For Kennedy Women, the Flame of Idealism Still Burns

A trio of accomplished Kennedy women invaded Los Angeles on a recent rainy night to raise money and awareness for their pet causes.

Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, 49, trolled for financial backers for her race for the governor’s seat. Kerry Kennedy Cuomo, 41, promoted her inspiring human rights book, “Speak Truth to Power” (Crown). And documentary filmmaker Rory Kennedy Bailey, 32, who is talking with Oprah Winfrey’s Oxygen network and with CourtTV, came to lend support to her sisters.

“Three Sisters,” the sitcom, it wasn’t. The daughters of Robert and Ethel Kennedy first gathered Friday on the Hollywood set of Candice Bergen’s new talk show, “Exhale,” and offered up some intelligent chat before heading off to various fund-raisers.

The show airs Feb. 13, but you can’t get it here, because local cable companies don’t carry the Oxygen network. But we can offer you a glimpse, because we were invited to the set. The sisters talked about their projects, what it’s like to grow up a Kennedy and how they draw support in times of triumph and tragedy from a strong matriarch and a passel of siblings.

Rory was not yet born when her father was gunned down at Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel after winning the California primary in 1968. But she recalled how, while filming a documentary about AIDS in Africa, she would encounter his legacy every time she walked into a humble mud hut and saw “nothing on the wall but a poster of my father.”

On her own show, Bergen was classy and low key--a far cry from the brassy, volatile Murphy Brown. “ ‘Temptation Island,’ ” she observed, “makes me want to jump off a bridge.” The Kennedy women expressed similar sentiments about the new Bush administration.

Kathleen said she found the policies and early actions of the new administration “very disturbing.”

Her sisters agreed. More on that later.

After the taping, Kerry Kennedy Cuomo took a few minutes to talk about her book, which is illustrated with photographs by Pulitzer Prize winner Eddie Adams. His most memorable work is the photograph that won him the 1969 Pulitzer--that of a Vietnamese general executing a Viet Cong lieutenant, point blank.

Kennedy Cuomo fears that these could be difficult times for the human rights movement--a cause she embraced while working as a summer intern for Amnesty International after her sophomore year at Brown University. She documented human rights abuses by U.S. Immigration officials against Salvadoran immigrants. It changed her life.

She dedicated herself to human rights causes. But she said that she avoided capitalizing immediately “on my family’s name.” Instead, she studied so that her work would grow from a base of knowledge. She went to law school. She sat on the board of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial, a nonprofit organization addressing social justice issues. And she founded the RFK Center for Human Rights, which uncovers and publicizes abuses such as torture, disappearances, child labor and repression of free speech.

Now, after 20 years of consciousness-raising, comes a book, a Web site that has received more than 2 million hits, a PBS special and an education program that, when launched in a few weeks, will target more than 10,000 schools.

Kennedy Cuomo said she fears that Bush’s policies, such as withdrawing troops from Bosnia, could prove “disastrous for human rights.”

“One day the president says we should be more compassionate,” she points out. “And on Day Two he takes away funding for family planning [abroad]. That’s not compassion.”

When you’re a member of a political dynasty, you can do something about it--starting at home. Kennedy Cuomo revealed that her husband, Andrew, a HUD secretary in the Clinton Administration, is seriously contemplating a run at his father’s former New York governor’s seat in 2002. “He’d be a tremendous governor,” she said.

The coffee-table book, which costs about $54, contains the stories of 51 human rights activists from all over the world. Why 51? “Because 50 seemed too concrete,” she said. “Fifty-one has an image that there are many more, thousands and thousands of people in the world, who certainly will give us much more to do.”

Then off she went into the rainy night.

While sister Kathleen raised campaign money at the home of Mayor Richard Riordan and his wife, Nancy Daly Riordan, Kennedy Cuomo, (accompanied by Rory and cousin Bobby Shriver) signed copies of her book at the Beverly Park mansion of the mayor’s friends, entertainment exec Haim Saban and wife Cheryl.

“The stories in this book will make you cry,” she said, speaking to about 150 movers and shakers that included producers Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin, former astronaut Buzz Aldrin and lawyer Daniel Petrocelli, who won the O.J. Simpson civil case.

In our copy, she wrote, “I hope you find inspiration.”

We did.

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Times staff writers Gina Piccalo and Louise Roug contributed to this story.