EXCERPT

Introduction

Monday, June 3, 1968

Bobby Kennedy is on the campaign trail. He is the one white politician who plunges into poor neighborhoods where armed Black Panthers speak openly of rebellion. He wants that challenge. He is the marshal, the gunslinger, who will bring order into the country--even if he has to bend the rules and cover his tracks to do so. Yet he also seems so real, so unguarded he is almost a saint. The two qualities--ruthlessness and vulnerability--are joined in one word: he is fearless.

Kennedy is wiry and short. In black-and-white pictures there often seems to be a shadow across him--like a tough street fighter from an old movie who can instantly flip into rage: Jimmy Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, early Jack Nicholson. Sean Penn has some of that aspect today: a sense of edge. You don't want to mess with this guy; he can "go off" in an instant. But in color photos, there is a different man. Though not blond, he has the tousled Kennedy hair. You can picture him playing touch football; you can imagine him out on the waves; you see him tumbled in a heap with his pregnant wife and ten children. There is something softer, but also charmed, about him. He has the strange trait of alternately seeming hard as nails and shy. That is the magic of Bobby Kennedy.

Bobby has one last day to appeal to the whole state of California, to keep his chances of being nominated for president alive. If he wins the Democratic primary tomorrow, all things are possible. Bobby has one last day to run as hard as he can, past the doubters, the critics, his own exhaustion, toward victory. Picture a movie that captures that last day of campaigning. It would have to move as fast as he did; he spent the day, as he spent his life, running: Bobby, in Los Angeles with his family, took six kids to Disneyland the day before. Today, he flies up to San Francisco's Chinatown. It's the morning of a workday; the streets are packed four deep. Kids rush out onto the streets to trot alongside his car. Bobby and his wife Ethel are in an open car, a convertible; he must have it that way, so that he can feel the crowd, and they can almost touch him. Suddenly five, six shots ring out. Ethel slumps down. Bobby doesn't flinch. Keeps waving. Just a string of loud firecrackers. Bobby makes sure Ethel is okay, drives on. Now to Fisherman's Wharf, to give a lunch talk at DiMaggio's, a restaurant owned by the great baseball player.

He flies back down the coast to Los Angeles; he is to mingle with people in a park. But six thousand have gathered to hear him, so he makes up a speech. Bobby is drained, doesn't feel well, but pushes himself on. Drives up through Watts, the black section of Los Angeles where he is a hero, then on to Venice, a beachfront community lined with canals and odd houses straight out of cartoons. Everywhere there are crowds, filling the streets on the way to the airport. People must see Bobby, be near him, feel him.

Bobby is hope. Bobby is peace--an end to the horrible Vietnam War. Bobby is the one politician the despairing can listen to, can believe in. He is electric, and everyone who is hurting needs to get close, to feel the current.

Last stop, San Diego. So many supporters they can't fit into the hotel. Bobby speaks, but is exhausted, has to sit down, buries his head in his hands. Comes out, gathers himself, and ends by quoting George Bernard Shaw:

"Some men see things as they are and say, 'Why?' I dream things that never were and say, 'Why not?'"

He is done. Finally, by 11:00 P.M., he, his wife, and six of their children travel to a friend's home by the beach. He can rest.

One day. Twelve hundred miles. Speeches made to every color of Californian. Mexicans, blacks, the poor, the outcast, have cheered Bobby with all their hearts. He has given everything, every ounce of himself.

The next day, a man who did not join in the cheering will head out to the range, to practice shooting his revolver.

Chapter 1

His brother Jack leans back, straight as a board, counterbalancing the wind. Flash II, Jack calls his trim Star Class boat, whose sails billow like the stylish dresses of well-brought-up debutantes. Cutting through the waves of Nantucket Sound, Jack does seem like a flash of light, darting at a faster pace then anyone around him. Bobbing in their slower boats, the old Protestant families mutter to themselves. The sons and daughters of Joseph Kennedy love to sail, fast. Too fast, say those guardians of old wealth, proud of their bloodlines stretching back to colonial days. They cheat, those Catholic Kennedys and their conniving father, say the Protestant families. Jack doesn't mind. Nor does Joe Jr., Jack's older brother, who is just a bit better at everything than everyone else. The third brother--ten years younger than Joe, and eight than Jack--Bobby, with the name that sounds so girlish, so sweet; Bobby cannot swim. Self-made, an extremely wealthy man, Joseph Kennedy has decided: Joe Jr., the wonder boy, will be the first Catholic president of the United States. Jack is being groomed, too, to glide comfortably into the world of the most important men and most beautiful women. Joseph hardly notices Bobby, born after Joe Jr., Jack, Rosemary, Kathleen, Eunice, and Patricia, and before Jean and Ted. Except, that is, to call him a "runt."

