On a beautiful June morning in Salem, Massachusetts, frumpy delegates throng into a state-college building for what would be, in ordinary circumstances, a midterm state Democratic convention of almost paralyzing tediousness. Not today. An air of real anticipation suffuses the cinder-block halls: after nearly two months of ducking the press, Massachusetts representative Joseph Kennedy is set to appear. Though the eldest son of Robert F. Kennedy has still not formally announced his run to succeed William Weld as governor in 1998, whereas the state’s attorney general, Scott Harshbarger, has, the latter is utterly ignored as press and partisans crowd the big, balloon-filled room where heaping plates of eggs and bacon are being devoured with appalling dispatch in advance of the appearance of the breakfast’s “host.” A sudden hubbub at the door signals his arrival—that, and the plenitude of Joe Kennedy signs hoisted by the faithful. With his once shaggy blond hair cut short enough not to fall below the collar of an expensive dark-blue suit, Kennedy still looks hipper than the average congressman, and more ruggedly handsome. At 44 he has the tanned, wind-weathered look of the expert sailor he is, with that hawklike nose and big grin that suggest his mother Ethel’s family more than the Kennedys. Like most of his brothers, he’s taller than his father was, nearly six feet two, with a wife in tow almost as tall as he. Beth Kelly, lissome in an immaculate cream-colored dress that a single ketchup drop would ruin, is the congressman’s second wife, not the one who wrote the book that is one of his two recent travails. When I work my way through the crowd around them to shake Joe’s hand, his ice-blue eyes lock on me. “I’ve been interviewing your siblings,” I tell him. “Yeah,” he says, “I heard.” “I’m hoping we can talk.” “We’ll be in touch,” he says briskly, almost menacingly, then moves away. A certain testiness is only in order: the preceding five weeks have been the worst of Joe’s political career, a one-two punch of embarrassing disclosures that have badly jarred his run before it starts and made national news as the latest “Kennedy scandals.” It’s hard not to sympathize with the siblings who say Joe has been unfairly tarred by the more shocking of the two: he is, after all, not his brother Michael’s keeper. And whatever age the family baby-sitter was when Michael, a 39-year-old married father of three, apparently began sleeping with her—maybe 16, maybe even 14—why should Joe be punished for that? But when reporters from The Boston Globe, which broke the story April 25, and its scrappy tabloid rival, the Boston Herald, cornered Joe soon after to ask what he’d known about the situation and when, Joe waffled enough to convince most voters that he was being less than truthful. Many were further annoyed to think that a congressman, whenever he found out the truth of the matter, would fail to act in the girl’s best interests by helping to end the relationship.

By a twist of fate, the baby-sitter story surfaced not 48 hours after Joe’s first wife, Sheila Rauch, appeared on PrimeTime Live to launch her book tour for Shattered Faith, a strongly felt chronicle of her battle to resist Joe’s petition for an annulment of their 12-year marriage. Rauch focuses her indignation on the Catholic Church and its emissaries who blithely endorse annulment as the way for divorced couples to get on with their lives—never mind that an annulled marriage, in the church’s eyes, is one that never existed. But Joe comes across as a bully, given to declaring his wife a “nobody.” Though granted a civil divorce by Rauch in 1991 without contest—and, more important to the Kennedys, without public complaint—a remarried Joe insisted on an annulment over his ex-wife’s objection that it would, theologically, negate their twin teenage sons. Worse, in Rauch’s account, he seemed to demand it not out of faith so much as out of political expediency: the annulment is, he rationalized to her, just “Catholic gobbledygook.” On its own, the book might have caused a small stir. Without it, the baby-sitter scandal might not have hurt. Together, the two seemed to underscore, as Maureen Dowd put it bluntly in The New York Times, the “swinish” attitude of Kennedy men toward women. “It’s the spontaneous-combustion problem,” says Lou DiNatale, a prominent Boston political consultant who has had his spats with Joe Kennedy. “You’re standing next to someone who goes up in flames, and you’re covered with gasoline. What happens? You go up in flames!” In newspaper polls, Kennedy has dropped from an imposing lead to a dead heat with his rival, and women voters, traditionally as strong a Kennedy bloc as blacks, have voiced the keenest disenchantment. In a year, of course, the crisis may be ancient history, and the candidate, with the money and muscle his family brings to every race, may be on his way to the statehouse. Above the fray, though, a larger question looms. The R.F.K. clan, to which Joe and Michael belong, is by far the largest of the six Kennedy families, including the Shrivers and the Smiths. Of the 28 cousins who form the family’s third generation after the patriarch who made the Kennedys the best-known Irish-Catholic family in America—the closest thing to a royal family we have—10 are “R.F.K.’s.” The R.F.K.’s have also been implicated in the most trouble, with a rap sheet disproportionate to their numbers: one son’s death by drug overdose, another’s arrest for heroin possession, and the involvement of Joe himself in reckless driving that left a girl paralyzed for life, along with a general trend of overindulgence among the sons that has sent several of them into rehab. With April’s news added in, one has to wonder: Is there something fundamentally wrong with Bobby’s kids? I set out to answer that question by going to as many of the sources as I could—6 of the 10 R.F.K.’s, as it turned out—and talking to as many of their friends, colleagues, and detractors as I could find. The answer I reached surprised me. Along the way, I began discerning the outlines of the story behind the baby-sitter scandal. What I found didn’t exculpate Michael from a serious lapse of moral judgment. But it did suggest that he may not have slept with an under-age girl, as reported, and thus wasn’t, in the eyes of the law at least, a criminal. It also raised the question of whether someone had set out to damage Kennedy by misrepresenting the story and leaking a steady drip of subsequent details to the Boston papers. The Kennedy clan, to its enormous frustration, felt that it could do nothing in response. It couldn’t even name the two likeliest suspects—not when one was a Kennedy relative and the other was a central figure in the sordid drama.

