summer was a training ground to recapture the greatness that had once belonged to the family. As Chris Lawford said, "We were all, every one of us, raised to be President."

Some of the older ones remembered what their parents referred to as "that brief shining moment": trips to the White House; Friday afternoons when the Presidential helicopter would swoop down, their uncle Jack would get out and, after disposing of his aides, drive them all downtown and give them each a dollar to spend at the candy store.

But if Jack represented what the family had been--"the President," they all grew up calling him, as if there had been no other--Bobby had represented what it would become. It was he who would come through a room where one of them was lounging on a sofa reading a comic book and say, "Put that junk down right now and get outside and do something." It was he who attended christenings and confirmations, graduations and commencements. When their grandmother Rose repeated her favorite saying from Saint Luke, "To whom much has been given, much will be required," it seemed just another of her religious homilies. Bobby translated the admonition into terms they could understand: "America has been very good to the Kennedys. We all owe the country a debt of gratitude and of public service." He was the energetic, embracing figure who demanded that they be better than they thought they were. He was the one who had defined their Kennedyness.

And so 1968, the year of his loss, became their first summer of discontent. "It was so different from Jack's death," Eunice's oldest son, Bobby, later said. "Then there had been a coming together. Uncle Bobby had seen to that. In a strange way, we'd felt even more like Kennedys than ever--proud of what Jack had been, determined that our time would come again. But once Uncle Bobby died, there was just this sense of splitting apart."

The impact was greatest on Bobby's own children, whom his magnetism had made the center of the clan. By the time of David's 13th birthday, on June 15--a spiritless party at Hickory Hill whose high point was Bobby, Jr.'s, decision to put laxative in everybody's milk--the heroic denial Ethel had been practicing since the funeral had begun to crack. Tension was thick in the house. The Little Kids and the Girls--as these branches of the new generation were categorized--were immune from it, but the Big Boys were not. Ethel punished them constantly and capriciously, almost as if she blamed them for reminding her of her dead husband. She told Joe that he must be the man of the house now and allowed him to sit in his dead father's chair at the dinner table. But when he hit his younger sister Kerry for making noise, she gave him the infantile punishment of having to walk up and down the stairs 100 times. (Later, he went into the back yard and, in a moment of tenderness, took the hands of his younger brothers and sisters and began to sing The Battle Hymn of the Republic, their father's favorite song.)

A few days after David's birthday, they all flew with Teddy to Connecticut and chartered a boat from Mystic to Hyannis Port. Ethel careened between gloom and febrile gaiety all during the trip. At one point, she took Bobby, Jr., and David below and hit them repeatedly with a hairbrush, the first such punishment they could remember and one that made them cry in spite of their teenage resolution to be stronger than their mother. "I can't stand it anymore," she said when they reached home port. "You guys have got to get away from here." Thus began a diaspora that would continue for years, a process of leaving and returning that symbolized the next generation's alienation.

Joe and his friend Chuck McDermott were flown to Spain, where they stayed with the Guardiolas, a large family that raised bulls for bull rings throughout the country. For the first few days, Joe walked around like a displaced person. He had the Kennedy smile, which had been so striking on his father's funeral train. But it was tenuous and suspicious and usually accompanied by a knot of perplexity at his forehead. Barrel-chested and slow (a line-man, McDermott felt, in a family that valued quarterbacks and receivers), he had experienced another bad year at Milton Academy. Scholastically behind to begin with, he had lost further ground. Being a Kennedy had also resulted in his being constantly tested: Girls solicited mash notes because they thought the signature might be valuable; boys had short-sheeted his bed and had even sneaked in to vomit on his pillow. Joe had been looking forward to the Presidential campaign to release him from his troubles. His father had already been trying to groom him--taking time out from a last raft trip down the Colorado to take him alone to the Navaho reservation, explaining the special plight of Indians in America, introducing him to key aides and letting him sit in on low-level briefings preparatory to a summer job as advance man. "That had been the big thing in his life," says McDermott. "It allowed him to forget his troubles. Now that future was gone and he was stuck with who he was."

Occasionally, Joe wrote home, always asking about Bobby, Jr. His brother was dark, wiry and enigmatic, a loner by choice rather than necessity, since, unlike Joe, he had no trouble making friends. The family regarded him as somewhat like the falcons he kept--hooded in intent and conveying the impression of slight danger. Even the taste for practical joking he had inherited from the Skakels had an eccentric and sometimes dangerous bite, as Philip Kirby had discovered when he was invited to join David and his brothers in serving the memorial Mass for their father. Philip had told the priest that he was unfamiliar with the liturgy and wasn't sure when to ring the bell. The priest replied that he would signal him by a touch on the shoulder. At one point, Philip felt the touch and rang the bell, immediately realizing that it was the wrong time. Almost in tears at having made a mistake during such a solemn ceremony for his best friends' dead father, Philip had turned around to discover who had touched him and had seen Bobby, Jr., smiling enigmatically behind him.

Because of Bobby, Jr.'s, interest in animals--snakes and lizards before the falcons--his father had commissioned naturalists from the Bronx Zoo to make him a walk-in terrarium for his 13th birthday. He had encouraged his interest in falconry, though he admitted to his son that he was disturbed by the implications of feeding pigeons to the predators. The two of them worked out a compromise with a distinctively Kennedy twist: If a pigeon managed to avoid a hawk on two successive flights, it was "retired" and never forced to face death again.

Impressed by the boy's omnivorous interest in things, Bobby, Sr., had once remarked that Bobby, Jr., was "just like the President." Jack's oldest and best friend, LeMoyne "Lem" Billings, had thought so, too, and had taken Bobby, Jr., on as a protégé. When Ethel became difficult in the weeks after the assassination, Lem had volunteered to take Bobby, Jr., to Africa on an animal-watching expedition, fulfilling a promise R.F.K. had made shortly before his death. And so, while Joe was watching bullfights in. Spain, Bobby was crouching in the veld grass of the Serengeti Plain, stalking animals with a camera and telling Africans that he planned to become a veterinarian. He kept a journal, which Lem, who had more or less adopted him by the time they returned to America, said they could sell to a magazine for a lot of money.

David was most conscious of the coup his brother had scored by having an adult who was fully devoted to him and ready to help him cope with the tragedy. "Lem could have chosen any of us," he later said. "I remember the day it happened. Lem appeared and they just sort of walked off together. I thought to myself, Bobby's lucky. I wish I had someone." If his father's death hit David harder than the others, it was because there had been a special bond between them--both were the runts of the litter, sandwiched into the middle of a large family--and because he had always been a sort of golden boy for the family with his open, freckled face and the wispy blond hair both parents had always tousled when passing by, almost as if fingering some talisman. ("If we ever go broke," Ethel had once told an interviewer, "we'll make a movie star of David and live off his earnings.")

David was the only one in the family who hadn't been enthusiastic about the run for the Presidency. For weeks after the announcement, he had been plagued by recurring nightmares centered on his father's death. The day of the California primary, he had joined his father in Los Angeles. The two of them had been swimming in the Malibu surf and his feet had been cut from under him by a rip tide; he had felt himself being carried out by the undertow when his father grabbed him, scraping his own head on the ocean floor as he reached for David's slipping arm. With an adolescent's sense of melodrama, David had decided that he owed his father a life and would look for an opportunity to pay him back in the years ahead. That night, as he sat in front of the television set in the Ambassador hotel room and watched the images from the hand-held cameras jostling to get a better view of the new Kennedy martyr bleeding on the floor of the Ambassador kitchen, one of the thoughts he had was that the debt would be forever undischarged.

With Joe and Bobby, Jr., taken care of for the summer, Ethel hustled David off to Austria with Chris Lawford as a companion. They went to Mayrhof, a tennis-and-ski camp run by former tennis great Bill Talbert. They skied on a glacier in the morning and practiced volleys in the afternoon. After hours, David was introduced to the Grateful Dead and to sex. "Some 17-year-old girl at the camp realized who I was and picked me up," he recalls. "I was hardly into puberty. Chris told me to take her out and try to feel her tits. I did it. All of a sudden, she was unzipping my pants and pulling them down and sort of moaning about how bad she felt that my father had died."

For the rest of their time in Austria, he and Chris sneaked out of their rooms at night with sleeping bags that they took into the girls' dorms, making macabre propositions to the girls, who, they realized, felt sorry about R.F.K.'s death. They knew it was wrong, but they also knew it was part of a large change in their attitude toward everything having to do with being a Kennedy. "It was like watching a huge balloon lose its air," Chris later said. "Things just didn't have meaning anymore." An outstanding tennis player, Chris now found himself not caring whether he won or lost. "I'd be out on the court and I'd just say 'The hell with it' in the middle of the match and walk off. Before Uncle Bobby's death, I wouldn't have dared do that."

When they returned home at summer's end, things were in a state of ongoing disorder. It had been difficult for Ethel to keep help in the best of times; during the summer, there had been several resignations, and ten-year-old Michael, the most resilient of the children, had taken to answering the phone with the words "Confusion here." As summer ended with a stream of friends visiting the family--Dave Hackett, Rosey Grier, Rafer Johnson and John Glenn were the regulars--David kept waiting for someone to talk with him about his father's death. During one lull in his mother's nonstop activity, he cornered her in the kitchen and asked her about it. "It's not a subject I want to discuss," she snapped, elbowing her way by him.

His brothers were back but leading separate lives--Joe driving around with older friends in their cars and Bobby, Jr., spending most of his time in the woods with Morgan le Fay, the red-tailed hawk he had captured and tamed a few years earlier. David saw a lot of Philip Kirby, while Bobby hung out with some older boys. One afternoon, one of them asked Bobby what he'd done with the LSD he'd sold him. Bobby tried to change the subject and then lamely said that he'd fed the drug to his parakeet. Later, after David had chided Bobby for keeping secrets from him, Bobby laid out some mescaline on a piece of wood and dared him to take it. Philip, who had watched David try to prove himself time and again by taking dares, begged him not to take the drug: "Don't do that, David. Please, don't do it." But Bobby egged him on and, after hesitating a moment, David swallowed the mescaline. Later on, when he was hallucinating, it seemed to him that the hedge Bobby was leaning against had sharp leaves. He asked Bobby to move away so he wouldn't get hurt. But Bobby laughed and backed deeper into the hedge, whose spines seemed to David to penetrate his brother's body. "You're dying," David cried out, "just like Daddy." Bobby smiled and sagged to the ground with his eyes glassy and his tongue lolling out of his mouth in a mime of death.

