A Left Coast Kennedy

Union Station, May 28, 1998. More than 1,000 people had gathered to remember the day, 30 years ago, when Robert F. Kennedy flew to Delano and stood by Cesar Chavez as the legendary labor activist ended his fast in support of California’s farm workers. Chavez’s son, Paul, spoke of historic labor battles and those still being fought. Edward James Olmos spoke, and Delores Huerta and Henry G. Cisneros. Gray Davis, on his way to winning the governor’s race, was there to capitalize on the Kennedy aura. Then Maxwell Taylor Kennedy, shirt sleeves rolled, ran his hands through his hair and stepped up to the podium. The audience fell silent, as if seeing a ghost.

“I know your cheers are not for me, but for my father,” he said. “And I know that if he were alive, he would be standing here tonight, and I wish it were so. I think he would be angry at companies like Driscoll [the nation’s largest strawberry-packing corporation], and he would say, ‘Why don’t you let your workers organize without fear of intimidation?’ ”

“It was eerie,” State Sen. Tom Hayden said later. “It was as though Max had inhabited his father’s body for the evening.”

“No way I did that on purpose!” Kennedy said of the rolled sleeves--a visual echo of his father’s famous campaigning style. “I forgot my jacket, all right?”

Maybe, maybe not. Kennedys have a hard time staying out of politics, and all evidence suggests that Max is no exception. What’s unusual, perhaps, is his philosophical approach to the traditional Kennedy career. Even more unusual is where he will likely take the plunge: in the city he has embraced as his home away from home--Los Angeles.

*

Named after Gen. Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs under John F. Kennedy, this Kennedy, at 34, already evokes a deep familiarity. There is a famous photograph of him and his father, taken in 1966, in a Cadillac convertible. The boy, not yet 2 years old, is scrunched toward the passenger window. RFK stares straight ahead, determined, preoccupied, his dog, Freckles, in his lap. But the viewer reluctantly leaves that iconic face, moves past the Shetland sweater, the hand on the wheel, and lands on the boy with beaming cheeks and round eyes looking out the window.

Kennedy thinks he remembers the moment the photograph was taken. He thinks he remembers being forced to curl up out of the way. But these childhood memories come several times a day, and he just can’t chase them all down to be certain of their authenticity, he says, pacing a rented Brentwood home. It’s hard for him to sort the public picture from the private, to create his own story about the man he knew so briefly. Kennedy says he remembers being in Los Angeles at the time of the assassination, but he will not speak of it. He does mention visiting Disneyland on June 4 with his father. A day later, late Tuesday, June 5, 1968, Sirhan B. Sirhan shot RFK at Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel. The man who had just won the California Democratic primary died early the next morning.

Eleven children lost their father that day: Kathleen, 16, Joseph P. Kennedy II, 15, Bobby, 14, David, 12, Mary Courtney, 11, Michael, 10, Mary Kerry, 8, Christopher, 4, Max, 3, and Douglas, 14 months. Ethel Kennedy was two months pregnant with their youngest girl, Rory.

Today, most of RFK’s children cleave to the East Coast. Kathleen, now 47, is lieutenant governor of Maryland; Joe, 46, is running Citizen’s Energy, a nonprofit that provides home heating oil to low-income individuals in Massachusetts; Bobby, 45, is founder of the Pace University environmental law program in New York; David died at age 29 of a drug overdose; Mary Courtney, 42, is raising a family with her husband, Irish independence activist Paul Hill; Michael died in 1997, at age 39, in a skiing accident; Mary Kerry, 39, is married to HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo and is writing a book; Christopher, 35, is president of the family’s Chicago Merchandise Mart; Douglas, 31, is a reporter for a cable-TV news division; and Rory, 30, is a documentary filmmaker in New York City. Max, who has divided his time between the two coasts since 1995, is the only child to express much interest in Southern California.

After graduating from Harvard and the University of Virginia Law School (his wife Vicki’s alma mater, too), Kennedy became an assistant district attorney in the juvenile crime unit of the Philadelphia prosecutor’s office. Trying four cases a day, he found himself swimming in violence: brothers raping brothers, neighbors killing neighbors, children killing children. The images crowded into his consciousness. Even now, three years later, he will begin to describe a case and be drawn in. His eyes well up and he tries to make certain he has conveyed what it means to hear witnesses describe a woman’s brain after she has been clubbed.

The work was frustrating, mainly because bureaucracy put the criminals he prosecuted back on the streets unreformed, Vicki says. It was also overwhelming on several levels. “I thought I should have been better at it,” Kennedy says.