The runt of the litter is the one who may not make it, who might not even survive. Bobby is the little one who can hardly stand on his own feet, who keeps crashing into things. His hands tremble. He even looks scared, as if he had just been knocked down, bruised, and doesn't want to cry.

Bobby hates every moment of being seated with his sisters at the girls' end of the table. He hates fumbling with everything he touches. He hates the word "sissy" that even the older women whisper about him. He even hates being called Bobby. He hates all of it, and he won't stand it another second.

As the story goes, he is about four years old, out on the boat in Nantucket Sound. He might be small and clumsy, but he has his father's clear, cold blue eyes--the gaze of absolute determination. Perhaps he squeezes those steely eyes for just a second, then

Bobby dives.

He will learn to swim, damn it, or drown.

It doesn't matter which.

Over and over, Bobby leaps off the boat.

Each time, the ever-perfect Joe Jr. rescues him.

"It either showed a lot of guts or no sense at all," the more cool and distant Jack, now President John Kennedy later joked.

A lot of guts or no sense at all, that was Bobby Kennedy. The runt on his wobbly legs is cute. But Bobby didn't want to be cute. He would catch up, and then win, or be destroyed. "Nothing came easy to him," a friend later said of Bobby. "What he had was a set of handicaps and a fantastic determination to overcome them." Bobby himself put it best: "We were to try harder than anyone else," he said of all the Kennedy children. "We might not be the best, and none of us were, but we were to make the effort to be the best."

"We were to"--the family was like an army unit, a clan that had absolute orders from on high. No individuals, no excuses, no mercy. Joseph Kennedy, the commander in chief, made that mission absolutely clear: "We don't want any losers around here. In this family we want winners. . . . Don't come in second or third--that doesn't count--but win." Every second was a contest, which Bobby entered with reckless fury. Being dismissed by his father, eclipsed by his brothers, that was torture. What did it matter if he hurt himself diving off a boat? He was hurting already.

Joseph Kennedy was not a screamer. He didn't have to yell at his children to make his point. He used his eyes. When he stared straight at you, peering over his glasses, your blood ran cold. "Daddy's look," it was called, and it silenced a raucous household. Daddy set the rules. And one rule was that you were to be prompt, to arrive at family dinners precisely on time. Bobby is five now, playing in the living room of the family's large home in Bronxville, a nice suburb near New York City. Joseph has made millions on Wall Street, and this is the right place for a successful stock trader to live. His home is well appointed, with a grand staircase leading up from the ground floor.

Dinner. Dinner is announced.

Bobby is playing in the living room.

Dinner.

Bobby jumps up.

Bobby runs head first into the thick plate glass under the stairway that separates the living room from the dining room.

His face streaked with blood, glass fragments flying everywhere. Bobby is swept off to the doctor for stitches.

Bobby would do anything not to disappoint his father. Diving into cold water, smashing into plate glass meant nothing to him compared to failing the man with icy blue eyes like his own. Years later, when he was twenty-two, he took James Noonan, a friend, out sailing on a twenty-five-foot Wianno Senior. Specially designed to fare well in the waters around Cape Cod, these boats can be handled by up to four sailors. This time there were just two, or really one: James was along for the pleasant trip, but hardly knew a sail from a sheet. Maybe Bobby was eager to be with a friend, having a good time, just the two of them together. But, suddenly, he realized that it was getting far too close to lunch hour to depend on the winds to bring him back on time. So he turned the boat in the right direction and dove off. Bobby swam away with stroke after confident stroke taking him back to the family. He would arrive, dripping wet, in time not to disturb his father. But he had abandoned James out on the water. When James finally managed to bring the boat in, Bobby's only reaction was, "terrific, but we've got to do something about your sailing."