Although they were not able to articulate it, the boys were aware that they were stepping over lines they had never expected to cross, lines between good and evil that R.F.K. himself had drawn. But they found themselves standing on an opposite shore from the one he had occupied, as if to better see his memory.

•

As the nation seethed in racial unrest and the turmoil of Vietnam--exactly the wounds Robert Kennedy had tried to heal in the last months of his life--the Kennedy kids' only surviving father and uncle, Teddy, appeared to be trying to find a political hiding place. During Christmas 1968 at Palm Beach, he decided to challenge Senate Majority Whip Russell Long. What intrigued political pundits was not his victory, which was virtually assured, but why someone with his national stature should want a post whose duties were primarily clerical. Yet, as one Kennedy aide pointed out, "It was the perfect solution, really. He looked for and found the one Senate post that would allow him to reproduce the younger-brother role he was in danger of losing."

Yet the pressures Teddy felt could not be released by minor corrections in his external situation, and as 1969 began, his behavior was more and more erratic. Returning to the "Cadillac Eddie" image of his youth, he was drinking more and moving faster than he had done in years. His marriage was suffering, and so was his reputation among his colleagues. Edmund Muskie, a rival for the leadership of the party, acknowledged that Teddy could have the 1972 nomination for the asking but then wondered, in an off-the-record comment, about his growing penchant for alcohol and fast cars. On July 18, the accident that had been waiting to happen since Bobby's death finally occurred when Teddy drove the Oldsmobile 88 off Dike Bridge at Chappaquiddick, killing Mary Jo Kopechne.

Chris Lawford, who was in California with his mother and sisters at the time, remembers how he got the news: "Nobody said a word about what had happened. There were all these hushed phone conversations and then my mother packed her bags and said she had to go to the Cape. That was the way we were always informed of crises--someone arriving in a hurry or someone leaving in a hurry."

The accident didn't much affect him or his cousins. It was merely a confirmation of something they had already sensed--that the build-up Teddy was getting in the press as someone who had solemnly taken on family responsibility in the Robert Kennedy tradition was not only a sham but a Kennedy-created sham at that. "We all felt a lot of bitterness toward him," Chris said later on. "It was probably unfair. There was no real reason for it except that he couldn't fill Uncle Bobby's shoes and didn't try."

The contrast between the two men had become painfully obvious at the beginning of the summer, before Chappaquiddick, when Teddy had decided to continue Bobby's tradition of an annual raft trip. He had chosen to go down the Green, scene of one of the best of the R.F.K. outings. After a devastating year at school, a year of personal disorientation and experimentation with the drugs that the counterculture was making increasingly available, the older boys were looking to the trip as a healing ritual, a way of getting back on the Kennedy track. But Teddy had been too preoccupied with his own troubles to pay much attention to theirs. He had made the trip a floating cocktail party centered on himself, Joan, Ethel, mountaineer Jim Whittaker and his wife and other nonfamily members. In R.F.K.'s time, there had been no such distinction between child and adult; although they had all been younger then, the children had joined in the conquest of the river as equals. Now it was different; the adults, in Chris's words, "wanted to float along with their frozen daiquiris and not be bothered." At one point, the kids drew their raft alongside and began a water fight, trying to compel engagement and change the terms of the trip. But the adults weren't interested. They told them angrily to stop and, when they didn't, pulled alongside to allow the 6'4" Whittaker, huge and threatening, to board the boys' raft and throw David and Bobby, Jr., forcefully into the white water.

"We were all upset," Chris remembers. "We didn't want to have anything to do with them after that. For the rest of the trip, we took our sleeping bags and found the hardest place to get to every night, places where they couldn't find us, and camped there. We'd sit in the darkness talking about what a drag the family was, what an incredible asshole Teddy was to let it happen, how it was never like this when Bobby was alive. We had the feeling that nobody cared enough about us anymore to make us part of the family." The feeling intensified that summer, so that as Chappaquiddick began to unfold, the Kennedy children were already providing their own subtext on its themes.

Lem Billings tried to fill the vacuum. Different from the others who had been (continued on page 187)Young Kennedys(continued from page 86) close to the family, people who ranged from sycophants to advisors, Lem was, in Eunice's words, "as close as you could get to being a Kennedy and still not one."

Lem had, indeed, been around since what were regarded in the family as almost prehistoric times: He had been football opponent of young Joe, oldest of the children of Joseph and Rose, who died in World War Two; suitor to Kathleen, most glamorous of the Kennedy sisters, who died in a plane crash in 1948; chauffeur to Rose's father and ex-mayor of Boston, Honey Fitz; and, most important, best friend of Jack. Lem had become especially close to the family after the late Fifties, when the ad agency in which he had worked for several years went bankrupt. He had drifted into an early semiretirement, buying and reselling New York brownstones he renovated, tending the modest investments he had accumulated over the years, and burrowing into the relationship with Jack that extended back to their prep school days at Choate. He was close to his own family and proud of its genteel past, but he kept the Billingses compartmentalized and separate from this other, more exciting part of his life. Jack had offered him jobs in the Post Office, the Commerce Department and the Peace Corps, but Lem had preferred to be an unemployed gadfly, weekending so often in Washington that he was able to reply to those who asked him why he had never married, "If I had, I never would have had my own bedroom at the White House."

He would have liked to transfer the love and loyalty he had felt for Jack to Jackie and her children. He did manage to see them sometimes in New York in the years before the Onassis marriage, but the relationship was one-sided, shaped by Jackie's mania for privacy and her possessiveness with John and Caroline. Since he could play no more than an occasional role with them, Lem had gravitated more and more to Hickory Hill after J.F.K.'s death, understanding that it was now the center of Kennedy life. Bobby had sensed the degree to which the assassination had left his brother's friend a displaced person and adopted him. Large and ursine, blinking out of thick glasses and barking out high-pitched laughter, Lem had become a regular there, prissy and yet raffish, a sort of court chronicler, reporting on the old days that even Bobby didn't recall and functioning as the all-purpose cheerleader, godfather and pallbearer who could always be counted on.

In the chaos following R.F.K.'s death, Lem had seen the need of the children he left behind more clearly than anyone else. But he had decided that instead of trying to extend himself to all of them, he would focus on one, Bobby, Jr., in whose imagination and intelligence he had seen so clear a reflection of Jack. The trip to Africa in the summer of 1968 had solidified the relationship. Despite the difference in their ages (Lem was then 52, Bobby 14), Lem got some of the same pleasure from the companionship of Bobby that he had gotten from Jack when the two of them had traveled to Europe more than 30 years earlier. But more than nostalgia had been involved. All during the trip, they had talked about politics and public service. Lem had seen an opportunity to initiate a Kennedy who might otherwise be lost into his heritage.

The African trip had not only given Bobby, Jr., a link to the adult world his brothers lacked but also validated him as leader of his generation. Even those cousins with fathers were envious. Lem was continuity. He was also tradition. Centrally placed in his apartment, which was a collector's paradise--Chagalls and Dufys, Early American folk art and letters from Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson and other heroes--was the best assemblage of Kennedyana around. There were massive notebooks of snapshots of the previous generation, bundles of letters from Kathleen and Jack dating back to the early Thirties and found objects able to convey an almost tactile sense of what it had been to be part of this unique family during its formative years. The ambience at Lem's was different from the atmosphere generated by photographs at Hickory Hill: cold, public, almost solemn. At Lem's it was accompanied by Lem himself, a master storyteller who made the people in the myth come alive, as if by verbal holography. For the younger Kennedy generation, going to Lem's was like entering Merlin's cave. For Bobby, Jr., it had soon become something more--oblique instruction for the day he would pull the sword from the stone, the day he would reclaim and extend the Kennedy legacy.

But for the time being, Lem had to work simply to keep Bobby's head above water. He was in trouble at Millbrook, the Poughkeepsie school he had been attending when his father was killed. He defied the rules and the upperclassmen--"lackeys," he called them--who enforced them. His girlfriend, Kim Kelley--one of the children of a large neighboring family in Hyannis Port the Kennedys had grown up with--hitchhiked to visit him and he hid her in his room until they were discovered by school authorities. As in the previous year, he did not go home on his six free weekends, and Ethel did not visit him. His only link to the adult world of the Kennedys was the non-Kennedy, Lem.

Lem visited frequently. The two of them would walk out into the countryside--the large, burly man and the gangly boy beside him, pointing up at the trees, decoding birdcalls and talking about animals. Lem tried to shore up Bobby's precarious sense of self by explaining that rebellious uncertainty was a normal stage in Kennedy development. He told about the problems Jack had caused in their days at Choate, so serious that Joseph Kennedy had been summoned by the headmaster for a summit conference. If these talks were liberating because they made the dead Kennedys something more than family icons, they also gave Bobby subtle license to continue on his course.

In March 1969, Bobby learned that he had been expelled. When he called home, his mother refused to do anything for him. Then he called Lem, who fumed about how Ethel was "like an ostrich, always with her head deep in the sand," and then arranged for Bobby to spend a few weeks in Colombia on a 30,000-acre finca belonging to an old friend from Princeton. He worked in the fields and lived with the laborers, spending his spare time roaming through the rain forests, capturing iguanas and howling monkeys.

In July 1970, after another troubled school year, he returned home to the Cape. Avoiding his mother, he hung out with Kim Kelley, her brother John and others, among them Bobby Shriver, who had tried to keep pace with his more adventuresome Kennedy cousins by experimenting with marijuana at Exeter the previous year. One of the people in their circle was Andy Moes, a bearded taxi driver in his early 20s who gave them free rides all around the Cape, once even taking them into Boston for a Red Sox game. One day, they were all sitting on the Kelleys' fence when Moes drove up and said he was looking for some marijuana. "He was whining that he had this girlfriend," Bobby Shriver recalls, "and that he had to have a joint to get laid and all that. Finally, he offered me ten dollars. I said, 'Shit! Ten dollars for one joint? I'll take it.' " Not long after, Bobby, Jr.'s, favorite hawk, Morgan le Fay, got loose and was discovered in a treetop in Cohasset. Moes was once again on the spot, offering to take him the 100-mile round trip in return for a joint, which they smoked on the way.

A few days later, there was a knock on the door of the Shrivers' house, where Ethel and the kids had joined them for dinner. There were several policemen and squad cars outside. The family was informed that Moes was an undercover narcotics officer and that both Bobbys, Shriver and Kennedy, were wanted for possession of Cannabis sativa. (Bobby Shriver told his parents indignantly, "We never had any Cannabis sativa. What is Cannabis sativa, anyhow?")