Toward the end of his three-year term, Kennedy began to think about how little time he was spending with his children: “Little Max,” now 5, and Summer, 4 (infant Noah was born last summer). His mother, Ethel, meanwhile, was urging him to read through his father’s notes and journals. For years, Kennedy had wanted to make a book of quotations, those spoken by his father and others that RFK loved, similar to Sen. Ted Kennedy’s book about his brother, “Words Jack Loved.” But he could not quite bring himself to dive into it. Deciding not to sign up for another term as prosecutor was like giving himself a gentle nudge.

“My own son was precisely the age I was when my father was killed,” Kennedy says. “And we were spending so much time in Los Angeles where he was killed. Leaving that job gave me an opportunity to think more openly about my father.”

The result was “Make Gentle the Life of This World,” published last year by Harcourt Brace. The title is a quote from the Greek poet Aeschylus. RFK recited it when he broke the news of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination to an audience in the heart of an Indianapolis ghetto. “The 1960s saw such terrible turmoil in this country, and I think that the phrase, ‘make gentle the life of his world,’ could, in many ways, have been the theme of the last few years of my father’s life,” Kennedy says.

Only RFK’s family and close friends knew how deeply connected the man felt to the words of poets such as Aeschylus or the novelist Albert Camus, he says. “He was able to internalize those complex writings so that they were embedded in the way he lived his life. I was struck by the remarkable degree to which his private reading contributed to his public thought and his policy. These great thinkers found their way into my father’s speeches and they moved people. He was able to expose people who might not otherwise have been exposed to that material.”

Many of Camus’ quotes are from a box of index cards that Kennedy found in a linen cabinet in his father’s bathroom at Hickory Hill--the home in Virginia where Bobby and Ethel’s 11 children grew up. He also read the other books his father read, which took him through most of the Western literary canon. At the same time, he pored over his father’s speeches to see where quotations were incorporated, and read his father’s letters.

“Reading the particular words that my father chose struck me. They seemed so familiar,” he says. “For a 31/2-year-old to have his father killed is a shattering experience. This was a way of picking up some of the pieces.”

Clay Tatum, a friend of Kennedy since the two were in their early teens, says that the immersion in his father’s reading, and the writing, caused a change. “Max used to be the guy who never slowed down. Writing this book and living in L.A. have helped him to do that.”

*

Before dinner in Brentwood one night, Max Kennedy’s branch of the family says grace. (Summer calls it “saying grace to the ghost” and thinks it is a time to cheer people you love--as in the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost and Minnie Mouse.) Their father is one of those young parents who cannot give a command such as, “Get back into bed, you two,” without trying to suppress a laugh, without watching himself act like a parent. It’s clear that this man who, of all the brothers, most strikingly conveys the essence of RFK, would much rather be down on the carpet playing with his children.

Max met Vicki at a Christmas party. She hailed from Philadelphia, where her family is prominent in its own right. (Vicki is, says a friend from law school, well suited for the traditionally difficult job of being a Kennedy wife. “She has her own life. She’s supportive without being wimpy.”)

Here we are at the Brentwood house that the couple rented until recently. It is a scaled-down, L.A.-style version of the child-ruled paradise Hickory Hill. Toys are available in every room. Children’s drawings are taped on walls. The kitchen sink appears to be hopelessly stopped up. On the dining room table, dozens of photographs of the children, taken underwater, are arranged in preparation for a book the couple are composing for the family, a fairy tale about two children who live underwater. In service of the book, a chaise longue, a stationary bicycle, a houseplant and a toy Jeep have been dragged into the backyard pool. The Kennedys have rented diving equipment to allow Paul Ryan, a photographer who once took pictures of RFK on a skiing trip, to shoot underwater. Visitors are encouraged to jump in and have their pictures taken. It would seem that nothing is done halfway, even fun.

To speak to this son of RFK for more than five minutes is to feel as though you are holding a large animal hostage. He would much rather be moving, preferably in water, and preferably on a boat. Asking direct questions about being a Kennedy is complicated. Rule No. 1: Do not ask about the bad behavior of siblings. This is a nonstarter. Begin instead by asking about boats.

“Here’s the thing about my family and politics,” says Kennedy. “Bob Dole probably spends a lot of time thinking about politics. But I asked Uncle Teddy once, ‘What’s your perfect day?’ and he said, ‘I spend the morning with my family; I get on a boat and sail downwind on a tear to Nantucket. I make it in three hours. I get a taxi to the airport, fly to Boston, put on a suit, make a speech and go home. Politics is about 15 minutes of that day.’ The important thing is the perspective. Not taking yourself too seriously.”

