Entire touch-football rosters could be filled with Kennedys who could never have been elected at their tender ages without their last names. In November, Ted’s 32-year-old cousin, Joseph Kennedy III — the son of a former U.S. representative, Joseph Kennedy II — became the latest pledge when he won the congressional seat left by Barney Frank, who retired. Even Ted Jr.’s son, Edward Kennedy III, has announced his intention to run for U.S. senator from Massachusetts someday. He was, at the time of his announcement, 11.

“There is this question with every member of my family,” Patrick Kennedy said. “How do we fit into this amazing legacy that we have been given by dint of our birth?” That is not a sentence most people utter. But his point was that simply running for an office because it is available is the family default option, and it’s not necessarily the best one.

Patrick did not seek re-election in 2010 and now devotes much of his life to promoting treatment and research for his twin causes, mental illness and brain injuries. He married, moved to New Jersey and has two children. He has sad green eyes, a big pillow of red hair and the gawky bearing of an overgrown boy. But he also has the weary voice of someone who could be 65.

Patrick told me he has no regrets about his career choices, but his own life proves his original point: that the family reflex to run early is not for everyone. He has battled depression and alcohol and drug addictions for years, and he admits that the United States Congress was not the best place to wrestle these goblins. “When you grow up in my family, being somebody meant having power, having status,” Patrick told me back in 2006, when I was reporting an article for The Times not long after police found him disoriented, having crashed his car into a barrier near the Capitol at 2:45 a.m. “The compensations you got were all material and superficial,” he said. “I’ve come to realize, in the last few months, that that life made me feel all alone.” After the article ran, Patrick told me his father was furious at him for unburdening himself publicly. “Save that stuff for your shrink, not a reporter,” Senator Kennedy said to him.

Ted Jr. is less the unburdening type. He has granted few interviews and he seemed nervous when we talked, or perhaps a bit suffocated by Keil, who was always with us. Keil, whom I first met back in his journalism days, is a friendly and earnest operator who, like many in Washington, is always working. (I ran into him once at the supermarket and teased him about the work Purple Strategies was doing to help BP “reposition” its image after the spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Without missing a beat, Keil unleashed his own gusher, calling BP the “the greatest corporate turnaround story in history” before moving on to the deli counter.) He sat in on all three of my meetings with Ted Jr., monitored a subsequent phone call and also stayed close by during my meeting with Patrick. He made backup recordings of all of our conversations, which is not unusual for public-relations people to do, but typically happens with high-level subjects, not with someone who has never run for office and wasn’t really running for anything now. The aggressive “management” of the story conveyed an impression of both loftiness and hand-holding — or, at worst, of a Not Ready for Prime Time Kennedy being propped up by consultants.

All of that said, there’s something innately likable about Ted Jr. People who have known him over the years generally describe a solid, down-to-earth guy who is quite normal, given his royal lineage. And his instinct to become a fully formed human being before answering the “call to service” was admirable. His priority, by all accounts, has always been to raise a family and nurture them as unassumingly as possible (again, for a Kennedy). As he put it, “I pretty much spent half my life trying to resist other people’s timetables.” Later, when I asked him to elaborate on this, he added: “My father was the single most important person in my life. But in some ways, we all live our lives resisting what our parents want us to become.”

In early 1985 Ted Jr. was 23 and living in Somerville, Mass., outside Boston. Tip O’Neill, the district’s longtime representative, had announced he would retire at the end of his term. This seemed an obvious starter gig, but Ted Jr. was not interested. His 34-year-old cousin, Joe — Robert F. Kennedy’s son — ran and won instead. “I never seriously considered that race,” Ted Jr. told me. “My father was strongly considering me.” Ted Sr. commissioned a poll that came back “a slam dunk for Ted,” said Steve McMahon, who was one of the people then running Senator Kennedy’s political operation. Ted Jr.’s decision not to run, McMahon said, “was against the advice and counsel of pretty much everyone around him.” Senator Kennedy was disappointed, Ted Jr. told me. “He couldn’t understand why someone with all the built-in advantages would not take advantage of the opportunity.”