Joe Kennedy III Wants You to Know He’s More Than Just a Name
on a normal day, the meeting hall in Middleton’s Flint Public Library is so empty and quiet, you can hear a bookmark drop. On a chilly afternoon in early February, though, the room looked like it had suddenly become the hottest spot in town, packed to capacity with politically engaged baby boomers eagerly awaiting an appearance by Massachusetts’ political man of the moment: Joe Kennedy III.
Holding court at the front of the room beside a welcome table decked out with campaign signs, Essex County District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett began by excitedly ticking off the many reasons he is “enthusiastically and without reservation endorsing” Kennedy in his campaign to unseat his fellow Democrat, U.S. Senator Ed Markey.
“We want someone who’s smart, someone who has empathy, someone who’s committed, someone who’s honest,” Blodgett said. “Check, check, check, check.”
The crowd broke out in hearty applause.
As Blodgett heaped praise on the 39-year-old candidate, the man himself leaned against a wall several feet away. Of all the famous Kennedys, JK3 looks most like his grandfather, Bobby. Tall and lean, he has the same eyes and high cheekbones, and even wears his hair in the same style: parted to the left and a little floppy, but not unkempt. The only difference is that instead of inheriting the usual Kennedy shade of chestnut brown, his hair is Doritos orange. As Blodgett went on, Kennedy wasn’t exactly shrinking from the praise, but he wasn’t gloating either. His smile looked just one degree away from something you could describe as bashful.
When Kennedy took the stage, his stump speech was as self-effacing as his stance in the back of the room. “My name’s Joe,” he said. “Hopefully some of you knew that. I’ve got a twin brother named Matt” who was born first. “He likes to say the eight minutes separating us at birth were the greatest eight minutes of his life.” The crowd laughed. This line always works, and not just because it’s funny, but because everyone is always eager to be let in on an intimate Kennedy family joke.
This town hall, like so many Kennedy events, went off without a hitch. The congressman, although not a natural charmer from behind the podium, wins over most crowds. Part of it is his innate assets—he’s young, handsome, and brilliant. Part of it is the calming, though oddly syncopated, way he speaks (like a man who has watched a lot of Obama speeches). And part of it, of course, is his electric last name. It can charge any event, any handshake, and any election with an excitement most politicians spend their careers trying and failing to incite. To be at an event with a Kennedy running for a seat in the Senate, after all, is to come into contact with a living piece of American lore.
On his way out the door, Kennedy shook hands with everyone who lined up—from the mayor of Salem, Kim Driscoll, who is a steadfast supporter, to a local dentist who just wanted to meet the young congressman. Selfies were had. Everyone was smiling. Then, when he was mere seconds from a clean getaway, a Democratic activist named Hannah Bowen approached. “I’m excited to support you in the long haul,” she said. “But I’m still debating about this race.”
Bowen is far from the only one who likes Kennedy but isn’t sold on supporting his primary challenge of Markey, a popular and effective progressive legislator who has served in Washington since the Gerald Ford administration. Markey seemed on his way to an easy reelection—until last September, when Kennedy announced he would campaign to take the incumbent’s seat. The decision caused an uproar in the Democratic political establishment. At a time when all Democratic fire should be trained on Donald Trump, the thinking went, what was Kennedy doing picking an intraparty fight?
“I don’t get the strategy,” Bowen told him now.
Kennedy struck me as less than eager to explain himself. In a campaign that has otherwise gone smoothly, this question of “Why?” has dogged him. Although he and surrogates such as Blodgett have no trouble arguing that he is an effective and virtuous public servant, his campaign has failed to satisfactorily explain precisely the reason voters should boot Markey out of office and install Kennedy in his place—and political insiders have taken notice. “There isn’t a single syllable in there that is a reason to vote for Joe Kennedy over Ed Markey,” wrote political columnist Charles P. Pierce (a Kennedy constituent himself) after Kennedy made the case for his candidacy in a debate. “So far, Mr. Kennedy has not articulated a good reason why voters should vote for him over the incumbent,” opined The Economist in its tart, understated tone. “I just don’t get why Joe is taking him on,” an elder statesman of Massachusetts politics told me.
