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Patrick Kennedy memoir angers his family

"A Common Struggle"

By Patrick Kennedy

Penguin Group; 432 pages; $29


A new book by former U.S. Rep. Patrick Kennedy, youngest son of the late
Sen. Edward Kennedy, openly discusses what he says are the mental illnesses
and addictions of himself and his family members.

The memoir, "A Common Struggle," focuses heavily on his relationship with
his father and how the younger Kennedy often felt he let his father down
while coping with bipolar and anxiety disorders and repeated trips to
rehab, even as a Rhode Island congressman.

By his telling, it was a singular experience growing up a Kennedy. A family
photo printed in the book depicts him in his bedroom as a young child
showing off his aquarium to Henry Kissinger.

But even stranger, he writes, was browsing through a bookstore one day and
discovering a shelf of Kennedy books, and realizing all the family secrets
he wasn't supposed to talk about were written there, he writes.

"The books were often riddled with inaccuracies, but also riddled with
facts that probably would have been much easier to hear first from close
family members and perhaps with some context."

He says his father spoke with him only once about his 1969 car accident on
Chappaquiddick Island that killed his father's passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne.
It happened one year as the anniversary approached.

"'I just want you to know how bad I feel about everything, and I'm really
sorry you have to hear about it,'" he says his father told him. "That was
it. Then we just walked in silence."

Many of the details in the book are no surprise. Kennedy, 48, has been open
in recent years about his belief that his father had PTSD after seeing both
of his brothers assassinated -- then being forced to relive the killings
whenever they were replayed on television.

But the book contains interesting windows into how his father coped. Sen.
Kennedy, for example, wrote a letter to his son when he decided to run for
president -- to be delivered if he was assassinated.

He also recounts what happened after a 1979 CBS interview when his father
famously choked when asked why he wanted to be president. The two went
sailing, and the elder Kennedy tried to pretend everything was fine, but
kept shaking his head and muttering.

"I had never seen him so upset with himself," he writes.

Kennedy describes worrying that his father was drinking too much,
particularly around the time of the 1991 sexual assault trial of his
cousin, William Kennedy Smith. He writes that he, his brother and sister
staged an "anemic" intervention, which their father rejected, telling them
he was trying to get help from a priest.

His relationship with his father was chilly for years after that, he
writes. So chilly that he decided to run for Congress in 1994 without
speaking with his dad first. But their relationship righted itself after he
took office in Washington the following year, he says.

Ted Kennedy Jr. disputes the accuracy of the book, saying that he was
"heartbroken" that his younger brother had chosen to write "an inaccurate
and unfair portrayal of our family" that was "misleading and hurtful."

"My brother's recollections of family events and particularly our parents
are quite different from my own," he said.

The book opens on Kennedy's 2006 car crash outside the U.S. Capitol --
which his father downplayed as "a little fendah bendah" in his Boston
accent.

Kennedy remained in politics until 2010, when he decided not to run for
Congress again, fearing the job would kill him. He writes that he has been
sober for more than four years, and now lives with his wife, Amy, in New
Jersey with their children. The couple met not long after his father died
in 2009.


Eric D. Schwerin
eschwerin@rosemontseneca.com

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