Joe Kennedy sat in his office, nursing a cough. Leaning back in a blue leather chair, he was quick to flash a grin familiar to anyone who has flipped through an American history book. True to his nature he was cheerful, polite, and self-deprecating.

But then the conversation turned to modern-day politics. The tempo of his speech picked up—suddenly a relatively laid-back congressman from Massachusetts went into double time; mild profanities began to flow. No, he doesn’t feel good about the state of government. Yes, he is worried about the state of the presidency. His attitude toward the ongoing debates on healthcare, immigration, and the criminal justice system can only be described as moral outrage.

It would be easy to get lost in the name, the glitz and glamour. Joe’s the opposite. —Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney

Kennedy has grown more outspoken lately, at times sounding a lot like the grandfather he never knew, Bobby Kennedy, or the great-uncle who helped mentor him, Ted Kennedy.

As he sat in an office replete with photos of his famed family, he glanced over his left shoulder. “You can see the damn Supreme Court from my window,” he said. “And it says, ‘Equal justice under the law.’ And we’re not anywhere close to it.”



In the era of Trump—which seems, on its face, to represent a rejection of the politics of yore, an excommunication of Clintons and Bushes—an odd thing seems to be sprouting: a Kennedy comeback.



With his wife Lauren and daughter Eleanor. Ben Hoffmann

A few years ago, after the death of Ted Kennedy and his son Patrick’s decision not to run for reelection, there were no Kennedys serving on Capitol Hill for the first time since 1947.

Joe—this four-shot-espresso-drinking, fluent-Spanish-speaking, 36-year-old redhead—is the one who ended that slump. Now one of his cousins is running for governor in Illinois. Another is a state senator in Connecticut. Another just returned home from her ambassadorship to Japan. But as a leadership vacuum takes hold of the Democratic Party, Joe is the most prominent Kennedy on the national scene. And he’s just starting to fill some very big shoes.

He was born on October 4, 1980, arriving eight minutes after his twin brother Matt. “It was a great eight minutes,” Matt joked. Joe thinks they had a fairly normal childhood. Then again, he said, he doesn’t have anything to compare it to.

Dinner with Dad—Joseph P. Kennedy II, who served six terms in Congress representing the 8th District of Massachusetts (Joe III reps the 4th District)—was on Monday nights, before he’d leave for DC for the week. Summers were spent at camp, or playing football, lacrosse, and hockey. Vacations were at the Kennedy compound on Cape Cod or with his mom, Sheila Brewster Rauch, and her parents on Fishers Island, off the coast of Connecticut.

When Joe was nine his mom moved out, and two years later his parents divorced in what became a subject of long-running fascination to the public, particularly in light of his father’s request to the Catholic Church for an annulment (which was initially granted but later overturned when Rauch appealed).



Joe and Matt went to Buckingham Browne & Nichols, a prestigious prep school in Cambridge; friends remember Joe as being “studious without being a nerd.” “He wasn’t a gossip. He was something of an old soul,” said Greg Henning, a good friend from high school who has remained close.

“You just had a sense that he was already mature—reflective and composed in a way the average 16- or 17-year-old wouldn’t be. It was almost like when you were around him you had some adult supervision.”

Joe’s the guy you call when something goes wrong. He’s the soccer dad.

Classmates called him “the beacon” because his red hair made him stick out. He was a defensive lineman on the football team; coaches called him “Joe K,” and when he was to go after the quarterback they would call out, “Joker Blitz.” He was the kind of guy who would fill in as goalie when the lacrosse team needed one, even though he was terrible. “He turned out pretty good by the end,” his brother says. “But for the first little while the trash can did better than he did.”

Once Joe—along with Matt—arrived at Stanford, they melded into college life, with few taking note of a last name that, on the campus at the time, wasn’t even the most politically prominent. “Chelsea Clinton was there at that point,” Joe recalled. “You could tell who she was because there would be three guys with empty backpacks behind her.”