After a court appearance ending in a year's probation, Ethel continued to rage at Bobby, Jr. "I have no control over you!" she yelled. "You don't listen to me! I'm throwing you out of the family!" In desperation she called in her husband's friend, Harvard psychiatrist Robert Coles, to deal with her son. Coles tried to use the family's deep-seated fears about "head-shrinkers" and about the possibly paralyzing effects of self-assessment in urging Bobby, Jr., not to become mired in the confusion that threatened his generation but rather to project himself onto the outer world as his father had.

In disgrace, Bobby took $600 out of a savings account and bought a used Ford. Telling nobody where he was going, he headed west. Arriving in Los Angeles, he sold the car for $200 and began hopping freight trains and sleeping in boxcars with tramps and vagrants. On one occasion, he decided to go to San Francisco and sneaked aboard a car carrier, discovering two days later that the train was actually headed for San Antonio. "I had no contact with home," he says, "except that every couple of weeks, I'd call Lem. I was riding around with bums. It was good: I could be one of them and not be a Kennedy." He stayed for several days in Berkeley, panhandling on Telegraph Avenue and using the money to buy drugs.

Back in Hyannis Port, Ethel's kids were being isolated as if contaminated by some psychological radioactivity. Steve Smith urged his two sons to stay apart from them and began designing a house at Bridgehampton as a summer place. Something like the same process took place with the Shrivers. More contemplative than his in-laws, Sarge had always been uncomfortable with an ethic that he felt sacrificed feeling to activism. (Once, when one of his children had fallen down and received the admonition "Kennedys don't cry," he had scooped the boy up and told him, "That's OK, you can go ahead and cry. You're a Shriver.") But now something more was at stake, and he took his oldest son aside and told him that the cousins were all reaching a crossroads and had to choose. "It was drugs, trouble with the police, a record, maybe jail someday," Bobby Shriver later said. "I got a sense of consequences and realized that I'd better figure out a way to move ahead and get on with my life. I also got a sense that the Bobby Kennedy family was dangerous."

•

While Bobby, Jr., was the author of much of the angry defiance in Ethel's house during those first couple of years after his father's death, David got blamed for it almost as if by reflex. "Her idea was that it didn't really matter whether or not I had actually done anything," David says of his mother. "I would do it sooner or later, so she might as well get heavy with me in advance. I remember it clearly: This was the point in my life when everything began to turn against me."

His sole friend in the family was Chris Lawford, even more an orphan than he, since his mother had decided on the spur of the moment to live in Paris with his younger sisters, leaving him in boarding schools. ("I don't want anything to do with this family for a while," she had told him upon leaving. "I'm going to France to get my own life together, away from the Kennedys.") Knowing that Bobby, Jr., had gone west, David and Chris, both now 15, decided in the summer of 1970 to hitchhike to New York. They arrived dirty and ragged and walked around town with no money for several hours before ending up at Grand Central Station, where they began to beg from commuters. "It was great being just ordinary people and not Kennedys," David said. "Also, it wasn't bad money. At one point, we were making about $40 an hour."

They took the money to Central Park to buy drugs. Heroin was selling for two dollars a bag on Dope Hill, and they bought some and snorted it for the first time. Then they tried to find some girls, inviting a few back to Pat Lawford's vacant Fifth Avenue apartment. Word got around that there was a party, and soon the place was filled with blacks, street people and hippies. David went to sleep and woke up in the middle of the night to find winos and bikers frying eggs in the kitchen. When neighbors threatened to call the police, he and Chris managed to get everyone out.

When they returned home several days later, Ethel gave no indication of having realized they had even gone. David was so estranged from her for the remainder of the summer that he often wound up sleeping with a blanket on the soft hedges behind the house. As the school year approached, he transferred to Middlesex, where Chris was, even though it meant repeating the ninth grade.

David had always been the one in his family who would try anything, and now he was trying drugs. He made a small reputation at Middlesex for religiously smoking marijuana with his morning cup of coffee and dropping acid at least once a week. Imitating Bobby, Jr., he and Chris let their hair grow to their shoulders and became part of the school's rebellious hippie faction, building huts in a nearby forested area and fighting off the more authoritarian "neofascists" who staged raids on their tribal lifestyle.

Meanwhile, Bobby had spent the year after his trip west at Pomfret School, in Connecticut, insisting on living in an all-black dorm and ignoring his schoolwork while reading Franz Fanon, Eldridge Cleaver, H. Rap Brown and others. As usual, he had trouble with the rules. As he had done previously at Millbrook, he had his girlfriend, Kim, come up to visit, hiding her in his room at night and by day taking her to a basement where he had set up a hot plate to avoid having to dress formally for meals in the dining commons. Early in 1971, he was expelled from his third school in four years.

That September, Lem enrolled him for his senior year in Palfrey Street School in Watertown, Massachusetts. He also arranged for Bobby to live offcampus in Cambridge with a family named Brode. During his year at Palfrey, he met a Brandeis student named Andy Karsch and immediately made friends with him. "He was very anxious to impress," says Karsch. "The first day I knew him, he put on some climbing spurs and went right up this huge tree."

The reason Bobby was courting Karsch, it soon became clear, was that he knew he had been an all-state quarterback at boarding school. As soon as they were friends, he challenged his older brother Joe, then going to a local prep school, to a football game. With Karsch, the team Bobby put together was victorious over the team Joe quarterbacked. After the victory, as his brother walked off the field glowering, Bobby was exuberant.

"By the end of that year," recalls Joey Brode, "housemother" to Bobby, "Bobby was coming into his own. He had developed a sense of charisma that the older brother just didn't have. The younger Kennedys, brothers and cousins, would come up to Cambridge and just wander around forlornly if Bobby wasn't there to lead them." His chief disciples were David and Chris, whose allegiance to him rather than the older Joe was now established. Chris emulated him by getting expelled from Middlesex for drugs, David by taking on some of his derring-do. Karsch remembers a time when they were all throwing snowballs near Harvard Square. One struck a passing car, which slid to a halt. A huge man climbed out (they would later learn that he was an offensive tackle for the Boston College football team) and advanced on them. "He was yelling about our irresponsibility, and we were sort of retreating as he walked toward us. All of a sudden, David, all 120 pounds of him, steps up and punches this guy right in the face. This huge guy stands there for a minute with an absolutely dumfounded look on his face, then just shakes his head in disbelief and gets back in the car and drives off."

In 1972, Bobby sold David a pound of marijuana, which he took to Middlesex and hid in a suitcase. When it was then stolen from its hiding place, Bobby appeared at the school, dressed gaudily with a bandanna around his head, telling students that he was a "cutthroat dope dealer" there to find out who had burned his client. He cornered the thief and so terrified him that he went to school authorities and told them everything. They asked David who the dope dealer was and he said he didn't know him by name. But looking through back issues of Time, somebody located a picture of Bobby, Jr., and identified him as the one. David was suspended.

Trying to keep the two brothers apart, Ethel arranged for David to spend the summer working in the lettuce fields with Cesar Chavez. ("Your father felt he was one of the most moral men he'd ever met," she told David. "Maybe he'll do you some good.") David scarcely saw Chavez or any other uplifting chicano role models while picking up farm-worker garbage for two dollars an hour at La Paz. After his tour of duty with the United Farm Workers was over, he traveled to Southern California to see Chris, who was visiting his father. "I knocked on the door and there was Peter Lawford," David remembers. "I hadn't seen him for years. The first thing he did after saying hello was offer me a pipe full of hash."

•

In the fall of 1972, Bobby entered Harvard, convinced by his apprenticeship with Lem that the way to seize his heritage was not by slowly growing into it but by striving for a mythic Kennedy identity right from the start. He began attracting followers in the same way that Jack had as a young man, exercising something like the magnetism Lem had described to him in such detail in their conversations about the Kennedy past. One of those gravitating to him was Peter Kaplan. In every way his opposite--Jewish, intellectual, cautious, literary--Kaplan represented a world of ideas for Bobby, who, in turn, represented for him a sort of noble savagery: "He was out for freshman crew and he had built himself up, getting real strength into that lean body. He had a sort of feral look, like Mowgli in Jungle Book. He was totally at home with nature."

Kaplan felt that Bobby adopted a "swashbuckling Douglas Fairbanks defiance" in part because of stories he had heard of Harvard's discrimination against the Boston Irish during his grandfather's day. It was also because he had accepted the existential challenge posed by the martyrs of the previous generation. The high point of his derring-do came in an almost legendary event that became known among his Harvard friends as the Bhutto leap, so-called because it was undertaken as a result of a bet with Mir Murtaza Bhutto, son of the then-president of Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. "Bobby's dorm was Hurlbut, and next door was a building called Pennypacker, not actually in Harvard Yard but, like Hurlbut, four stories high" recalls Kaplan. "The gap between them was ten or 12 feet. Bobby bet Mir, who was in our circle, that he could jump the gap. People heard about it and gathered below, a large crowd shading their eyes and looking up as if waiting for Superman. The distance wasn't that great, but it looked twice as big as it was; if he missed he'd probably die. Suddenly, Bobby just soared across. Everybody on the ground gasped and shook their heads in disbelief."

But if some saw his behavior as heroic, others looked for deeper significance. Another Harvard friend says, "It was like someone who wants a massage but is so desensitized that he has to be hurt to feel anything at all. I think this sort of thing, which Bobby did quite often, was a way of reminding himself that he was alive."

Bobby, Jr., might be the focus of his own generation's attention, but his brother Joe was still the one the adults felt would have a career. He had gotten the political initiation his father's death denied him in 1968 two years later, working as an advance man for Teddy in his Massachusetts re-election campaign. He was integrated into the political life in a way that his cousins were not--the first-born male, the one with the dynastic name, the one who had shaken hands with his father's bereaved supporters on the funeral train. All the others had been able to experiment with anonymity and temporarily escape the onus of being a Kennedy, but Joe was the one always forced to make speeches and appearances, the one called on to dedicate R.F.K. Stadium and to accompany his mother and younger brothers and sisters to his father's grave on assassination anniversaries. When he finally graduated from prep school in 1971, he was the one who went to work for the recently established R.F.K. Memorial Foundation, interviewing potential grant recipients and visiting Indian reservations, pockets of poverty on the Mississippi Delta and other areas loyal to his father, almost as if he were an ambassador from the grave.

