The Kennedy Legend Deserves to Fade Away

C amelot has seen better days. No, not the legendary court of King Arthur, which supposedly faded away after its ruler departed to Avalon. Rather, “Camelot” as a shorthand for another legend: that of the Kennedy family in American politics. That the future hopes for relevance of this once-dominant political dynasty may now reside in a 31-year-old self-described “silly goose” who briefly addressed the Democratic National Convention speaks to its present fortunes. It also ought to make us wonder how credible the Kennedy myth ever really was.

We owe the association of Arthurian legend with Kennedy politics to Jacqueline Bouvier, the widow of slain president John F. Kennedy. The understandably grief-stricken Jackie impressed upon political journalist Theodore White, writing in the wake of JFK’s assassination for Life magazine, the connection between her assassinated husband and the then-popular Broadway musical Camelot. “There will be great presidents again,” she told White, “but there will never be another Camelot.” Manhattan Institute senior fellow James Piereson recounts that White regretted helping transmit this myth. It took off quickly; by November 1968, William F. Buckley Jr. was calling “the dynastic assertiveness of the Kennedys” a “wonder of the world.” And it has persisted.

But there couldn’t have been a myth without some good old-fashioned politicking. The Kennedy clan was into politics before Joseph P. Kennedy. But the well-connected businessman vaulted the family to electoral prominence (he himself was the first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and then U.S. ambassador to the U.K.). Three of his sons advanced the family’s fortunes further still: JFK became a Massachusetts representative and senator, then president; Robert became John’s attorney general, then New York senator; Edward (“Ted”) became a longtime Massachusetts senator. They secured a Kennedy foothold in American politics: From 1947 until 2011, there was a Kennedy in federal elected office. One, Joseph P. Kennedy III (grandson of RFK), got to the U.S. House in 2013, but left it in 2021, having failed to work that old Kennedy magic in a Senate primary.

Consider Camelot’s present state. Joseph and JFK’s daughter Caroline hold diplomatic posts in the Biden administration (special envoy for Northern Ireland and ambassador to Australia, respectively). Meanwhile, the most politically active Kennedy, the one leaning most heavily into the Kennedy legacy (see, for example, this Super Bowl ad from earlier in the year), is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. On Friday, RFK Jr. semi-suspended his presidential campaign (he removed his name from the ballot in battleground states) and endorsed Donald Trump. Several of his siblings called this decision “a betrayal of the values that our father and our family hold most dear.”

RFK Jr. has touted the record of his family, including his father’s, while adding an anti-establishment perspective. He rails against the military-industrial complex, has backgrounded his longtime skepticism of other vaccines to focus on Covid-era government excess, and has embraced views and figures associated not with the Left but with the Right. His relatives largely rejected his campaign and had supported Joe Biden before he dropped out. “He’s trading in on Camelot, celebrity, conspiracy theories and conflict for personal gain and fame,” one of them said in July 2023. “I’ve listened to him. I know him. I have no idea why anyone thinks he should be president. What I do know is, his candidacy is an embarrassment.” After RFK Jr.’s endorsement, this particular Kennedy tweeted, “RFKjr is for sale, works for Trump. Bedfellows and loving it.”

Those comments were made by Jack Schlossberg, son of Caroline Kennedy and grandson of JFK. But Schlossberg, the aforementioned 31-year-old “silly goose” with undergraduate degrees from Yale and business and law degrees from Harvard, can’t help but engage in a little trading in on Camelot himself. Now a political correspondent at Vogue, Schlossberg told his employer that he is “inspired” by his “family’s legacy of public service” and wants to make his own contributions. The first thing he “ever got really nerdy about” was JFK’s presidency. For him, it is “a blueprint for how progressivism can work in America and how America can lead the world in a positive, optimistic, science-driven way” and can help prevent young people from “growing up only knowing a certain era of government where they don’t think anything can get done.”

A sampling of his insight casts him as a standard contemporary leftist. Overturning “Roe v. Wade is just one example of a Supreme Court that’s actually trying to go back in time and take power back for themselves,” he told Vogue. Likewise, he endorsed Kamala Harris at the DNC (after having once called himself “Biden’s biggest fan”) as an heir to his grandfather’s legacy because she will “defend our freedoms,” including “the freedom for women, anywhere in America, to make their own healthcare choices.” Overturning Chevron deference was also a Supreme Court power grab. He wrote for Vogue that “by getting rid of Chevron, the six unelected justices granted themselves the power to write rules and regulations meant to protect public health and safety.”

Schlossberg is proud of his alleged capacity to be “much more aware of every point of view and more open to other ways of thinking,” as he puts it. He might consider the possibility, then, that these Supreme Court decisions did not grab power but rather returned it to the people, and that the precedents they overturned had arrogated that power to the Supreme Court and to the administrative state, respectively. He might also consider the possibility that unborn life is human and ought to be treated as such, instead of resorting to euphemism. But Camelot was built on verbal wizardry, typically supplied by behind-the-scenes Merlins.

To the extent there is a political vision to the Kennedy myth beyond its namesake avatars, it centers on the vague concept of “public service.” In his first inaugural, JFK outlined how Kennedys thought not-Kennedys should think of public service when he urged Americans, “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” Both halves of this statement, however, assume a relationship between citizen and state that diminishes the former. As Milton Friedman wrote, “The paternalistic ‘what your country can do for you’ implies that government is the patron, the citizen the ward, a view that is at odds with the free man’s belief in his own responsibility for his own destiny. The organismic, ‘what you can do for your country’ implies that government is the master or the deity, the citizen, the servant or the votary.”

As for how aspiring Kennedys should think of public service, Schlossberg unintentionally reveals that most of what is left of that vision is the “best and the brightest” top-down technocracy that had always marred it even in its better days. In response to the overturning of Chevron deference, he urged his readers to “vote for candidates who believe in the federal government’s capacity to help people and make life better, and stop listening to leaders who tell you how bad everything is.” Lost on Schlossberg’s allegedly capacious mind is the possibility that the very form of government Camelot popularized has helped lead to a bloated, monstrous, centralized state, whose powers, extent, and location have distorted our politics.

And for actual Kennedys, “public service” has meant that they are entitled to rule over us, however they wish, and we must accept this for the sake of the myth. We must look away (with media help) as a drug-addled JFK indulges his sexual appetites while president. While perhaps acknowledging, as Charles Pierce did in a 2003 Ted Kennedy profile, that his role in the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne deprived Ted of the “moral credibility” he needed to become president, we must not forget that “through his tireless work as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her in her old age” if Kopechne had lived. Public service has turned out to be a reliable way for the Kennedys to serve themselves. It’s Kennedys all the way down — which may help explain why in 1979 Ted could not answer the simple query of why he was running for president.

The portentous yet nebulous presentation, the arrogance disguised as selflessness, the leftism masquerading as common sense — all are meant to keep alive what remains of Camelot. It is a tenet of Arthurian legend that the king is merely resting and will return one day when the need for him is greatest. Yet the foundation of small-r republican America is a rejection of such monarchical or aristocratic pretensions. America has seen political dynasties, of course. But they have risen — and fallen — on their merits. If the Kennedy dynasty has none left, then let it fall, and take the myth of Camelot with it. We need not return. After all, it is a silly place.