Second J.F.K. looks set to move into political spotlight

Press, 4 April 1989, Page 12

Second J.F.K. looks set to move into political spotlight

lan Ball, in New York for the ‘Daily Telegraph,’ te

watches the emergence of the President’s son

THERE IS always, it seems, another Kennedy waitiqg in the wings. The very week the surging political career of Robert Kennedy’s eldest son, Joseph Kennedy 11, unexpectedly stalled in marital disharmony, JFK’s son, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, jun., found himself solidly — and more than a bit selfconsciously — in the public spotlight The man most of us still think of as "John-John” — the barekneed toddler in English-tailored blue overcoat giving that heart-> wrenching last salute as his father’s funeral cortege passed; by on a chilly Washington morning 26 winters ago — is now 28,. The most private of the Ken-' nedys (if one excludes ■ his? mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis) has found that life for a* Kennedy male in full maturity is? almost pre-ordained: a public role or obscurity. - -The slain president’s son is • about to become one of more than 300 assistant prosecutors on the staff of Manhattan District 1 Attorney Robert. Morgenthau/Modest salary (SNZSO,OOO a year), long hours that cut into the partying life, heavy caseloads and the sort; of legal drudgery few young and celebrated millionaires would accept.

Last summer at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, J.F.K- jun. took a national stage as “a Kennedy” for the first time, his political coming-out. It was a walk-on part, a brief speech to introduce Uncle Ted — Senator Edward Kennedy; ; ■ but suddenly ail America had an updated mental picture to file alongside that of three-year-old "“John-John” in the blue coat. Michael Gross, a keen student of the Kennedys, wrote this week of “perhaps the most famous presidential child of the century transformed into the living embodiment of a nation’s not-quite-impossible dream: that it will wake up one morning with another J.F.K. in the White House.” Those liberal diehards who once may have pinned those same fantasies on the pudgy form of Uncle Ted had only to see how the Senate dealt with the wine-and-women issues swirling around John Tower to realise how political mores have changed and how pointless it was to promote the surviving Kennedy brother as a presidential possibility in the Nineties. Their back-up position was always “Bobby’s boy” — Congressman Joseph Kennedy, son of the late Senator Robert Kennedy, and, at 36, the eldest male in the rising generation of politically ambitious Kennedys. Then, this month, came the news that shocked Irish Boston, political Washington and New York’s Smart Set: “Bobby’s boy” and his wife, Sheila, were separating after 10 years of marriage and “after long and intense efforts to find another course.”

The poiitlcai“coroiiary .was the congressman’s announcement that he was/ putting his career “oh hold,” at least-untll his young twin sons afe-tilder. An energetic and effective campaigner Who brought to the hustings much of the charisma of the two slain Kennedys, his father and his uncle, Joseph Kennedy had seemed confidently on the launch pad-to real political power. Until; his withdrawal from the race, tie had been the favourite to succeed retiring Michael Dukakis next year as governor of Kennedy-loving Massachusetts. All of which suddenly made infinitely more incandescent the probing spotlight on “J.F.K.’s boy.” ; The paparazzi, of course, have followed him since his .playpen days, through;; "prep-school; pranks, higji jinfe'at cialegejhhd ; seripus dating, in tiis early twenties with such women as--Daryl Hannah, Molly Ringwald, Monaco’s Princess Stephanie, Brobk Shields and even Madonna.

i ' •«.<♦ ;With his Kennedy iSnlto,/. Rambo chest, bulging biceps and.. carefully tousled brown hair, "tie is what - , the residents; tit; tiny / J worldly girls’-school dorm would agree is ' a “gorgeous hUlk.” “People” magazine last year put him oh its cover and acclaimed him Sexiest Man Alive. A new picture of him on page one sells the supermarket tabloids as briskly as covers on Elizabeth Taylor or “Miami Vice’s” Don Johnson. Yet there is far more to*J.F.K. jun., than tabloid celebrity. He genuinely loathes publicity. Jn . spite of hundreds of requests, n e has given only one interview in his life — and that fairly noncommittal.. I have seen him wince several times lately.*when he lends his name for a>gddd /(cause anAJlje, occasion is alFtigt/ ■ /wrecked-/^a-couple of ■/ literally /frenzied' swtx|jMs.j , He has hard of late to lead an ordinary life within an extraordinary family. To some extent, this has meant distancing himself from some of the other

Kennedy cousins of his genera- . tion. //in his profile on J.F.K. jun., ■ Gtoss pointed up this isolation within the dynasty. To a family friend, some of the cousins were “monsters — they might as well have the name emblazoned on their sleeves.” The writer found that John jun., does share, however, many traits with his assassinated father: his wit, his love of life, his ability to get along with all types — “and people want to believe he shares even more.” “Like his father (and like his mother’s father, Black Jack Bouvier, who had an affair on his honeymoon), John’s got serious sex appeal,” said Gross. He quoted an older friend of the family as confiding: “Kennedy men are intensely, highly sexed. Sphere’s, a lot of activity. But the 'they marry are solid gold. They need both and they ■get iP'-Why not have the cream of the crop?” For the past four years, the: potential “cream” has been the

daughter of a Manhattan businessman, a comely, vivacious and moderately successful stage and television actress named Christina Haag. They met at a New York party. He lives alone in a twobedroom flat in a newly gentrified area of Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Miss Haag has an apartment nearby. To other residents, he is an unexceptional neighbour, slipping out early for a health-food breakfast in a neighbourhood restaurant and then cycling 6km to New York University in Greenwich Village where he is completing his third and final year of law studies. In his spare ■ time, he works with blacks and underprivileged children and, on environmental issues. j It is air a far cry from the sumptuous life he knew as a child on Skorpios as Aristotle Onassis’s stepson. His only pub-lic-service interest now is criminal law. not impressing an electorate. ; No-one is betting, however, that those priorities will remain fixed.