People Who Live in Glass Palaces…

Celebrity-Politician and Cultural Icon Caroline Kennedy

This should never have been necessary. I’m well aware that tow-thirds of the U.S. population is 59 years old or younger. This matters a lot in determining what we might call consensus knowledge of the American experience and perhaps nowhere as significantly as in our consensus view of the Kennedy family. Which has suddenly become at least briefly relevant to a degree it hasn’t been for 20:years or so.

Putting this in because 1) it’s a cool graphic, and 2) it demonstrates 

the usually invisible dynamic importance of age in the political realm.

Which means that only 28 percent are old enough to remember

seeing the moment when Caroline became an American icon.

All most of you have of the beginning hours of Caroline’s celebrity is a photograph or at most a brief video clip of the hours that transformed her life forever:

The funeral of JFK. Everyone in this photo but Caroline Kennedy is dead, including her brother.

None of under-60 folks remember the assassination itself, the murder of Oswald, the growing mystery about how and why it happened, and then the subsequent hammer blows of the MLK and  RFK assassinations, the blood in the streets as the radical era began and started its deadly work of transforming American society into something altogether other. Nothing has ever been the same since November 22, 1963, and Caroline is the only surviving principal of that day. It’s a near-metaphysical role if expertly played, and there’s plenty of evidence she’s well aware of what’s involved and what’s at risk. Why it’s so important to pay attention when she steps out from behind the soft focus she usually inhabits and goes low on something she feels strongly about.

For the most part, the only surviving child of John F. Kennedy has lived her life well away from the public eye. Even when she has held office, it has been as an ambassador in a foreign nation. Until this political cycle, when she appeared dramatically before the cameras to denounce and defame her uncle Robert Kennedy, Jr., who is — like her — the offspring of an assassinated national politician. Most recently, she said this at a press conference, shocking nearly everyone:

For his part, RFKjr refused to criticize his cousin in return, or other members 

of the Kennedy family. He said, without heat, that he loves his family and 

that political differences between them are normal don’t affect family unity.

Should we believe Caroline? Can we believe her? Answering that question involves some archaeology, digging up a past that has only partially played out in public. Both the public and the private artifacts of the Kennedy history matter. And we are entitled to look more closely at a storied name which is amazingly complicated in its innumerable details. First question? Who is Caroline with respect to the public record?

With the exception of the assassination mention, this part of her Wiki résumé is pretty vanilla, elite but appropriate credentialing of a former ambassador to the very distant nations of Japan and Australia. She went to Harvard and Columbia Law School, which makes her, unsurprisingly, a member of CHYOS, although the text specified that she went to Radcliffe College at Harvard, a giveaway of an old pose among ‘Cliffies’ that they were smarter than Harvard boys because they weren’t jocks, just great students. There’s no mention here of her secondary education (a common omission among elite Democrats), which was at the Concord Academy, an elite girls’ prep school in Concord MA, sister school of Middlesex School in the Grottlesex league and therefore a purebred preppy. Significance? Democrats tend to underplay their preppy experience, especially when it occurs in single-sex schools, which suggests a kind of silver spoon pampering that doesn’t behoove leaders of the self-appointed Party of the Common Man. Does this mean Caroline’s political affiliations go beyond ambassadorships? Yes. More about that later, but the most urgent question facing us is why this woman not only turns publicly on her first cousin but in such an ugly fashion, with such biting personal accusations.

The terms Predator and Addict are the neon headlines of her screed.  This where we have to scrape the vanilla icing off the résumé she presents in Wikipedia. Why blame RFKjr in particular when there are so many skeletons of both types in the overflowing Kennedy closet? Notable for problems in both areas was her father, John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the United States at the age of 42. But he wasn’t just a success story. Before he was elected, my Dad insisted that JFK was a playboy philanderer and a drug addict. I don’t know how he knew this, but he was right. It must never have been that much of a secret before the press moved in during his presidency to cover for him. 

Drugs? Yes:

Women not his lovely wife? Yes:

Predator? Mystery continues into the present day regarding the timing of two events. There was the awkward moment when Marilyn Monroe sang Happy Birthday to the President on May 19, 1962:

This was followed by her death, ruled a suicide, just over six weeks later, on August 4, 1962.