‘I have a sense that all of the Kennedys are in a castle with a moat around it and a gangplank that lifts up,” says one old Washington friend of the R.F.K.’s. “And they’re all in there with boiling oil for journalists. They’re in a siege mentality all the time, and I think it colors their whole relationship with other people.” Every journalist approaches the ramparts with a wary upward look. But around to the side is a door that swings open readily enough to reveal an R.F.K. as accessible as a Rotarian—an early reminder that even in a clan as tight-knit as the R.F.K.’s, Kennedys do vary. And that a scandal involving one up in Massachusetts is a world away from another’s life and mores in Annapolis, Maryland. At 46, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is the eldest of the R.F.K.’s and, if one is to believe Charlie Peters of The Washington Monthly, the most admirable. “She’s been the embodiment of the best the family represents,” says Peters, who got to know Kathleen when he published political articles by her in the early 1980s. “She’s stayed loyal to the true faith.” Within Maryland’s historic domed statehouse, up a curving flight of marble stairs, Townsend commands a large, high-ceilinged lair as lieutenant governor but introduces herself as Kathleen. Except for the pictures of her father on the walls, one might not make the family connection; handsome but prim, with a demeanor more professorial than political, Kathleen is certainly the most cerebral of the siblings. She is also, by one measure at least, the most successful. While at Radcliffe, Kathleen met the man she wanted to marry, a college tutor four years her senior. But David Townsend had no thought of settling down. Kathleen talked him into joining her, with friends, on a Huck Finn–like excursion by wooden raft down the Mississippi. At the trip’s end, they were a couple; they now have four daughters. Townsend’s family goes back hundreds of years in Maryland—one reason, Kathleen observes without waiting for the carpetbag question, why they live in Annapolis. The other is that Townsend is a professor at St. John’s, which makes him the seeming antithesis of Kennedy ambition and machismo. “You know, I wouldn’t say that,” Kathleen responds, bridling. “He’s an intellectual. I mean, he teaches at the most intellectual of all colleges, where they study the great books. He teaches Greek … [and] Einstein and Shakespeare and chaos theory. In other words … he’s very strong.” So is Kathleen, who survived the humiliation of being the first Kennedy ever to lose an election when she tried unsuccessfully for a state congressional seat in 1986. Her district was strongly Republican, which hurt, but so did Kathleen’s squeaky speaking voice (since trained), her thick glasses (replaced now by contacts), and her decision to downplay the Kennedy name by not including it on bumper stickers (a mistake she won’t make again). Stoically, she settled for a modest post in the state’s department of education, steering high-schoolers to community service. Then she hit on the larger notion of formally inculcating moral values. The program’s success helped persuade Parris Glendening to pick her as his running mate in 1994, as did her positions, conservative for a Kennedy, which include a pro-death-penalty stance and the belief—since put into law—that violent offenders with life sentences should not be eligible for parole. These convictions have obvious roots—a father’s murder and his killer’s continuing efforts to seek his freedom—but Kathleen stresses the more positive values she learned from her father while he was alive. The night, for example, that he came back from rural Mississippi and told his startled children how families were living in houses smaller than their dining room. “Do you know how lucky you are? You have a responsibility. You have to give something back.” The times he drove them through Washington ghettos, saying, “See? Street after street, there’s no grass, no playground. These kids want to be able to play, too.”

None of the R.F.K. sisters appears to have suffered a turbulent youth or later moral failings, though such a distinction is lost in the tabloids. When you ask them if this is because they grew up clear of fierce political expectations, they roll their eyes—Kennedys prefer sports to self-analysis—and ask you, in return, if it isn’t true that boys just get into more trouble than girls. Whatever the reason, they tend, like Kathleen, to be more open as a result: only Rory, the youngest sister, adamantly refuses to meet with me. The child with whom Ethel was pregnant when Bobby was shot, Rory is, at 28, a New York–based activist whose documentary films explore social issues such as the rough treatment accorded female addicts in hospitals. Rory is also, according to her sister Kathleen, “a radical feminist,” which must have sparked up dinner-table talk when the family gathered this past Memorial Day weekend, as it does every year, at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. Cordial but a bit warier than Kathleen, Kerry, 38, meets me in the new, sunlit offices of the R.F.K. Memorial off Washington’s Dupont Circle. She’s a Cabinet wife—her husband of seven years, Andrew Cuomo, is the new secretary of housing and urban development—and the mother of twins, with another child due this month; she no longer oversees the memorial, but does keep a hand in the part of it that she started a decade ago, the R.F.K. Center for Human Rights, which helps protect activists in oppressive countries. Of the sisters, Kerry was the biggest tomboy—shinning up trees, helping her brother Bobby skin rats—and daring enough, one day at Brown, when she was with her best friend, Mary Richardson, to jump out of a second-floor window into a snowdrift that unfortunately masked a flight of stairs (one foot bears the scars of multiple operations to mend the many broken bones). This moxie stood her in good stead when she began traveling to troubled countries to lobby on behalf of jailed dissidents. She also soon realized how useful the Kennedy name could be. “In the international human-rights field, people put their lives on the line every day,” Kerry says. “And they can’t afford to trust someone they don’t know, because if they share what they’re doing or how they’re doing it, or what their plans are, with the wrong person, they may be imprisoned or maybe killed. Every single country I’ve ever been into, people have immediately opened up to me. And have immediately trusted me with that kind of information.” Kerry has been stopped and searched in her travels; once, at the airport in El Salvador, she had to take drastic action. “They confiscated our papers,” she recalls, “and I got them back from the guy and ran into the bathroom and ate them.”

A short walk away is the Georgetown house where Courtney lives with her second husband, Paul Hill, and their infant daughter, Saoirse Roisin (pronounced “Searsha Rosheen”). One of the Guilford Four, Hill was imprisoned on charges of I.R.A. terrorism and murder—15 years in all, 5 of them in solitary confinement. He was freed when a British court acknowledged that his confession had been manufactured. From the start Hill protested that he had been framed, and upon his release refused to accept parole for a second murder charge, insisting instead on a hearing that would clear his name completely or, conceivably, throw him back into prison. It was in March 1990, between hearings, that Courtney met him. Her brother Joe had championed the Guilford Four in Congress and got to know Hill. Ethel went to hear Joe’s new friend speak, and decided that Courtney, divorced after a 10-year marriage, ought to meet him. That Courtney lay in a Manhattan apartment with a broken neck from skiing deterred her not at all: Ethel gave him Courtney’s address, Hill went to visit her, and the two promptly fell in love. Of the R.F.K. sisters, Courtney is the exception. Blonde rather than dark-haired, shorter and fuller-bodied than the others, she is also the most sensitive and emotionally vulnerable of the bunch. With palpable affection she introduces me to her husband, who for his good looks, long hair, and lightness of manner might more likely be a roadie for U2 than the survivor of a Kafkaesque nightmare. Then she leads me through a living room filled with family photographs out to the back garden, where we sit with Heinekens as she talks proudly of having her first baby at 40, with her mother in the delivery room and her husband beside her to cut the umbilical cord. Like her sisters, Courtney has worked on issues, impelled by her father’s example. She helped bring environmentally responsible companies into Eastern Europe and served as a U.N. representative there for pediatric aids, taught elementary school, and did fund-raising for the R.F.K. Memorial. Still, she seems more tentative than, say, Kathleen. “I was never very good in school,” she says readily. “I didn’t finish college or anything.” What she had, from her first trip to Ireland at age 14 with Kerry, was a deep affinity for her family’s roots. “As soon as the plane landed at Shannon,” she says softly, “I felt like I was at home.” Courtney studied Irish history at Trinity College in Dublin, visited often after that, then immersed herself in her husband-to-be’s second case, eventually mobilizing much of the family to attend the hearing in early 1994 which expunged the last stain from his name. Though a terrorist murder charge is in a somewhat different league from an affair with a baby-sitter—and Michael Kennedy appears, unlike Paul Hill, to be somewhat less than innocent—Courtney feels strongly for both Michael and Joe. “I don’t understand why everybody’s going on about Joe,” she says with indignation. “A lot of people have had brothers who may have done things that they regret, and you don’t blame it on the brother.” And whatever Michael has or hasn’t done, she says loyally, “I’m crazy about him. He’s extremely friendly and outgoing. He’s smart. And I don’t want to say ‘charming,’ but he’s got something about him that draws people to him. Also, he’s a great father. He takes his children on little adventures everywhere.” So it must be painful, I suggest, all this recent stuff. “Of course,” she says quietly, and takes a sip of her beer. “It’s painful.”