Now, standing outside the Middleton library’s front doors, Kennedy was faced with the very same question from a flesh-and-blood voter. “So, the short, um…” Kennedy paused. “Ali, where’s the car?” he asked an aide, a note of urgency in his voice.
Reaching the vehicle, Kennedy turned toward Bowen and responded. “There is an awful lot of opportunity that comes with being a senator from Massachusetts,” he said, “and with due respect to Senator Markey, who is a good man, there’s more to this job than the way you vote and the bills that you file. It comes with an ability to leverage that platform to address the issues we’re talking about and, with due respect to the senator, if you’re not going to leverage that now, given what is at stake for the Democratic Party, for the values that we hold dear in our commonwealth, that have been targeted by this administration literally from day one, if you’re not doing it now, then when?”
Kennedy’s response seemed to leave Bowen flat. And in that moment, it struck me as strange that half a year into this campaign, Kennedy had not honed a home-run answer to the central question of his candidacy. It is odder still considering the kind of risk he has assumed by running.
To take on Markey, Kennedy had to give up the chance to run for reelection in the House, a race he would have been virtually guaranteed to win. Now, if he loses—and polls show the Senate race is tight—he’ll be out of government entirely by next January. Making matters worse, his decision to challenge Markey has alienated so many key members of the Democratic establishment that he is risking his standing in the party, not to mention his legacy. And it’s not just his own career that is at stake. He may be betting his family’s name as well. “A Kennedy has never lost a race in Massachusetts,” says Thomas Whalen, a Boston University historian who has studied the family. “If Joe Kennedy loses this race, the dynasty is over.”
Carrying his family’s legacy into this race has been both a blessing and a curse. It has opened him up to a damaging line of attack: that he is entitled and using his name to tilt the race unfairly in his favor.
(“Kennedy is ready to be a Kennedy,” scoffed Slate columnist Jim Newell.) But it also provides him with that most valuable of political commodities—100 percent name recognition—and a less measurable, but perhaps even more potent, political substance: romance. The unique challenge Kennedy faces now (and, frankly, every day of his life) is convincing the world that he’s far more than just a name.
before the coronavirus ended interpersonal contact—and political rallies—I spent some time with Kennedy on the campaign trail. One Sunday morning, we met at the congressman’s Newton home and piled into a small SUV along with two young staffers for a marathon day of campaigning. The goal was to crisscross eastern Massachusetts and hit up town halls, receptions for supporters, and even a funeral for a prominent official from an allied labor union along the way. We were about halfway to a rally for campaign volunteers in Dorchester when I popped the question:
“Joe, can I ask you some of the, uh, mandatory ask-Joe-Kennedy questions?”
“Go for it,” he said.
“Why don’t you drink?”
He burst into laughter. “Talk about mandatory questions.”
Kennedy—who is famously a teetotaler—told me that in high school he watched friends experiment with alcohol. “Candidly,” he said, “it didn’t look like that good a time.” Although he was a regular at jock parties in college at Stanford (he was his club lacrosse team’s starting goalie), he felt drawn to other social activities. “Whether it was skiing or just going out to breakfast,” he explained, “there were plenty of other things to do that seemed more fun than sleeping off a hangover.”
It makes sense, but considering that Kennedy’s decision not to drink stands out in the context of his family’s long line of playboy politicos, I felt compelled to ask the obvious: “Does your family history factor into it?”
He paused. “I’m sure it did at some point,” he said. “Just understanding that there are good people, you know—close friends or family—who have had their struggles, sometimes it’s better not to even allow that to get started.”
If there’s one word that most people who know Kennedy use to describe him, it’s “careful.” They don’t mean he’s averse to risks—after all, running for Markey’s seat is a colossal one—but he pursues them deliberately. So for Kennedy, when it comes to drinking, the risk/benefit analysis has never added up.