If you find it indecent to intrude on the image of death, don’t click on the pic.

Documentarians and other investigators have assembled evidence suggesting both JFK and RFK played some part in the events of the night Monroe died. Nothing has been proven. But it lingers, like the suspicions that dogged their brother Teddy for the rest of his life after his seeming inheritance of the Kennedy talent for the top dove away into the waters of the Chappaquiddick:

Familiar elements here: philandering, excessive alcohol intake, the death of a rumored sexual conquest, seriously jeopardizing Teddy’s presidential hopes…

…before they finally vanished into consolation prizes of a safe Senate seat and “waitress sandwiches” with his drinking buddy Sen. Chris Dodd…

After Teddy’s death, Caroline had no problem assisting in the glossing over of her uncle’s personal weaknesses in praising his record as a longtime senator.  I don’t think she ever addressed the evidence of her father’s manifold marital infidelities, and she never appeared in public during the sordid rape trial of William Kennedy Smith, which confirmed to many that Kennedy men were all just hounds when it came to sex.

On trial, then scot fee and on the make. Shit happens.

It would appear that to Caroline, sex is not a thing Kennedy’s have to explain or defend. Call it the Smith Approach. Fugeddaboutit. The word that’s hardest to get past is Predator. Maybe it’s not the kind of predation her father and uncle engaged in. Maybe it’s not just about BobbyJr but his Daddy, the lifelong bad influence who seduced Caroline’s Daddy into policies that might have gotten him murdered, and the. Caught up with Bobby later. (I remember hearing scuttlebutt from Harvard clubbies that a steward of the undergraduate Spee Club gossiped he used to find Jack and Bobby passed out in the club’s main lounge of a morning, tuxedoed from the waist up and naked from the waist down…) It was always Bobby who had a talent for finding a fight and taking no prisoners. He started feuds with Hoover and Hoffa as Attorney General, but before that he was a hitman for Eugene McCarthy (a Republican!) along with the most vicious lawyer in America, Roy Cohn…

…Who also had, at some point, some sort of affiliation with Donald Trump:

Hell yeah. It was good enough for PBS to worry about in 2024. 

Roy Cohn’s only been dead for 36 years. Fascists think long term.

This is all starting to seem more political than strictly personal. Sure, Caroline probably holds a grudge against her uncle for a past that ensnared both of them. Probably why she never fully internalized the fact that she and BobbyJr were both kids when their fathers were brutally murdered. All kinds of emotional upsets (three dead siblings), unpredictable behaviors, and even appalling eccentricities arise from such life circumstances. Yet she seems to be going out of her way to blame family patterns of bad behavior she’s seen emerging in the younger generation on Bobby, not her father, her uncle, or (dare we mention him?) that old bootlegger, rake, and Nazi-loving Grandfather Joe?

Politics. Young Bobby is repeating Old Bobby’s original sin of consorting with evil Republicans. It makes for a convenient motive for betraying him and forgiving herself the sin against family loyalty. The whole impression she tries to give off of not being involved in the cold-blooded business of dirty Democrat politicking is a lie. (Here’s a whole bunch more of her political career no one’s been mentioning since she tried to knife Bobby.)  She was active in the Obama campaign, so much an insider that she chaired the committee to find a VP for the Hope and Change messiah, and took her payoffs in the form of ambassadorships that kept her safely out of the tabloid messes that keep happening around Kennedy spawn, just as they always have. She even passed up a Senate seat she could have had just by nodding her head, because being the little girl at her Daddy’s tragic funeral is too enduring and angelic an image to risk in the jungle of Capitol Hill. It would never do to become honest-to-God flesh and blood when your sainted brother has already joined the other family martyrs in upper air of Asgard…

Don’t even try to compete with that.

One thing she has never learned though. A simple lesson. But simple lessons are rarely learned by the ones who are too smart for their own good.

She’s a Kennedy too, who wants what she wants, to hell with anybody else, and she just proved it. The little cherub in the blue coat was always an illusion, and now she’s gone. BobbyJr looks like he’s trying a different path from the one blazed by the old crook who bought Cook a county and the Presidency for his oldest surviving son.