It was January 29, 2018. There he stood, looking robust behind a podium, like so many of his ancestors and relatives, in front of a nation of millions, the virtual embodiment of the hopes and dreams of not only a new generation of Kennedys but of those who still believed in the dream and in a family that had always personified that dream. He was Joseph Patrick Kennedy III, Democratic representative of Massachusetts’ Fourth Congressional District—the thirty-seven-year-old grandson of Bobby and great-nephew of Jack. Though he’d been serving for five years, this was the first time many people in America had ever laid eyes on Joe. As he stood before America in a light purple shirt and maroon tie with no jacket, his demeanor and personality shone through loud and clear. He was pure Kennedy—the artful connection with his audience, the eyes alert and sincere, the cadence of his language reminding some of his father, Joe, during his political heyday. He also displayed a quality many critics of Donald J. Trump, the President who’d just given his State of the Union address, felt was perhaps lacking in him: empathy. Most politicians will tell you that it can’t be faked. Either you care about people or you don’t. Of Trump’s White House, he said:
This administration is not just targeting the laws that protect us, they are targeting the very idea that we are all worthy of protection. For them, dignity is not something you are born with, but something you measure by your net worth, your celebrity, your headlines, your crowd size. Not to mention the gender of your spouse, the country of your birth, the color of your skin, the God of your prayers. Their record has rebuked our highest American ideals, the belief that we are all equal, that we all count in the eyes of our laws, our leaders, our God, and our government. That is the American promise.
As he spoke, Joe Kennedy exuded self-assurance and power; in every way, he was a Kennedy mastering his moment and reminding some of the way President John F. Kennedy had handled himself in the historic televised presidential debate with Richard M. Nixon in 1960. The response to him the next day would be overwhelmingly positive. Most media outlets agreed that he was a real up-and-comer, someone to keep an eye on, which, of course, is what the Kennedy family had been saying about him for years.
Joe III is one of twin boys born in 1980 to Joseph P. Kennedy II and Sheila Rauch. He was born just two months after his uncle Teddy abandoned his presidential aspirations in 1980. He was six when his father was elected to Congress, eleven when his parents divorced, seventeen when his mother’s book, Shattered Faith, was published, which helped ignite the fire that eventually consumed his father’s political career.
At twenty-three, after graduating from Stanford in 2003, Joe joined the Peace Corps, an important foundation of the family’s legacy established so long ago by his great-uncles Jack and Sarge. At twenty-six in 2006, he and his brother, Matthew, worked for their uncle Ted’s reelection campaign before he enrolled in Harvard Law School. He graduated at twenty-nine and went on to work at the Cape and Islands office as an assistant district attorney. In 2011, he joined the Middlesex County district attorney’s office. A year later, he officially entered politics, running in the Fourth Congressional District for the newly vacated seat of the retiring Barney Frank. Others had considered opposing him, but there was no point; he was a shoo-in not only because of his family’s popularity in the state but because he just seemed to have “it”—again, that ineffable quality that makes a politician. He won against Republican Sean Bielat with 61 percent of the vote. He won again in 2014 and then again in 2016.
Despite the disappointing end to his father’s political career, Joe refused to be discouraged when it came to public service. Paying heed to his grandmother Ethel’s admonitions, he always knew he would serve in some capacity. He inherited the burden of expectation and didn’t mind it; he embraced it. “I grew up around politics,” he told Boston magazine. “But I think politics is a unique field in that you have to put yourself out there in a very public way for the entire world to see. People think my family pushed me into running for office. The person who pushed me most not to run for office was my father. He said, ‘If you don’t want to do this, it is going to be an absolutely brutal experience for you. So make sure that this is something that you yourself want to do and not some sort of invented idea of obligation.’ And that’s some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten.”
Joe married Lauren Anne Birchfield, an attorney, in December 2012; they met in Harvard Law School, students of future senator Elizabeth Warren. They have had a happy marriage and are now the parents of a daughter, Eleanor “Ellie,” born on December 29, 2015, and a son, James Matthew, born on December 20, 2017.
Joe’s twin brother, Matthew, who studied business at Stanford and Harvard, is a partner at InfraLinx Capital, an international project development and finance company. He’s the oldest of the twins by eight minutes, which he jokes were the “greatest eight minutes of my life. It’s all been downhill from there.” He has been married to Katherine Lee Manning since 2012, their wedding having taken place at the Kennedy compound, of course.
