Kennedys Marked by Success, Tragedy
By TED ANTHONY, AP
They are the country's most enduring celebrities, the closest thing, it's often
said, to American royalty. But if the Kennedys of Massachusetts have helped define modern
ambition and 20th-century success, they've also withstood two generations of televised
tears and premature goodbyes.
John F. Kennedy Jr.'s disappearance in a small plane off the Atlantic Coast is
but the latest in a litany of high-profile misfortunes that have torn apart a family, and
often a nation as well.
``It's almost as if there's some ineffable force that demands that they suffer,
and suffer nationally,'' said Neal Gabler, a sometime contributor to Kennedy's ``George''
magazine and author of ``Life: The Movie,'' which explores the American celebrity and
entertainment culture.
There was, of course, the excruciating assassination of President John F.
Kennedy. The hail of bullets, five years later, that killed the brother who aspired to the
same office. The Chappaquiddick accident in 1969 that killed a young woman and virtually
ensured that Ted Kennedy would never be president. The list goes on. A Kennedy
killed in a World War II plane crash. A Kennedy institutionalized because of retardation
and a failed lobotomy. A Kennedy accused, and acquitted, of rape. A Kennedy killed while
playing football on the ski slopes. Paralysis. Cancer. A fatal drug overdose.
On Saturday, members of the Kennedy clan huddled yet again in their Hyannis Port
compound, the site of the famed touch-football images of the early 1960s. They had come
together for a wedding, but were united in uncertainty as boats and planes scoured the
waters for three of their own.
It has, for America, become a familiar sight, their princes and princesses,
hunkered down on a windswept patch of coast, trying to make sense of another loss. People
watch, and wonder; for many, it's an epic soap opera set in a world they could never
access. ``They occupy a very special place in the celebrity hierarchy,'' said Irving
J. Rein, a Northwestern University professor who studies how American celebrity is
marketed and perceived. ``The Kennedy name is almost like a brand; it evokes a
series of feelings in us _ about families, about relationships, about luck and fate and
tragedy,'' he said. ``Everybody's drawn to tragedy when people have everything.''
But is this level of heartache truly that unusual or just different?
``This family has been under a microscope for so long that anything that happens
adds to the catalogue of misfortune, and we remember it. But how many beloved relatives go
through similar sorts of things without so much public attention?'' wonders James F.
Smith, a Penn State University professor who studies postwar America.
``If you take out Robert and John, you have young people killed in skiing
accidents, people having trouble with drugs, people with cancer,'' he said. ``Those are
pretty normal things.''
Certainly the Kennedys have had their share of pain, but they're also
risk-takers. You can't have a public assassination without public service; a paragliding
accident, like the one that injured JFK Jr. in May, is the result of an adventurous
lifestyle.
The Kennedys have thrust themselves into the vortex, and thus their suffering
has been very high-profile, making them fit into a narrative the public and media are
ready to embrace.
``There's no way that something can happen to any of them without it falling
into a ready-made narrative, `the curse,' or `that reckless group' or `this is payback for
the sins of the great-grandfathers,''' said Susan Bordo, author of ``Twilight Zones: The
Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J.'' ``It's a story that's been written so
many times,'' she said. ``A family of men with a tremendous amount of capabilities
and wealth and ambition who seem hell-bent on putting themselves at risk. I'm not saying
it's true, but it's the narratives everyone's going to think of.''
In the end, public adulation of a family like the Kennedys can serve as a
there-but-for-the-grace-of-God role for Americans. Sure, we see the glitter of Camelot and
the romance of the Hyannis Port touch football games. But when something like this
happens, we like our normal, workaday pain just fine, thank you.
``Somehow their lives, which have seemed to us blessed, now become tragic,''
Smith said. ``In a kind of a backhand way, it says to us, `Maybe my life, as ordinary as
it is, ain't so bad at all.'''
``There are a lot of people who looked at JFK Jr., and said, `If I could only
trade places with that person,'' he said. ``Nobody's saying that today.''
