The House of Kennedy: Is the public saga over?

Three days before John F. Kennedy won his first campaign, the 1946 Democratic primary in Boston's 8th District, the enormous Kennedy family threw an enormous party.

Eunice, the middlest of the middle children, was the driving force behind the idea: a huge formal reception at the Commodore Hotel in Cambridge, with engraved invitations sent to female voters, plans for ballroom dancing and tuxedos required.

The party was the crown jewel after a series of house parties Eunice and Patricia had coordinated during the campaign to bring the family in direct contact with voters. The sisters oversaw every detail, even providing the cookies, silver, flowers, coffee cups and saucers.

The party plans were ridiculed by some of Boston's old politicos and some of Jack's campaign workers, who thought the event a pretentious dress-up ball that would leave the Kennedys a laughingstock if it didn't draw a crowd.

But decades before she was the wife of a Democratic vice-presidential nominee and mother of California's first lady, Eunice was often praised by her father as the one with the best political instincts in her generation, which with her death this week and Ted's grave illness make many recognize the era's foreseeable end.

Others in Eunice Kennedy Shriver's generation had milestones that were encyclopedia-worthy, but her service began with that ball.

By all accounts, she staged a glorious success. At least 1,500 women came in their finest, and guests queued up for a receiving line a block long.

The ball marked the moment when the Kennedys realized they could market themselves as a middle-class fantasy of American royalty. Jack's campaign offered not just a political candidate but a kind of pop-culture aristocracy that average Bostonians could join. In one glamorous evening, the family harnessed an immigrant city's aspirations and imagination.

That generation of Kennedys — Joe Jr., John (Jack), Rosemary, Kathleen, Eunice, Patricia, Bobby, Jean and Edward (Ted) — went on to become America's royal family, not just Boston's.

Eunice and her ball, Jack and his campaigns for Congress, the Senate and the presidency, all the brothers and sisters and their dedication to public service embodied the American dream in upward motion and social progress.

Ted and Jean survive the seven other Kennedy brothers and sisters from that towering generation, and Ted has a brain tumor that has kept him from the Senate most of the year.

As their generation dwindles, a six-decade chapter in the nation's political and cultural history is coming to a close, posing the question: Is the Kennedy story ending as a public saga?

Dinner-table lessons

The House of Kennedy was formed at the dinner table. The matriarch, Rose, posted news items on a bulletin board in the kitchen before dinner, and her children were expected to bone up so they could contribute to the conversation. One family friend remembers a map on the dining-room wall that Joe Kennedy would unfurl to make geopolitical points to his children. Mealtime was lesson time, and the nine siblings all defined their roles within the family hierarchy. It was also where their competitive instincts were sharpened, their rivalries worked out and the ties that bound them were tightened nightly.

Charles Spalding, a friend of John's, summed up the nine this way: "You watched these people go through their lives and just had a feeling that they existed outside the usual laws of nature; that there was no other group so handsome, so engaged. ... The Kennedys had a feeling of being heightened, and it rubbed off on people who came into contact with them."

Seventeen years separated Joe Jr., the oldest, from Teddy, the youngest, and the sheer number of children required two tables at dinner. The Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port, Mass., faces the sea rather than the village, creating a private Kennedy peninsula on Nantucket Sound. The cluster of clapboard houses in Hyannis Port is more of an outpost than a town, and Joe Kennedy wanted it that way. His compound was a training ground for competition against the Brahmin world he believed had shunned him. The millionaire businessman, film producer and former bootlegger was once turned down for a country-club membership and never forgot it.

Joe drove the siblings hard, especially the boys. Ted called him not so much a prodding father but a "blowtorch," and Joe once boasted to friends, when his boys were children, that they all would run for president one day. Three did.

A call to service

High hopes can lead to long drops, and consequently the famous siblings involved the country deeply in their later tragedies: Jack's assassination; Bobby's assassination; Ted's Chappaquiddick disaster; John Jr.'s airplane crash and a variety of substance-abuse calamities and marital melodramas.

Clare Boothe Luce, a celebrated journalist and playwright, came away with a memorable impression of the Kennedy brothers and sisters. "Where else but in Gothic fiction," she once wrote, "where else among real people could one encounter such triumphs and tragedies, such beauty and charm and ambition and pride and human wreckage, such dedication to the best and lapses into the mire of life; such vulgar, noble, driven, generous, self-centered, loving, suspicious, devious, honorable, vulnerable, indomitable people?"

Somehow, the family's legacy of public service has persevered through its grief.

Wendy Schiller, a political-science professor at Brown University who has studied the Kennedys, thinks commitment to service sprang from Rose's devotion to the Roman Catholic Church. "There's a strong sense of charity in the Catholic faith, that you have a moral obligation to serve others," she said.

Joe Jr. died serving his country as a World War II pilot. Jack served as congressman, senator, president and reviver of the country's spirit. Eunice served as founder of the Special Olympics and lifelong advocate for children with special needs, inspired by her older sister Rosemary's developmental problems. Jean served as ambassador to Ireland, helping broker the peace agreement between England and Northern Ireland. Bobby served as U.S. attorney general, senator from New York and populist presidential candidate. Patricia founded the National Committee for the Literary Arts, even when distracted by life as a Hollywood wife (to actor Peter Lawford for several years).

Ted has served longer than any of them, 47 years in the Senate, accumulating a legislative record that rivals any in the history of the chamber.

Bob Shrum, who worked for Jack and Bobby and later wrote speeches for Ted, said: "JFK inspired me the way he inspired a whole generation of people. The call to purpose, the sense of idealism. The sense that you could actually make a difference, and that government had to be there for people who couldn't necessarily fend for themselves."

A young Peace Corps volunteer summed up the appeal of that call in 1962: "I'd never done anything political, patriotic or unselfish because nobody asked me to. Kennedy asked."