It always comes as a surprise to those who have studied the Kennedy family that some of the younger generation were so eager to shed their identities as scions of one of the most powerful American families and seek out a darker underside of life. Maybe it shouldn’t be so unexpected, though. Many of them, especially the young men, were raised by parents who had such great hopes for them that there was no way they would ever meet them, or so they felt. Before they knew who they were, they were required to know what they wanted to do with their lives, to be of service to others and—who knows?—to one day even become President of the United States. Given the tragedy of the murders of their beloved relatives and, in the case of Ethel’s kids, the fact that they were being raised in an unstable atmosphere, it wasn’t surprising that some of them turned to drugs and alcohol, and also not surprising that some of them wanted anything other than to be Kennedys.
In the summer of 1970, there was one Kennedy son—a fifteen-year-old with big, defiant eyes that were so blue they were almost turquoise, a tangled mop of blond hair, and an emaciated, malnourished physique—who found himself in dire straits. His clothing was damp and dirty—worn-out black jeans, a red T-shirt with holes in it, and a ratty blue denim jacket. The bottoms of his sneakers were falling apart. He wore no socks; didn’t believe in them, or so he said. He was a runaway to big-city Manhattan, an escapee from the Kennedy compound in Hyannis. He and his cousin were standing at the foot of an escalator on the ground level of Grand Central Terminal. As a train stopped and passengers began to disembark and make their way to the escalator, the cousins would approach. “Got any spare change?” one would ask. Usually, he’d be ignored. Sometimes, though, he would get lucky and end up with a buck or two. Then, the two would take the money and hightail it to Central Park. Once there, they would score a small bit of heroin.
At this same time, three thousand miles away in Los Angeles, there was another Kennedy kid, this one sixteen. He looked like a true bum with disheveled, smelly clothing, his long hair past his shoulders and so skinny his cheekbones looked like small rocks on otherwise smooth adolescent skin. Sitting in the corner of a train’s boxcar, he shared a joint with two other refugees from the Cape. While the train chugged along at a nice clip, this Kennedy kid turned to one of the other boys and asked, “So, where we headed?”
“Beats me,” said the kid as he passed a joint. “Doesn’t matter, does it?” he asked.
“Not really.”
The first kid, the one in New York? That was David Kennedy.
The other one, in California? His brother Bobby.