It was difficult for Joe to grasp something real inside the symbolism ("I'm like a BB rattling around in a boxcar," he told one friend during a tongue-tied discussion of the difficulties of being crown prince), and so he continued to founder. That quality of psychic explosiveness, present even when his father was alive, grew more intense. Robert Coles was asked (in family parlance) to "work on" Joe.

To avoid family comparisons, Joe rejected Harvard and enrolled at MIT in the spring of 1972. But the intellectual atmosphere there was too rarefied, and he spent much of his time receiving counseling from one of Coles's colleagues, MIT psychiatrist Joseph Brenner. There was no real therapy; Brenner, like Coles, just tried to adjust the velocity and direction of Joe's pell-mell movement into the world.

Late in 1972, Brenner called his friend Diane Clemens, professor of history at Berkeley and a coordinator in R.F.K.'s last campaign, told her about the 20-year-old Kennedy heir and the trouble they were having with him and asked her if she could help. Soon after, a call came from Coles, who said he had Joe in the room with him and that he wanted to go to Berkeley to study and to get some distance on the ongoing family drama. Finally, Joe himself came on the phone. "I hate academics," he told Clemens. "I hate universities. There's probably no reason for me to go to school at Berkeley." Sensing that she was being tested, Clemens replied, "Who cares? If you don't want to do it, don't do it." After the sycophancy of family supporters, Joe seemed to find that attitude refreshing, because following a muffled conversation on the other end of the line, Coles came back on and said that Joe would be taking the next plane out.

Within days of arriving in Berkeley and moving into a room in Clemens' hillside house, Joe had enrolled in a couple of classes but rarely went oncampus. Aside from borrowing Clemens' car occasionally for mysterious visits across the bay to San Francisco's chicano community, he spent most of his time in his room, talking on the phone line he had gotten installed. The calls were all to Massachusetts (intelligence-gathering operations, Clemens thought) to his cousins and his friends.

Before one of their nightly talks in the kitchen, Joe came in with a desperate look and announced melodramatically, "I'm through! I'm through! It's all over!" Knowing that he enjoyed having her extract the information from him, Clemens patiently asked what was wrong. Bit by bit, he told her. He had heard that his brother Bobby had gone out for freshman crew at Harvard and done quite well, so he had gone to the Cal crew coach and asked to get on the team. He had gotten a private tryout on the estuary next to the bay and somehow had managed to turn the small boat over, dunking himself along with the coach. "I'm through!" he kept moaning, cradling his face in his hands.

Joe talked often about his grandfather and what he had done in the early part of his life, when he was, in effect, "becoming" a Kennedy. He was intrigued by the rumors that had always linked Joseph Kennedy to rumrunning and organized crime, and in their chats he sometimes speculated to Clemens about how and why his namesake would have made such alliances. He made it clear that he, too, would like to become a romantic figure of evil and make an illicit fortune, not so much for the money as because it would be an achievement that would help establish him as unique within the family. No longer attending classes at the university, he admitted that he had been making trips across the bay because he had gotten to know a chicano hustler named Raul and the two of them were thinking about buying a boat and smuggling in drugs from Central America. "This fantasy seemed very important to him," Clemens remembers. "It seemed to represent something that was real. He always said, 'I can get a much better education outside of school. We Kennedys belong in the real world. That's where we function best.' "

At one point, he disappeared for a couple of days. Clemens didn't think much about it until Raul and his wife brought over a note that had been mailed to them: "I, Joe Kennedy, leave all my life's possessions to Raul and Linda. This includes my television set, car and other possessions. These people have been good to me." Clemens tried to get in touch with Coles, but he was traveling. Finally, she did get through to Joseph Brenner, who got in touch with the Kennedys. "I'll never forget it," Clemens says of the instructions that came back to her. "They said to keep looking for him but under no circumstances to call the police." She got into her car and spent much of the night driving to all the spots she could think he might be, even patrolling local freeways to look for the evidence of auto accidents in which he might have been involved.

The next morning, she got a call from Raul, who said that when he had arrived at his job as a longshoreman, Joe had been stretched out in the sun near the wharf, asleep. "He's already forgotten about the note," Raul said. "He says it's yesterday's news." A couple of weeks later, after getting involved in several traffic accidents, Joe told Clemens that he had decided to return home.

•

Like Joe, the other cousins were always trying to get a distance on the family but always returning as if in response to a gravitational pull that couldn't be challenged. For Chris Lawford, it was especially hard. He didn't have the magic name, and so the political career they all talked about would be much harder for him. He thought that perhaps the Lawford part of his identity offered a way out, and so after graduating from high school in January 1973, he went to Southern California to live with his father and work in films.

Although just 18, he became close to Elizabeth Taylor, a longtime friend of his father's, and spent several weeks accompanying her on the social whirl. They went to Disneyland by helicopter, to Hollywood parties by limousine. Their relationship ended one evening when Chris accompanied her to a party at the home of automobile dealer Henry Wynberg, who was there with a woman closer to Chris's age than his own. Midway through the party, Wynberg suggested half jokingly that they switch dates. Chris and Taylor agreed, though Taylor had second thoughts and later told him reproachfully, "I ran after your car as you were pulling out, destroying my heels in the process, and yelled at you to stop, but you were apparently too infatuated to hear me."

Chris's major failure in Hollywood was not with stars or starlets or at the studio but with his father. Chris worked hard to re-establish the relationship that had been severed when his parents divorced, his Kennedy half trying to make amends with his Lawford half. "Peter and I would stay up all night doing dope together and talking about family problems," Chris remembers. "We'd have what seemed a breakthrough--saying we loved each other and hugging and all that. But the next morning, it would be all gone. He'd snap at me and absolutely cringe if I called him Dad instead of Peter."

After one of those nights of drug-induced camaraderie, Chris decided that he would tell his father about how disoriented he and his cousins were, how lost without adult guidance. "I need you, Dad," he began to cry. "I need you to be my father--at least for a little while. My life is a mess, and if I go back East again, it's going to get worse."

Lawford looked at him in disgust and said, "You must be high on something. Get the hell out of here."

When Chris entered Tufts University in Boston in the fall of 1973, Bobby, increasingly confident in himself, sensed Chris's unhappiness and began asking him to go with him when he went to New York to stay with Lem. Chris understood that Bobby acted less from a desire to save him than because he had entered a period in his life when he was gathering disciples, but it was still a kind of salvation. Now he, too, would experience Lem's remarkable ability to bring the Kennedy saga alive and to make someone of his generation feel like a beneficiary rather than a victim of the Kennedy legacy. Lem healed the wounds Chris had suffered in Hollywood by telling him the story of his parents' romantic courtship, by describing how much they had loved each other when first married and detailing the factors beyond either's control that had led to their breakup. Chris was allowed to stay in "Bobby's room" when he wasn't there. In a gesture that seemed symbolic, Lem began an album of photographs and memorabilia for Chris to go along with the several he had already started for Bobby.

•

The fact that Chris was now part of a triangle with Lem and Bobby also meant that David, more than ever, was odd man out. He had been allowed to re-enter Middlesex on condition that he not live oncampus. He had taken a room with a family in Concord and, knowing that this was his last chance, tried to apply himself. But school and life itself had become difficult for him. When his brother Joe had returned from Berkeley early in 1973, he had sensed David's growing desperation and tried in passing to take a paternal interest in him. But, as David later said, "Joe had problems of his own and couldn't keep his mind on me for more than a few minutes at a time. It had reached that point in the life of our family where it was every man for himself."

As summer approached, Ethel arranged another trip to keep David occupied and out of the house. This time, there was no effort made to involve him in some socially redeeming activity. It was a job doing manual labor at a place called Caribou Ranch near Boulder, Colorado.

Just before he left the Cape, David was talking with Pam Kelley, younger sister of Kim, who had been involved with Bobby so long. Spunky, with rimless glasses and long blonde hair, Pam confessed that she, too, was having trouble with her parents. She asked David if she and a girlfriend could drive west with him; he said yes.

David tried to get Pam's girlfriend to sleep with him all during the trip across the country, but she wouldn't yield and finally flew home. So he slept with Pam. "I told him I'd had a terrible year," she recalls, "and that I'd been feeling nobody loved me. He smiled that wounded, angelic smile of his and said that he'd been going through the same thing. We sort of decided to love each other."

After several weeks, they decided to return home. Back in Hyannis Port in August, they went first to the Kelleys', where Pam dropped off her clothes, and then to Ethel's. They stayed together in the dollhouse, a miniaturized scale-model house Joseph Kennedy had built for his children years earlier on the lawn of the Compound. "It was a Saturday night," Pam recalls. "We slept in this miniature bed, and the next morning, David got up and said, 'Uh-oh, I've got to go to 11 o'clock Mass.' I said, 'What am I supposed to do, stay in this two-by-two house and wait? No way. I'll sneak out and meet you someplace for lunch.' David panicked and said for me to sit tight, because his mother would go into a rage if she knew I was with him. Then he left. I had started my period that night; the little white room of the dollhouse was half red--the sheets, the mattresses and the rest of the miniature bed. I just rolled everything into one bloody pile and bolted. I was scared of Ethel, who was always hysterical even when she wasn't mad. I thought that if I was caught, she'd hang me from the Compound flagpole."

Later that day, she met up with David again. He had gotten a call from his brother Joe, who had sat down with Ethel and Teddy for earnest talks after returning from Berkeley and had promised to get his life together. He had been accepted at the University of Massachusetts for the fall and was having a last summer fling on Nantucket, where he was staying in a rented house with friends. That day, he invited David to spend a day and bring Pam with him. "David was ecstatic," she says. "Here, finally, someone in the family was taking notice of him."

They spent that Sunday at Nantucket sailing with Joe and his friends. That night, they had a cookout on the beach. The next morning, they got up and went for a last swim before catching the ferry back. Joe commandeered a friend's jeep to take them to the jetty.

"He was doing his super-Kennedy act," David later said. "There was all this crazy energy. I suppose Teddy was that way before Chappaquiddick."

As Pam remembered the drive: "We were all sort of standing up in the jeep. Joe was cutting through the woods, spinning the jeep in circles. We were yelling and laughing and acting crazy. There was a rest area on the other side of the highway and Joe started to cross over to it. He didn't see this station wagon heading toward us until the last minute. He swerved and we hit a ditch with our tires on the right side, breaking the jeep's axle and flipping us. We held on to the roll bar for a couple of flips and then had to let go. Me and David were right together ... in the air. I remember tumbling and seeing David's face. I hit the ground. When I tried to get up, nothing happened."

