BOSTON — Judaism has a concept called the decline of the generations. As one rabbi puts it in the Talmud: “If the early generations are characterized as sons of angels, we are the sons of men. And if the earlier generations are characterized as the sons of men, we are akin to donkeys.”
By that analysis, Joseph Patrick Kennedy III, the Massachusetts congressman who last week lost his primary challenge to Sen. Ed Markey, is the donkey.
Robert Kennedy (1925-1968) made his name as a Senate aide investigating union corruption. As attorney general during his brother’s presidency, he mediated the Cuban Missile Crisis and integrated Southern state universities. As a senator from New York and presidential candidate, he denounced welfare dependency.
Joseph P. Kennedy II, Robert Kennedy’s oldest child, was elected to Congress in 1986 by the Massachusetts district that had been represented by House Speaker Tip O’Neill, President Ronald Reagan’s sparring partner, and he served until January 1999. In November 1990, I covered for the Harvard Crimson an election-night victory party that featured the reelected congressman Kennedy singing “Love Potion No. 9.” “It was hard to imagine Kennedy’s father Robert F. Kennedy ’48 or his uncle John F. Kennedy ’40 yelling the pop lyrics into a microphone,” I wrote then. The following year, Joseph P. Kennedy II and his then-wife, Standard Oil heiress Sheila Brewster Rauch, divorced.
Joseph P. Kennedy III was born in 1980 to Rauch and Joseph P. Kennedy II. After Stanford, the Peace Corps, and Harvard Law School, where he had Elizabeth Warren as a professor, he was elected in 2012 to the House seat that had been held by Barney Frank, the 16-term congressman and chairman of the House Financial Services Committee for the last two of those terms, coinciding with the housing crash and big-bank crisis. Sometimes described as a rising star, Kennedy gave the Democratic response in 2018 to the State of the Union address.
Any concept of Kennedy as a rising star, however, was extinguished by the loss to Markey. So, too, might have been the flame of goodwill burning in Massachusetts Democrats’ hearts for his last name.
It might have seemed like a plausible challenge: Markey had been in Congress since 1976, before Kennedy had even been born, and had achieved nothing besides a reputation for mediocrity. Massachusetts would be better off with a senator named Kennedy. That, at least, seemed to be the gist of the losing candidate’s closing campaign message. The Kennedy camp released a video of the candidate’s 92-year-old grandmother, Ethel: “He reminds me of Bobby, and Jack, and Teddy.” A direct mail piece from a super PAC supporting Kennedy featured a photograph of the Senate candidate paired with a black-and-white picture of Robert Kennedy and the words “For Joe Kennedy, this fight is in his blood.”
Voters I interviewed in Boston on Election Day were not impressed.
“We’re not a monarchy. You don’t get a seat because of your name,” said Bethany Czerny, 43, who said she planned to vote for Markey. She faulted Kennedy’s primary effort for “wasting Democratic dollars” that could have been better used against Republicans.
“I’d be quite happy to see the end of the Kennedy dynasty,” said John Cronin, 58, who works in construction and came to Boston in 1985 as an immigrant from Ireland’s County Cork. “I think he’s gone crazy to the left.”
Cronin attributed to “trust funds” the Kennedy family’s drift away from centrism. “They’ve never really had to have a job,” he said. If Kennedy’s ill-starred primary challenge accomplished anything, it was to help voters finally realize their exhaustion with the hereditary legacy politics of the state’s royal family.
Kennedy’s defeat is being depicted in some quarters as the last chapter of Camelot. It’s been a rough stretch. In August 2019, Saoirse Roisin Kennedy Hill, 22, a granddaughter of Robert Kennedy, died in an overdose at the family compound in Hyannis Port, on Cape Cod. In April 2020, Maeve Fahey Kennedy McKean, another granddaughter of Robert Kennedy, died at age 40 in a canoe accident in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay.
Conceding to Ed Markey, Senate candidate Kennedy said the campaign had been “for working folks who carry the economic injustice of our country on their backs.” Kennedy insisted to a small crowd of supporters gathered outdoors and wearing masks, “This campaign, this coalition, will endure. … We are not done.”
What in the past would have been taken for granted is now probably wishful thinking. It’s true that the Kennedy brand has rebounded repeatedly from defeats and scandals. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy pleaded guilty in 1969 to leaving the scene of the accident at Chappaquiddick that killed Mary Jo Kopechne. He spent another 40 years as an effective senator, making bipartisan progress on everything from Iran sanctions to airline deregulation.
As far back as when John F. Kennedy was first campaigning for Congress, in 1946, the Democratic Party primary electorate was suspicious of inherited wealth. Kennedy made light of his relatively comfortable background, joking at one candidate forum, following a series of opponents who emphasized their humble beginnings, that he was “the only fellow here who didn’t come up the hard way.” Even JFK’s win in his initial 1952 Senate race against the Republican incumbent, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., was narrow: 1,211,984 votes to 1,141,247.
The current national Democratic leadership has not abandoned the Kennedys. Far from it. John Kennedy’s daughter Caroline Kennedy and her son Jack Schlossberg spoke at the 2020 Democratic National Convention. “We need to tackle climate change. We need to end systemic racial injustice. We need to make healthcare available for everybody,” Schlossberg said. A biographical video introducing Joe Biden before his acceptance speech at the convention lingered on a newspaper clip describing the young Delaware senator as “Kennedyesque.”
In Joseph Patrick Kennedy III’s congressional district, which includes the Brookline, Massachusetts, homes where both JFK and Robert Kennedy were born, the final winner of the Democratic primary to choose his successor has not been declared. But the candidate with a narrow lead, at this writing, is Jake Auchincloss, a Marine infantry veteran and Harvard graduate whose campaign bio reports that public service “on his dad’s side” is “a tradition dating back to the Roosevelt and Kennedy administrations.” Auchincloss is distantly related to the Kennedys via Jacqueline Kennedy’s family.
A businessman who worked to get Republican Charlie Baker elected governor, Auchincloss might seem like a link to the Kennedy family’s more pragmatic, centrist history — of tax-cutting JFK and his Cold War military buildup, of Robert Kennedy’s advocacy of jobs, not welfare. Auchincloss, though, spent the Democratic Party primary season apologizing. “As a white man, I recognize that I need to interrogate my own privilege,” he said in a statement. “I’ve gotten this wrong, years ago, in tone-deaf social media posts that could cause offense to Indigenous and Muslim communities. I’m sorry for these comments — I regret them, and I’ve learned from them.”
Markey won the primary in part on the strength of an endorsement from avowed socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who worked with him on the Green New Deal. Rather than criticize the Green New Deal as a tax-and-spend, central-planning boondoggle, Joe Kennedy boasted that he’d co-sponsored it, too.
Some analysts have tried to make the case that Massachusetts voters, or the Democratic Party, have moved to the left of the Kennedys. Even in heavily Catholic and once Puritan Massachusetts, though, the appetite for a politics of guilt rather than greatness has its limits. If the patriarch of the Kennedy family, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. (1888-1969) — the successful businessman and FDR administration official who in certain significant respects started the whole thing — were alive today, one suspects he’d be frustrated by his great-grandson’s defeat. He might encourage him not to wait around for a position in the Biden administration and not to spend a lot of time decrying “economic injustice” but rather to go start a company and create some jobs.
Ira Stoll is editor of FutureOfCapitalism.com and author of JFK, Conservative.
