The One Caught in the Undertow

David Anthony Kennedy: 1955-1984

The sheer longevity of the Kennedy melodrama is astonishing. Some Americans have grown weary of the spectacle, of course, the high American soap opera verging now and then upon Greek tragedy, and of the cruelly ingenious turns that the story takes. But there is something fascinating and emblematic about the family still. For a long time it dramatized the American possibilities of self-invention—old Joe Kennedy by sheer will contriving to raise up a President, to start a dynasty. But after Joe Jr., and John, and Robert, the darker, the converse American principle intruded upon the drama, the principle that tends toward disintegration and failure, toward annihilation.

Last week a new generation of Kennedys trudged into that complexity. The long lens caught their photogenic Irish-American faces, eyes all downcast at the same angle of mourning, some shirtsleeves rolled up, a shirttail out the way that Bobby’s sometimes was. The cousins walked up Hickory Hill bearing one of their own, David Anthony Kennedy, Robert and Ethel’s fourth child, their third son. Except for infant deaths years ago, David, at 28, was the first of the new generation to die.

It was a Kennedy death that was different. When John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, theirs were the public deaths of public men brought down in the enactment of large public dramas. The same aura surrounded the death of the first Kennedy brother, Joseph Jr., killed in a plane explosion while on a secret military mission from England in 1944.

David died alone in a hotel room in Palm Beach, a sad and private capitulation to drugs and confusion and an unappeasable grief. The burden to which he was heir was not the burden of public service and sacrifice, but the (for him) unbearable burden of being a Kennedy. And the burden of an appetite for drugs that he could not control. Yet though his death was miserably private, being a Kennedy he also became a public example, a sermon against drugs that parents will preach to their children for months hence.

David had tried, off and on for years, to get free of drugs. Not long ago he completed a course of treatment at St. Mary’s Rehabilitation Center in Minneapolis. Just before the Easter weekend, David flew down to Palm Beach to spend the holiday with his ailing 93-year-old grandmother Rose and other members of the family, including Caroline Kennedy. He did not stay at the oceanside Kennedy winter mansion on North Ocean Boulevard, but checked into a $150-a-night room at the Brazilian Court Hotel, a rambling three-story place five miles away.

It seemed to be a quiet stay. David visited his grandmother every day and went to Mass with the family on Easter Sunday. By most accounts, David behaved himself. Said Hotel Owner Dennis Heffernan: “He swam more than once every day. I would see him three or four times a day. He did have a few drinks at the bar, but no more than anyone else, not an unusual amount. I never saw him take a misstep, never saw him stagger or anything.”

The Miami Herald, however, claimed that Kennedy spent the last days of his life “in what hotel employees called an alcoholic haze.” The paper said David drank vodka and grapefruit juice at the hotel bar all day; one day it was “straight through to midnight.” A hotel employee corroborated that version.

In any case, David was due back in Boston on Wednesday of last week. His mother called the hotel manager’s office from Virginia at 11:15 a.m. and said she was concerned because David had not appeared at the Kennedys’ oceanside compound for dinner the night before. Someone was sent to check the room. David Kennedy was found clothed in shorts and a shirt, lying face down on the floor between the twin beds in the room. He was dead.

Gerald Beebe, who handles the hotel’s public relations, got on the phone to Ethel Kennedy and told her, “We have found your son and the paramedics have arrived.” Recalls Beebe: “She said, ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, yes.’ She made a mother’s sound, a strange sound, like a gasp, and hung up the phone.”

Caroline Kennedy and Sydney Lawford, daughter of Pat Kennedy Lawford and Peter Lawford, were summoned, still in bathing suits, to identify the body. Caroline took charge of the immediate family business. She spent an hour on the telephone in the manager’s office, making arrangements, notifying everyone.

There were drugs in David’s room. Jay Pintacuda, chief medical examiner of the Palm Beach sheriff’sdepartment crime lab, said the police found 1.3 grams of high-grade cocaine. He reported that an autopsy discovered traces of cocaine and Demerol, a powerful prescription painkiller, in his body. But it was too early to know what exactly had caused his death.