For Joe, it meant an appearance in court and the revocation of his driver's license. For David, it meant painful fractured vertebrae. For Pam, it meant days in and out of a haze of painkillers and then an awakening into the cold realization that she was paralyzed. The first person she saw was Ethel, always before an enemy but now the angel of mercy, twittering sweetly as she bustled around straightening the hospital room, setting flowers in vases, putting iced tea on the bedside table. Ethel brought Rose, who brought chocolate cookies she had baked herself. She brought Teddy, sun-tanned and salty from having just finished sailing. Every night, she brought a projectionist and a movie to Pam's room. "Everybody would gather there, even the nurses," remembers Pam. "I'd ease into the hall in my wheelchair and smoke a cigarette while they watched the film. They never missed me."

In the same hospital, David lay immobilized in a traction device, reading Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 through prismatic glasses. He knew that Pam's injuries were more serious than his. But when one of her friends broke the news to him that Pam would never walk again, he started screaming at her. He managed to get out of bed and walked stiffly to Pam's room. "That fucking bitch," he began yelling as he saw Pam. "You wouldn't believe the shit she's been telling me...."

Pam looked at him, amazed that his family, whose lawyers had already been talking with her and her parents about a million-dollar settlement, had told him nothing. "It's true," she said. David later recalled this episode: "You finally find someone to love, and you lose her. It's the shits."

Released from the hospital, David began to look for newer and darker boundaries to cross. Drugs provided the route, the morphine he had taken in the hospital leading him to experiment with heroin, a drug to which he had just been introduced with Chris in Central Park. He shot the drug during the fall of 1973, his senior year at Middlesex, though he had convinced himself that he was just a "chipper," able to take heroin or leave it.

At the beginning of the spring semester, he decided to go to Nashville for his senior project, because that was where his father had triumphed over Jimmy Hoffa when he was Attorney General, and because John Seigenthaler, an old R.F.K. aide who was now publisher of The Nashville Tennessean, had offered him a part-time job as a reporter. He arrived at the Seigenthaler house thin and wasted-looking. As they were talking, his father's old friend got out an album of photos taken many years earlier, at the time when Robert Kennedy had brought David with him to a speech at a Nashville high school gym. "David looked at himself in those pictures like they were a strange sort of mirror," Seigenthaler says. "He looked at them a half dozen times at least, mesmerized by them, and he kept asking me questions. There was a tremendous desire to know his father, to really know him. There was also a tremendous desire to know the person he himself had been in those pictures and was no longer."

•

In the early days, Lem had been the leader in Bobby's expedition toward selfhood, but now Bobby was charting the course for both of them. He told Lem that he had decided to "go into the eye of the storm," to go down roads no Kennedy had ever traveled before in an attempt to attain an identity whose epic dimensions would quickly vault him to the status his uncle and father had attained through patient career building. "I can't do it the way they did," he would say. "The conditions aren't the same. I've got to take short cuts." When warned about the difficulties and risks, he had a ready answer: "If you see your limits, you won't even reach them. To strive, to seek new worlds--that's what my father stressed."

Lem and Bobby had begun like Falstaff and Hal, with Lem trying to tempt Bobby away from nihilism and toward an acceptance of the power that was part of his heritage. But over the years, Bobby had tempted Lem with a different kind of power, the power of narcotics. At first, it was marijuana. Lem had smoked it to show Bobby that he was not like all the other family friends who professed to understand what he felt but didn't really try. Then it was LSD. One Aspen acquaintance recalls a scene there during Ethel's annual Christmas skiing pilgrimage: "Bobby and some of the other kids were milling around this guy Billings, right there with the rest. He was quiet for a while and then he started babbling about what a mind-expanding experience acid was, how it made you rediscover youth. 'We're all one!' he started to say in that high-pitched voice. 'The world is one!' Everybody sort of smiled: It was one of those madcap acid rants you thought had gone out with the Sixties."

But it went further than recreational usage. Bobby, now 20, had become the drugmaster of his generation, descending step by step into a netherworld of narcotics, with Lem loyally following right behind him, at first to protect him and then as a coconspirator. Bobby gave him angel dust, and Lem tried it. Bobby gave him amphetamines, and Lem shot the drugs, despite that fact that, at 57, he was developing a serious heart condition that sometimes left him gasping for breath. One of Bobby's friends, present at the apartment on one of the first times Lem shot cocaine, remembers the scene: "Lem was lying on the bed and complaining that it wasn't having any effect. 'I'm not getting high, Bobby!' he kept saying. 'I'm not getting high! Give me some more!' "

Lem also shot heroin, going with Bobby even into that last forbidden zone. Sometimes they went to Harlem together to score. A mutual friend remembers, "There was one time when Bobby got burned by some rip-off artist. There were dangerous-looking characters all over the place, but Bobby started screaming and beating on the door. Lem pulled him away and when those black dope dealers came after us, we all ran, Lem and Bobby leading the way, laughing like hell."

The thrill and excitement were part of "scoring." There was also, as the term suggests, the element of competition, almost as if it were a perverse sort of athletic contest. Bobby had to be the best at everything. (About this time, he and Chris were seeing the same girl, and when he found out that she thought his cousin performed cunnilingus more satisfyingly than he did, Bobby wouldn't relent until the girl gave him another chance and admitted that he was actually better at it than Chris.)

Lem's onetime Princeton roommate Francis McAdoo was struck by the change in his old friend as he moved deeper into this dark ethos. Once fastidious and even prissy, insisting on a clean-cut, Brooks Brothers look, Lem started dressing casually, allowing his hair to grow long, filling his talk with street slang. "You'd pass him somewhere and hardly recognize him," McAdoo says. "He looked like a hippie. He was trying to live like Bobby, and he was burning the candle at both ends."

As the summer of 1974 approached, Bobby, Jr., and Lem began talking about a river trip, which would summarize the joint enterprise in Kennedy mythmaking they had embarked on and also celebrate the new reality of a relationship that had become a joint existential dare. Rafting had been a dead issue since the debacle with Teddy in 1969, but now Bobby got the idea of a different kind of trip--one that would be both a reprise of and an advance over the great trips his father had created in an earlier and better time; a trip that he would dominate as R.F.K. had dominated those of prior years. Lem mentioned the Apurímac, a wild river at the headwaters of the Amazon, and Bobby went to Harvard's Widener Library and researched it, coming back in excitement to say that it was untamed and virtually unexplored. They decided to do it.

The group of adventurers they put together for the assault on the river included Bobby's old friend Doug Spooner, journalist Harvey Fleetwood (whom Bobby invited along to write up the trip--as his Arthur Schlesinger), Chris Lawford and David. Bobby and Fleetwood decided to be the advance party. They flew to Lima and from there set out for the town of Arequipa, about 500 miles away. Fleetwood was at the wheel of their rented car as they began to ascend into the high plains. At a point in the road where visibility was poor, a peasant child dashed out and they hit him. "I was really shaken," Fleetwood later recalled, "but Bobby behaved with perfect poise and calm, obviously working to live up to that Kennedy ideal of grace under pressure. He was just 20, seven years younger than I was, but he took charge right away. He jumped out and gave the kid first aid, splinted his broken leg and carried him into the car, then drove us back to the nearest town and took the kid to the hospital. When he found out that the hospital didn't have pain-killing drugs, he went to a local pharmacy and bought some himself. We didn't leave town until it was clear that this kid was going to be OK."

They finally rendezvoused with the rest of the group in the mountain town of Ayacucho, where they had been dropped off by a chartered plane from Lima. From Ayacucho, it was a 24-hour ride through the "high jungle" of the Andean foothills to San Francisco, the last village outpost, which sat at the edge of the river. Pigs rooted in the streets, which were covered with six inches of mud, sewage and human excrement; short-statured Indians transferred cacao leaves and barbasco root from canoes into trucks.

Fleetwood, who watched Bobby closely throughout the trip, was struck by his recklessness in all things but especially in food. "During the time we were in this little town of San Francisco, Bobby ate anything and everything, even though he had a bad case of dysentery. He'd take paregoric, but he claimed that the only thing that worked was some tincture of opium we'd brought along. But he kept eating strange things--another of his dares. At one point, we were at some peasant's house and boiled rat was served for dinner. Bobby ate it. Not only that, he sat there with this weird smile and then pulled one of the eyes out of the rat's head and ate that, too. Then he pulled the other one out and handed it to Lem. Lem shook his head, then sort of shrugged and popped it into his mouth."

Some 300 Indians a year got caught in the Apurímac's wild current and were smashed to death in its rapids. One couple had tried to cross it for National Geographic. Others had failed with tragic results. When Fleetwood saw the river and realized that it would take them a week to get to a doctor if anything happened, he got cold feet. But the others, led by Bobby, began to needle him about it, and he stifled his doubts. Bobby insisted that they eliminate any technology that would make the trip easier, so they began cutting down balsa logs that they lashed together with vines to make rafts. After several days' work, they were ready. The rafts were loaded with supplies they'd taken with them--canned goods and a few tools, a medicine chest well stocked with morphine prescribed by a physician, and some items purchased locally--a few chickens and three sticks of dynamite. David stood on the side lines, watching everyone else work and cynically commenting on the expedition: "Here you have it, my big brother's own personal heart of darkness."

Bobby had met an Indian named Epifenio and got him to act as guide, along with his one-eyed brother-in-law Camilo. Suffering from dysentery and other ailments, they set out like sailors on the raft of the Medusa. They ate the canned food and the chickens kept in a cage at the back of the raft. ("Bobby would get one of them," Fleetwood recalls, "and hold it by the neck and crack it like a whip to kill it.") They beached the rafts at night, trying to find high ground when they set up camp to guard against the alligatorlike caymans, poisonous snakes and packs of river rats the size of cats. Bobby was very much the leader, always acting in a way to reinforce his status. One day, he staged a breathtaking leap between their two rafts just as they were navigating a stretch of hazardous rapids and managed somehow to make it. David, on the other hand, was almost willfully unheroic, having brought The Making of the President 1968 and half a dozen other hardcover books, which he read throughout the journey, and hoarding cartons of cigarettes that he doled out one at a time to the others on the expedition in payment for doing his part of the work.