Loyalty is the virtue Kennedys put above all others. It’s the trait friends of the family speak of with admiration. Yet it’s the one that most infuriates critics when a Kennedy gets into trouble. “There are no moral judgments!” exclaims one close friend of the family. “In fact,” says another person close to the R.F.K.’s, “the family values are more those of the Mafia. It’s about power and control. It’s like the Mafia even in the way the children are directed—not to be well-rounded individuals, but to create an effective team. The hard part for this family,” adds the observer, “is that there wasn’t enough attention paid, right from the start. If your child hits a playmate at two years old, you intervene. That doesn’t happen with the Kennedys. The only time the family intervenes is when there’s an embarrassment in the press—then there’s the circling of the wagons. The infraction is not considered important, only the public embarrassment.” That attitude seems to go back at least two generations, to the grandfather who made the family fortune with a mixture of shrewdness, opportunism, and brute force. “Part of the measure of strength of the family, as he saw it, is what you can fix,” this same observer says. “It’s only that Teddy got caught cheating on the Spanish exam, not that he was cheating. You do whatever you can get away with, and if the family’s powerful enough, you fix it.” But as the R.F.K.’s grew up at Hickory Hill, the gracious Virginia estate purchased by their grandfather for Jack and Jackie, then passed on to Bobby and Ethel, they were shaped far more, of course, by their mother, who brought with her the complex imprint of her own family, the Skakels. Life at Hickory Hill with 8 or 10 children underfoot was, depending on a visitor’s point of view, a high-energy household of constant activity or, as one put it, “a fucking zoo.” Both Bobby and Ethel adored their children individually and, it sometimes seemed, in the growing aggregate, as Ethel appeared to aim for breaking her mother-in-law’s record of nine children to claim the title of Ultimate Kennedy Mother. And both felt strongly that children should be treated, as much as possible, like grown-ups. Kathleen remembers attending the Senate racketeering hearings presided over by her father in the late 50s. Later, as attorney general, Bobby would bring his children to the office and have them sit in on meetings with senators; when dignitaries came to the house for dinner, the children were encouraged to quiz them. “They all liked to wrestle and do athletic things … a lot of chatter around the table … or get into a food fight,” recalls Judge E. Gerald Tremblay, a law-school classmate of Bobby’s. “They were active children. They weren’t mean-spirited. They were normal kids—with a lot of opportunities.” As the family continued to grow, however, the children’s upbringing became more erratic. “Their father was a strict disciplinarian,” one friend observes. Fights were settled fairly, and some decorum was maintained when he was there. When he was away, though, the rules seemed to disappear. “A lot of the strength came from Bob in that family,” says another old friend. “Ethel depended on him for that. I don’t think she had been raised with that quality. She didn’t have the training to raise a large family.” In some ways, Ethel’s background seemed to mirror the Kennedys’ own. She came from a large, wealthy family with a mother as fiercely Catholic as Rose Kennedy. Indeed, the Skakels were wealthier than the Kennedys. As a young entrepreneur in the early 1920s, George Skakel saw a use for the coal residue called “fines” that was produced—and usually dumped—by the large mines. He offered five cents a ton—free money for waste removal, as the mine operators saw it—and hung on to his growing pile until strikes occurred, then sold it for windfall profits. Reading in Fortune that aluminum’s value was rising with the new aviation industry, he staged a similar gambit, buying waste coke from oil refineries on long-term contracts—then refining the stuff to yield a pure form of carbon used by the aluminum companies. All through the Depression, Skakel made millions, becoming one of the country’s richest men. Unfortunately, as Jerry Oppenheimer relates in his biography of Ethel Kennedy, The Other Mrs. Kennedy, both George and Ann Skakel were alcoholics, whose children, for all the Catholic ritual and dogma their mother instilled in them, grew up virtually wild. Of the fractious brood, Ethel was the standout, a sunny, athletic girl whose high jinks tended more toward riding her horse through the family home than, say, driving cars into swimming pools. Imbued with an unshakable faith, she attended Manhattanville College for women in New York and, while she managed to flout its stern Catholic conventions on occasion, was certainly a virgin when, through her classmate and new best friend, Jean Kennedy, she met the young, rather gangly, and self-conscious runt of the Kennedy clan, Robert.