In college initiation rituals (his freshman year on the lacrosse team, or when he rushed the fraternity Kappa Alpha), alcohol usually played a big role. But knowing that Joe didn’t drink, upperclassmen would put large glasses of whole milk out for him. He downed them, one after another. “Joe drank an awful lot of milk,” David Kaufman, one of his lacrosse teammates, told the Boston Globe. “He kept pace with us glass for glass.”

“He never gave in to peer pressure,” said former NBA player Jason Collins, who was Kennedy’s roommate at Stanford. “Guys respected him for that.”

Joe was quiet and studious. His music was never too loud, his room always clean and orderly. “I kid you not: When I would open the door, Joe would either be at his desk working or reading a book,” Collins recalled. “I never saw him hanging out playing video games. That’s not Joe.” His brother Matt—who went on to hold several roles in the Obama administration and now works firm he founded that helps businesses find and develop international markets—was the one you’d go out partying with, Collins said. “Joe’s the guy you call when something goes wrong. He’s the soccer dad.”

Kennedy with one-and-a-half-year-old Eleanor Ben Hoffmann

If you’re looking for a flaw in Joe Kennedy, Collins said, it’s this: “His hair. It could become like a big sheepdog. Like, big, red, sheepdog hair. It could get a little out of control.”

For years that was a running joke between Collins and Kennedy. When Collins was playing for the Celtics, he would hang out with Kennedy in Boston. “I would tell him, ‘More product, more product,’ ” Collins said, laughing. “That was his huge flaw: not having enough product in his hair.”

To ring in the year 2013, Collins went to Kennedy’s house in Brookline. A gay couple were also there, and they talked about their flag football team. Collins could join, they said, since each team could have two straight guys. A few months later Collins called Kennedy and recounted that night. “You know, they weren’t the only gay people there,” Collins told his friend. “I too am gay.”



“I told Joe part of the reason I was coming out to him was I was jealous of him. I saw him march in a gay pride parade with Barney Frank,” Collins recalled, referring to the first openly gay congressman.

“I was still in the closet, and I was terrified of my secret getting out.” Shortly afterward, Collins came out publicly in a Sports Illustrated cover story. The next year it was Collins and Kennedy marching together in the gay pride parade. And the SI cover now hangs prominently in Kennedy’s congressional office.

After college Kennedy went into the Peace Corps, which was founded by his great uncle, President John F. Kennedy. Joe remembers going to the airport, his mother in tears, as he headed off to the Dominican Republic. “I remember thinking I was absolutely nuts and why did I ever do this?”

Indeed, the Peace Corps had its challenges. At some point during his stint he contracted a parasite. “I remember getting so sick one night I was actually seeing how far I could projectile-vomit,” he said.

But he also played a version of stickball, with a broomstick, in which the goal was to hit a little Frisbee, with local kids who could nail five out of 10. “I’d miss them by a country mile.” He remembers a little girl who looked at him and burst into tears—she had never seen a redhead and thought he was a witch. “It was cold and beautiful and breathtaking and poor,” he said. “I mean, like dirt poor. And amazing. Incredibly generous people.”

Kennedy ultimately spent two years there, helping the locals build a more sustainable business around giving tours of a series of magnificent waterfalls. It was there that he began contemplating his legal career, even as he came to understand more viscerally than ever before that the opportunities afforded him were not available to the people around him.

United States Representative Joe Kennedy III at the historic Commandant’s House in Boston. Ben Hoffmann

“There’s nothing those kids, those babies or young men I was working with—there was nothing they could ever do that was going to get them to Harvard Law School,” he said. “I was no more talented, I was no smarter, I was no better than any of them. I just had the resources and support and platform. It was a struggle for them to make sure they could turn the lights on. I would not be here at all but for that experience. I draw on it every single day.”

After graduating from Harvard Law in 2009, Kennedy took a job as an assistant district attorney in the Boston area and on Cape Cod. A congressional seat came open in 2010, but he passed on running for it. About a year later he was in Cambridge District Court when his brother called. “Barney Frank just announced he’s retiring,” Matt said.