Many of the Kennedy men of Joe’s generation have not had the kinds of troubled personal relationships that characterized their parents’ experiences. As this fourth generation of Kennedys steps into the light of public scrutiny, it would seem they’ve learned some important lessons about fidelity and commitment by watching their mothers and fathers duke it out over the years. Also, to their great advantage, this new generation doesn’t have to deal with the same kind of trauma suffered by their parents; after all, they’re one generation removed from the murders that so deeply affected their older relatives.
“Joe III and [his brother] Matt were raised by a mom [Sheila Rauch] who taught them to respect women,” said Gayle Fee, who covered the Kennedys for thirty years for the Boston Herald. “It was a different generation in many ways. Many of the boys of that era—and these would be the grandkids of Ethel and the rest—were raised by strong women like Sheila and like Michael’s widow, Vicki. These were women who didn’t put up with a lot of nonsense for long. When Sheila was unhappy in her marriage, she did something about it; she divorced Joe and then fought the annulment he sought. Then she wrote that book. So her sons saw a strong, determined woman they could respect. It was a new day, all right. Sheila raised those boys on her own and kept them away from any bad influences.”
Joseph Patrick Kennedy III wants nothing more than to continue the legacy of his great American dynasty, the Kennedys. Named after his great-grandfather, the family patron and architect of all their dreams and ambitions, Joe is proud of what his ancestors have achieved. It doesn’t seem as if he feels he’s surrounded by, as Lem Billings once put it, “footprints, all of them deeper than his own.” Rather, one has a sense that Joe walks in tandem with his forebearers while charting his own political course with his own special brand of big-hearted liberalism. Especially given Ted Kennedy Jr.’s announcement in February 2018 that he would not run for a third term in the state senate, all eyes have been on Joe to continue to carry the torch for the family.
Joe serves because he wants to, though, not because he feels he must. Things have definitely changed in that regard in the Kennedy family. The pressure to be a public servant has dissipated with time, and maybe that’s for the best. Some of the new generation is involved in philanthropy, while some have no interest in it. For instance, Ethel’s granddaughter Michaela Cuomo, daughter of Kerry Kennedy and Andrew Cuomo, is an activist intent on raising money for sexual assault awareness. Kyra LeMoyne Kennedy—Bobby Kennedy Jr.’s daughter with the late Mary Richardson Kennedy—seems a little less invested in social activism. Unfortunately for her, at least for the time being, she’ll probably be best known for her great comeback to a bouncer after being refused entry into a club because she was nineteen in 2015: “I’m a Kennedy,” she screamed at him. “Google me.” She followed that classic line with a threat for the ages: “If you don’t let me in, the governor will be calling.” A year later, her father insisted she shut down all her social media when she fought back at a blogger who had criticized her and her friends. “I can play games, too, bitch!” she posted. Kyra is twenty-three as of this writing. “She’ll learn,” Bobby Jr. said of his daughter. “Give her time. You should’ve seen me at that age.” Two years later, her twenty-two-year-old cousin, Caroline Summer Rose Kennedy—one of Max Kennedy’s three kids—would make a few headlines with her own memorable line when she and her father were arrested for disturbing the peace during a house party in Hyannis Port: “You don’t know who you’re messing with,” she exclaimed. “I went to Brown and I’m a teacher, sweetheart.” The charges against father and daughter were eventually dismissed.
DESPITE THE PERSONAL tumult her venture into politics had caused her back in 2008, Caroline Kennedy still knew she wanted to serve her country in some way. She knew it was what her uncle Teddy had wanted, too. What she didn’t know was how she might satisfy the family’s mandate while at the same time maintaining her privacy and also staying out of the line of fire of partisan politics. In early 2013, the right opportunity presented itself when President Barack Obama, grateful for her support during his campaign, asked her to be his nominee for the job of United States ambassador to Japan, succeeding Ambassador John Roos.
In September 2013, Caroline sat before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to answer myriad questions from Democratic and Republican senators about possible platforms and ideas. She’d come a long way in just a few years’ time. Now she presented herself as a completely different woman from the one five years earlier, who’d seemed unable to answer a simple question without becoming defensive. On this day, she was confident and calm, eager to put forth her ideas, anxious to impress and to be approved. If given the opportunity, she said, she wanted to focus on student exchange programs as well as military concerns and trade relations. In October, she was approved by unanimous vote as the first female United States ambassador to Japan.