By the time Bobby Kennedy decided to run for president in 1968, the household at Hickory Hill had become more Skakel than Kennedy. Children wandered in at all hours to demand meals from cooks who often lasted no more than a week. Animals, including Bobby junior’s huge turtle from Kenya, wandered about freely, leaving their droppings. One guest recalls seeing rats in the kitchen—and not just once. No mother, to be sure, could endure a more horrible trial than the brutal murder of her husband and the subsequent responsibility of being a single parent to 11 children ranging in age from infancy to 17. And with the older boys in early adolescence, the challenge sometimes seemed to get the better of her. Bobby and David, in particular, were drawn to drugs. Other siblings seemed merely like loose electrons. “Hickory Hill was pretty active, all right,” recalls a friend of that time. “Nobody ever picked anything up, and it was assumed that no one should. It was almost like if you picked things up you were a weak personality. Even for the little kids, there was no supervision.” Brad Blank, a close friend of the four youngest R.F.K.’s in Hyannis Port, offers a more sanguine view of that household, including a schedule of well-planned activities—tennis at 9, sailing at ll, and a full baseball game every day with 18 players at 3. “Dinner was promptly at seven,” he adds. “Ethel would sit at the head of the table, and Joe, or whoever the eldest one was, would sit at the other. There was lots of conversation, and no lack of attention from their mother. What I remember is reading Richie Rich comics and all of us thinking, Gee, we’d like to be Richie Rich.” By then, however, Joe had been at the wheel of a Jeep on Nantucket which overturned on a joyride, paralyzing his brother David’s Hyannis girlfriend, Pam Kelly. And Bobby junior had had enough drug trouble for his mother to decide that he should spend his senior year of high school boarding at the home of a family friend, Joey Brode, a schoolteacher. “He was magnetic but withdrawn. Shy like a wild animal,” Brode recalls. “But he had the ability to touch the spirit of others, because he had an immense spirit himself. He reminded me of the kind of person in a primitive tribe that would have been a shaman.” Not everything went wrong. During the 70s and 80s, the older kids got through college. Joe married Sheila Rauch. Bobby graduated from the University of Virginia School of Law—like his father and uncle Ted before him—and married Emily Black, a classmate. Michael started a rafting company in Maine, inspired by the annual July 4 rafting trips his father had organized for family and friends on various western rivers, and married Victoria Gifford, whose father, Frank, had for a while dated Ethel—though probably not seriously since Ethel remained fiercely loyal to Bobby’s memory years after his death. During those years, too, Kathleen and Courtney married. Most, when they married, were in their early 20s.

But in April 1984, David, the son whose vivid premonitions of his father’s murder after the shooting of the president had come true, and from whose death he had never recovered, died of a drug overdose in a Florida hotel room. One longtime family friend partly blames David Horowitz and Peter Collier, whose book The Kennedys: An American Drama, published that year, addressed at length the third generation’s most painful period. “Horowitz snorted cocaine with David and then brought out the ax later,” the friend says. Coaxed into candor by the drug bond, the friend claims, David emerged in the account as the sibling most willing to spill secrets. “David was alive when a pre-publication excerpt appeared in Playboy with some gruesome stories,” the friend recalls. “So he got phone calls from siblings saying ‘Nice work.’ ” By the time the book appeared, David was dead. “And that fucking book,” says the friend, “which was so distorted, has become the main clip, the frame of reference, for all stories since.” “I did not do drugs with David,” Horowitz counters. “It was Bobby who did drugs first, at 13, and got David hooked.” Horowitz says he made a deal with Bobby, who introduced him to the family, not to mention Bobby’s own drug use in the book—a pact Bobby presumed to include his drug taking with Lem Billings, the old family friend who had become a sort of surrogate father to several of the young R.F.K.’s. But when Bobby was arrested for heroin possession in late 1983, Horowitz believed that the issue was now public, so all the private drug use he’d witnessed could be put in the book. Dubious as Horowitz’s rationale may seem, the portrait of drug use among the children was clearly accurate. If one R.F.K. succumbed to it, however, another recovered with dramatic results.

The founders of this association began with a simple truth,” declares the rangy, earnest speaker to the crowd gathered on the grounds of a Hudson River estate called Boscobel, “that the Constitution says the people of New York have a right to use the river.” In the most visceral sense, the speaker needs no introduction: at 43, Bobby Kennedy Jr. looks uncannily like his father. The dark, brooding magnetism Bobby radiated at 18 has only deepened, though now he possesses the added confidence of a man who has figured out what he wants to do—and done it. As senior prosecuting attorney for Riverkeeper, a conservationist organization based in Garrison, New York, Bobby pursues polluters in court. At any given time he has about 40 cases pending, a load somewhat alleviated by law students at the Pace Environmental Litigation Clinic, where he teaches; the students do legal research for Riverkeeper as part of their education. John Cronin, the organization’s director, who actually patrols the Hudson, says Kennedy and the Pace clinic have helped collect more than $200 million in settlements in just 10 years, money that has gone mostly to undo damage and helped transform the Hudson from direly polluted to clean enough for swimming. Three other law schools have created clinics like Pace’s to work with Riverkeeper spin-offs; in all, nearly a score of other Riverkeeper programs have been started in the U.S., each based on the Hudson model. Bobby also works as senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council (N.R.D.C.). At this ninth annual fund-raiser, hundreds have shown up to picnic on Boscobel’s lawn overlooking the Hudson. One of them is Bobby’s mother, who stands off to the side listening as her son rolls on with hortatory fervor. When he’s done, he coaxes her to the microphone amid a round of applause. “Mom,” he says, “you want to say something?” Ethel, in jeans and a blue shirt, with a visored cap that has “Home Boy Industries” emblazoned on it, shakes her head no but whispers something into his ear. Bobby turns back to the crowd. “My mom says, ‘Get off and give the microphone to someone else.’ ” In nearby Mount Kisco the next morning, Bobby ushers me into the sunroom of the large white Colonial house where he lives with his second wife, architect Mary Richardson—the same Mary Richardson who was present when Kerry jumped out of a dorm window at Brown, and who has known Bobby since high school—and their three children. The room is filled with souvenirs of jungle trips and rafting expeditions: Indian bows and arrows, animal skulls, framed butterflies, a huge stuffed turtle—the one he grew up with at Hickory Hill. It was in 1984, to fulfill the community-service requirement that was part of his sentencing, that Bobby met with John Adams and Ross Sandler of the N.R.D.C. “I asked them if they had anything that I could do,” he says. “They didn’t actually hire me for N.R.D.C. then.” But Adams knew that a small group called the Hudson River Fishermen’s Association—genesis of Riverkeeper—had just won a large settlement from Con Edison for pollution, and that part of it was being used to start an environmental-advocacy center. “They needed somebody to put that whole thing together. And so I said that I would do that.” Not long after, Alec Wilkinson of The New Yorker arrived to do a story on Riverkeeper, as it was soon called. “They were in a farmhouse, just John [Cronin] and Bobby; it was the equivalent of ending up with a law practice in Deep Fork, South Dakota,” Wilkinson recalls. To amuse himself, Bobby indulged in feats of derring-do, and took Wilkinson along. “One of the most terrifying nights of my life was lobster diving with him on Long Island Sound, somewhere up in Connecticut,” Wilkinson says. At midnight, Bobby, Wilkinson, and a half-dozen others set out in a Boston Whaler. “I only went down about 10 feet. The rest went way below. They come back to the surface; they’ve got dozens of lobsters. As we start back, a storm comes in, and suddenly there’s thunder and lightning. I’m huddled on the floor of the boat. And Bobby is sitting like George Washington on the Delaware. I asked, very casually, ‘Could we get hit?’ ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘I got hit in my sailboat in Hyannis. It hit the mast, and it was like a bomb going off. Threw us into the water.’ He didn’t flinch.” Stories of Bobby’s reckless courage abound: jumping 10 feet from one rooftop to another at Harvard, dodging machine-gun bullets while skiing in Chile, rafting several of South America’s wildest rivers. Over the years, he has shown another brand of courage as well: clean and sober since 1983, he has, according to friends, helped literally dozens of addicts join and stay with A.A. “The A.A. reliance on a higher being has saved his life, he feels,” says a friend. “And those of several of his relatives. For him, it plays into a renewed Catholicism.”