“So what?” Joe replied.

He claims he hadn’t previously considered running for that seat. Frank, after all, was firmly entrenched in the district—he had been its congressman since 1981, three months after Joe was born.

Joe didn’t live in the district, but he was almost immediately mentioned as a likely successor. As he began thinking it through, his father, whose 12 years in Congress were marked by brashness and frustration with the slow pace, pulled him aside. “Don’t do this out of some family obligation,” he said. “And if you’re not certain, wait.”

“If your heart is not in it, people can tell,” his dad told him. “And it’s the hardest damn thing you have ever done in your life.”

As soon as Joe entered the campaign, the Democratic field basically cleared the way for him. He had a Republican opponent, but the race was never close. Predictably, Kennedy was tagged with accusations that he was entitled and inexperienced. He heard modern-day versions of the line delivered during a 1962 U.S. Senate debate, when Ted Kennedy’s opponent said, “If your name was simply Edward Moore instead of Edward Moore Kennedy, your candidacy would be a joke.”

But Joe won by 25 points, and he hasn’t had a serious challenge since. Shortly after winning his first election he married Lauren Birchfield. They had met at Harvard Law School, in a class taught by a professor named Elizabeth Warren.

During most of his tenure in Washington, Joe Kennedy has been slow and methodical, and often understated. Like his uncle Ted, he pays attention to some of the less flashy constituent services that don’t earn him headlines but do earn him loyalty in his district.

Each term he does a “tour 34,” visiting all 34 towns in his district and holding meetings at local libraries to hear from constituents and help them navigate the federal bureaucracy in areas like Medicare, immigration, housing, and veterans’ affairs. Like Ted, he regularly sends hand-written notes.

He has a Congressional Youth Cabinet composed of two students from every high school in his district, and they meet with him or his staff several times a year to discuss issues important to young people.

“The thing about Joe is that it would be so easy to get lost in the name or the glitz and glamour. But Joe is absolutely the opposite,” said Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, a New York Democrat and one of Kennedy’s closest friends in Congress.

In some ways it’s a shame he’s named Kennedy. —Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney

“In some ways it’s a shame he’s named Kennedy,” Maloney added, “because I think it brings with it a lot of assumptions about him that are in some cases at odds with his laserlike focus on rolling up his sleeves and working. It would be easy for someone with a name like that to fall back on it in some way. Joe just doesn’t.”

What criticism there is of Kennedy tends to be that he has often appeared cautious and risk-averse, less willing than others in the liberal Massachusetts delegation to engage in the kind of partisan warfare that has consumed national politics.

In 2014, for example, he told party leaders that he did not want to be chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, partly because it meant he would be working to oust Republicans from Congress rather than finding ways to work with them.

But lately Kennedy has grown more animated. Issues such as immigration have him roiled. A few months ago he attended the Friends of Ireland luncheon, where members of Congress gather with the Irish prime minister in a bipartisan tradition— started in part by Ted Kennedy—and signal U.S. support for Ireland. Joe’s mind turned to his own family’s story.

“Yes, it was now a century and a half ago,” he said. “But my family was in a similar position as those folks fleeing famine and destitution. It wasn’t a war zone in Ireland, but it certainly wasn’t good, either. That history is repeating itself today. And it just strikes me as, yes, on the one hand times have changed and things have changed. On the other hand humanity hasn’t changed all that much. And the fact that we’re willing to say, ‘Hey, it was okay for me but it’s not okay for you,’ given the destitution and strife that people are going through? We can do better than that.”

Will Kahn

In March, a day after Speaker of the House Paul Ryan—a fellow Irish Catholic—called the plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act an “act of mercy,” Kennedy took the floor.

“With all due respect to our speaker, he and I must have read different scripture,” Kennedy said. “The one I read calls on us to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to shelter the homeless, and to comfort the sick. It reminds us that we are judged not by how we treat the powerful but by how we care for the least among us.