Some thought that the real cause of death was Sirhan Sirhan. David was more sensitive and inward than most other Kennedy males. He did not display quite the same sharp, aggressive self-confidence that came down the line to sons and grandsons from Ambassador Joseph Kennedy. David tended to be a loner. Bobby Kennedy, perhaps because he was a third son himself and knew the difficulties of struggling along in the middle of the pack in a large family, paid special attention to David. He gave him more of his time. He often brought David to his Senate office on Saturdays and let the boy putter around while he worked or talked to reporters.

He took David campaigning with him. On June 4, 1968, the day of the California primary, Bobby took his son swimming in the surf off Malibu. A strong undertow seized the twelve-year-old and drew him out toward open water. Bobby Kennedy swam after the boy and saved him.

That night, only hours later, Bobby Kennedy was giving his victory speech in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. David Kennedy was sitting up late, alone in his hotel room, watching. He was doubtless in a daze of pride and gratitude and excitement. The television cameras followed Bobby Kennedy off the platform and back through the hotel kitchen toward an elevator. As David watched on TV, Sirhan Sirhan shot his father in the head. The cameras focused interminably on the chaos, on the body and the head lying in a pool of blood. In the confusion, no one came to check on David for several hours. When Astronaut John Glenn and Author Theodore White at last discovered him, David was sitting before the television set, unable to speak.

David never recovered. There was a profound emotional undertow in his life, and his father was not there to help him. If he found being a Kennedy difficult before, with all of the competition and crushing expectations, he now saw the price that his father had paid, that they all had paid, for that identity, and his soul seems to have recoiled from what he was. David began experimenting with drugs not too long after the assassination. In a new book that Ted Kennedy’s press secretary has bitterly denounced, Authors Peter Collier and David Horowitz offer a procession of harrowing stories not only about David’s adventures with drugs but also about those of his older brother Bobby and cousin Chris Lawford. According to Horowitz and Collier, David began to shoot heroin in the fall of 1973, his senior year at Middlesex School in Concord, Mass.

David managed to get admitted to Harvard in 1974, but he dropped out of college two years later. He completed a term at Harvard last fall, but took the spring term off to take stock of his life. One night in 1979, he went to Harlem in his BMW, presumably to buy drugs. He was mugged in the lobby of a sleazy hotel.

David ended up in Massachusetts General Hospital with bacterial endocarditis, an infection of the lining of the heart. It is sometimes caused by using dirty needles to inject drugs. After that, according to Collier and Horowitz, a psychiatrist agreed to prescribe the painkiller Percodan in order to keep him away from heroin. David took up other drugs as well—cocaine and Dilaudid. Bobby was arrested in South Dakota last year for possession of heroin, and entered a drug-treatment program.

Ethel Kennedy had eleven children to raise. She did what she could with David and with Bobby. But something in the vigorous family ethic that had driven the second generation now came unhinged in at least part of the third. Bobby Kennedy’s assassination may have shaken down the superego, the dynastic sense of discipline, and let loose something anarchic and despairing. David, brilliant and gifted in many ways, seems to have felt an orphan’s lostness.

When he received the news of David’s death last week, Ted Kennedy issued a statement that expressed the gripping sadness: “All of us loved him very much. With trust in God, we all pray that David has finally found the peace that he did not find in life.”

The family brought David back to Hickory Hill in McLean, Va. On the way from the airport, Ethel and other members of the family stopped to say prayers at the graves of John and Robert Kennedy. Then, on a beautiful, sun-drenched afternoon, with the cars parked bumper to bumper along Chain Bridge Road, family and friends gathered. Babies squealed. Dogs tore around among the guests, bounding onto the furniture. Two Roman Catholic priests circulated among the people. Ethel bore up stoically. She spent much of her time with David’s coffin in one room of the house. David’s brothers were close to tears, but perhaps they remembered their grandfather’s hard rule: “Kennedys don’t cry.”

That night the wake had some gaiety about it. The buffet tables were heaped with ham, turkey, macaroni casserole, tomato aspic and lasagna. David’s coffin stood in the drawing room. The guests reminisced about David’s brighter sides. Ethel was composed, perhaps because, as a friend says, “she believes he went right up there with his father.”

—By Lance Morrow. Reported by Joseph N. Boyce/Palm Beach and Hays Gorey/Washington