From time to time, Bobby’s name is bruited about for a political candidacy. Right now, he says meaningfully, he just lives one day at a time. Three of his five brothers, however, seem to have shucked political expectations altogether. By chance or not, none of the three has ever been remotely connected to a Kennedy scandal. In Chicago, Christopher Kennedy, 34, presides over day-to-day operations at the Merchandise Mart, the colossal Art Deco building his grandfather Joe Kennedy bought for a song back in 1945. Inside the Mart, shoppers walk the halls of what seems a prehistoric mall, or ride the elevators up to the myriad trade showrooms on the upper floors. Christopher’s office has the requisite Kennedy memorabilia, including a framed photograph of his grandfather, to whom, upon closer inspection, Christopher bears a strong resemblance. “Basically, I go to meetings,” Christopher says with a boyish grin. That’s not quite it: he oversees a fast-growing number of national trade shows in fashion and design which have helped revitalize the Mart. Within the family, he’s seen as his generation’s Steve Smith, who managed the Kennedys’ financial affairs. It was Smith, in fact, who gave Christopher a job here a decade ago while he waited for his prospective bride to graduate from Northwestern Law School. Somehow, he just never left. Of all the siblings, only Christopher seems to have jumped foursquare into business—less haunted, perhaps, by his father’s admonitions. Moving away from the family’s East Coast enclaves, he suggests, may have been a factor. “I got a little more perspective on what’s going on,” he says, “and sort of came to the conclusion that I’d like to provide my children with the same sort of opportunities that I had. And that if they wanted to run for office, or wanted to give their lives to a not-for-profit, that they were going to need certain resources, everything from financial to contacts, and a sort of a stable home environment—all of those things. And I’d be very satisfied if I could provide those things to my children over the long haul.” The Midwest may have worked another change on Christopher: he’s more open and relaxed than his brothers. Also more self-deprecating: capitalist tool though he may be, he has worked hard to expand Chicago’s Food Depository, which allocates surplus food to the poor, and to involve the Mart in other charitable projects. And about his siblings he seems, to a stranger, more reflective. Though there were, for example, the “big kids” and the “little kids,” Christopher, as one of the latter, never felt a generation gap. Different passions united different siblings. “Like, my little sister, Rory, loves to horseback-ride. Max and Douglas and I never rode, because Max is allergic to horses.… Doug is ambivalent, and I can barely hold on to a frigging horse. Right? Max and I and Joe love to sail. Joe can’t really ski anymore”—bad knees—“but Michael and Max and I do that.… Yet Joe and I like to bike-ride, and probably nobody else does that.” In the Mart’s cavernous basement, Christopher extricates two bikes from a storeroom. Soon we’re pedaling at a brisk pace along the lakefront as Christopher calls out the sights: he is, as it happens, the city’s new chairman of tourism and conventions. Eighteen miles later, we reach the North Shore town where he and his attractive wife, Sheila—whose own large Irish-Catholic family is still rooted nearby—lead their un-Kennedyesque midwestern life. In the living room, again, are the Kennedy pictures, most poignant among them one of Bobby senior playing in the grass with Christopher as a toddler; he was not quite five when his father was killed. Out in the backyard is the present-day chaos their own three children cause: bats, balls, and lots of brightly colored plastic. The scene is so relaxed, so normal. Yet why is it that when something goes wrong with Kennedys the reaction seems so abnormal: that circling of the wagons, that blindness to the moral ramifications of what has occurred? “That may be true from an outsider’s view,” Chris says. “As an insider, I can tell you that counted among the Kennedys’ most trusted allies are people like [the child psychologist] Robert Coles or clergy like Father Jerry Creeden … and others who can provide some serious insight as to the motivations that cause some of us to be caught in positions they don’t want to be in. And there’s at least 8 or 9 members of the 28 [cousins] who are involved in A.A. meetings, daily—or their spouses. And clearly a number of them spent time in rehab clinics around the country. And there’s a fair number who have sought consultive advice from doctors and psychiatrists. “The combination of those,” he adds, “is an almost unparalleled examination into the forces that affect our lives, a much more serious one than you could imagine. It’s done individually, it’s done as a group, and it’s almost … endless.”

Three thousand miles from Hickory Hill and Hyannis Port, Max Kennedy, 32, reluctantly meets me for lunch in Santa Monica at the Ivy at the Shore. As if for protection, he brings his wife, Victoria, a cool, leggy academic who taught a course last year at Harvard for Robert Coles. The Boston scandals notwithstanding, R.F.K.’s sons have, without exception, married smart, strong women, very un-swinish choices indeed. He chose his first job, Max explains, because when he was at the University of Virginia School of Law, in fine family tradition, a professor observed that the Philadelphia district attorney’s office tried more cases than any other in the country. “In New York they’ll plead out more than 80 percent of the cases,” the professor said. “And in Philadelphia they try about 85 percent of them.” Assigned to juvenile crime, Max found that he could try all the cases he liked—and, like most prosecutors, win the vast majority of them. The only problem was that most juvenile offenders were back on the street the next day. “A typical case I had was one where the police received a radio call of a theft in progress half a block from a crackhouse,” Max says. “They saw a man getting out of a car, [and] the thing that struck them was that he was wearing a Halloween mask and it was late November.” It turned out that he had an arsenal under his coat. “He was going to shoot up the crackhouse; he even had surgical gloves on to go through the bodies for money. If he were an adult, he’d be facing 20 years in prison. But he was sixteen and a half years old: he was released that day. That was very frustrating.” So Max found himself weighing a career change. In September he will start working toward a business degree at U.C.L.A.; meanwhile, he is producing a book based on writings his father admired, which will be published by Harcourt Brace next spring. “I’ve looked at my friends who have gone into private-sector careers who have been successful,” he says, “and to be quite frank, the ones who are creating businesses are building more jobs than all these poverty programs put together.” Like his brothers, Max is reluctant to say anything about Joe’s and Michael’s problems. Instead, I ask what he admires about them. “Joe’s leadership skills are just … to me they’re just staggering. The way that his presence is so strongly felt in a room. Also, he’s the most fun person to go fishing with that you could ever imagine.” As for Michael, says Max, he is, among other things, “an unbelievably good athlete. I guess I could give you an example, which is that I had to sail a boat from Boston to Hyannis Port last December. And there was kind of a nor’easter blowing.… I was thinking, God, I’m scared to make this trip.” So Max called Michael to ask if he’d go with him. “And I thought if he would come I would go from really fearful about the trip to no fear at all. Unfortunately,” Max adds with a laugh, “Michael couldn’t come. I had a crew, but … if I’d just had him and nobody else, I’d have had no fear.”