For the next three years, Caroline would spend most of her time in Japan, though she and her family would also reside as much as possible in the States. Though her job was, for the most part, ceremonial, as are the duties of most ambassadors, it was the perfect fit for her in that it satisfied her desire to serve yet didn’t expose her to much controversy. When she resigned from the position in 2017 it was only because political appointees of one administration generally don’t stay on for the next one; President Donald J. Trump had ordered all Obama appointees to resign before his inauguration without giving them the customary extension to get their affairs in order.
Caroline moved back to the United States full-time, and she and Ed live in New York today.
BESIDES JOSEPH P. KENNEDY III, another young Kennedy in whom people seem intensely interested is the only grandson of President Kennedy—Caroline and Ed’s son, John Bouvier Kennedy Schlossberg, better known as Jack. Born in 1993, as he reached adulthood and became more high profile, it was clear that Jack was well-spoken and ready for the attention.
Jack, a member of the John F. Kennedy Library New Frontier Award Committee, has become a confident speaker with the passing of time. In November 2013, he introduced Barack Obama at the Medal of Freedom award dinner commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of his grandfather’s assassination. A member of the committee for the Profile in Courage Awards, he also hosted the ceremony in 2014. He’s often involved in high-profile Kennedy honors and makes numerous television appearances to talk about them.
A Yale graduate (2015) with a history degree focused on Japanese history, Jack is presently attending Harvard Law School.
Though she appears to take the public’s growing fascination with her son in her stride, people with knowledge of the situation say that Caroline is keenly interested in seeing him pursue politics. “Caroline is a kingmaker,” said family friend R. Couri Hay, “a Kennedy kingmaker. The family is always looking to see who amongst them will rise to the pinnacle of power. All eyes are on Jack. Some of the other Kennedys, with the exception of Joe III, will likely fade away while Caroline anoints Jack as, forgive me for saying it, the crown prince of Camelot. It’s Caroline, with her vision and her ability to look back in history with moral judgment, who gets to decide when he’s ready to assume the mantle of her father and his grandfather.”
One character trait Jack—who is now twenty-six—has in common with his uncle John Kennedy Jr. is his openness; he seems to have no fear of public scrutiny. Maybe that’s ironic given that ever since he was a child, his mother has cautioned him to be leery of others. He has rejected that advice, as have his sisters, Rose, thirty-one, and Tatiana, twenty-nine.
Rose is a Harvard graduate with a degree in English who got her master’s in the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She’s also a comedian who wrote a digital web series called End Times Girls Club. Tatiana is a Yale graduate whose internship with The New York Times led to a job as an environmental reporter for that newspaper.
ROBERT KENNEDY JR. married Cheryl Hines in 2014. From all accounts, the two have had a happy union, with Bobby’s rabble-rousing days long behind him. He has also apparently conquered his sexual addiction. He and his mother, Ethel, with whom he’d long had a contentious relationship, have had a détente for many years now. “I was also able to recognize that my mother’s passing storms of nettlesome temper were mainly the fruit of her own personal miseries, and I began to see the extraordinary qualities in her character,” he wrote in his memoir, American Values. “She always put her children first, while understanding that ‘I love you’ and ‘No’ could be part of the same sentence.”
Bobby has continued his tireless advocacy for environmental issues. He continues to argue, for instance, that vaccines containing mercury are unsafe for children. While he’s not opposed to all vaccines, he does seek to make them safer.
Recently, Bobby set his sights on unraveling the mystery of his father’s murder. He’s long suspected that Sirhan Sirhan didn’t act alone and was possibly not even the shooter. As he points out, the autopsy report indicates that Kennedy was shot at point-blank range from behind, including a fatal shot behind his ear. Sirhan was standing in front of him.
In December 2017, Bobby had what must have been an incredible experience of visiting Sirhan Sirhan at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility outside San Diego, where he has been imprisoned for nearly fifty years. “I went there because I was curious and disturbed by what I had seen in the evidence,” said Bobby, who was sixty-three at the time. “I was disturbed that the wrong person might have been convicted of killing my father. My father was the chief law enforcement officer in this country. I think it would have disturbed him if somebody was put in jail for a crime they didn’t commit.”
With Cheryl waiting in the car outside the facility, Bobby spoke to Sirhan Sirhan for about three hours. As of this writing, he hasn’t yet revealed what he learned, but he’s now more convinced than ever that, while somehow likely involved, Sirhan Sirhan didn’t kill his father. It’s been reported that he plans to examine all angles in a book that he’s writing about the subject.