A boy who drives himself mercilessly expects no less from others. No soft voice soothed Bobby's aches, so he had none to offer another. That, too, was Bobby Kennedy: the relentless, reckless third son of a clan determined to change history.

Reckless courage was a characteristic Robert Francis Kennedy showed throughout his life. The bigger the challenge, the more eager he was to throw himself at it. As a child, Bobby flung himself into cold waters. As a lawyer in Washington, and later as attorney general, he took on the nation's most dangerous mobsters. He went up, one-on- one, against Jimmy Hoffa, a corrupt union official who was as ruthless as he was powerful. At the height of white racial violence, Kennedy made himself the number-one target of armed and hate-crazed segregationists. Then at the worst moment of African-American fury and despair he chose to speak in an all-black neighborhood. In a time when assassinations of outspoken leaders were all too common, he plunged into endless crowds. Bobby Kennedy was fearless. And yet he would never, ever, defy his family. He would do anything to be a great Kennedy, but would never question the obligations of being a part of that tragic clan.

Bobby was blessed and cursed by being born a Kennedy. His father was a strong, shrewd, confident man who impressed the most important leaders in America. Everyone from the president in Washington to the richest businessmen on Wall Street to the heads of Hollywood studios eagerly answered his phone calls. But Joseph did not work so hard only for himself. He was ready to devote every penny he earned to providing for his family and opening the world to his sons. No one, not even a royal prince, was born into the world with as much family support behind him as the sons of Joseph Kennedy. That was the blessing Bobby received from his father. But it came with a price.

Bobby was and would always be a Kennedy. He could, in fact, he must, use all of his ability, his skill, his courage, to make a difference in the world. He was free to challenge his father's ideas. But everything he did from the day he was born to the day he died would be with the family, and for the family. He was an individual, but really he was part of a group, and everything he ever did must serve that group. Bobby was trapped inside the family that made him special. That was the family curse.

This book, then, is the story of Bobby but, equally, of the Kennedy family. And there is something especially appropriate about that. America is often called the land of opportunity. Ever since the first Europeans crossed the Atlantic, America has been described as a place where a single person, on his own, could make his fortune. That is only partially true. The old established families lived in an America defined by ancestry, not individual effort. And Americans who were not white, or Protestant, or from old families had more limited horizons of opportunity. Bobby Kennedy's fate was to be the product of a wealthy family, but a family whose religion made them outsiders. He enjoyed the best of the land of opportunity, but was a spokesman for the victims of prejudice. As he struggled with these contradictions, he tried to craft a new future for the country. In that sense his story was not just that of a man and a family, but of a nation coming of age.

Chapter 2

Sound carried in the big Bronxville home. Even when Bobby was in his room trying to fall asleep, he could hear Joe Jr. pounding Jack's head against the wall. But Jack would not quit. The fights went on all the time, and Bobby would hide out upstairs, listening to the echoes of the two big kids bashing at each other.

One fine day Joe challenged Jack to a bicycle race around the block. But they were not to ride side by side. Instead, they sped off in opposite directions. The winner would be first back to the front of the house. As the two brothers peddled furiously toward the finish line, neither would slow down and a race turned into a game of chicken. Question: which Kennedy would turn away from a bicycle hurtling straight at him? Answer: neither; a Kennedy would never give in. Joe walked away from the huge collision shaken but fine. Jack needed twenty-eight stitches to put himself back together.

Today, many families would treat a bloody crack-up like this as an alarm bell, a sign of trouble in Joe Jr., in Jack, in the home. All of that would prove true. Joe's competition with his brother was out of control. Jack was battered, brutalized, and could never show it. Instead he treated the injuries the same way he would later deal with his serious illnesses: staying cool, bemused, distant, and keeping them hidden from sight. In fact, Joseph was putting the family under tremendous strain. But for the Kennedys, as for most people in the 1920s, injuries like Jack's were just the normal mishaps of boyhood.