Midway through the trip, they hit a series of roller-coaster rapids that broke up both of their rafts and spilled their canned goods into the river, though they managed to make it to shore and to save the chickens, medicine and dynamite. While some of them lashed new balsa logs together, Bobby, Lem and Chris made a smaller raft and went on ahead to reconnoiter. They had tied up along the bank to try to dig the roots of a yuccalike plant they thought might be edible when a band of Indians began shooting arrows at them. One penetrated the canteen near Lem's leg. As Lem began to yell, Bobby rummaged for the bow and arrow he had earlier obtained in a trade for a Harvard sweat shirt. He hadn't brought it. Chris found a stick of dynamite and held it up. "Lawford was standing there, holding it, telling me to hurry," Bobby later recalled. "We could hear the Indians coming at us through the bush. We put a blasting cap and a fuse in the dynamite. As the Indian who'd shot at us stepped out onto the bank of the river, I lit the dynamite. Lawford held it until the fuse had almost burned down, then threw it. It landed in the water right next to the Indian. Then it exploded, sending water 30 feet in the air. He and all the rest of them took off."

The guides Epifenio and Camilo had brought liquor with them and were always drunk. Epifenio delighted in outraging Lem, who was unable to get away from him because he was partially immobilized from a fall he'd taken just before they had set out. Fleetwood recalls, "Epifenio would lie on the raft and hold his penis up and then urinate in an arc into his mouth. Lem would yell, 'Make him stop it, Bobby, make him stop it!' " Nearing the end of the trip, Bobby told Epifenio that he had decided to give him the tents and the rest of the gear that had survived their various mishaps. Camilo became jealous. In a drunken rage, he charged Bobby with a machete, slashing him in the back and then aiming a coup de grâce at his neck, before Chris jumped him and wrestled him to the ground.

•

After their return from South America, Lem compared Bobby's performance on the Apurímac to Jack's adventures in the Solomons with P.T. 109. In slips of the tongue that happened so often they became "in" jokes among their friends, Lem frequently called Bobby "Jack." He once lectured Andy Karsch, who had refused to accompany Bobby somewhere, "I used to do it for Jack and you've got to do it for him. He'll need a best friend."

Lem also spent a lot of time talking about Bobby to Chris: "He had filled several albums with stuff about Bobby," Chris recalls, "letters, pictures, etc. He had one about me with some pictures, clippings about me and Elizabeth Taylor, that sort of thing. He made it pretty clear what role I was supposed to play. I was going to be to Bobby, Jr., what my uncle Bobby had been to Jack--the one who would sacrifice everything, the one who made sure that his destiny came true."

Half a Kennedy, with no certain place in the family system, Chris, now 20, was one who had increasingly come to see that obsessive goal driving them all--the Presidency--as embodying a sharp and dangerous paradox. It had made the Kennedys what they were as a group; it had also alienated each of them from what he or she might have been as an individual. In his view, it was an ideal that infantilized them rather than encouraged maturity; it gave a millenarian cast to their lives as they awaited the second coming; it made him and his cousins into lost boys living in a political never-never land. "The Presidency is in our system and we can't get it out," he later said. "We can't get free enough of it to consider doing something else with our lives."

The problem, as Chris saw it, was that nobody in his generation could make a move until Teddy made a move, and Teddy, for various reasons, was not moving. So their lives had become a matter of killing time and toying with heroic fantasies that seemed to have no pertinence to the real world. In his own mind, he compared the cousins' situation to that of some absurdist drama whose themes had to do with waiting and boredom.

Although he couldn't really admit it to himself, he was sick of the family's brand of politics. In 1976, he took a leave of absence from Tufts and became involved in the New York Senate campaign of Ramsey Clark, who seemed to embody his uncle Bobby's morality and the R.F.K. credo that "one man can make a difference" far more than Teddy did. Chris remembers, "Before, everything I did was Kennedy related. I did it out of family obligation, because it was part of the joint Kennedy undertaking. Ramsey's campaign was a cause rather than a family responsibility. It was much more satisfying to me than anything else I'd done, because it was not just expected but philosophically worth while." The only problem was that Clark got only ten percent of the vote.

So Chris returned to New York and his relationship with Lem and Bobby, the only situation in his life with any emotional charge. But even here his marginality was always clear in those years. An almost Kennedy, he was also almost Lem's best friend: "At times, when it was just the two of us, we'd draw incredibly close. He'd say to me, 'If only I'd met you before I met Bobby.' But then Bobby would blow into town from his latest adventure and I would be second fiddle again, and I'd see that Lem would always mean more to me than I'd ever mean to him."

Early in 1978, Chris went to a New York night club where a rock singer named Jennifer Jacobson was entertaining. Although he had been living with another woman for several years, Chris was stunned by Jennifer. She was streetwise and savvy; her vision of the Kennedys was unclouded by guilt or romanticism. He went home with her that night and they were together for the next six months.

"Like all the Kennedy kids," Jennifer later said, "Christopher is both tremendously savvy and tremendously naïve. It was the oddest combination of innocence and experience I'd ever encountered." She saw immediately that Chris and Bobby were addicts--not mainlining heroin addicts, perhaps, though heroin had become the summa drug for them--but addicted to narcotics in general: "Christopher and Bobby liked heroin. But they'd settle for a cupful of Valium, some Percodans or whatever else was there. They were obsessive about drugs. There was a desperate need to escape. Most of us who do dope just want to leave our lives behind. You got the feeling that whatever they might say about the Kennedys, they wanted to leave their whole ancestry behind."

Always there were Bobby and Lem and what was becoming an increasingly surreal scene centered at Lem's apartment. Jennifer felt Lem was strongly antifemale but that he recognized that the Kennedys were dependent on women and even more dependent on women's being dependent on them. "What he'd do was interpose himself between Bobby and Chris and their girls. He'd get close to the girls when they were distraught and hurt by the boys' infidelities and say, 'Don't worry, I'll talk to him. I'll work it out for you.' Then he'd go to Bobby or Chris and say, 'That girl sucks. You've got to get rid of her.' "

Once the best place to connect emotionally for the strangely love-starved Kennedy kids, Lem's apartment was now the best place to make a drug connection. "There was always the period of sitting around, making small talk," Jennifer says. "It was really a period of waiting for somebody to decide when and how we were going to score. Then there would be the fighting over who got to do it first. Bloody needles. Doors slamming. Lem in his bathrobe and shorts, yelling, 'Bobby, get in here quick!' and then going into the bathroom to get his shot. The women were supposed to wait for the drug leftovers. It was always a macho scene, a shoot-out: which of them could do the most drugs, which of them could do the most women."

Chris tried to keep up with Bobby, but he couldn't. He became more and more dependent on heroin, less and less able to handle it. He was sick and despondent for long periods. Worried about him, Jennifer helped him enroll in a methadone program under an assumed name. But methadone turned out to be a "nightmare high," as well as physically debilitating. By the summer of 1978, Chris's weight had ballooned some 40 pounds to 220. He contracted pneumonia. Jennifer thought he was dying. Desperate, she called Robert Coles, who said, "Tell him to come to see me. He's got to come himself if he wants help." Not knowing what else to do, she called Pat Lawford, who came in a cab and took Chris to a hospital. From there he was transferred to McLean's Hospital, a Massachusetts clinic specializing in the mentally and emotionally disturbed. Jennifer went to see him and found that he was in a room with another drug addict and an apparently hopeless schizophrenic. "He came to the door and we talked awhile and the first thing he asked was if I could get him some dope."

•

Although no longer close to Chris, David was on a parallel journey that would also lead to a brush with death. In the fall of 1974, after his stint on The Nashville Tennessean, he had managed to get admitted to Harvard. Other students grew used to his disheveled appearance--an unvarying uniform of rumpled shirt and dirty Levi's. "I never saw him without a Colt 45 Malt Liquor in one hand and a cigarette in the other, no matter what time of day it was," says a female student who lived on the floor above him.

He spent time with Boston Globe reporter Tom Oliphant, whom he'd met the previous summer while working as a journalist. "He'd bring papers over to my apartment in Cambridge," Oliphant recalls, "and we would generally talk about school and school subjects. Sometimes he'd come over and just sit. He was an excellent writer, and he was doing work in school that was out-of-this-world good. He wasn't bookish, but he had an original and at times brilliant way of looking at things. But he was clearly in deep psychological trouble."

The source of his problems seemed to be the ongoing issue of his place in the family itself. It was most apparent on ceremonial occasions, such as the family's annual Christmas at Aspen. Older brother Joe would take an apartment of his own. Bobby would be active with his younger brothers, consolidating his status as their leader. (Once, a skier accidentally knocked Ethel down and Bobby, along with brother Michael, flew down the Aspen slopes in pursuit, finally catching the man, knocking him down and punching and kicking him, which caused Ethel to beam, "My Dobermans.") David would spend the holiday on the living-room couch, reminding everyone--by his oppressive presence--of his pain and disorientation. He had a maid bring him food as he read and slept amidst the others' nonstop activity. The more he proposed himself as a symbol of the fact that something was out of kilter with his generation, a subject nobody wanted to talk about, the angrier Ethel became. "She just tore into David sometimes," a family friend recalls. "I remember once she misplaced $200. She came in and immediately began accusing David. He told her it was ridiculous--he had money, what did he need $200 for? She just kept it up, absolutely vicious, wouldn't let him go."

While most of his cousins were campaigning for Shriver's abortive Presidential try in 1976 or Teddy's Senate re-election the same year, David, then 21, was on a 40-day binge shooting drugs. Bobby's friends Peter Kaplan and Eric Breindel went to David's room at Harvard and, finding him practically comatose with a spiking fever, took him to Massachusetts General Hospital. Doctors quickly diagnosed bacterial endocarditis, a potentially fatal inflammation of the lining of the heart caused by dirty needles. Back home after six weeks of hospitalization, David sank deeper and deeper into a nightmare world. He dropped out of Harvard, devoting himself almost exclusively to scoring heroin. He spent a good deal of time in the Roxbury ghetto. ("My father was concerned about blacks in one way," he would say later with bitter self-knowledge, "and I was concerned about them in another--as people from whom I could get drugs.") One day, a black dealer told him he'd meet him in a bathroom to make a transaction. When David showed up, the man overpowered him, tied him up and tried to stab him. David jumped back, so that the knife only sliced him along the abdomen, and managed to get out of the bathroom and run. Later, after his wound healed, he was disappointed that the scar wasn't more severe: "I was modeling myself on the James Caan character in The Gambler. I saw that movie over and over. I loved the last scene, where Caan had pushed things so far that the black guy cut his face, and then he goes to the mirror and sees the wound and smiles. I could relate to that."