If fun is a Kennedy guiding principle, failure to keep it in balance may be the family’s fatal flaw. When Joe was 21, he flipped a Jeep in Cape Cod, leaving a family friend paralyzed for life. Bobby was arrested in 1983 for possession of heroin and sentenced to 800 hours of community service. David Kennedy died from a drug overdose in a Palm Beach hotel room in 1984. Michael died just months after his public apology for an affair with the family’s teenage baby-sitter. Clearly, any Kennedy is, from birth, laden with obligations and obstacles. Each must find his own response to this familial gravity.

Max tells a story about hiking in Venezuela with Michael. They came to a beautiful 80-foot bridge over a river. “I said to Michael, ‘Promise me, just promise me that you won’t jump.’ He promised. But when we got to the middle of the bridge, sure enough, he jumped.”

It was less than a year later that Michael died in that skiing accident. Still, Max laughs recalling the tale. To him, the terrible thing was not that Michael broke his promise. It was that he, Max, had no choice but to leap as well.

*

There is a fire in the fireplace; the children are sort of in bed. With Vicki sitting quietly beside him, Kennedy reads a passage from the Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke. He says it rang in his head as he was deciding whether to begin work on “Make Gentle . . . “

Here you will beat me then, you nights of anguish

Why didn’t I kneel more deeply to accept you, inconsolable sisters

and kneeling lose myself in your loosened hair

How we squander our hours of pain.

Kennedy did not want to squander his hours of pain. He wanted to face something terrifying in himself, and putting the book together helped him to do it. Now he is moving deeper. One day Max shares a few fragments of fiction he has written, pieces that bubble up from myth, violence, history and hopefulness. Some are plainly autobiographical memories that float close to the surface (football, swimming, rafting, sailing). Others include dream sequences in which Kennedy drowns or is responsible for others drowning. In some, a reader can feel childhood memories palpably sinking, and imagine Kennedy, the diver, trying to gather them, but afraid to stay under too long.

More than once, I’ve noticed Kennedy’s eyes welling with tears. When I point this out, it is as if I’ve accused him of instability. “Look,” Kennedy says, smiling, “I may be the healthiest one in the family!” He works hard to keep himself fit and to protect himself from the demons that have pulled down some of his brothers and cousins, he says. “I made a decision when I was 20 to give up alcohol, and I’ve maintained that ever since.”

For much of his life, he has had the guidance of Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Robert Coles, a close friend of his father and perhaps the best-known child psychiatrist living. Kennedy regularly attends meetings of an anonymous 12-step program and is a yoga fiend. He seems to understand the role contemplation and demon-facing play in building strength. Tatum, who knew Kennedy when he was in his late teens and drinking heavily, says watching Kennedy pull out of that vortex inspired him to do the same. “Like his father,” Tatum says, “he is very committed to a spiritual path and a moral one, to doing the next right thing.”

The new writing, the fragments and memories that Kennedy is just beginning to write down for his children, are extremely difficult to face, but will, he believes, carry him to the next level of the dive. Years ago, he explains, his cousin Teddy went to India to meet Mother Teresa. Teddy had lost his leg to cancer. “It was terrible, but he got a lot of sympathy--until he met Mother Teresa, who told him he was the luckiest boy in the world. I was little at the time, but I thought about it a lot, and I came to the conclusion over time that I am incredibly lucky to learn so much through the pain of losing my father. I realized that I had been given an incredible opportunity to learn about myself and my father and to really experience grief--the suffering that comes from an aching loss. I’ve put it off too long. “

His father, Kennedy notes in the introduction to his book, was not very introspective--until JFK was killed. When RFK did look inside, what he saw made him devote himself to civil rights and poverty issues. This matter of why his father, when he had the opportunity to just “spend the day by the pool,” opted to lead, intrigues Kennedy, as do more fundamental questions about the nature of leadership--political, personal, familial. He describes a time in 1966, when doctors working in Appalachia could not get the ear of a single politician to help the astonishingly poor people they encountered. “Finally, they got my father’s phone number and called him at home. He said ‘come on over’ and they spent the whole day talking. He called 14 senators and got them to agree to propose legislation. Almost instantaneously they had the first food stamp program.

“Would I rather my father had spent the day with me?” Kennedy asks. “Of course.” But while he believes that his father’s greatest contribution “may have been his marriage and his family,” he has come to understand why that wasn’t enough.

