Cohen: How Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is undoing his family’s proud legacy

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Three of the four celebrated sons of Joseph P. Kennedy died young. Joe Kennedy, Jr., the eldest, was killed at 29 in the Second World War. John F. Kennedy was assassinated at 46, Robert F. Kennedy at 42.

Of this greatest generation of Kennedys who came to define public service in post-war America, only Edward M. Kennedy lived a reasonably long life. He died of cancer at 77.

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Beyond Teddy, the fifth-longest serving member of the U.S. Senate, we wonder how the others might have turned out.

We never did see Joe Jr. reach the presidency, as his father had fervently hoped. We never saw JFK finish his presidency. He might have pursued peace with the Soviets. RFK might have withdrawn U.S. troops from Vietnam. Who knows?

Would they have become more liberal or more conservative? Would they have lost their certainties with age or deepened them? Would history have caught up to them?

What we do know is those Kennedys have stood frozen, in relative youth, which may have been just as well. Ted grew old but his early womanizing and drinking nearly undid him, until he remarried and remade himself late in life.

The next generation — the sons and daughters of Ted, Jack, Bobby — has been less distinguished. They entered state or national politics, most prominently Kathleen Kennedy, Joseph Kennedy II and Patrick Kennedy. They had middling careers that never went beyond legislator or lieutenant-governor. They didn’t have the mix of temperament, intellect, judgment and timing of their fathers.

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(The best example of failed ambition is Joe Kennedy III, who was a rising star in the House of Representatives. In 2020, he foolishly tried to unseat Sen. Ed Markey, a fellow Democrat from Massachusetts. He didn’t. Now he is an ambassador, as is his cousin, Caroline Kennedy, who briefly considered running for the Senate from New York but withdrew before entering the race.)

You might say these next-generation Kennedys have been the decline of the House of Kennedy. Many have served honourably in politics, the arts or philanthropy. None had huge impact.

All of which leads us to the strange presidential candidacy of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Unlike his father and two of his uncles, he has become a septuagenarian. Yet he’s a different person than he was at 40, when he was a crusading, consequential environmentalist. You might say that then, he was normal.

In today’s Bobby Kennedy we see for the first time a Kennedy running for president at 70, what Leonard Cohen called “the foothills of old age.” (Teddy ran in 1980, at 48). If the face is craggy and the voice thin, we recognize the cobalt eyes, the hair askew, the pulsing energy. Maybe, on a good day, we can conjure his father. Or his uncle. On a good day.

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The reality is something different. As Donald Trump represents the collapse of politics in the United States, Bobby Kennedy Jr., who is running as an independent, reflects the collapse of a dynasty. Before the Bushes, who produced two presidents, there were the Kennedys: smart, glamorous, progressive, charismatic.

How did it come to this? Bobby Kennedy, Jr., in his radicalism and his paranoia, is the antithesis of the reason and idealism of his forebears. He is of another world. To his brothers, sisters and cousins, who have denounced him, he is someone they no longer recognize. He’s an imposter who, on the strength of his name, wealth and pedigree, corrupts a proud legacy.

If they have broken with him, it’s because they know what’s at stake. Kennedy’s conspiratorial candidacy is not just a quixotic exercise in vanity that will not win him the presidency. It may cost Joe Biden his office — and hasten an era of chaos, violence and authoritarianism.

Today Robert Kennedy, Jr., is mounting the strongest third-party challenge since Ross Perot helped elect Bill Clinton in 1992. Electing Donald Trump, who sat at the same desk as Jack Kennedy in the Oval Office, may be, perversely, what comes of it.

But again, this is how broken America has become: the last political act of the Kennedys may be to kill the country that they helped create.

Andrew Cohen is a journalist, commentator and author of Two Days In June: John F. Kennedy and the 48 Hours That Made History.

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