In their relentless determination, Joe and Jack were following perfectly in their forefathers' footsteps. Patrick Kennedy was one of the desperate Irish who fled from the potato famine that ravished their homeland in the 1840s. He accomplished his main goal: he reached Boston and managed to survive. But when he died in 1858, he left his wife, his son Patrick Joseph, and three daughters with nothing. At fourteen, young P.J. had to quit school to start making money. A hard worker and a good businessman, he figured out how to profit by catering to the needs of his fellow Boston Irish. He bought one, then a second, then a third tavern, followed by a liquor importing business. As he rose in the community, he made a name for himself as a good listener who was ready to help out if someone needed a little cash. P.J. converted this popularity into a political career, first running for office himself, then becoming an important behind-the-scenes power broker.

P.J.'s life was a remarkable success story, a tribute to his hard work and good sense. But for those who disliked the Irish, it merely reinforced their prejudices. Rose Fitzgerald, who went on to marry P.J.'s son Joseph, described this split very well. Boston's leading old Protestant families "lived serenely amid ancestral portraits and mahogany sideboards and silver tea services in spacious houses on large grounds. With the advantages of inherited wealth and status and close-knit interfamily ties, they controlled the banks, insurance companies, the big law firms . . . and almost all the usual routes to success."

These families had a sense that they were the true Americans, and certainly the rightful masters of their city and state. They saw the poor, uneducated, Catholic Irish as recent arrivals who drank too much and were too clannish. When hiring workers, these proud Protestants made clear that "no Irish need apply." Whatever his accomplishments, P.J. was an Irish innkeeper, and not welcome in the inner circles of Boston.

Joseph, P.J.'s son, was the trailblazer who brought the Kennedys into the world of the old Boston families. He went to Harvard, not just because it was a good school but because that was the place for the sons of Boston's elite. Joseph knew that everyone was judging him, seeing him as a Catholic outsider, the child of a family of barkeeps. Indeed there have been endless stories that Joseph actually made his money as a bootlegger, smuggling in liquor from Canada during Prohibition, but there is no proof. On Wall Street he definitely did manipulate stock prices in ways that would now be illegal. But at the time, he was just cooler, smarter, tougher than the old-money men, and he beat them at their own game. He expected nothing less of his sons.

If Joseph conquered the Protestant world of wealth and privilege, what was left for his children? His daughters were groomed to marry well. What of his sons? Only one Catholic had ever been a serious candidate for president. And when Al Smith ran in 1928, millions of Americans had made it clear that they were not ready to accept a Catholic in that high office. That did not faze Joseph, who had already selected Joe, his firstborn, his namesake, to run the whole country. The Kennedy family had not been defeated by the potato famine or by Boston snobbery. If the Kennedy men were relentless, they were fighting not just for themselves but to change history.

There were actually two families within the Kennedy household. Joseph's wife Rose put her own strong stamp on the nine children, especially Bobby and the younger girls. Rose was the daughter of John F. Fitzgerald, which made her a leading light of what might be termed Boston Catholic royalty. "Honey Fitz" was one of the nation's most capable politicians. Blessed with a fine voice, and brilliant at charming voters, Honey Fitz was elected mayor of Boston. That made him the first person of Irish heritage to reach that position in any American city. Like Joseph, Rose had been reared by a family determined to prove that an Irish Catholic could be as well brought up as the most established Protestant. But a woman's role was thought to be very different from a man's. While Joseph had been groomed for Harvard, Rose was forbidden to attend Wellesley. Instead she was sent to convent schools to study with nuns.

Rose was intelligent, strong, and hardworking. In these ways she was the perfect partner for Joseph. But they were also quite different. For one thing, her religion was as important to her as success in the world was to him. Bobby, the younger son, the sensitive one whose face only looked tough until you noticed that the sneer was halfway to tears, was his mother's "favorite," her "little pet."

Joseph the invincible patriarch and Rose the queen of organization reigned together each night at the family dinner table. Every meal was a lesson for children being groomed to rule. Rose prepared the novices, filling bulletin boards with clippings from newspapers and magazines. As she explained, "The girls and boys . . . were supposed to read or at least scan these in order to be able to say something about the topics of the day" at dinner. Then came the tests: When the children were younger, Rose ran the quizzes. She would read from a newspaper piece on the state of Florida to "ask how the state got its name. What does the word mean, and what language is it from?" As Joe and Jack got older, Joseph took over.

