“We choose to go to the Moon,” John F. Kennedy once said. “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard…” These are words that still make the hairs stand up on the back of American necks. Spoken in 1962, JFK’s announcement that he would put an American on the moon by the end of the decade recalls a glorious time in his nation’s history and his family’s place writing it. This era of the Kennedy family seemed so pure that it was later mythologised by Jacqueline, JFK’s widow, as “Camelot”.
How times change. Half a century later, some members of the Kennedy dynasty are less Camelot and more Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Earlier this month, Joe Kennedy III, the grandson of Robert F. Kennedy, JFK’s brother, became the first of his name to lose an election on his home turf of Massachusetts. The Kennedy family was always thought to be indelibly marked on that New England state – his family have carried Massachusetts, on and off, since PJ Kennedy was elected a state representative in 1884. It’s a good pub fact that the period from 1947, when JFK became a member of Congress from Mass., to 2011, when Patrick J. Kennedy (PJ’s great-grandson) retired as one, marks a 64-year stint during which at least one Kennedy was in elected office.
But if anyone doubted that the Kennedys had had their day in the sun, it was surely when Joe III, 37, lost his primacy race for the US senate to Ed Markey, a 74-year-old who secured the younger, more progressive wing of the Democratic Party with sharper messaging. Joe, who comes from a lineage of square-jawed, boozy womanisers, incredulously said in his defeat speech that his family name “was invoked far more often than I anticipated in this race”.
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