The story of Caroline Kennedy is as macabre as it is uplifting. She’s the child of death. The odd, puzzling, silent survivor.
The uplifting part is harder to fathom. She has done nothing that ought to make us feel good about ourselves—except survive. And yet, somehow, among middle-aged people, she personifies the longevity of some gauzy, dreamy, wounded state of innocence.
She’s forever what she was—and that makes us what we were. It gives you the shivers if you think about it too much.
But now, this pressed rose, her children growing up, her marriage (by tabloid reports and Manhattan whispers) not so good, needs something to do. So why not become the senator from New York?
(AP Image)
The fact that she has never had a job, other than as a retailer of sentimental poetry, and keeper of the flame, and occasional figure-head on commissions and committees, is beside the point. What she has is glamour—true, old-fashioned, gives-you-a-little-buzz glamour—which is quite remarkable, given the oddness, ungainliness, and general lack of sociability of the latter-generation Kennedys.
She may be the last Kennedy to have the touch and to be able to bestow it. She bestowed it on Barack Obama and it helped make him president. She said that Barack was the new JFK. Even though, if you think about it, there could hardly be two people more different than JFK and Barack Obama.
She offers an all-purpose mythology of political saintliness (the ghastly books she’s put her name to are all about this sort of sentimentality). She has lived a life off the celebrity grid—but at the same time very much on.
Assiduously courted by benefit committees and PR types, she’s a china doll. A kitschy presence. In real life, she is said to be rather droll and, even, quite captivating on the subject of her bizarre family (come on, they are bizarre) and unimaginable life. So much so that it is a kind of perk of power and status to get near to her at a dinner party or benefit gala and receive a small tidbit, an insight or witty view, about what it is really like to be a Kennedy.
She has also been a inveterate defender of the Kennedy life, cultivating well-placed media people. Indeed, she has her own media retainers whose status has risen through their relationship with her.
When the New York Post pursued a story about antics (Kennedy-type antics) involving her then 18-year-old daughter, Caroline went to Rupert Murdoch’s primary aide, Gary Ginsberg, formerly her brother John’s right-hand-man, who went to Murdoch, who quashed the Post’s story. In turn, she wrote a letter to Brearley, the private school in Manhattan where she sits on the board, when Murdoch’s daughter, Grace, was applying for kindergarten there.
Likewise, when Murdoch wanted an audience with Barack Obama, he went through Caroline (who, at that moment, was riding with Barack Obama in his car). All this is not in any way an indictment of her insiderism. Indeed, the attraction to her is precisely because she seems like the ultimate insider, the person who most knows the truth about power and celebrity, and the darkness of American public life (everybody else has to claw their way to insider status, compromising themselves as they climb the pole—she was born inside).
Now, the reality is she’s just a middle-aged Park Avenue housewife. Except how could she be? She’s a genuine historic artifact. So who’d begrudge her a Senate seat?
