Caroline Kennedy As America's Princess Leia

The Death of the President, William Manchester’s classic account of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, has many heart-wrenching passages, but one scene is indelible for its simple sadness. Caroline Kennedy, five days shy of her sixth birthday, is en route to Bethesda for a sleepover with a friend. The car radio suddenly crackles with an alarming news bulletin from Dallas. The date, of course, is November 22, 1963. Although an adult instantly snaps the radio off, Caroline is smart and attentive. Intuiting the tragedy that is unfolding, the little girl retreats silently into her own thoughts.

As we now know, the Kennedy family’s trials were not over, not nearly, but Caroline grows up, marries, has children of her own and does many good works. Yet, it seems that she never quite recovered her voice, the voice she muted briefly on that sad autumn day. Until 2008. Somehow, the candidacy of Barack Obama rekindled in her the joy of Camelot, the spring-like promise that had been deferred in Caroline’s heart for 45 years. She entered the political fray this year on behalf of a young Democratic Senator whose appeal, she said, reminded her of her father’s. Caroline Kennedy ruffled feathers in doing so—some of them in her own family—but she and her uncle, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, helped bestow a mantle of legitimacy on Obama, a freshman senator whose resume was thin, but whose candidacy was thick with possibility.

With her newly rediscovered voice, Caroline Kennedy-Schlossberg now informs the nation that she wants Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Senate seat. Notwithstanding the fact that Mrs. Clinton is off to new pastures of her own as Obama's choice to be Secretary of State, Caroline's stated desire strikes many New York Democrats as ironic—after all, Clinton was Obama’s main rival for the Democratic presidential nomination—and, to others, reflects an unseemly sense of entitlement. To Loose Cannon, however, it has the feel of redemption.

I was not much older than Caroline when John Kennedy was murdered. Americans of our generation have always been haunted by a feeling best expressed during that terrible weekend by Daniel Patrick Moynihan during dinner at the house of legendary Washington journalist Mary McGrory.

“We’ll never laugh again,” the hostess laments in her grief.

“Oh, we’ll laugh again, Mary,” replies Moynihan. “But we’ll never be young again.”

Caroline Kennedy has made some of us feel young again. In his own way, Barack Obama has, too. This is not, as readers of this blog know, the expression of any partisan view: It's more like a simple expression of unfiltered emotion, one reflecting the generational longings of those who never wanted an assassin's bullet to have the last word. Nearly a decade ago, in early 1999, I spoke with John F. Kennedy Jr. about the possibility of his running for the Senate seat in New York—Pat Moynihan’s soon-to-be vacant seat, as it happened. I was no confidant of Kennedy’s. My relationship was that of a writer and an editor, as I was freelancing for George magazine, which he founded and edited. As a way of broaching the subject of the Senate, I joked with Kennedy that he had gone into my family business (print journalism) and not his own family’s profession of politics. John surprised me by not ruling out running for Moynihan's Senate seat. Moreover, he gently made it clear that if he decided his path lay in government, he would not be dissuaded by the whisperings that then-first lady Hillary Clinton was also interested. He also must have known, although we didn't discuss it, that if he ever were elected a member of the U.S. Senate, as his father and two uncles had been, that the talk in political circles would inevitably turn to the presidency, as it also had for Jack, Bobby, and Ted Kennedy.

John did not survive that summer, his death being yet another cruel blow to his only sibling, sister Caroline. I was reminded recently of a fateful scene in Star Wars—the movie, not the nuclear defense shield. [The link is here, about three minutes and ten seconds into the clip...] Yoda, the Jedi master, is ruminating with Obi-Wan Kenobi about young Luke Skywalker, another Crown Prince whose enthusiasms as a pilot sometimes outweigh his good judgment—and who has a sister of his own.

“Reckless is he,” says Yoda. “Now, matters are worse.”

“That boy is our last hope,” says Obi-Wan.

“No,” replies Yoda. “There is another.”