“This is not an act of mercy,” he continued. “It is an act of malice.” He was speaking up not just for his values but for a law that Ted Kennedy had spent his career working toward, dying just months before it passed.

Joe’s speech lasted only about a minute, but it went viral and was soon viewed online more than 10 million times. (“Wow,” tweeted Howard Dean, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. “This is a Kennedy who could be president. A must-watch.”)

It was one of many times Kennedy has used Facebook to great effect lately, posting videos and missives about everything from the EPA’s proposed cuts to lead paint programs, to Trump’s budget, to gay rights. Last year his posts got an average viewership of 13,500. This year his average viewership per Facebook video is nearly 1 million.

If he sounds too angelic to be true, if you’re still looking for the vices, Joe promises he has “plenty of them.” “I definitely swear more than I should,” he offered. “I have a pretty terrible sweet tooth.” He’ll eat anything available (except this year during Lent, when he gave up sugary snacks). “Candy. Chocolate chip cookies. Cake. Pretty much anything.”

But aside from the need for better hair maintenance, his friends can’t come up with much. His brother notes that Joe had a pudgy period in junior high. “He was a little... He was... Let’s just say in junior high he outweighed me—but I was six inches taller.”

People always ask what’s it like to grow up as a Kennedy. It’s a family.

“People always ask what’s it like to grow up as a Kennedy,” Joe said. “It’s a family. It’s big, it’s large, it’s amazing. You’ve got strong personalities with strong opinions. And we’ll come out differently on some of those opinions.”

Throughout the summer various Kennedys come through what is still the clan’s common gathering spot: the compound in Hyannis Port. It’s where they have mourned tragic deaths, celebrated milestones, maintained their bonds.

Every Independence Day and Thanksgiving the place is abuzz. “For Thanksgiving it’s so many people that you’re just trying to find a shred of space. You’re sitting on a little corner of a stair, eating next to a dog that’s trying to eat off your plate,” said Kennedy, whose own family now includes his and Lauren’s one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Eleanor, and their dog Banjo.

“Almost everybody is there. And it’s great. It’s a big family, and people are off doing their own thing, at this point now in almost every corner of the world. But they come back for these holidays, and it keeps the family together.”

Still, Kennedy is frequently reminded that not everyone is enamored of his dynastic family. “People come up every day and usually say very nice things about my family, but sometimes not. You get both,” he said.

“Look, my family means different things to different folks. I think for most people they have very fond memories and believe my family made important contributions to the country. And I happen to believe so too, and I’m grateful when people do mention that and share their stories: ‘I shook your grandfather’s hand,’ or JFK’s hand, or ‘I met your Uncle Teddy.’ ”

Look, my family means different things to different folks. I think for most people they have very fond memories and believe my family made important contributions to the country.

Kennedy has often been mentioned as a candidate for higher office. Right now, though, there aren’t many good options, unless he wants to take on the state’s popular Republican governor, or wait for Elizabeth Warren or Edward Markey to leave their Senate seats. Nevertheless, the website Irish Central wrote a column outlining “Why Congressman Joe Kennedy should run for president in 2020.” The International Business Times recently asked, “Will there be another President Kennedy?”

He may run someday, but for now he is firmly ensconced in his congressional office, where, among the family photos, sit a New England Patriots helmet and a Boston Red Sox poster. Also on the wall is a printing of the text of a speech his grandfather Bobby Kennedy gave in 1966, which for the young congressman is nothing less than a mantra.

“You can use your enormous privilege and opportunity to seek purely private pleasure and gain, but history will judge you,” it reads.

“And, as the years pass, you will ultimately judge yourself, on the extent to which you have used your gifts to enrich the lives of your fellow man.”

Styled by Will Kahn, Photographs by Ben Hoffmann, Hair and makeup by Liz Washer at Ennis Inc., Tailoring by Karon Yee, Produced by Michele Doucette and Matthew Eriksen at M Doucette Production

This article originally appeared in the August 2017 issue of Town and Country.