Of the three low-profile brothers, Douglas, 30, has the most unexpected job for a Kennedy: he’s a journalist. Greater ironies lie in the fact that he has worked for two tabloids owned by Rupert Murdoch. Both the Boston Herald and the New York Post have always been tough on Kennedys, and Murdoch is a bitter enemy of Senator Ted Kennedy, who personally tried to block the Australian magnate from buying the Post. Yet working for Murdoch makes Doug one of the few R.F.K.’s who can say they have succeeded without any family help—which may be the point. And from all accounts he’s done well. “Doug did some nice stories for us,” recalls Andrew Gully, the *Herald’*s managing editor for news. “He just worked freelance, but he was good.” One day, however, an invitation to a party for his brother Joe came to the office addressed to Douglas; when one of the reporters opened it and ran the news in a gossip column, Douglas quit. He went to the Post, where one editor remembers him as “a born tabloid reporter—real hungry, real ambitious.” But when the Post ran an article about The Other Mrs. Kennedy, Doug quit there too. Now he’s at another Murdoch operation, Fox News television. Of all the R.F.K.’s, Douglas—the journalist—is the only one who sounds angry when I call. “I have no interest in participating in that kind of story,” he snaps. “You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. But you’ve got your conscience to answer to, is all.”

Conscience is the animating factor behind the drama in Boston and its aftermath: lack of it, apparently, on brother Michael’s part, and conscience somewhat opportunistically rediscovered on Joe’s. “I come before you today to talk with you about what I see as some of the great issues before our state,” Joe says from the podium at the Salem convention. “But before I do that, there are some other issues that we need to talk about.” The vast, darkened arena grows suddenly silent: this is the moment all have been waiting for. “I had a marriage … that didn’t work out,” Joe says slowly. “I can’t tell you, I can’t put into words, how sorry I am about that. I said things that I wish I’d never said. And I did things that I wish I’d never done. I’ve told you, I’ve told Sheila and everyone who cares, how sorry I am. Sheila is the mother of my two sons, and I respect whatever way she chooses to handle these issues. Those two boys are the most important thing in my life. “On the matter of my brother, I am so terribly sorry, so very sorry for what has happened to the Verrochi family [the baby-sitter’s family]. I extend to them the deepest apology I can summon. I love my brother very much, I will always love my brother, and I will stand with my brother. “In closing on these issues, I’ve said I view these as private and personal matters. Sometimes in my family it doesn’t always work out that way. But that’s the way I view it. And I want to thank you for respecting that wish.” The room bursts into thunderous applause, though in coverage as far away as Los Angeles reactions will be sharply mixed. Among women especially, the consensus will be that Joe still just doesn’t get it. Where, after all, is the acknowledgment that wives deserve better than to be bullied into annulments, and that teenage girls may get emotionally scarred by sleeping with older, married men? Where is the recognition that Michael, even if the girl was of age, must be rebuked and make amends? Only the martyrish “I will stand with my brother.” Omertà, Irish-American-style. Sheila Rauch, who reportedly now communicates with her ex-husband only by fax, thinks nevertheless that the way the press has linked the Joe and Michael stories is somewhat inaccurate. The link is how Kennedy men treat women. But, says Rauch, “I don’t think Joe is so much anti-woman as he is tough when he wants something.” She laughs, a little bitterly. “Men who are in his way get treated the same way. My vulnerability to it was different, because I was under the assumption we were married.” Still, she says, “my motivation [for writing the book] had absolutely nothing to do with Joe at all. I was incredibly moved by what women in the country told me.… Their faith had enabled them to flourish and find joy in difficult circumstances. Then when things fell apart, to have that same institution desert them is what I wanted to underscore.” Has she been distressed, I ask, at how the press played up the few passages about her marriage and Joe? “Political reporters pulled the pieces out about Joe,” she says calmly. “That’s their job; I understand that.” No thought, in hindsight, that some of the brushstrokes might have been too harsh? “I think I chose my words in the book very carefully,” Rauch says.

Joe and Michael, says a longtime family friend, are intriguing counterparts. Joe is like his mother: high-energy, gregarious, with Skakel features. Also, like Ethel, fierce when provoked. Joe’s temper, remarked upon for a decade by the Boston press, is said by his handlers to have abated, but as one union leader who recently experienced a scathing verbal attack from him in front of colleagues says, Joe is, at the least, a headstrong guy. As for Michael, says the family friend, “Ethel always felt that he was a lot like Bobby. Very bright, quick.” Also quiet and coolheaded, with some of his father’s looks. According to another family friend, the two brothers are especially competitive among a competitive group. “They resent each other because neither gets what the other does. Michael didn’t get to run for Congress; Joe did. Joe, on the other hand, resents Michael because Michael made money, while Joe never did.” Often said to be a slow learner, Joe did poorly in school. At the suggestion of former John F. Kennedy speechwriter Richard Goodwin in 1979, however, he started the socially responsible fuel company called Citizens Energy Corporation (C.E.C.), and seemed to find himself in business. Wielding Kennedy charisma, Joe persuaded foreign oil companies to sell him modest allotments of crude, had refineries process the fuel and sell all the products except for heating oil, and then used the profits to subsidize sales of cut-rate heating oil to low-income families. C.E.C. was small enough to amuse the big producers, yet it did offer some social benefit and, as important, provided Joe with a story to tell when he ran for Congress six years later. During Joe’s campaign, says a family friend, “someone approached Michael for a potential run for lieutenant governor,” but Ethel put her foot down. “Ethel said, ‘This is Joe’s time,’ very much in the tradition of the second generation.” Instead, Michael took over Citizens Energy and began to expand the company with an entrepreneurial flair that Joe had seemed to lack. Before long, C.E.C. had sprouted for-profit offshoots, not only in oil but also in mail-service pharmaceuticals and the brokering of electricity. Michael benefited accordingly: in 1993 his reported compensation would exceed $680,000, before dropping to $313,000 in 1995. By then Michael had helped found Stop Handgun Violence, an organization which mounted a national campaign of ads and lobbying efforts highlighting the youngest victims of handgun deaths. At C.E.C. he had initiated social programs for a wide range of the needy, from low-cost drugs for aids patients to small-business loans for African women. Reportedly, he had also begun sleeping with the daughter of Paul Verrochi, a longtime Kennedy supporter, prominent businessman, neighbor in the Boston suburb of Cohasset, and, in 1996, a C.E.C. board member.

