Crash Landing For Bobby

Kennedy faces heroin charge

Being a son of America’s most lustrous political family is both a blessing and a curse. He basks in the reflected glory of his kin, but he also feels the burden of living up to his celebrated name. And at times of personal crisis, he can find himself bunking in the harsh spotlight of national attention. That is what happened last week to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., 29, the third eldest child of the late New York Senator.

Traveling alone from Minneapolis to Rapid City, S. Dak., aboard a Republic Airlines Convair, Kennedy suddenly grew sick and dazed. Alarmed passengers near him reportedly summoned the flight attendant, who passed the word to the cockpit. The pilot radioed ahead to Rapid City to request that a paramedic and ambulance be on hand to meet the flight. When the plane landed, Kennedy was helped down the steps, but declined medical assistance.

Local police officials, however, suspected a drug overdose and obtained a search warrant to look through Kennedy’s bags. They found slightly less than one gram of heroin. Four days later, Pennington County State’s Attorney Rod Lefholz ordered the arrest of Bobby Kennedy for possession of heroin, a felony carrying a maximum penalty of two years in jail and a $2,000 fine. Kennedy is expected to be arraigned in Rapid City some time in the next two weeks.

Kennedy had already taken action of his own, having announced that he had committed himself to a private hospital, whereabouts undisclosed, for treatment of drug abuse. “With the best medical help I can find, I am determined to beat this problem,” he said in a statement released by the Washington office of his uncle, Senator Ted Kennedy. “I deeply regret the pain which this situation will bring to my family and to so many Americans who admire my parents and the Kennedy family.”

Bobby, like his six brothers and four sisters, grew up at his parents’ estate in suburban Virginia. Only 14 when his father was assassinated in Los Angeles in 1968 while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, Bobby emerged as one of the most exuberant and outgoing of the “cousins,” as the conglomeration of Kennedy children is dubbed. His life, at least on paper, glittered: Harvard (class of ’76), a stint at the London School of Economics, author of a 1978 book on Alabama Judge Frank Johnson. In 1982, in quick succession, he was married, graduated from the University of Virginia Law School, and started work as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan.

Yet there were stabs of trouble. Back in 1970, when he was 16, Bobby was arrested in Hyannis Port for smoking marijuana and placed on 13 months’ probation. In 1979 his younger brother David, then 24, was found dazed and bruised outside a sleazy Harlem hotel, packets of heroin scattered near by; David reportedly had gone there to make a buy. Bobby himself, says a family friend, has been dabbling heavily in both heroin and coke for at least the past three years. According to another pal, Bobby knew he had a problem and sometimes sought psychiatric help. Over the past year, his resume began to tarnish: he flunked the New York bar exam last summer, then walked out on the test on the second go-around last February.

For the past six months or so, he has appeared increasingly edgy, with a fleeting attention span. He started skipping work, and chums feared that he would derail from the fast track. In July he quit his D.A. post to devote all his time to studying for his third try at the bar. Kennedy spent much of the summer in Rapid City and the surrounding Black Hills. He has a good friend there named Bill Walsh, a onetime Roman Catholic priest and part owner of a hotel in Deadwood. The two of them would run several miles a day, go swimming and hike through the hills. Walsh claimed last week that his friend was heading to Rapid City to seek his aid in kicking the habit when he overdosed on the plane. Said Walsh: “Bobby made the commitment to straighten himself out before his crash landing.”