The Kennedy family dinner table became an ongoing seminar on politics and policies, where all were expected to know their facts and current events, and Joseph constantly challenged his older sons. When Joe or Jack asked a question about world affairs, he would respond in detail, as if speaking to adults. Then he would take challenging positions just to see how quick they were on their feet. Perhaps Bobby, quiet, seated with the younger girls, was racing through names and dates to think of a way to join in, but no one would have considered pausing to give him a chance. Mealtime conversations were as much a test of guts and will as were daytime bicycle races.

While Joseph had strong, generally conservative opinions, he knew his sons could only become leaders if they were exposed to men with different points of view. One after another, they were packed off to visit all corners of the world, even the Communist Soviet Union. Joseph realized that his sons had to see the world and think for themselves.

Yet for all of Joseph's commitment to opening the minds of his children, he also passed along his prejudices. He did not like Jews, and did not hide it. Even though Catholics also experienced discrimination, he did not want Harvard to remove the quota system that severely limited the number of Jews it admitted. His children listened. When Joe Jr. visited Hitler's Germany in 1934, he was impressed with the Germans' pride and "great spirit." He knew that Jews were being forced out of their jobs, but believed the Germans when they said this was a necessary response to the Jews' "unscrupulousness."

Joseph's intellectual curiosity and his private biases were not just a family matter, for in 1938 President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him ambassador to England. This was a crowning achievement. Now the grandson of a man who had fled starvation in Ireland would be calling on the king of England as America's representative. And this just as Hitler dared the entire world to bow to him or defeat him.

In March, Rose herded five of her children onto the Manhattan to sail across the Atlantic and join her husband. Joe was at Harvard, where he would graduate in the summer, with Jack to follow two years later. Bobby would not turn thirteen until November, but, on this trip, he was the eldest boy. That might have been a wonderful opportunity. But looking back on the trip, it really revealed the impossible pressures in Bobby's life.

Bobby kept plotting and planning to find a way to bring a Bronxville pal with him to England. "I'll write you," they each swore, sounding like characters in a novel about summer camp. Even as the Manhattan was getting ready to pull away from the dock, Bobby tossed one last message out the porthole to his friend. But he steamed away with his mother, leaving his friend behind.

In London, Bobby acted the gentleman. He stopped traffic so that the family nanny could easily cross busy streets. The nanny was needed because Rose had so many official duties. That made Bobby all the more attentive to her. Whenever they traveled, he was careful to sit next to her. A boy just on the edge of adolescence, he would rush to the door each night when his mother went out, in order to tell her she looked beautiful. He was the perfect young man, the escort, at the service of his mother.

Once a day, he and his younger brother Teddy (who had turned six in February), were each granted an hour alone with their father. This daily audience was Bobby's only moment for quiet conversation with the great man. Finally, this was Bobby's chance to have the kind of discussion that he had heard each night at the dinner table. But Joseph did not seem to expect much from Bobby, which only drove his son to strive ever harder to win his attention. Even years later Bobby pleaded with his father to continue to speak to him, on paper: "I wish Dad that you would write me a letter as you used to Joe and Jack about what you think about the different political events and the war as I'd like to understand better than I do now."

Joseph had a great deal to say about politics, for Adolf Hitler was making clear that he was ready to go to war to capture a part of Czechoslovakia in which there were many Germans. As the leading American spokesman in Europe, Joseph was a crucial voice. England was debating whether to take a stand against the dictator. What was America's position? Was it also willing to challenge Hitler? Not Joseph Kennedy. He was horrified by the thought of a second world war, and passionately in favor of what came to be called "appeasement"--giving in to Hitler. Americans, he argued in October of 1938, should get along with dictators, not antagonize them.

Less than a month after Ambassador Kennedy spoke, on the night of November 9, Nazis went on an organized rampage against Jews in Germany. On Kristallnacht--the Night of Broken Glass--Jewish homes and shops, thousands of them throughout the country, were plundered. Jews were raped, murdered, thrown into jail. Germans were like beasts turned loose on their prey. This was the true face of Hitler's Germany. Alarmed, Kennedy suggested organizing a global program to get Jews out of Germany. But the plan went nowhere. And everyone now knew him as the man who would rather bend to Hitler than resist him. Being the ambassador to England was no longer an honor for Kennedy, instead it exposed him to increasing condemnation.