Reasonable people may wonder if there is more to it. Did dreams of politics push him to refrain from drinking? Did potential drunken escapades pose too big a risk to his future? By all accounts, however, through high school, college, and most of his twenties, Kennedy had not decided whether he would one day run for office. “It was not preordained,” his brother, Matt, says. “It’s not like from age eight he was thinking, ‘I have to be in Congress.’”
Peter Munzig, a college friend of Matt’s and Joe’s, says that at Stanford neither of the twins had set his sights on politics and that Joe was not even especially politically engaged. In fact, it was not clear to friends which of the brothers was more likely to enter the family business. Sure, Joe had the name, passed down from the patriarch, Joseph Kennedy, to Joe and Matt’s father, Joseph Kennedy II, and finally to JK3 himself. But Matt was more naturally gregarious. “I might enjoy going out more than he does,” Matt tells me. “I’ll leave it at that.” (Attentive readers might notice there’s a generation missing in that succession; in fact, Joseph Kennedy had a son, Joseph Jr., who died in a World War II plane crash before having children, so the name passed to Joseph Sr.’s oldest grandson, Joe and Matt’s father.)
Joe II never pushed his sons into politics, and they didn’t have to wonder why. Although he had a productive career in Congress, serving from 1987 to 1999, his time in Washington wreaked havoc on his marriage. Soon after his political career began, Joe and his wife, Sheila Rauch, separated and the boys moved from the family home in Brighton to live with their mother in Cambridge. All members of the family attribute the collapse of the marriage to the strain of constant travel to Washington and the stresses of the job.
Watching politics devastate his parents’ relationship made Kennedy even more wary of running for office. But the two men—Joes II and III—are very different. Joe II is more outgoing than his son, perhaps a more natural retail politician. “He’s a strong personality,” Kennedy says of his father. He is also quite a bit messier. After divorcing Sheila, he wanted to marry his secretary, Beth Kelly. So he did what any upstanding Catholic in the early 1990s did: He sought an annulment to invalidate his previous marriage. Only he didn’t tell his ex-wife. She found out by certified letter from the Archdiocese of Boston while her husband was in the Caribbean with Kelly. After receiving the news, she locked the door to her bathroom and threw up.
By some accounts, the divorce molded Joe in his mother’s image. “Keep in mind, he was not raised really within the Kennedy family universe,” says Jon Keller, a CBS Boston political analyst. “He was raised by his mother, who is a quieter person with excellent manners. Unlike his father, who was very brash and kind of aggressive, and unlike Ted [Kennedy], who, you know, was kind of boisterous, Joe is as humble and sweet as can be.”
As a teenager, Kennedy attended Buckingham, Browne & Nichols, a prestigious private day school in Cambridge, where he excelled. “The school had very high expectations for students and student success,” says Will Droste, a friend of Kennedy’s from B B & N. “I know a lot of people felt like it
was almost too stressful, but Joe wasn’t in that boat.” At Stanford, where Kennedy studied management science and engineering, he was social but kept his head down when it mattered. “It was work before play,” Munzig notes. And he stayed out of trouble. “There’s tons of guys on that lacrosse team who I could give you intel on,” Munzig says, “but there’s nothing about Joe.”
After college, Kennedy joined the Peace Corps (an organization created by his great-uncle’s administration) and served in the Dominican Republic before enrolling at Harvard Law. When he graduated in 2009, he worked as an assistant district attorney, first on the Cape, where he had
summered as a child, and later in Middlesex County. Kennedy says that when he pictured his future, it did not include politics, at least not anytime soon. But intentionally or not, he had spent his twenties crafting a damn good political résumé even beyond the weight of the name at the top. The decision of whether to enter politics or lead a quiet life—where his name would not be an asset or a
responsibility, but merely a curiosity—was solely his to make.
