Death of Michael Kennedy Casts Pall Over Cape Cod

John and Robert. Joe and Rose. David, dead at 28 of a heroin overdose. By now, the Kennedy family funeral is as much a public ritual as its weddings, its political triumphs, even its touch football games.

But as relatives arrived at the family compound here Friday for a wake in honor of the latest fatality, the mood was strikingly different. Bed sheets and tarpaulins were hastily draped over windows in hopes of warding off curiosity-seekers. U.S. Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II (D-Mass.) was ashen and uncharacteristically silent as he greeted the chartered jet that bore the body of his brother Michael, the 39-year-old son of the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and Ethel Kennedy.

Michael Kennedy died on New Year’s Eve after slamming his head into a tree while playing football on skis with members of the family near Aspen, Colo.

Around Cape Cod, where the Kennedys have summered for 75 years, a pall took hold.

“Everyone here feels a connection,” said fund-raising consultant Kathleen Mackay, whose weekend home lies 20 minutes from the Kennedy compound. “The Cape just feels that this is one of their own that they have lost.”

A rosary and a private family wake were held Friday at the home of Ethel Kennedy. A funeral Mass is scheduled for this morning in the church near here where the family, beginning with Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, has worshiped for years. Burial will follow at the family plot in the Boston suburb of Brookline.

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Among Kennedy family members who arrived Friday were Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Michael’s brother, and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, his sister and Maryland’s lieutenant governor. Maria Shriver, a cousin of Michael’s, arrived with husband Arnold Schwarzenegger. Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), also flew into the local airport.

By sheer numbers alone, the Kennedys are an imposing presence here. Michael was one of 11 children; his father was one of nine. Many of the cousins, as Michael’s generation is often known, in relation to the late President John F. Kennedy’s family, have married and had children of their own.

Boston Cardinal Bernard Law, who met privately with the family, said: “They’re very strong, they’re very united, they’re very supported by one another. I was very moved in my encounter with Ethel and her own profound sense of faith.”

At least two of Michael Kennedy’s young children were with him when he crashed into the pine tree on an intermediate skiing trail in Aspen. With his brothers Max and Robert Jr., Michael had organized a late afternoon game of touch football on skis. He was so confident as a skier that he volunteered to videotape the snowy antics while also playing the game.

His death brought tragedy full circle for his children. Michael Kennedy was 5 years old when his father was assassinated in Los Angeles in 1968. He grew up to be the son who physically most resembled his father.

“It’s as if there were a sense of Greek tragedy and fate involved,” said Mackay.

Michael Kennedy, a lawyer and Harvard graduate, became chairman of Citizens Energy Corp. in 1988. The corporation supplies home heating oil to the poor. Kennedy also managed the successful 1994 reelection campaign of his uncle Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).

He was in charge last year of running his brother Joe’s nascent campaign for governor of Massachusetts when it was revealed that Michael had had an affair with a teenage baby sitter. The scandal was a factor in his brother’s subsequent withdrawal from the race.

Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman, a good friend of the Kennedys’, will represent President Clinton at the funeral.

Other Cabinet members planning to attend are Commerce Secretary Bill Daley, a longtime Kennedy family friend; and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew Cuomo, whose wife, Kerry Kennedy Cuomo, was Michael Kennedy’s sister.