Bobby was not in London to see his father under attack. He had returned to America with his mother and younger siblings, and was then sent off to boarding school. Not only was he under tremendous internal pressure, he was alone.

##

The school stands on a hill overlooking Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay, open to the winds. Today, beautiful buildings and a well-groomed campus make Portsmouth Abbey a welcoming place to be a student. But when Bobby was sent to what was then Portsmouth Priory, conditions were much more primitive. Thin walls did little to keep out the chill, and shivering students tacked up blankets as makeshift storm windows. They were on their own, toughing out the cold, just as they needed to fend for themselves against other students. When Teddy followed Bobby there two years later, he told his brother that he was being picked on. "You'll just have to look out for yourself," Bobby warned. He knew, because he had been through the fire.

Black-robed monks guided students at the priory--which you can picture as a kind of Hogwarts-under-construction, with strict Catholicism, not magic, as the reigning principle. The fact that Bobby's father was famous made him as much a target of other students as Harry Potter was in the first book because of his reputation. "Mrs. Kennedy's little boy Bobby," taunted his classmates, and they were right.

Joseph Kennedy did not even know that Bobby was at the priory. His wife made sure of that. Rose had transferred Bobby there, distressed at the Protestant slant of the prep school that Joe had selected for him. Her letter to London telling her husband about the new school carefully left him in the dark about its intense religious focus. Just as her parents had steered her away from Wellesley and into a convent school, she guided her chosen son to a school where there were morning and evening prayers, special religious retreats, and Catholic masses four times a week. If his father was going to groom his eldest son for the presidency, Bobby's mother was training her favorite to be a priest.

Bobby prayed with all of his heart. He liked attending mass, serving as an altar boy, reciting Latin alone in his room. Devoting himself to service, to God, to the rituals of faith felt exactly right to him. He yearned to belong, to live a moral life, and to serve God. Here, alongside the monks, he found a way, an answer, a path.

Being with the other boys was harder. During Bobby's second year at the priory, his father had been quoted as saying, "Democracy is finished in England. It may be here." Not only was he an appeaser, he was a defeatist who believed some form of dictatorship was inevitable. The backlash against Joseph Kennedy was so intense that he soon resigned the post he had been so honored to receive. As they will, Bobby's schoolmates picked up on their parents' scorn for Kennedy. That only infuriated Joseph's neglected son, who defended his distant, idolized father with his fists. Bobby was all the more on his own. As he said years later, "What I remember most vividly about growing up was going to a lot of different schools, always having to make new friends, and that I was very awkward. . . . I was pretty quiet most of the time. And I didn't mind being alone."

Kids who say they don't mind being alone sometimes mean that they don't think anyone wants them around. One of his teachers thought, "He didn't look happy, he didn't smile much." Kennedy kept having accidents, injuring himself. And he wasn't doing well in class. His grades were mediocre at best, in the 60s and 70s. By contrast, in 1940 Jack's college thesis was published, and became a best seller. And then the following year, Joseph sold the family home in Bronxville.

An isolated boy is stumbling at school while a brother writes the book everyone is talking about. The home where he had close friends is suddenly taken away by the quiet boy's father, who is both far-off and under attack. A boy under these pressures can become so angry at the world and himself that he becomes self-destructive. Perhaps that was why, in 1941, Bobby joined a cheating ring. Cheating can seem like an effort to do well--as if Bobby were desperate to raise his grades and please his father. But cheating is also a high-risk gamble, a way of inviting adults to catch you, to notice you, to save you. Someone got a copy of a final exam and shared it. Whether Bobby was at the center of the plot or was just carried along is not clear. But he did use the stolen test, and was caught.

A chauffeur arrived in a black limousine and whisked Bobby away. A place was found for him at Milton Academy, and no one mentioned the scandal out loud--at least not when there were guests in the house to hear.