‘Michael and Vicki have had a complicated marriage,” observes a family friend. They met when Michael was 16 and Vicki 15—the early Kennedy mating dance—and Michael, says the friend, “was crazy” about her. By the time they married, according to the friend, Vicki’s view of men had been soured by her father, Frank Gifford, who had left her mother when Vicki was 18, married a second wife, whom Vicki came to like, and then left her to marry the now famous Kathie Lee. “So Vicki was always distrustful of men, and it’s like … a self-fulfilling prophecy. They never seemed to have common goals. Vicki hated politics. Why marry a Kennedy?” When Vicki reportedly learned of Michael’s interest in the baby-sitter, in 1995, he blamed alcohol and enlisted in a rehab program. That, suggests the family friend, was overkill on Michael’s part, an effort at atonement. “Michael’s not an alcoholic!” By last fall, however, Michael’s affair with the baby-sitter had become common knowledge among his friends, including the Verrochis. And on November 7, in response to what a family spokesperson terms “disturbing news,” June Verrochi, the baby-sitter’s mother, climbed out onto a precarious part of her roof in a possible suicide bid that forced a rescue by local firemen and police. (A spokesperson for the Verrochis denied that suicide was the motive.) In hindsight, the strangest detail in press reports of that incident was that Michael Skakel had been on the scene and accompanied Mrs. Verrochi to the hospital.

On April 25, the day The Boston Globe broke the baby-sitter story, probably few readers stopped to consider how curious it was that such a story should rest entirely on anonymous sources. How, that is, could the story have reached the press when neither the Kennedys nor the Verrochis seemed to wish it to? The Verrochis, after all, refused in subsequent weeks to press charges lest their daughter be subjected to a trial and media circus, and successfully managed to keep her hidden from journalists. Clearly, though, for such an incendiary story the Globe needed more than just neighbors who spoke of seeing Michael and the baby-sitter around town. Among the Kennedys and their friends, the story that began to circulate was that Michael had been betrayed by his Citizens Energy colleague and cousin, Michael Skakel. Skakel, whose father, Rushton Skakel, is one of Ethel Kennedy’s brothers, often skied with Michael as the two grew up, and is said to be an outstanding downhill racer. His work history, until C.E.C., was less impressive. He blew off college until his early 30s, then graduated from Curry College, a small private institution in Milton, Massachusetts, with a program for students with learning disabilities. In April 1994, he became Michael Kennedy’s driver as Kennedy managed his uncle Ted’s most recent senatorial race, then spent less than a year at a Boston real-estate company, R. M. Bradley, before going to C.E.C. to work on international programs. The subtext is that Skakel is, as family members acknowledge, a recovering alcoholic who went to his first rehab clinic as a teenager—at an institution in Maine where he was reportedly beaten, which badly exacerbated his problems. He has, however, remained clean and sober for some time, family members say, and is active in 12-step programs. Indeed, his desire to help others in trouble is what seems to have led him to play a key role in the baby-sitter mess. Skakel apparently became a confidant of the baby-sitter’s as early as 1994. When he learned that her relationship with Michael Kennedy had become a romantic one, he tried to discourage it, but without success: neither Michael nor his siblings seemed to feel a Skakel had any business telling a Kennedy what to do. Whether or not he had a hand in disclosing the affair to the girl’s parents late last summer, he clearly found a more receptive audience in the Verrochis for his diplomatic efforts. According to one Kennedy-camp source, Skakel also began sharing details of the growing drama with friends in A.A. Then, curiously, he started lobbying Citizens Energy for a “settlement” by which, the Herald later reported, he would go freelance for three years for $250,000. (A C.E.C. spokesperson denies that such settlement talks took place.) Was he, perhaps, demanding hush money in return for not divulging details of the affair? A hardball tactic like that might seem implausible for an advocate of 12-step programs who is, as one Kennedy relative puts it, “the sweetest human being that you have ever met,” except that this would not be the first murky situation to which Michael Skakel was linked. The first was the 1975 murder of Martha Moxley in Greenwich, Connecticut.

The Moxley murder, dramatized in Dominick Dunne’s best-selling novel A Season in Purgatory, remains unsolved more than 20 years after the discovery of the body of 15-year-old Martha, bludgeoned to death with a golf club, in a yard adjacent to her home. Martha had been out the evening she died in a van full of teenagers, including Michael Skakel and a brother, Tommy. Tommy Skakel’s alibi proved to be very weak, but no one was charged with the crime. In response to angry mutterings over the years that a Skakel had gotten away with murder because of his family’s influence, in 1992 Rushton Skakel hired a team of private investigators to re-examine the case. Assurances were given that the results would prove that another youth was guilty, and that the results would be made available. Instead, after receiving the reports, Skakel lawyers held on to them and reminded the investigators of their confidentiality agreement. Somehow, copies leaked to Newsday reporter Leonard Levitt. The investigators, Levitt wrote, felt both Tommy and Michael were suspects, because both had changed their original stories. Both brothers have hotly asserted their innocence. “They continue to blame the authorities for making them look guilty,” says Detective Frank Garr. “Yet they refuse to answer questions! How could they say, ‘No, I’m not going to take the time to help you find the person who killed that girl’?” One Kennedy-camp source points out that forensic studies indicated that the murderer was left-handed. Michael is reportedly right-handed. As for the “settlement,” says the source, there is a reasonable explanation. Citizens Energy had been downsizing: selling off several of its for-profit offshoots, most recently an electricity-brokering operation started with Lehman Brothers that employed 50 people. “At one point [C.E.C.] was down to six jobs in the office,” says the source. “So Michael Skakel got tied up in this idea that he might lose his job.… He has a new house in Cohasset, a mortgage, a wife—he’d rearranged his life.” And with Skakel’s work history as lightweight as it was, another job would be hard to find. That was when, as the source says, “he began talking to all sorts of people.” But even if Skakel was enough of a loose cannon to talk to the Globe about Michael Kennedy and the baby-sitter, he could not have been the only source. The telltale clue is the *Globe’*s firm policy of not publishing the names of alleged sex-crime victims without their family’s permission. The April 25 story describes the girl in question as the under-age daughter of June and Paul Verrochi. The Verrochis, despite their claim of wanting to avoid publicity that might further hurt their daughter, would seem to have cooperated.