After his endocarditis attack, David's family had gotten him a psychiatrist, Lee Macht, a 39-year-old boy wonder who'd been commissioner of the Massachusetts Mental Health Department and was chief of psychiatry at Cambridge Hospital. Worried about the compulsive risk-taking associated with heroin, Macht agreed to prescribe Percodans to keep him out of dangerous places. David's reaction was to use more and more drugs. In April 1978, he O.D.d on a combination of cocaine and Dilaudid, a surrogate morphine. During his recuperation, he was called on by the group he'd begun to think of as The Committee to Keep David Out of the Picture--Teddy, Steve Smith, former R.F.K. aide Richard Goodwin, Robert Coles, his brother Joe and sister Kathleen. They all persuaded him to let Kathleen serve as his guardian and to get treatment for his drug problem.

After a few weeks at McLean's, where Chris had gone, David was released and sent to Sussex, England, to become a patient of Dr. Margaret Patterson, a Scottish surgeon who had invented what she called "neuroelectric therapy." One of her most celebrated patients, Who guitarist Peter Townshend, had endorsed the procedure, which involved wearing a Walkmanlike headset emitting signals to the brain that Dr. Patterson theorized affected drug dependence. For David, who wore this appliance while living with a family of English evangelicals who spoke in tongues during moments of religious ecstasy, the experience was part of the surrealism that he was coming to accept as his own reality. His family wanted him to stay in England, but after two months there, he returned home.

He began hanging out again. In the fall of 1978, he and his brother Bobby met starlet Rachel Ward, whom David regarded (and still does) as "the most beautiful woman who ever lived." The two of them took her dancing. To Bobby's surprise, and David's, too, she chose to go home with the younger Kennedy brother. It was an intense involvement, the first serious romance for David since Pam Kelley's injury. He got intensely jealous when he went to pick Rachel up one night and found Philippe Junot, recently married to Princess Caroline of Monaco, at her apartment. The three of them went to Xenon's discothèque, though David's leg was in a cast from a recent football mishap. When they sat down at their table, David saw Junot put his arm around Rachel and knocked it off. Junot, who had been trained in martial arts, leaped up and they had a brief fight that ended with David on the floor, bleeding from the nose.

"Rachel wanted to get an apartment with me and settle down. But I knew I was too fucked up. I was back on smack. She had no idea of what I was up to. I don't know what she thought of all those little marks on my arms when I was naked. I guess she thought they were some odd Kennedy rash. We never talked about it. I was supplementing the heroin--five times the lethal dose for someone not used to it--with 40 Percodans a day. I'd go up to Boston on the shuttle and get five prescriptions from Lee Macht for 40 Percodans each. Then I'd go to drugstores around town and get them filled and go back to New York that evening with 200 pills. That was the ritual--once a week."

One day, his temperature began to spike again, and he could tell he had been reinfected with endocarditis. He called Macht to arrange to go into the hospital, but before flying to Boston to be admitted, he decided to go to Harlem for one last score. He had been a good and regular customer and was well known on certain blocks by his tan BMW. Because he had given his name as James (after Caan in The Gambler) and because there were several blacks named James in the drug business, dealers there called him White James. This time, he had trouble. As he was making his connection at the seedy, run-down Shelton Plaza Hotel, a huge black man accosted him, demanded his money and then blocked him from leaving the lobby of the shooting gallery while illogically shrieking, "You get out of here! Don't come in here, you honkie!" As the man hit David in the face repeatedly, a black woman watching the scene slipped out and called the police. "I should have just said it was no big deal and walked off," David now says. "But I was so out of it that I walked up to the cop in charge and started acting suspicious and said I didn't want to get involved. Naturally, I was arrested and the next day the news was all over the papers. David fucks up again."

•

The decline of Chris and David seemed to make Bobby's equilibrium all the more remarkable. It appeared that he could, indeed, "handle" and "maintain" the heaviest drug use of them all, as he liked to boast; that he could integrate drugs into his rush of success and never have to admit, even privately, that he was a "junkie"--a word he taunted both of them with. By 1975, he had gone to Alabama to write a thesis on Frank Johnson, a liberal judge his father had admired; upon his return to Harvard, with Lem's help, he began turning it into a book. He had also applied for a Rhodes scholarship, Lem supporting him with an eloquent letter of recommendation ("I am almost 60 years old and I have watched a few great ones come along.... I know what qualities are the ones that shape strong men into strong leaders. Bobby has those qualities...."). And, following the pattern of his dead uncles Joe, Jr., and Jack, he had enrolled at The London School of Economics, which the family thought of as a sort of finishing school for political greatness.

It was the moment when he would make his move, when he would exchange that sense of latency that had surrounded him like a halo for the past several years for a start in the real career that he and Lem had talked about. But nothing worked according to plan. Far from reaching the success of Why England Slept, his uncle Jack's thesis-turned-best seller, Bobby's (published as Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr.: A Biography) got savaged by reviewers. The Rhodes-scholarship committee flatly turned down his application. His experience at The London School of Economics turned out to be only a few weeks in duration--a halfhearted attempt to study at the Strategic Studies Institute while he explored England's political haut monde and traveled to County Wexford in Ireland, getting high in the land his ancestors had escaped.

Compounding Bobby's lack of tangible success was the fact that his brother Joe seemed to have found a way to be a Kennedy that worked, a way that made their long competition begin to look like the parable of the tortoise and the hare. Joe's stabilization had begun in 1976, when he ran Teddy's Senate re-election campaign, giving a sense of real involvement and success that few of his cousins had experienced. It was part of a general change. As his old friend Chuck McDermott says, "He had just gotten to the point where he wanted to do something with his life and that was more important than getting crazy every night."

He had tried Washington as a next step, taking a job with the Community Services Administration, which aides to Robert Strauss at the Democratic National Committee had pushed because they felt it would give the operation "a lot of credibility." In May 1978, after a year in Washington, he resigned and moved back to Boston. People had tried to rush him into running for Congress. But the new caution Joe had acquired counseled against it. Instead, he began work setting up Citizens Energy Corporation. Based on a plan originally coming from Richard Goodwin--a plan to create a business that would show, in a politically exemplary way, how to solve the energy crisis--Citizens Energy would buy crude oil in Venezuela, have it processed in the Caribbean, sell the gas and other by-products at market prices and use the profits to bring to Massachusetts heating oil that could be sold through the state to the elderly and the poor at a 40 percent discount. The corporation was the chance to start a business the way his grandfather had. It was also a way of starting a political career.

Joe was different from Bobby also in the fact that he realized that the price of a political career was an almost antiheroic version of what a Kennedy should be. "I'm different from Bobby," he said to friends. "I can't parachute down into the name from above. I have to work my way up." He understood, too, that he had to renounce any claim to involvement in the dark world that so intrigued his brother. About the time he was beginning Citizens Energy, he became engaged to Sheila Rauch, a Philadelphia Main Liner who had been his girlfriend since high school. Andy Karsch had seen Joe at the New York wedding of family friend Tim Haydock, where among the Titians and Gauguins there were drugs and beautiful, unattached women. "I'm getting the shuttle back to Boston," Joe had said anxiously. "I've got to get out of here. Everything I see that's worth wanting will only get me in trouble."

•

The plot that had been forming around the Kennedy kids since R.F.K.'s death finally thickened when Teddy announced his Presidential candidacy on November 7, 1979. The reason for his running had less to do with objective political factors than with his sense that he had simply waited long enough, waited all the long years after he could have had it in 1968, waited through a decade of penance for Chappaquiddick, waited while the legacy seemed to be slipping further away.

The older boys, particularly, had counted on the campaign to banish the ambiguity that had ruled their lives and to take them back home to the Presidency. Chris, now 24, was eager to prove himself in action, and tried to get on board from the moment of Teddy's announcement. He had put off his already long-delayed plan to enter law school so that he would be available for a role in the campaign. He wrote, called and sent messages to Teddy and Steve Smith, but nothing happened. "It was the old Kennedy run-around. I couldn't figure out what the reason was at first, but then I remembered how I had been visiting David in the hospital during his most recent bout of endocarditis and Teddy had breezed in and, on the way out, said, 'By the way, I hope none of you guys knows Barry Landau, that guy who's connected Hamilton Jordan to cocaine at Studio 54.' As a matter of fact, I did know him. He was a friend of Lorna Luft, Judy Garland's daughter, whom I'd grown up with. Stevie Smith and I and some of the other cousins knew him. After Teddy made this comment, Steve Smith called me down to the campaign headquarters in Washington. He said, 'Listen, Chris, this Landau thing could really blow up, and I think that until we find out whether a special prosecutor is going to be appointed, we should hold off on involving you in the campaign.' I told him that if this was what he was worried about, then he better bring about three quarters of the family in and talk to them, too."

Chris went to Massachusetts and New Hampshire on his own to campaign in the fall of 1979, demonstrating political savvy as well as star appeal, performing like a walk-on trying to make a big-league team. Recognizing that he was an asset after all, Smith sent him to Iowa. He did well there, even as the Kennedy operation itself was falling apart. Yet there was always a fierce jockeying among the cousins. Chris always felt that they were more interested in how well they were performing against one another than in the ultimate goal; always looking over their shoulders; always looking to unhorse one another. The incident, admittedly a small one, that exemplified his case came at his cousin Courtney's wedding in the late spring of 1980. Groggy from several sleepless days on the campaign trail, Chris showed up for the obligatory toasting, itself a moment of subtle competition. Desperate for something to say, he asked Bobby, who had just given a particularly witty toast, for something he could use when his turn came. Bobby took Chris aside and pointed out that all the waiters employed by the catering service looked vaguely Middle Eastern. He gave him the theme of a toast and told him to conclude by saying, "These waiters are Shiite Moslems, and anybody who doesn't give a contribution to the Kennedy campaign is going to be held hostage in this room." Chris gave the toast. When he was done, there was dead silence, because the hostage situation was just then acknowledged as the issue that could kill the campaign. When the silence was broken, Chris noted that it was Bobby who led the jeers.

For Chris, the campaign ended during the holidays in Aspen, when he was busted trying to fill a phony prescription for Darvon, which he was taking as part of his ongoing struggle with heroin.

Bobby, meanwhile, had been given control of Alabama. The alleged reason was that he had links there with conservatives around George Wallace (whom he had met while researching his senior thesis) and liberals around Frank Johnson. Yet, since it was next door to Carter's Georgia stronghold and Kennedy strategists had projected a 15 percent showing as a victory, he saw that the post was clearly a means of getting him out of the way.