“I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase, ‘to whom much is given much is expected,’ in connection to my family,” he says. The words are St. Luke’s. They were “almost a religious edict” to his father’s mother--who was much closer to her son than most people know, he says. “My father, clearly, dedicated his life to public service, and while I’ve made a similar decision, it comes not from a sense of religious duty but because I think that this is the most direct route to personal fulfillment--in other words, the most fun way to live my life. People hear the word ‘fun’ and they tend to think of the speaker as being trivial. You know, for Catholics, Judgment Day is a scary thought. But I like to imagine that they’ll ask me, ‘Yeah, yeah, you were a prosecutor, you tried to do something for the environment. But Max, did you have fun?’ ” I believe that God put us here to have fun. Which doesn’t mean going to discos. It means leading a fulfilled life.

“Like everyone, I’m looking for fulfillment from family and work,” Kennedy says. “I’m hoping that delving into the loss of my father might make me more present for my family, better able to be a friend to my friends, to contribute and have a more attuned relationship to my God.”

At the moment, Kennedy is teaching an undergraduate class in environmental literature at Boston College. And he and a friend from law school have started the Watershed Institute, a training program for science teachers in Boston’s inner city. Vicki, meanwhile, is Robert Coles’ head teaching fellow. After their academic duties end, the Kennedys plan to return to Los Angeles (they’ve been back once a month anyway) and raise their children here. He envisions himself someday running a similar program in L.A.’s schools. But he also admits, guardedly, that this is where he would like to begin his political career. He won’t say just what position he covets--or if he has even decided yet--but he may already have taken the first step.

The week of his Union Station appearance, Kennedy made his media debut, touring widely to publicize the book. Before his first radio appearance, he admitted to being nervous. About five minutes into the interview, his headset fell off and rolled under the table. He dove under to find it. Vicki joined him and together they groped about for it. “It occurred to us both,” Kennedy says, “that we could have just stayed under there and let the very professional talk show host carry on without us.” In the next few days, however, Kennedy gained confidence. He did NBC’s “Today” Show and made the cover of Esquire with his brothers. Most of the boys look like clean-cut Hyannis Port frat boys. Max, staring straight at the camera, seems wilder, less predictable, the one most likely to slip off to Southern California and take up yoga. In a single week, a fledgling celebrity had emerged, shirt sleeves rolled.

*

The possibility that Max Kennedy will run for office in the city in which his father was killed strikes some of Kennedy’s friends as the logical end to a cycle of violence. Tatum, for one, thinks the boy who sat in that Cadillac photo has grown into a natural leader. “Not because he tells you what to do, but because his laughter is infectious. He makes things look like fun. “That’s the way he leads.” Says Michael Mailer, another longtime friend and the son of author Norman: “I’m hoping he runs for Congress and makes his way up.”

Not everyone, of course, is ready to start stumping for the new Kennedy kid on the block. “God help him,” says conservative gadfly David Horowitz. “Why do they want to put their heads in the vice, these Kennedy kids? They should stay out of politics.” In 1984, Horowitz and co-author Peter Collier wrote “The Kennedys--An American Drama,” which analyzed the family’s multi-generational ambitions. “The Kennedy myth is an old, negative myth--and very destructive to any individual in that family who tries to inhabit it,” Horowitz says. “All the enemies! All the loyalties! Why can’t he just do something innovative, like become a dentist?”

Says Ken Kachigian, a consultant to California Republicans: “He’s going to have to get in line behind a lot of Democrats, and I don’t know whether any of them is ready to concede to a carpetbagger--even if he is a Kennedy.”

Asked if the Kennedy name would help a candidate in Southern California, longtime Los Angeles congressman Henry Waxman says, “It depends on the Kennedy.” The public, he adds, “is always willing to vote for someone who stands for things.” But Waxman doesn’t offer any suggestions as to where this Kennedy might get his feet wet. “As for a logical path, a logical place, there isn’t one. There don’t seem to be any vacancies in the governorship, and we have two wonderful senators already . . .”

Former Westside congressman Mel Levine is more welcoming. “There is a deep, lingering affection for the Kennedys in Southern California,” he says. “I think it may even be stronger in California than in other parts of the country. After all, it was the extraordinary outpouring of support for RFK that won him the California primary. We all hoped very much that he would go on to be president. His death created a void that has never been filled in American life.”

Levine warns, though, that merely being RFK’s son won’t get Kennedy far. “He can’t just waltz in and get elected to office. He’ll have to demonstrate who he is and what he stands for here.”

The answer to those questions, to the extent that Max finds them in his plunge into the past, may have been RFK’s final gift to his son.