Neighbors in Cohasset, Paul Verrochi and Michael Kennedy were also close friends. “Paul and Michael saw each other a hell of a lot, even before Michael bought the big house in Cohasset,” confirms one friend. The Verrochi daughter began baby-sitting for Michael and Vicki Kennedy when she was 14 or younger, and, as the Herald has reported with glee, the daughter accompanied Michael and various Kennedy children on several family rafting trips that included many friends and relatives but not, oddly enough, Victoria Kennedy. No one in the Kennedy clan—relatives, friends, lawyers—is denying that Michael and the Verrochi girl slept together, or is suggesting that the affair was morally defensible. But Michael Kennedy’s lawyer Tom Dwyer strongly denies that an illicit relationship occurred before the Verrochi girl was 16—the legal age in Massachusetts—as do many Kennedy friends. Moreover, Michael recently claimed to have passed a lie-detector test in which questions about the girl’s age were asked. Critics devalue tests arranged, as this one was, by a client’s own lawyer; stress levels are presumably lower when the client knows that embarrassing results won’t go beyond his lawyer’s office. But the news may have had a psychological effect on Paul Verrochi. Initially, says one Kennedy source, Paul Verrochi was willing to focus his ire on Michael alone. But Michael appeared unfazed enough to attempt to visit the Verrochi girl at least once that fall at Boston University, where she had enrolled as a freshman. When Verrochi sent an emissary to Joe to urge the congressman to get involved, the emissary was rebuffed. “Joe didn’t understand it was Verrochi asking for the meeting,” says the Kennedy source. “He thought it was [the emissary] trying to insinuate himself.… Joe said, ‘Forget about it.’ So [the emissary] goes back to Verrochi and says, ‘Joe says, “Fuck you.”’ Then Verrochi decides to get Joe, too.” According to one source, the person who may have first contacted the press was one of Michael Skakel’s friends from A.A. “He admitted to me he did,” says this source. But both Skakel and Verrochi would have been able to corroborate the story. For the Globe, the most critical element was the age of the baby-sitter when she began sleeping with Michael Kennedy. Only if she were under-age—and the affair a crime—would the story be front-page news. Otherwise, it was a gossip item. “The daughter [went] back and forth on the story,” says a closely placed source. “At one point … [she] was saying the relationship began when she was 16, because she thought that that was illegal. Then they found out that was the age of consent. Then she said, ‘Maybe it happened once before my birthday.’ ” Her 16th birthday, in fact, was in January 1994. In a mid-June meeting with District Attorney Jeffrey Locke, Michael Skakel apparently repeated a story he said the baby-sitter had told him: that she had had under-age sex with Michael Kennedy several times, including the night of a rock concert in September 1993. Kennedy sources say that’s simply not true. As for the suggestion that she may have been as young as 14 when the affair began, these sources say, that could only have been willful misrepresentation. A family spokesperson for the Verrochis says that Paul Verrochi has never spoken about his daughter to the press on or off the record. He’s a busy and very successful executive, the spokesperson observes—American Medical Response, Inc., the network of local ambulance companies he built into a national powerhouse, was recently sold to a Canadian outfit, Laidlaw, Inc., for $1.1 billion—who has delegated all dealings concerning the case to his lawyers and representatives. But according to one closely placed source, the Verrochi camp conducted a campaign of ongoing leaks to keep the scandal in the papers as a way of punishing both Michael and Joe Kennedy. Verrochi says he never held any other Kennedy responsible for Michael’s conduct. As for the suggestion that the Verrochis may have misrepresented their daughter’s age at the outset of the affair, Verrochi’s spokesperson responds on his behalf, “He has no reason to doubt that it became a sexual relationship when his daughter was 14. Therefore, he did not downwardly revise the estimate.” His daughter, he adds, did not give conflicting versions of her age in her account. Verrochi clearly seems to have the upper hand. “What he’s communicated to attorneys,” says one source, “is that if Michael makes any exculpatory statements he’s going to go forward with the prosecution. If he does, he won’t win, but Joe will be destroyed.” The threat of an investigation that would drag on through Joe’s gubernatorial campaign—that, at core, is what the baby-sitter scandal has come to be about. The Verrochis say that if there is any attempt to disparage their daughter or interfere with her in an unacceptable way, such action will be met with severe legal consequences.

Michael Kennedy has remained mum since the baby-sitter scandal began—neither acknowledging that the affair took place nor denying that the baby-sitter was under-age. Given how outraged the girl’s father is, he must fear that even a public apology for sleeping with her at 16 would seem exculpatory. The surprise is that Joe, who seems to be stepping up his political career, is still so press-shy. “He feels he’s said all he wants to say on those subjects,” the congressman’s press man avers when I pursue an interview in the days following his mea culpa speech. Fine, then: no questions about annulment or Michael’s situation. “What sort of questions would you ask?” demands the press man. Exasperated, I lob a few: What was it like being the eldest son in your family after your father died? Why did you decide to run for Congress in 1986? What are you proudest of having achieved there? Why do you want to be governor next year? Fluffy softballs, every one. “I’ll get back to you,” the press man says. Two days later comes the reply: the congressman declines. The Kennedy who hopes to be governor in the state his family has dominated politically for nearly half a century prefers not to answer pre-set questions about himself with a reporter whom six of his siblings have met and judged harmless enough. On Thursday, June 19, Joe finally appears on Good Morning America to declare that he certainly doesn’t condone his brother’s “bad behavior.” The statement seems a sop to all who found his Salem apology inadequate, but it may be more intended to satisfy one Massachusetts resident in particular. The next day comes the statement from Robert Popeo, Paul Verrochi’s lawyer, that the Kennedys have been waiting for. After a week of stirring the pot with the possibility that the Verrochis’ daughter might change her mind and cooperate with Jeffrey Locke’s investigation—mere posturing for dramatic effect and further punishment, says one Kennedy-camp source—Popeo acknowledges that his clients have chosen not to have their daughter bring suit. “Michael Kennedy has caused us great pain and suffering by his outrageous conduct and his breach of the trust we placed in him as a neighbor and friend,” the Verrochis’ statement goes on to say. “Although our natural response is to seek justice, our daughter’s health and well-being are our paramount concerns and cannot be further jeopardized.” The statement, of course, implies that a crime has been committed, but the Kennedys, for all their vaunted power, cannot even make that point in public for fear of inspiring Verrochi to bring suit after all. As for Jeffrey Locke, he’s left scrounging around for willing witnesses—not a very large group—who may tell him enough to inspire the convening of a grand jury, with the aim of having the state charge Kennedy in court. But the Verrochis’ request in their statement that he let the investigation drop is all the political cover he needs to do just that.