Nonetheless, Alabama was a typically frenzied experience. Bobby, now 26, adopted the protective coloration of a good ol' boy, wearing his pants low on his hips, sporting dust-covered snakeskin boots and occasionally spitting the juice of his Skoal into an empty Coke bottle. Spring of 1980 became a Southern version of the double life he had been leading for the past several years. On the one hand, there were evangelical appearances at black churches and other meetings, as he played the Kennedy presence in the state. On the other, there were wild personal scenes. Bobby had taken up with Harris McGough, a Cadillac salesman and Vietnam vet who claimed to have killed 24 Viet Cong singlehandedly and kept an arsenal including bows with razor-tipped arrows, pens that fired bullets and submachine guns. McGough's house in Montgomery became the appropriate scene for Bobby's excesses. Bragging that he'd had a woman every night for two years, he chased them frantically between speechmaking. He was doing drugs, too. He and McGough and their friends would let off steam by driving close to 100 miles an hour on the highway at night in a pair of cars with headlights off and passing a joint back and forth from one car to another.

At one point in Teddy's campaign, Bobby went to New York for a strategy session and took with him one of the "aides" he had acquired in Alabama. They ran into Bobby's old friend Andy Karsch, who was now a film maker working as a media consultant for Teddy's campaign. The aide told Karsch that he was looking for an appropriate district in which Bobby could run for Congress and had almost settled on one in Staten Island. Karsch, who, like most of his friends, knew of Bobby's drug problem and thought of him as being "on his eighth life," blew up. "It's getting stupid, this manifest-destiny plan," he said. "Teddy's showing you that it's all over, but none of you seems to be getting it. You guys play politics the way little girls play house."

Only David was free from the ambition and delusion. After his Harlem bust, The Committee to Keep David Out of the Picture, which had a six-month guardianship, had given him the choice of going back to McLean's or traveling to Sacramento to be placed under the control of a therapist named Don Juhl, who had created a drug-rehabilitation program called the Aquarian Effort. "Naturally," David says, "I chose the latter. Juhl told me that there were three rules: I had to jog every day. I wasn't allowed to say 'Fuck off and die' anymore. And no drugs. If I broke any of those rules, it would cost me another month, and every month I was there cost me $20,000 of my own money."

•

By the end of his run for the Presidency, Teddy had lost 24 of 34 primaries and 20 of 25 caucuses. Garry Wills called it the end of a Kennedy time in our national life.

One of those most depressed by the debacle was Lem, who had always shared Jack's view of Teddy as an irksome younger brother. At the beginning, he had been upset by the decision to run, because he knew it would start all the stories about Jack and his women and Bobby and Marilyn Monroe once again. "My God, why does he have to do it?" Lem had groused. "He's just dragging the family through the mud. I don't know about everybody else, but I'm going to sit this one out." At the end, he had been upset because it had seemed, in his phrase, such a "half-assed effort," one that raised questions about the family's political vitality.

A whole new generation had discovered Lem: Caroline, who was moving through New York's artistic community with various boyfriends; Timmy Shriver, whose godfather Lem had become when Jack was killed; and the middle kids of the R.F.K. family--Courtney, Michael and Kerry. As Bobby had veered more and more onto his own, Lem, now 64, had encouraged this new wave of Kennedys to use his New York apartment as a gathering spot. He saw it as "rallying the troops from Teddy's defeat." They saw it as their turn to experience the man who had become almost legendary in Kennedy annals.

One of his attractions was that he was a central switchboard, the person who called around to key people in the family every day, getting the travel plans and gossip. He was also a fountainhead of information. As Michael said, "He always knew what was proper--everything from what you should get a person as a present on a particular occasion to how to handle yourself in various social situations--the things parents teach but ours hadn't."

This new group lacked the emotional charge of Bobby, Joe, Chris Lawford and David. (Christopher Kennedy, one of the "little kids" in the R.F.K. family, says, "Our lives have not been as extreme. We have not had the adversity or the excitement or some of the problems the older ones have had.") But they had youth and promise. And Lem could have the roaring good times with them that it was no longer possible to have with Bobby and his friends, who were on the edge of their 30s and now trying to mix drugs and careers. Lem would take these 20-year-olds out drinking at Trader Vic's at The Plaza, where he would have eight or nine scorpions, his favorite drink. He would regale them with Kennedy stories and they would accompany him back to his apartment and stay there until three or four in the morning, looking through scrapbooks and photo albums. Yet it was different with them than it had been with Bobby and Chris Lawford. While they were intrigued with him, they didn't need him. They had gotten parental attention, however haphazard it had been. They had been young enough when Robert Kennedy was shot to have been shielded from the full metaphysical blast of his death. They didn't have the huge needs of their older brothers; they also had a different perspective on Lem, regarding him as a sort of curio. "He was fun to be with," Timmy Shriver says. "But in a way, he was sad. Sad because of what had happened to my uncles. We could see that tragedy through the effects on his life. Sad also because he had believed he could make it happen again but couldn't."

He had grown out of touch with his old friends and even with his own family, contacts that had once given at least a semblance of autonomy to his life. Now he was completely dependent on the Kennedys. He called Eunice every day. "We're the only ones left of that early era," he'd say and try to get her to join him in reminiscing about Joe, Jr., Kathleen and Jack. He had become abnormally sensitive to imagined slights. On Sarge and Eunice Shriver's 25th anniversary in May 1978, he was seated on Eunice's left instead of her right, which he insisted was the place of honor. He was deeply hurt by this affront and went around the party drunkenly asking, "Why wasn't I seated on the right?" Another time, Caroline called in a hurry and asked for someone else without identifying herself. Finding out it was she, he got back on the phone and said angrily, "What is this? You call my house and when I answer, you can't even take the time to say hello to me." She tried to argue him out of his irritation, but he finally hung up on her.

But his greatest anxiety came from Bobby. It was as if Lem's hopes and ambitions for him had gotten caught up in a prolonged dry labor as all the charisma and promise of the early years failed to reach a payoff. Bobby was about to finish law school at the University of Virginia but was no closer to the political career they had dreamed of than he had been when Lem more or less adopted him 12 years earlier. He and Bobby had terrible fights, like lovers' quarrels, that ended in sulks that lasted for weeks followed by emotional scenes of reconciliation. In between those times, Lem would forlornly call Duff Pacifico, an old girlfriend of Bobby's, the one who had come closest to keeping him focused. "We'd talk for a long time," Duff says. "He'd be close to tears. He'd ask if I thought Bobby loved him, if he was Bobby's best friend."

He was short of breath and had bouts of vertigo, his heart strained by a decade of drugs and liquor and by trying to keep up with people 40 years younger than he. He wheezed; he used an asthma inhaler. Before, his talk of death had been something of an "in" joke with Bobby, Chris Lawford and their friends. (On the river trips that had followed the Apurímac, Lem had insisted on taking a body bag along so that they would have a way of handling his corpse if he were accidentally killed.) Now it took on a more serious, morbid aspect. He went to Pittsburgh with Bobby's old friend Timmy Haydock, whom he was helping get into medical school. While they were there, he took Haydock to a cemetery and showed him the spot that had been reserved for him in the family plot. He lay down on the ground to prove that the burial site was large enough for his bulky form. Then he sat on the grass looking down at a pacific pond below filled with waterfowl. "I'll be here all through eternity, watching the ducks," he said. Then, after a minute or so of silence, he added, "Being a pallbearer is the worst job. You just sweat and sweat. I've been a pallbearer for so many Kennedys. I know what I'm talking about. God, I'm going to make you guys sweat."

He changed his will every few weeks. He had left everything to Bobby. Then he eliminated him. Then he changed his mind again and added a codicil leaving him only his apartment and giving the collectibles to his sister.

On May 25, 1981, Lem was with Michael Kennedy and his new wife, Vicki. Harvey Fleetwood was also at the apartment. Bobby was supposed to come up from Charlottesville but at the last minute didn't. "Lem was very upset about that," Fleetwood recalls. "He and Bobby had been fighting over the phone about whether or not to go to Haiti that summer. The real subject was the thousand or more things they couldn't talk about, things having to do with the death of the Kennedy dream. That night, Lem got very drunk. He said to me, 'You've got to take care of Bobby.' I said that he shouldn't worry about Bobby, because Bobby had a million friends. 'No, you're one of the only ones who care.' I said that all this talk didn't mean much, because he'd be there to look after Bobby the way he always had. He shook his head and started to cry. 'No, I made a terrible mistake. I took drugs with him. I made a terrible mistake. I let him down.' "

The next night, in a better mood, he took ten of the younger Kennedys and their dates to see the film Outland. He was enthusiastic, talking of how he was going to help Michael and Vicki design their house in Virginia, just as he had helped Steve and Jean Smith design theirs at Bridgehampton. He talked loudly throughout the movie. "It was hilarious," Michael remembers. "He pretended that he didn't understand what was going on. He kept saying, 'Why is he doing that?' and 'What the hell is going on, anyway?' We went back to his apartment and talked. It was a good night."

The next morning, after another conversation with Bobby, he was down again. He called Duff and asked, "Do you think I've wasted my life on the Kennedys? Do you think they appreciate me?" He called Fleetwood, sobbing: "I'm taking all my Kennedy pictures off the wall. I don't want to see them anymore."

That night, he died in his sleep. The autopsy said that death was caused by a heart attack, though Ethel asked one of Bobby's closest friends if he thought that Lem had suffered an O.D. The funeral was at the Episcopal church around the corner from Lem's apartment. For the Kennedys, it was as if the past itself had died; as if the secret passage they'd used to make contact with their glory days was now forever closed.

In his eulogy, Bobby, whose Prince Hal he had been for so long, compared Lem to Falstaff and said, "He felt pain for every one of us--pain that no one else would have the courage to feel.... I don't know how we'll carry on without him."

Eunice had the last words: "I'm sure he's already organizing everything in heaven so it will be completely ready for us--with just the right Early American furniture, the right curtains, the right rugs, the right paintings and everything ready for a big party. Yesterday was Jack's birthday. Jack's best friend was Lem, and he would want me to remind everyone of that today. I am sure the good Lord knows that heaven is Jesus and Lem and Jack and Bobby loving one another."

As they were leaving the church, someone recalled something Lem had said a few years earlier when he was in one of his jolly moods: "After I go, there'll be no more Kennedys."

"Lem had seen an opportunity to initiate a Kennedy who might otherwise be lost into his heritage."