The Kennedy Legend

The media tapestry that is the Kennedy legend has been getting awfully threadbare lately. And it unravels more and more due to the shoddy material from which it was made -  the Kennedys themselves.

From the NY Post:

Along with their waning power, wealth, privilege and prestige, here’s another element of the Camelot mystique that needs to be extinguished: the myth of “The Kennedy Curse.” It’s almost a reflexive national reaction when we hear of yet another Kennedy dying too young, so of course it was invoked again last week, when news broke that Mary Richardson Kennedy, the estranged 52-year-old wife of Robert Kennedy Jr., had hung herself in her barn on Wednesday. A curse, however, implies supernatural intervention by vengeful gods jealous of mortal youth, beauty, brilliance.

Let’s just call it what it is: the natural fallout when you’re a member of a family riddled with entitled, underachieving drunks, drug addicts and adulterers, whose treatment of women is historically deplorable.

Billy "What Stain?" Clinton said he was influenced by JFK to seek public service. Neither JKF nor Billy Boy ever owned up to what they would be servicing or how.

Until recently, JFK’s relentless womanizing was contextualized as a glamorous flaw, one he shared with many other men who have held the office, born of the swinging, shaken-martini ’60s. We now know that JFK was a remorseless predator, a sitting president who got a teenage intern drunk, took her virginity on his wife’s bed, then later suggested she perform oral sex on an aide while he watched..

Not to be outdone, Ted "Where's My Buick" Kennedy reached new levels of despicable behavior.

And Ted. Where to begin? There are the well-documented stories of truly sleazy behavior, but it’s quite the legacy when partying with your nephew leads to his trial for rape—and that’s just a footnote. Ted was the worst of the three, pitching off a bridge at Chappaquiddick in 1969, leaving a young campaign aide named Mary Jo Kopechne to die at the bottom of a lake while he slept off the booze, then strategized spin control.

Of course the patriarch of the family, Joe Kennedy Sr., established a record that was hard to beat. Rose managed to outlive him which was probably wasn't reward enough for what he put her through. Two subsequent generations of Kennedys have killed themselves or their spouses trying to best the old man.

And lest we forget the third-generation Kennedys: the late Michael Kennedy (affair with the teenage babysitter); Ethel’s nephew Michael Skakel (convicted of the 1975 murder of teenage neighbor Martha Moxley); William Kennedy Smith (tried for rape in 1991); Joe Kennedy II (getting an annulment without telling his wife);Doug Kennedy (kicking and shoving his maternity nurse).

And Robert Kennedy Jr. isn't any better. Alcoholism and substance abuse runs rampant in the women married to the Kennedy clan because of the humiliation they suffer.

“I remember being seated at a dinner next to Bobby around 10 years ago that she was also at,” a close friend of Mary’s told The Post last week. “It was the first time I had met either of them, and he put his hand on my thigh under the table. He was such a dog that way.”

Yesterday, the Kennedys buried Mary in Hyannisport, near the famous family compound. In life, Mary had been banned from there for years. In death, she is now the good Kennedy wife, keeping up appearances.

Poor Mary. She just couldn't beat the Kennedy legend.