The Kennedy clan cleaned up its own mistakes. Nothing was to leak out to the world. Bobby's trouble at school was just one of many secrets the family was doing its best to manage. Rosemary, the oldest girl, had long experienced severe emotional problems, which got worse as she aged. In 1941 Joseph agreed to let doctors try an operation in which part of her brain was removed, in the hope that it would diminish her outbursts. The lobotomy left her so damaged she had to be sent away to an institution. Joseph handled this with such secrecy that Rose, her mother, never knew exactly what had happened to her own daughter.

Rosemary's macabre fate was not even the most troubling story the family had to keep quiet. Joseph Kennedy was a compulsive womanizer. While most of his affairs were brief, he became so involved with the film star Gloria Swanson that he brought her to the family's summer home in Hyannis Port. His pursuit of women was blatant and consuming. That left his children no choice but to reject him entirely, or treat his compulsion as a fact of life. Some even became his accomplices, putting out the word for him so that he could more easily find companions. In turn Rose became all the more the distant, efficient organizer who controlled her territory, her chosen children, and left Joseph to his own devices. The father's obsession poisoned the whole family.

When Bobby was sinking at Portsmouth Priory, he probably did not yet know about Rosemary, or his father's affairs. But what he did not consciously know, he may well have felt: the family had secrets that were never to be spoken. And now he had added one more. The family would protect him. He would not suffer in the outside world. But he was sealed into the silence.

Other wealthy families surely did as much as the Kennedys to hush up their own scandals. But the Kennedys rose just at the moment when the world of publicity--the press, radio, soon television--blossomed. Anytime they needed to protect or advance the family, they needed to shape what the public would learn. They mastered the arts of "spin" and media manipulation just when these became crucial to political success. Dealing with Bobby's cheating and whisking him off to another school was just one small way in which the well-oiled family machine worked to protect one of its own.

Picture a thin, wiry, short teenager who is so shy he walks four feet behind a girl he is escorting home from chapel. Head down, hands jammed into his pockets, he looks to her like "a bird in a storm." That was one Bobby Kennedy at Milton Academy. But that same boy had been a second-string halfback at Portsmouth Priory, and now, out on the football field, he was a demon, a terror. He was not big for his age or especially fast, but he had strong arms because he worked and worked at it. There was no such thing as "practice" for Bobby. He was as likely to get hurt smashing into a piece of equipment as into an opposing player. He never stopped.

Bobby was now a starter on the varsity. Some of the kids found him weird for being so single-minded. One schoolmate remembered that "Bobby certainly tried hard. He showed absolute determination; he decided to do something, he just gave it everything he had." Even in those appreciative words you can hear the hesitation: "certainly" he "tried"--but all the effort showed him to be uncomfortable, out of place, on his own strange track.

The funny thing is that Bobby's very discomfort, his oddness, drew the attention of the most important student in the whole school. Life at Milton revolved around one young man who was a spectacular natural athlete and completely at ease with himself. David Hackett's charm, his grace under pressure, could disarm even the sternest headmaster and dazzle every fellow student. In fact there is a whole book written about him: A Separate Peace, by John Knowles, where he appears as Phineas, the wonder boy. The amazing David Hackett did not need to fit in.

David took a liking to the intense young man who held nothing back on the football field, and who was as irreverent as he was. And perhaps in David, Bobby found someone a bit like his older brothers, but in his own world. With David at Milton, Bobby could be in the circle of the star as he was in the circle of the family: not at the center, but close by, and driving himself without mercy.

Bobby out in front of David, blocking for him; Bobby racing downfield to catch one of David's passes finally drew his father's attention. The very first time Joseph ever praised Bobby to the rest of the family came after he "played a whale of a game."

One reason for Bobby's success in football was that Joe had patiently and carefully taught his brother how to catch and throw, with each pass just a little harder so that Bobby could get used to the speed and sting. Jack's connection to Bobby came through books. At times he shared the adventure stories he was reading with his younger brother. Jack's stories and Joe's games gave Bobby a path to follow: he could admire his older brothers from afar, as if they were the knights and heroes of legend, while trying to emulate them in his own world of schoolboy sports. But in the 1930s a much bloodier form of competition was looming, as Europe stumbled toward a second world war. The war changed everything.